Madison and Jefferson (59 page)

The 1796 presidential campaign featured newspaper attack ads that modern Americans would recognize. “Will you,” a Philadelphia handbill asked rhetorically, “make the avowed friend of monarchy, President?” John Adams had sons who might succeed him, the paper reminded voters, while Jefferson had only daughters. One candidate was the “fond admirer” of the British system; the other “likes better our Federal Constitution, and thinks the British full of deformity, corruption, and wickedness.”
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Both sides applied scare tactics. Jefferson came under fire for views critical of organized religion, as gleaned from
Notes on Virginia
—views fortified during his five years in France. The
Gazette of the United States
noted with disdain Jefferson’s witticism, “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” “What?” the shocked editor exclaimed. “Do I receive no injury as a member of society if I am surrounded with atheists?”

According to the
Gazette
, Jefferson had been heard to say that his philosophical Parisian friends were atheists. Both he and his protégé, fellow Francophile “Citizen Monroe,” were intimates of Tom Paine, who in 1793–94 had followed up his
Rights of Man
with
The Age of Reason
. The latter work was regarded as a frontal assault on Christianity. Were Jefferson returned to the executive and promoted to the first rank, the “impious and blasphemous” Paine would take a seat at the president’s dinner table. As kindred
philosophers and tools of French Revolutionary atheism, they would unleash chaos in America. There was a real difference between freedom
of
religion and freedom
from
religion. Was Jefferson the fit successor to the “virtuous” Washington? And what “good effects” were ever produced by his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom?
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If atheism were not enough of a disqualification, Jefferson could be charged with “timidity” and “cowardice” for having abandoned the governor’s chair in the midst of the British invasion of Virginia. He had resigned his position as secretary of state at a critical moment as well. To such charges, his defenders reflexively answered that a lack of ambition to govern men was a mark of trustworthiness, not timidity. And when Jefferson’s deviation from Washington’s line of thinking was used as a rationale for denying him the presidency, an incredulous columnist quickly countered: Who differs from Washington more than John Adams?
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Republican newspapers were beginning to make casual references to Jefferson’s role in the Second Continental Congress. In Savannah, Georgia, he was toasted on July 4, 1793, as “chairman of the committee that reported the declaration of independence”; in Bache’s
Aurora
, and in neighboring New Jersey, in 1795, he was “the illustrious framer of the declaration of independence”; and again, a few months later, “he who penned the declaration of independence.”
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As the French Revolution cast a shadow over political discourse in America, the durability of the two young republics remained a central question. Newspapermen intent on making their mark reckoned with extremes only, which they could do because it was impossible for anyone to predict what a post-Washington government would look like. In a sense, the public’s anxiety boiled down to the question of who was able to distinguish between what was real and what was illusory. Those with their heads in the wrong books became “crazy projectors.”

Abstract ideas feed speculation in any age, but they were never so violently imagined as they were in the period that is imperfectly remembered as the Age of Reason. In Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston, and other places, the talk of the town consisted of a vocabulary that is in less frequent use today: “innovation” courted “instability,” “imagination” clouded “judgment,” and “effete” or “decadent” tendencies (or in individual cases, “relaxed nerves”) led to unproductive behavior or the blind acceptance of unrepublican rule. All recognized that change was coming, but what kind of change? Good order devolving into chaos? Freedom dissolving before monarchical tyranny? There was no in between. One
was either attached to the old order or willing to bear a dangerous political experiment. Partisan oversimplification had become a contagion.
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Sectionalism shaped the election season as much as personalities or foreign alliances. “Pelham,” a writer for the
Connecticut Courant
, saw the contest on a grand scale: northerners would have to decide whether they wanted to stay in the Union and remain accomplices of the institution of slavery. “Pelham” was offended by the unwieldy clause in the Constitution by which House seats were apportioned and electoral votes assigned preferentially to the South—each slave state inflating its population by adding three-fifths of a person for every noncitizen kept as property. Years before arch-Federalist Timothy Pickering tarred Jefferson as the “negro president,” elected only because of the three-fifths advantage, a host of New Englanders were already expressing ample resentment over the inequity.

As the “Pelham” essays made the rounds in Virginia, Joseph Jones wrote to Madison about them. The sarcastic Connecticut columnist had charged that slaves were “the
CATTLE
of citizens of the Southern states”—and if their self-indulgent masters had found them “good for food,” they would surely have eaten them already. Jones’s reaction was tongue-in-cheek: “He does not degrade us to the servile office of toad eaters [i.e., toadies], but exalts us to the honourable Station of Can[n]ibals.” Not in the least uncomfortable, Jones presumed that the writer’s feeling was dictated by partisan, not ethical, considerations. Whether or not spoken of directly, North versus South was clearly the subtext when the presidential choice was between Adams and Jefferson.
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Though he was the ostensible leader of the Republicans, Madison had to admit to one Virginia ally that he was “little informed on the present state of electioneering politics, either in or out of Virginia.” Having been unable to do very much to coordinate a Republican ticket in his home state, he could not prevent many Virginia electors from throwing away their second votes. Consequently, they wrote in Samuel Adams, George Clinton, or George Washington and gave only a single vote to Aaron Burr.

Electoral votes divided, for the most part, along sectional lines. Pennsylvania went Republican; New York, New Jersey, and New England went Federalist; and Maryland was split. Adams received 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. The South Carolina Federalist Thomas Pinckney came in third, Burr a distant fourth. Because the framers had not anticipated strict party competition, the Constitution did not as yet provide for tickets and running mates. As the second highest vote-getter, Jefferson was awarded the vice presidency.

“The event [i.e., result] of the election has never been a matter of doubt in my mind,” Jefferson wrote to Madison on New Year’s Day 1797. “Indeed the vote comes much nearer an equality than I had expected.” Though he said he could not decide whether the vice presidency, a largely powerless office, was in the least attractive to him, he accepted his role: “The General of to-day should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.” Acknowledging that he was Adams’s “junior” in age and experience, Jefferson submitted to fate. He was hopeful, he said, that the incoming president would relinquish his pro-England bias and govern as a republican.

In accounting for his willingness to serve with Adams, Jefferson added something else: “He is perhaps the only barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.” Jefferson was apparently thinking ahead to 1800, suggesting to Madison that if the relatively moderate Adams failed, Hamilton would be pulling the strings of a Pinckney; or perhaps he meant that Hamilton himself stood a chance of being elected president, because, after Adams and Hamilton, the Federalists’ choices were all lesser men.

Jefferson enclosed the draft of a congratulatory letter to President-elect Adams so that Madison could comment before it was sent. Its tone was genteel, its conventional rejection of political ambition a rhetorical but still meaningful peace offering. “In the retired canton where I am,” wrote Jefferson, “I learn little of what is passing: pamphlets I see never; papers but a few; and the fewer the happier.” With an ironic metaphor suited to an age of risky travel, he continued: “I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm.” Rationalizing his preference for the less taxing second position, he wanted Adams to know that he would rather have as his neighbors “fellow laborers of the earth” than the “spies and sycophants” who surrounded whichever man possessed real power. He did not envy Adams his job, and while he expected no one would believe him, he said he had no wish to be president.
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Madison, in Philadelphia, read the letter and without hesitation instructed Jefferson not to send it. As Jefferson had entrusted the draft to his most dependable friend, Madison in turn did what he thought a friend should do. “In exercising this trust,” he said, “I have felt no small anxiety.” He told Jefferson that it was unnecessary to express conciliatory views directly to Adams—others could be relied on to let Adams know that, as runner-up, he harbored no jealous feelings. Eventually, Madison himself took on this duty, making a point of leaking the letter by way of the harmony-seeking Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, an intimate of both
Adams and Jefferson. Rush did as Madison expected he would, transmitting to Adams a detailed summary of the contents of the unsent letter.

Madison’s second critique of Jefferson’s offering to Adams was its “general air,” which sounded labored to him. He believed that Jefferson was protesting too much his dislike of politics and lack of ambition. Given Adams’s “ticklish” temper, one could not at all predict how the new president would read Jefferson’s intent. Madison put forward, all together, six arguments against sending the letter. The last and most direct of his arguments was the “probability that Mr. A’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter.” Though he said he appreciated the desire to give the president-elect “a fair start to his Executive career,” Madison returned Jefferson’s draft knowing full well that Jefferson would follow his recommendation. Their relationship was entering a new phase. To use modern parlance, Madison had become Jefferson’s “handler,” sensitive to the missteps his enthusiastic friend was prone to and eager to help him avoid embarrassment. As such, Congressman Madison may be described as the first presidential campaign consultant.
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Even without the written note of congratulation that Jefferson had wanted to send, the new president and vice president started out the year at ease with each other. On March 4, 1797, in an otherwise-opaque inaugural address, Adams pledged his devotion to republican government. He castigated all the evils known to political man: “the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments.” It was an effort to appease.

Adams wanted to include Jefferson in his administration in a visible way, but Jefferson backed off. He was candid with Madison as to why: he refused to “descend daily into the arena like a gladiator to suffer martyrdom,” as he had been obliged to do in Washington’s cabinet. As far as Vice President Jefferson was concerned, his sole duty would be the constitutional one of presiding over the Senate.
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The spirit of party was not to recede. Broadly considered, neither side wished that any level of comfort should exist between the two leading members of the executive branch, whose principles were so incompatible.
In fact, what the president and vice president had most in common at this juncture was their aversion to one man, Alexander Hamilton. In the letter he composed but never sent, Jefferson assumed that Adams would appreciate his characterization of Hamilton as “your arch-friend from New York.”

Philadelphia was a pressure cooker. On the same day that he took the oath of office as vice president, Jefferson paid Benjamin Franklin Bache for a year’s subscription to his ultra-Republican newspaper. He stayed in the city only nine days, returning to Monticello for nearly two months. On arriving back in Philadelphia in May, ever righteous in denying his own contribution to conflict, Jefferson wrote to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a friend to both Adams and himself: “I consider as a certainty that nothing will be left untried to alienate him from me. These machinations will proceed from the Hamiltonians by whom he is surrounded, and who are only a little less hostile to him than to me.”
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President Adams did not need to confer with his vice president to come to the same conclusion. Early on he was certain that Hamilton would stop at nothing to sink his chances for a second term. As his term proceeded, his cabinet repeatedly heard him blast Hamilton for his treachery; the cabinet, which Adams had inherited from Washington, kept no secrets from Hamilton. It took far too long for Adams to realize that cabinet selection was his prerogative and not his esteemed predecessor’s.

Years later, after Hamilton’s death, the battered New England patriot would pour out his heart in an autobiography that one historian has aptly called less a literary text than “an open wound.” Hamilton was “infamous,” Adams railed, a being caught up “in a delirium of Ambition,” who yet “hated every man young or old who Stood in his Way.” Hamilton, Adams insisted, was far less courageous than he was given credit for—the very same critique Jefferson had leveled when he wrote Madison that Hamilton was “timid on horseback” and easily taken sick.
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Combustible elements combined to defeat the hope of a presidential honeymoon. As Adams was trying to constitute an embassy to France to include at least one moderate who was not an extension of Hamilton (it would turn out to be Elbridge Gerry), he was being told that Jefferson did not want him to succeed in his efforts toward peace. Adding fuel to the fire was the
Aurora
, Bache’s newspaper, which gave the new president almost no time at all before printing inflammatory stories. William Cobbett, in his rival Federalist paper,
Porcupine’s Gazette
, fought fire with fire: “The most infamous of the Jacobins is B
ACHE
,” he pronounced, “Distributor General
of the principles of Insurrection, Anarchy and Confusion.” Franklin’s grandson was cartooned as a “haggard-looking hireling of France.”