Madison and Jefferson (77 page)

Overall, Jefferson appeared the more accommodating. But the authenticity of some parts of his self-vindication (and not just as to Callender) remain open to question. Was he really as prompt to forgive lame duck John Adams for his “midnight” appointments in 1801 as he maintained? He was dexterous, but how genuine? Was he trying, and failing, to match Abigail Adams in emotional genuineness? In the words of historian Edith Gelles: “She measured justice by its impact on people, not by abstract principle.” Jefferson argued from principles while he worked to gain the political upper hand, whereas Mrs. Adams, in this case, framed her argument on the basis of a belief that personal relationships were meant to be defended and friendship preserved at all costs.
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Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire provides us with an apt generalization of where partisan politics stood as the election of 1804 approached. A Federalist who socialized with the political opposition, he confided to a friend: “The southern Democrats fear New England Federalists. Though our numbers are small, we are both feared and respected. We can seldom carry any measure; but we prevent the ruling party from doing much mischief.” Plumer, relatively new on the national political stage, was still optimistic.
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Joseph Dennie was another story. The
Port Folio
had been hammering away at southern democrats week by week. “In Virginia, where churches are out of fashion,” he wrote in July 1804, “democracy is most in fashion. In Connecticut, where they have yet more room for their Meeting Houses and Schools and less for whiskey shops and brothels, there is less of democracy and more of federalism.” Right when the Republicans were beginning to take pride in the unpopular word
democrat
, Dennie grabbed onto it and tried to pull it backward so that it could only connote chaos.

In the following issue, he called up some of the shibboleths of election year 1800, hoping to get new traction by renewing his critique of
Notes on Virginia
—especially its “tendency to Subvert Religion.” Jefferson’s “tendency” could be traced back to another whom the cranky critic deemed morally suspect. “Whereas Franklin has made one man frugal,” Dennie wrote aphoristically, “he has converted a hundred to Deism.” But what Dennie appeared to despise most about Thomas Jefferson was his stealthy and manipulative vocabulary, and here the
Port Folio
went on a tear: “With respect to Mr. Jefferson’s style, I cannot better express my opinion than by saying, that it is just such a style as Betty, my cookmaid, uses, in writing to her lovers … Betty is a long-sided, red-haired slut, and, like Mr. Jefferson always hankering to have a mob of dirty fellows about her.” New England Federalism of the Dennie sort found most appalling what it saw as the vulgarity of popular appeal.
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Alexander Hamilton was yet another story. Despite regular opinion pieces in the newspaper he had founded in Manhattan, Hamilton was long out of office and had less influence than ever. His correspondence suggests he was feeling sorry for himself. He continued to distinguish between the “cool and discerning Men,” whom he called “real friends to the national government,” and those who had been “successful in perverting public opinion, and in cheating the people out of their confidence.” These “mad Democrats” were now “advancing with rapid strides in the work of disorganization—the sure fore-runner of tyranny,” which for Hamilton meant “the horrors of anarchy.”

Hamilton’s fear-mongering language was the equal of Jefferson’s. The difference was that when Jefferson invoked his “reign of witches” imagery to symbolize High Federalist rule, he immediately predicted that the reign would soon end, and the republic would be saved. Hamilton had no such vision. But he did have salient points to make, because he still hoped to quiet the pro-administration press before it could completely rewrite the founding and make the Hamilton of 1788 into a moribund monarchist. The problem, he wrote in one sharp editorial, lay with the arbitrariness of terminology:
monarchy
did not necessarily connote
despotism
. It could as easily mean any government in which the executive was a single individual, even an elected one. Great Britain, with its hereditary king, was easily spoken of as a commonwealth and as a republic. And so to try to distance the Hamilton of 1788 from the Madison of 1788 by describing the former as an exponent of monarchical government was fatuous.

Hamilton knew the Republicans in power were trying to discredit his political theory as something morally inferior to their supposedly genuine republicanism. This, he charged, was “worse than arrogance.” The Virginia delegation at the Constitutional Convention, Madison prominent among them, had voted for “the most energetic form of government”—for a strong national authority. Showing that old disputes persisted, some months after Hamilton wrote these words, the
National Intelligencer
explained that when Federalists used the term
energetic government
, “they mean that government which shall introduce privileged orders, and the oppression of the poor and industrious.” It was a good comeback, but by then Hamilton was already dead.

All this swatting around of political language eventually led the Jefferson administration to become proactive. A paragraph of Dennie’s printed in April 1803, and largely ignored by Republican newspapers at the time, would later become evidence in the editor’s trial for seditious libel. “A democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history,” wrote Dennie. “Its omens are always sinister, and its powers are unpropitious … It has been tried in France, and has terminated in despotism. It is on trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy.”

While Dennie raged, Hamilton was too realistic to calculate on an end to Democratic-Republican rule. Insisting “mine is an odd destiny,” he wept for his own fallen star in a pair of letters to Gouverneur Morris, now U.S. senator from New York: “What can I do better than withdraw from the Scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.”
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Of course, he was right about that, but not as he intended. In the spring of 1804 the doomed partisan turned his attention to Aaron Burr’s campaign for the governorship of New York. Jefferson’s vice president had long since been shown the door, as it were, given clear signals that Madison and Jefferson did not want to cede the national stage to any but a trusted Virginian. Looking to reestablish himself in his home state, Burr was drawn into an affair of honor with his old colleague and occasional cocounsel. It was not the first time that Hamilton had sought to deny Burr elected office by resorting to character assassination—their political competition went back a full decade. In the past Hamilton had apologized. But not this time. The result of his stubbornness in the affair with Burr was an avoidable duel and Hamilton’s untimely death at the approximate age of forty-nine.
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Neither Madison nor Jefferson left their true feelings about the death of
Hamilton to the historical record, just as they were careful not to publicly comment on Callender’s drowning. Senator Plumer, however, noted with disquiet when members of the administration who had formerly distanced themselves from Burr began to embrace him. “I never had any doubts of their joy for the death of Hamilton,” he wrote of congressional Republicans; “my only doubts were whether they would manifest that joy, by carressing [
sic
] his murderer. Those doubts are now dispelled.” Gallatin, who had long looked favorably on Burr’s republicanism, was known to have spent two hours meeting privately with the vice president. William Branch Giles, the impulsive Virginia congressman, now U.S. senator, was urging the governor of New Jersey—in whose state the duelists met for their “interview”—to void the pending indictment of Burr and declare the duel fair. But Madison had “taken his murderer into his carriage,” on a ride that mystified Plumer, because it brought them to the home of the French minister. And Jefferson had “shewn more attention” to Burr than was becoming, inviting him into the President’s House. It amazed Plumer what had happened to the U.S. government: “The high office of the President is filled by an infidel, and that of Vice President by a murderer.” Yet the day after he penned this last sentiment, he dined with the infidel and found him “dressed better than I ever saw him”; his scarlet vest new, his hair powdered, and his stockings clean. Not to disappoint the Federalist fashion police, Jefferson’s slippers were old, the senator reported, and his coat “thread bare.” No secrets fell from the president’s lips.
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Though Dennie had long kept alive his hopes for a Federalist revival, he was forced to admit in September 1804, on lamenting the death of Hamilton: “The sun of federalism is indeed set, and unless it rise again, nothing remains for us but to be subjected to the dominion of Virginia.” The Federalists remained active with their pens but were unable to stir the electorate. Jefferson, renominated by his party in February 1804, awaited a reelection that was all but inevitable, and the Washington newspaper that routinely defended him, the
National Intelligencer
, celebrated the prospect of a second term: “While the world around him has been in a state of mutation, it is his distinction to have remained the same. Who more fit to preside over the destinies of a republic than such a man?”
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Republicans were a bit complacent. That fall the newspaper
Republican Farmer
, in Federalist Connecticut, challenged the neighborhood gossip concerning Jefferson’s alleged failure to appoint northerners to key posts by pointing to his cabinet. “His magnanimity and impartiality are conspicuous,” the editor proclaimed.
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The president issued his fourth annual message on November 8, 1804, presenting the executive’s outlook on the still-simmering issues of France and Haiti, Spain and Florida. Senator Plumer expressed frustration at the lack of substance in the address. Bringing up the U.S. boundary with Spanish Florida, Jefferson stated that America’s object had been “misunderstood on the part of Spain”; on the related matter of Madrid’s discomfort with America’s title to the larger Louisiana Territory, he expressed equal confidence that the issue would be easily resolved. But to Plumer, this was all wishful thinking. Only the “irresistible arm” of France had convinced Spain to accede, he wrote, and only for the moment.

Jefferson was feeding Congress mere crumbs of information. Probably his secretary of state was the one who made sure that nothing more specific was being conveyed. Madison had been unyielding in his posture toward France, but especially toward Spain. He preferred to negotiate with Madrid to buy the arc of land abutting the Gulf of Mexico; but in letters to diplomats Monroe and Pinckney, his language suggested that, with or without an agreement, and lest it fall into British hands, he would have the United States move into the disputed borderland that was known as West Florida—east of New Orleans, past Mobile and Pensacola, and nearly to Tallahassee. His claim to this land was certainly debatable; but just as he had few qualms about proceeding with the Louisiana Purchase without consulting Congress, he put the law second after what he regarded as national security.

Senator Plumer was not fully aware of Madison’s role when he took out his pique on Jefferson alone. He jotted in his private journal that the president’s message contained such outright ambiguity that his words could be interpreted however one chose. The annual address that marked the end of his first term was, the senator said, “more empty & vapid, & wrapt in greater obscurity than any of his preceding messages.” So much for the positive gloss Federalists were meant to place on the emblematic first inaugural.
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Though it could not completely drown out the opposition, the administration’s voice carried the farthest. In his 1804
Defence of the Measures of the Administration of Thomas Jefferson
, Virginia’s John Taylor enumerated the successes of Jefferson’s first term. The man the Federalists painted as a dangerous radical was in fact, he wrote, a prudent administrator of the general
government, paying down the interest on the federal debt (“retrenchment of unnecessary expence”) while seeking to preserve peace with the European powers and pointing the executive branch away from any tendency toward “criminal excess of power” at home. Similarly, Secretary of State Madison had done nothing to undo his own long-held reputation for mildness. He operated “by the force of argument and truth,” said Taylor, who went on to contradict the Federalists’ appraisal of the foreigner Gallatin. Differentiating between France, which provided a language, and the canton in Switzerland where Secretary Gallatin was born, Taylor reflected: “the air he there inhaled was that of liberty.”

In the sentimentally assertive rhetoric of republican empire, Americans found a way to minimize their protectiveness of region and declare their superiority as a nation. They were accustomed to hearing patriotic oratory and reading patriotic pamphlets protesting their fervent desire for peaceful expansion for the good of all. Since the middle of the prior century, sylvan America had been known as an “asylum” for those oppressed elsewhere in the world. A cheerful folk, full of energy and enterprise, they had learned not to crave the “gaudy superfluities” of foreign manufacturers, but to reap satisfaction in their plain possessions. Jefferson himself had early on hailed the “elegant simplicity” of his countrymen. This was the America a young Vermont lawyer named Orsamus C. Merrill evoked in his Fourth of July oration in 1804, when he alluded to “fields of futurity” and extolled his nation’s mission to diffuse knowledge and virtue “through mankind generally.” That same America was the one John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, was proud to associate with the first Republican-led administration.
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Emphasizing the calm acquisition of Louisiana as a triumph of peace through manly diplomacy, Taylor invoked Alexander Hamilton as a highly useful, if supremely ironic, example in support of his position. Quoting at length from Hamilton’s defense of the Jay Treaty negotiations, he demonstrated the reasonableness of Republican methods. “A very powerful state may frequently hazard a high and haughty tone with good policy,” Hamilton had stated in 1795. “But a weak state can scarcely ever do it without imprudence. The last is yet our character, though we are the embryo of a great empire.”