Alexander Hamilton (93 page)

Hamilton was always fond of his “Pacificus” essays, which show the impassioned pragmatism that informed his foreign-policy views. He later incorporated them into an 1802 edition of
The Federalist,
proudly telling the publisher that “some of his friends had pronounced them to be his best performance.”
⁵⁵
Hamilton must have enjoyed bundling these essays with
The Federalist,
because they had provoked a venomous response from his main
Federalist
coauthor, James Madison. It was Jefferson who prodded Madison into taking on Hamilton over the Neutrality Proclamation. Jefferson had read the first few “Pacificus” essays with mounting dismay and decided once again to deploy a proxy to refute Hamilton. On July 7, he urged Madison to tilt lances with the treasury secretary: “Nobody answers him and his doctrines will therefore be taken for confessed. For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him.”
⁵⁶

Jefferson must have thought that Madison would leap at the chance to resist the expanded executive powers embodied in the Neutrality Proclamation. Instead, Madison balked. From his Virginia plantation, he complained to Jefferson that he lacked the necessary books and papers to refute “Pacificus,” and he griped about the summer heat. He blamed hordes of houseguests who overstayed their welcomes. Did even Madison tremble at the thought of confronting Hamilton? When he had exhausted all excuses, he told Jefferson grudgingly, “I have forced myself into the task of a reply. I can truly say I find it the most grating one I ever experienced.”
⁵⁷

In the end, Madison hammered away at Hamilton with five essays published under the name “Helvidius.” The first essay reflected the deep animosity that had sprung up between the
Federalist
collaborators: “Several pieces with the signature of Pacificus were late published, which have been read with singular pleasure and applause by the foreigners and degenerate citizens among us, who hate our republican government and the French Revolution.” Madison complained of “a secret Anglomany” behind “the mask of neutrality.”
⁵⁸
He flayed Hamilton as a monarchist for defending the Neutrality Proclamation. Such prerogatives, he said, were “
royal prerogatives
in the
British government
and are accordingly treated as
executive prerogatives by British commentators.
”
⁵⁹

In prose more pedestrian than Hamilton’s, Madison brought the perspective of a strict constructionist to the neutrality issue. He wanted full authority over foreign policy to rest with Congress, not the president, except where the Constitution granted the chief executive specific powers. Madison was both edited and supplied with cabinet secrets by Jefferson, who seemed to have no reservations about abetting this assault on a presidential proclamation.

The instigator of many articles against his own administration, Jefferson knew that they were upsetting Washington. He felt sympathy for the president but also believed he was getting his just deserts. He wrote to Madison in June:

The President is not well. Little lingering fevers have been hanging about him for a week or ten days and have affected his looks most remarkably. He is also extremely affected by the attacks made and kept on him in the public papers. I think he feels those things more than any person I ever yet met with. I am extremely sorry to see them. [Jefferson then indicated that Washington had brought the attacks on himself.] Naked, he would have been sanctimoniously reverenced, but enveloped in the rags of royalty, they can hardly be torn off without laceration.
⁶⁰

During that eventful summer of 1793, administration infighting grew increasingly cutthroat. On July 23, Washington held a cabinet meeting that took on a surreal atmosphere. The president wanted to ask for Genêt’s recall without offending France. This pushed Hamilton into an extended harangue on the crisis facing the government. He alluded to a “faction” that wanted to “overthrow” the government, and he said that to arrest its progress the administration should publish the story of Genêt’s unseemly behavior; otherwise, people would soon join the “incendiaries.”
⁶¹
What made this dramatic scene so unreal was that the spiritual leader of that faction was sitting right there in the room: Thomas Jefferson.

That summer, Jefferson found Hamilton both insupportable and inescapable. Besides his Treasury job, Hamilton conducted a full-time career as an anonymous journalist. In late July, the
American Daily Advertiser
printed his piece called “No Jacobin,” the first of yet another nine essays that issued from Hamilton’s fluent pen over a four-week period. He began by hurling a thunderbolt: “It is publicly rumoured in this city that the minister of the French republic
has threatened to appeal from The President of the United States to the People.
”
⁶²
The leak of this secret information about Genêt’s insolent disrespect toward Washington had a pronounced effect on public opinion. In coming weeks, Hamilton continued to lash out at Genêt for meddling in domestic politics: “What baseness, what prostitution in a citizen of this country, to become the advocate of a pretension so pernicious, so unheard of, so detestable!”
⁶³

On August 1, Jefferson found himself trapped again in a cabinet meeting with Hamilton, the human word machine, who spontaneously spouted perfect speeches in every forum. The treasury secretary thundered on about the need to disclose the damaging correspondence with Citizen Genêt. From Jefferson’s notes, we can see the highly theatrical manner that Hamilton assumed in Washington’s small cabinet. “Hamilton made a jury speech of three quarters of an hour,” a weary Jefferson told his journal, “as inflammatory and declamatory as if he had been speaking to a jury.”
⁶⁴
One senses the laconic Jefferson’s perplexity in dealing with this inspired windbag. “Met again,” Jefferson reported the next day. “Hamilton spoke again three quarters of an hour.”
⁶⁵
Hamilton repeated charges made by the royal European powers that France wanted to export its revolution to their countries. Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. “What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty;
et tu Brute,
” he wrote in his diary.
⁶⁶

At this point, Jefferson finally aired his own views. He predictably opposed public exposure of government dealings with Genêt and also warned of the futility of cracking down on “Democratic” societies that had sprung up since Genêt’s arrival. If the government suppressed these groups, Jefferson argued, people would join them merely “to assert the right of voluntary associations.”
⁶⁷
His point was well taken, but he had squandered his credibility with the president, as he was about to discover in peculiarly dramatic fashion.

With heroic fortitude, Washington had tried to remain evenhanded with Hamilton and Jefferson, but he could no longer tolerate this dissension in his cabinet. A sensitive man of pent-up passion, he also could not endure the vicious abuse he had taken in Freneau’s
National Gazette.
In May, Washington had asked Jefferson to fire Freneau from his State Department job after the editor wrote that Washington had signed the Neutrality Proclamation because the “Anglomen” threatened to cut off his head. Convinced that the
National Gazette
had saved the country from monarchy, Jefferson refused to comply with Washington’s request. Now, in a cabinet session, Henry Knox happened to mention a tasteless satirical broadside called “The Funeral Dirge of George Washington,” in which Washington, like Louis XVI, was executed by guillotine. This libel was thought to have been written by Freneau. Knox’s reference lit a fuse inside Washington, and the seemingly phlegmatic president became a powder keg. In his “Anas,” Jefferson described the unusual scene:

The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran on much on the personal abuse which has been bestowed on him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives; [said] that he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office and that was every moment since; that
by God
he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation; that he had rather be on his farm than to be made
emperor of the
world; and yet they were charging him with wanting to be a king. That that
rascal Freneau
sent him three of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor of his papers; that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him. He ended in this high tone. There was a pause. Some difficulty in resuming our question.
⁶⁸

Jefferson scored few points in the cabinet that August. It was decided that America, as a neutral nation, could not allow belligerent powers to equip privateers in her ports or give them asylum. As head of the Customs Service, Hamilton was charged with punishing violators, fortifying his hand in foreign affairs. All the while, Jefferson conspired to strip Hamilton of his power. On August 11, he sent a confidential letter to Madison, noting that Republican representation would be stronger in the new House. The time had therefore ripened for weakening Hamilton with two measures: splitting the Treasury Department between a customs service and a bureau of internal taxes and severing all ties between the Bank of the United States and the government. If Jefferson could not diminish the man, he would try to diminish the office.

For all his growing dismay over the incorrigible Genêt, Jefferson still blocked cabinet efforts to release the full saga of Genêt’s impertinent behavior.
⁶⁹
He threatened to resign in late September, telling Washington that he hated having to socialize in the circles of “the wealthy aristocrats, the merchants connected closely with England, the new created paper fortunes,” and he again cited steps being hatched to bring a monarchy to America.
⁷⁰
Jefferson agreed to stay until year’s end only after Washington agreed to keep confidential Genêt’s obnoxious conduct. His cabinet colleagues continued to dissent. “Hamilton and Knox have pressed an appeal to the people with an eagerness I never before saw in them,” Jefferson told Madison.
⁷¹

Hamilton got the story out indirectly by prompting Senator Rufus King and Chief Justice John Jay to publish a revealing letter in a New York paper. An agitated Genêt protested to Washington, asking him urgently to “dissipate these dark calumnies.”
⁷²
His letter’s intemperate tone would only have strengthened the suspicions he sought to allay, and Jefferson consequently had to draft a letter to France on August 16 asking for Genêt’s recall.

Jefferson admitted that the tales told about Genêt were not Federalist fabrications. “You will see much said and gainsaid about G[enet’s] threat to appeal to the people,” Jefferson told Madison. “I can assure you it is a fact.”
⁷³
All through August, Madison and Monroe crafted resolutions thanking France for aiding the American Revolution. When Washington broke with Citizen Genêt, a crestfallen Madison stated that it “will give great pain to all those enlightened friends of the principles of liberty on which the American and French Revolution are founded.”
⁷⁴
Nor would Philip Freneau concede that the French Revolution had taken a vicious turn. In early September, to stress parallels between the two revolutions, he printed in succession the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Constitution.

The situation in Paris, however, soon undermined this thesis. That spring had seen the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, soon the principal vehicle of revolutionary terror. In June, the moderate Girondist faction, to which Genêt belonged, was purged and placed under house arrest by radical Jacobins. This Jacobin triumph, Hamilton realized, had made French officials receptive to American requests to cashier the bumbling Genêt, whom they accused of offending a friendly power. Led by Robespierre, the Jacobins swept aside all obstacles to their Reign of Terror. Nocturnal house searches and arbitrary arrests became routine by the fall. Priests were persecuted and churches vandalized in an anti-Christian campaign that led the cathedral of Notre-Dame to be renamed the Temple of Reason. On October 16, Marie Antoinette—or the “widow Capet,” as she was designated—was pulled from her cell, stuck in a tiny farm cart, paraded through streets teeming with heckling citizens, and beheaded. The guillotine worked overtime: twenty-one Girondists were executed on October 31 alone.

As Hamilton got wind of the bloody fate that awaited Citizen Genêt in Paris, he urged Washington to allow him to remain in the United States, lest Republicans accuse Washington of having sent the brash Frenchman to his death. Washington agreed to give him asylum, and Citizen Genêt, ironically, became an American citizen. He married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of Hamilton’s nemesis Governor George Clinton, and spent the remainder of his life in upstate New York. In the end, Washington never submitted to Hamilton’s wish to publicize a detailed account of Genêt’s dealings with the administration. But Hamilton had gotten most of what he wanted in the Genêt affair, including the dearest bonus of all: the exit of Thomas Jefferson from the cabinet by year’s end.