Founding Brothers (21 page)

While the
specific terms of the treaty were decidedly one-sided in England’s favor,
the consensus reached by most historians who have studied the subject is that
Jay’s Treaty was a shrewd bargain for the United States. It bet, in
effect, on England rather than France as the hegemonic European power of the
future, which proved prophetic. It recognized the massive dependence of the
American economy on trade with England. In a sense, it was a precocious preview
of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), for it linked American security and economic
development to the British fleet, which provided a protective shield of
incalculable value throughout the nineteenth century. Mostly, it postponed war
with England until America was economically and politically more capable of
fighting one.

The long-term advantages of Jay’s Treaty, however,
were wholly invisible to most Americans in the crucible of the moment. Sensing
the unpopularity of the pact, Washington attempted to keep its terms secret
until the Senate had voted. But word leaked out in the summer of 1795 and then
spread, as Madison put it, “like an electric velocity to every part of
the Union.” Jay later claimed that the entire eastern seaboard was
illuminated each evening by protesters burning him in effigy. In New York
Hamilton was struck in the head by a rock while attempting to defend the treaty
to a crowd. John Adams recalled that Washington’s house in Philadelphia
was “surrounded by an innumerable multitude, from day to day buzzing,
demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the
French patriots and virtuous Republicans.” Any concession to British
economic and military power, no matter how strategically astute, seemed a
betrayal of the very independence won in the Revolution. Washington predicted
that after a few months of contemplation, “when passion shall have
yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn,” but in the
meantime “this government, in relation to France and England, may be
compared to a ship between the rocks of Sylla and Charybdis.”
³²

To make matters worse, the debate over the treaty prompted a constitutional
crisis. Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the singular status that
Washington enjoyed was the decision of the Constitutional Convention to deposit
the minutes of its secret deliberations with him for safekeeping. He therefore
had exclusive access to the official record of the convention and used it to
argue that the clear intent of the framers was to vest the treaty-making power
with the executive branch, subject to the advice and consent of two-thirds of
the Senate. Madison, however, had kept his own extensive “Notes on the
Debates at the Constitutional Convention” and carried them down to share
with Jefferson, who was in retirement at Monticello.

Although a careful
reading of Madison’s “Notes on the Debates” revealed that
Washington was correct, and indeed that Madison himself had been one of the
staunchest opponents of infringements on executive power over foreign policy at
the Convention, Jefferson managed to conclude that the House was intended to be
an equal partner in approving all treaties, going so far as to claim that that
body was the sovereign branch of the government empowered to veto any treaty it
wished, thereby “annihilating the whole treaty making power” of the
executive branch. “I trust the popular branch of our legislature will
disapprove of it,” Jefferson wrote from Monticello, “and thus rid
us of this infamous act, which is really nothing more than a treaty of alliance
between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislatures and
people of the United States.”
³³

The actual
debate in the House in the fall and winter of 1795 proceeded under
Madison’s more cautious leadership and narrower interpretation of the
Constitution. (Jefferson’s position would have re-created the hapless and
hamstrung conditions that he himself had decried while serving as minister to
France under the Articles of Confederation, essentially holding American
foreign policy hostage to congressional gridlock and the divisive forces of
domestic politics.) Madison instead argued that the implementation of
Jay’s Treaty required the approval of the House for all provisions
dependent on funding. This achieved the desired result, blocking the treaty,
while avoiding a frontal assault on executive power.
³⁴

Madison
served as the floor leader of the opposition in the House during the debate
that raged throughout the winter and spring of 1796. At the start, he enjoyed
an overwhelming majority and regarded his position as impregnable. But as the
weeks rolled on, he experienced firsthand the cardinal principle of American
politics in the 1790s: whoever went face-to-face against Washington was
destined to lose. The majority started to melt away in March. John Adams
observed bemusedly that “Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale,
withered, haggard.” When the decisive vote came in April, Madison
attributed his defeat to “the exertions and influence of Aristocracy,
Anglicism, and mercantilism” led by “the Banks, the British
Merchts., the insurance Comps.” Jefferson was more candid. Jay’s
Treaty had passed, he concluded, because of the gigantic prestige of
Washington, “the one man who outweighs them all in influence over the
people.” Jefferson’s sense of frustration had reached its breaking
point a few weeks earlier when, writing to Madison, he quoted a famous line
from Washington’s favorite play, Joseph Addison’s
Cato,
and applied it to Washington himself: “a curse on his virtues,
they’ve undone his country.”
³⁵

W
HAT COULD
Jefferson’s extreme
reaction possibly mean? After all, from our modern perspective
Washington’s executive leadership throughout the debate over Jay’s
Treaty was nothing less than we would expect from a strong president, whose
authority to shape foreign policy is taken for granted. We also know the course
he was attempting to steer, a middle passage between England and France that
required tacking back and forth to preserve American neutrality and avoid war,
turned out to be the correct policy. But in this instance, hindsight does not
make us clairvoyant so much as blind to the ghosts and goblins that floated
above the political landscape in the 1790s. What we might describe as admirably
strong executive leadership struck Jefferson and his Republican followers as
the arbitrary maneuverings of a monarch. And what appears in retrospect like a
prudent and farsighted vision of the national interest looked to Jefferson like
a betrayal of the American Revolution.

For Jefferson also had a
national vision and a firm conviction about where American history was headed,
or at least where it ought to be headed. The future he felt in his bones told
him that the true spirit of ’76, most eloquently expressed in the
language he had drafted for the Declaration of Independence, was a radical
break with the past and with all previous versions of political authority. Like
Voltaire, Jefferson longed for the day when the last king would be strangled
with the entrails of the last priest. The political landscape he saw in his
mind’s eye was littered with the dead bodies of despots and corrupt
courtiers, a horizon swept clean of all institutions capable of coercing
American citizens from pursuing their happiness as they saw fit. Thomas
Paine’s
The Rights of Man
(1791) captured the essence of his
vision more fully than any other book of the age, depicting as it did a radical
transformation of society once the last vestiges of feudalism were destroyed,
and the emergence of a utopian world in which the essential discipline of
government was internalized within the citizenry. The only legitimate form of
government, in the end, was self-government.
³⁶

Shortly
after his return to the United States in 1790, Jefferson began to harbor the
foreboding sense that the American Revolution, as he understood it, had been
captured by alien forces. As we have seen, the chief villain and core
counterrevolutionary character in the Jeffersonian drama was Alexander
Hamilton, and the most worrisome feature on the political landscape was
Hamilton’s financial scheme, with its presumption of a consolidated
federal government possessing many of the powers over the states that
Parliament had exercised over the colonies. Under Hamilton’s diabolical
leadership, the United States seemed to be re-creating the very political and
economic institutions—the national bank became the most visible symbol of
the accumulating corruption—that the Revolution had been designed to
destroy. Jefferson developed a full-blooded conspiracy theory in which bankers,
speculators, federal officeholders, and a small but powerful congregation of
closet Tories permanently alienated from the agrarian majority (“They all
live in cities,” he wrote) had captured the meaning of the Revolution and
were now proceeding to strangle it to death behind the closed doors of
investment houses and within the faraway corridors of the Federalist government
in New York and Philadelphia.
³⁷

Exactly
where Washington fit in this horrific picture is difficult to determine. After
all, he presumably knew something about the meaning and purpose of the
Revolution, having done more than any man to assure its success. (As
Jefferson’s critics were quick to observe, the man ensconced at
Monticello had never fired a shot in anger throughout the war.) Initially,
Jefferson simply refused to assign Washington any culpability for the
Federalist conspiracy, somehow suggesting that the person at the very center of
the government was wholly oblivious to the schemes swirling around him. At some
unspoken level of understanding Jefferson recognized that Washington was the
American untouchable, and that any effort to include him in the indictment
immediately placed his entire case against the Federalists on the permanent
defensive.

Jefferson’s posture toward Washington shifted
perceptibly in 1794. The catalyst for the change was the Whiskey Rebellion, a
popular insurgency in four counties of western Pennsylvania protesting an
excise tax on whiskey. Washington viewed the uprising as a direct threat to the
authority of the federal government and called out the militia, a massive
thirteen-thousand-man army, to squelch the uprising. Jefferson regarded the
entire affair as a shameful repetition of the Shays’s Rebellion fiasco
nearly a decade earlier, in which a healthy and essentially harmless expression
of popular discontent by American farmers, so he thought, had prompted an
excessive and unnecessary military response. While his first instinct was to
blame Hamilton for the whole sorry mess, Washington’s speech justifying
the action could not be so easily dismissed.
³⁸

Jefferson
denounced Washington’s speech as “shreds of stuff from
Aesop’s fables and Tom Thumb.” In Jefferson’s new version of
the Federalist conspiracy, Washington was an unknowing and somewhat pathetic
accomplice, like an overaged “captain in his cabin” who was sound
asleep while “a rogue of a pilot [presumably Hamilton] has run them into
an enemy’s port.” Washington was certainly the grand old man of the
American Revolution, but his grandeur had now been eclipsed by his age,
providing the Hamiltonians with “the sanction of a name which has done
too much good not to be sufficient to cover harm also.” Washington simply
did not have control of the government and was inadvertently lending
credibility to the treacheries being hatched all around him. Washington, in
effect, was senile.
³⁹

While
hardly true, this explanation had the demonstrable advantage of permitting
Jefferson’s vision of a Federalist conspiracy to congeal in a plausible
pattern that formed around Washington without touching him directly. Jefferson
was also careful never to utter any of his criticisms of Washington in public.
But in his private correspondence with trusted Republicans, he developed the
image of an old soldier past his prime, reading speeches he did not write and
could not comprehend, lingering precariously in the misty edges of
incompetence, a hollow hulk of his former greatness. The most famous letter in
this mode—famous because it eventually found its way into the newspapers
against Jefferson’s will—was prompted by the passage of Jay’s
Treaty. “It would give you a fever,” Jefferson wrote to his Italian
friend Phillip Mazzei, “were I to name to you the apostates who have gone
over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the
council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot of England.”
Since there was only one person who could possibly merit the mantle of
America’s Samson and Solomon, Jefferson’s customary sense of
discretion allowed him to make his point without mentioning the name. But
everybody knew.
⁴⁰

One final
and all-important piece of the Jeffersonian vision transcended the troubling
particularities of domestic politics altogether. As Jefferson saw it, the
American Revolution had been merely the opening shot in a global struggle
against tyranny that was destined to sweep over the world. “This ball of
liberty, I believe most piously,” he predicted, “is now so well in
motion that it will roll around the globe.” Whereas Washington regarded
the national interest as a discrete product of political and economic
circumstances shaping the policies of each nation-state at a specific moment in
history, Jefferson envisioned a much larger global pattern of ideological
conflict in which all nations were aligned for or against the principles that
America had announced to the world in 1776. The same moralistic dichotomy that
Jefferson saw inside the United States between discernible heroes and villains,
he also projected into the international arena. For Jefferson, all specific
decisions about American foreign policy occurred within the context of this
overarching, indeed almost cosmic, pattern.
⁴¹