Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
Although he
certainly knew better, Jefferson went along. He reported gossip in the
corridors of Congress to the effect that Adams had been heard to declare
“that such was his want of confidence in the faith of France, that were
they ever to agree to a treaty ever so favorable, he should think it his duty
to reject it.” (Adams was in fact, at that very moment, listening to
Gerry’s pleadings for a renewal of the peace effort.) Another rumor
circulating in the streets of Philadelphia caught Jefferson’s ear:
Washington had leaked the news that he opposed Adams’s foreign policy.
(The exact opposite was true. Washington was endorsing the Adams initiative as
the effective implementation of his own long-standing commitment to American
neutrality.) Yet another rumor had it that Adams was working behind the scenes
to scuttle the plans for moving the capital to the Potomac (also untrue). And
then, when the president announced his unexpected decision to send a new
American peace delegation to France in February of 1799, Jefferson apprised
Madison that this “event of events” had been forced upon Adams.
Jefferson had reliable evidence that Talleyrand had threatened to leak news of
his previous peace initiative, thereby requiring Adams to reciprocate.
“Mark that I state this as conjecture,” Jefferson told Madison,
“but founded on workings and indications which have been under our
eyes” (all contrived).
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If the
primary function of the collaboration within the Adams family was to insulate
and eventually isolate Adams from the ideological warfare raging between both
political parties, the primary function of the collaboration between Jefferson
and Madison was to generate mutual reinforcement for their uncompromising
assault on the presidency, frequently at the expense of even the most
rudimentary version of factual accuracy. In their minds, the political stakes
were enormous, the threat posed by the Federalists put the entire republican
experiment at risk, the battle was to the death, and taking prisoners was not
permitted. They convinced themselves that Adams was the enemy, and then all the
evidence fell in place around that rock-ribbed, if highly questionable,
conviction.
Jefferson’s nearly Herculean powers of self-denial
also helped keep the cause pure, at least in the privacy of his own mind. In
1798, he commissioned James Callender, a notorious scandalmonger who had
recently broken the story on Hamilton’s adulterous affair with Maria
Reynolds, to write a libelous attack on Adams. In
The Prospect Before
Us,
Callender delivered the goods, describing Adams as “a hoary
headed incendiary” who was equally determined on war with France and on
declaring himself president for life, with John Quincy lurking in the
background as his successor. When confronted with the charge that, despite his
position as vice president, he had paid Callender to write diatribes against
the president, Jefferson claimed to know nothing about it. Callender
subsequently published Jefferson’s incriminating letters, proving his
complicity, and Jefferson seemed genuinely surprised at the revelation,
suggesting that for him the deepest secrets were not the ones he kept from his
enemies but the ones he kept from himself.
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When
Congress began the debates over the Sedition Act in the spring of 1798,
Jefferson’s first fear was that it was aimed pointedly at him. He
complained to James Monroe that “my name is running through all the city
as detected in criminal correspondence with the French directory.”
Editorials in Federalist newspapers accused him of passing information to the
French government through pro-French agents in America and meeting routinely
with Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the
Aurora,
the chief vehicle
for the opposition. Jefferson privately acknowledged to Madison that these
accusations were essentially true. Even though he was the second-ranking member
of the Adams administration, he was, as the Federalist leadership in the House
described him, “the very life and soul of the opposition.”
Jefferson defended himself by claiming that his consultations with Bache were
not clandestine meetings; he had met with Bache many times, true enough, but he
was not, as the Federalists charged, “closeted” with him. More
basically, Jefferson simply did not regard his behavior as seditious or
treasonable. Indeed, it was the Federalist government, though duly elected,
that was guilty of treason.
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Here was the
core of the problem. Jefferson genuinely believed, and Madison reinforced the
belief, that the Federalists had captured the government from the American
people. Despite its electoral mandate, the programs and policies the
Federalists were implementing at the national level—an expansive agenda
for the federal government, a version of neutrality that aligned the United
States more with England than France—represented a repudiation of the
spirit of ’76. The passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, then the
creation of the New Army, only confirmed that the Federalist agenda violated
the central tenets of the American Revolution, conjuring up memories of
Parliament’s restrictions on the colonial press and British troops
quartered in the major colonial cities. How could opposition to such measures
be treasonable now when they had been legitimate expressions of American
dissent back then?
The legal guidelines that might permit a clear
answer to that question had not yet congealed. By modern standards
Jefferson’s active role in promoting anti-Adams propaganda and his
complicity in leaking information to pro-French enthusiasts like Bache were
impeachable offenses that verged on treason. But then Hamilton had been guilty
of similar indiscretions with pro-English advocates during the Jay’s
Treaty negotiations. And his conduct in providing clandestine instructions to
Adams’s cabinet undermined the constitutional authority of the executive
branch in ways that would have landed him in jail in modern times. Only ten
years after the passage and ratification of the Constitution, however, what
were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic
judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide.
Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the
Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat in a
sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not
hold because it did not exist.
The capstone of the Jefferson-Madison
collaboration occurred at this volatile political moment—namely, their
joint authorship of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Jefferson visited
Madison at Montpelier on July 2–3 to discuss their response to the
Sedition Act, which passed the Senate the following day. (The Federalists,
ironically, thought it was the perfect way to celebrate the Fourth of July.)
They agreed to launch a pamphlet campaign against what Jefferson called
“the reign of witches.” Working alone at Monticello, Jefferson
composed what became known as the Kentucky Resolutions in August and September.
His core argument was that the Sedition Act was unconstitutional because it
violated the natural rights of the citizens of each state to control their own
domestic affairs. Moreover, each state “has a natural right in cases not
within the compact”—that is, in all cases not specified as under
federal jurisdiction in the Constitution—“to nullify of their own
authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits.” Here
was the classic states’ rights position, topped off by the sweeping claim
that federal laws could be nullified by the states, which then had a legitimate
right to secede, what Jefferson called “scission,” if the federal
Congress or courts defied their decision. If the Sedition Act was a serious
threat to civil liberties, Jefferson’s response was an equally serious
threat to the sovereignty of the national government and the survival of the
union.
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Fortunately for Jefferson, the leadership of the Kentucky legislature
decided to delete the sections of his draft endorsing nullification, presumably
because such open defiance of federal law seemed excessive and unnecessarily
risky. Madison’s more judicious arguments, published as the Virginia
Resolutions, were circulating in the national press and achieving the same
goal—condemning the Sedition Act—but without recourse to
nullification. In fact, the Virginia Resolutions described the Alien and
Sedition Acts as “alarming infractions” of the Constitution that
violated the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Instead of
challenging the authority of the federal government, Madison invoked the
protections afforded by that very government, implicitly suggesting that the
federal courts and not the individual states were the ultimate arbiters of the
Constitution. Whereas Jefferson’s line of thought led logically to the
compact theory of the Constitution eventually embraced by the Confederacy in
1861, Madison’s arguments led toward the modern doctrine of judicial
review and constitutional guarantees for free speech and freedom of the
press.
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When Madison wrote or spoke on constitutional questions, Jefferson always
deferred. To Republican confidants in Virginia, he reiterated his conviction
that “the true principles of our federal compact” left the states
sovereign over all domestic policy; if Congress failed to rescind the Sedition
Act, “we should sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather
than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved.” After
a personal visit from Madison in September of 1799, however, Jefferson agreed
to soften his stance on secession, “not only in deference to his
judgment,” as he put it, “but because we should never think of
separation but for respected and enormous violations”—or, as he had
previously written in the Declaration of Independence, after “a long
train of abuses.” Madison’s prudent and silent intervention rescued
Jefferson from the secessionist implications of his revolutionary principles
and artfully concealed the huge discrepancy between their respective views of
the Constitution. The imperatives of their collaboration, plus the need to
present a united front against the Federalists, took precedence over their
incompatible notions of where sovereignty resided in the American
republic.
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T
HERE ARE
only a few universal laws of
political life, but one of them guided the Republicans during the last year of
the Adams presidency—namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily
engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction. As soon as the Federalists
launched their prosecutions of Republican editors and writers under the
Sedition Act—a total of eighteen indictments were filed—it became
clear that the prosecutions were generally regarded as persecutions. Most of
the defendants became local heroes and public martyrs. Madison quickly
concluded that “our public malady may work its own cure,” meaning
that the spectacle of Federalist lawyers descending upon the Republican
opposition with such blatantly partisan accusations only served to create
converts to the cause they were attempting to silence. The threatened
prosecution of aliens also backfired on the Federalists, when Irish immigrants
in New York and Germans in Pennsylvania, formerly staunch supporters of the
Adams administration, went over to the Republicans in droves.
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What
Jefferson had described as “the reign of witches” even began to
assume the shape of a political comedy in which the joke was on the
Federalists. In New Jersey, for example, when a drunken Republican editor was
charged with making a ribald reference to the president’s posterior, the
jury returned a not guilty verdict on the grounds that truth was a legitimate
defense. There was even room for irony. It was while James Callender was
serving his sentence for libel in a Richmond jail that he first heard rumors of
Jefferson’s sexual liaison with a mulatto slave named Sally Hemings. He
subsequently published the story after deciding that Jefferson had failed to
pay him adequately for his hatchet job on Adams.
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But this
delectable morsel of scandal, which was only confirmed as correct beyond any
reasonable doubt by DNA studies done in 1998, did not arrive in time to help
Adams in the presidential election of 1800. Indeed, Adams’s string of bad
luck or poor timing, call it what you will, persisted to the end. The peace
delegation he dispatched to France so single-handedly negotiated a treaty
ending the “quasi-war,” but the good news arrived too late to
influence the election. Moreover, the New Army, which Adams had opposed and
then rendered superfluous, had strained the federal budget to a point that
demanded new sources of revenue. Even as the army was being disbanded, much to
Adams’s credit and relief, the cost of raising it landed on the voting
public. Adams had somehow managed to miss the political rewards due him and
catch the criticism that properly belonged to others.
Abigail’s
earlier characterization of the Adams-Jefferson competition—the oak
versus the willow—proved prophetic. Perhaps the supreme example of
Jefferson’s greater flexibility occurred on the foreign policy front.
Throughout the Adams presidency, Jefferson and his Republican followers had
been insisting that the French Revolution was the American Revolution on
European soil and that France was therefore America’s major international
ally. But when Napoleon overturned the French Republic and declared himself
omnipotent military dictator, again just as Adams had predicted would happen,
Jefferson quickly shifted his position to accommodate the new reality.
“It is very material for the … [American people] to be made
sensible that their own character and situation are materially different from
the French,” he observed in 1800, “and that whatever may be the
fate of republicanism there, we are able to preserve it inviolate here.”
This was precisely the neutral foreign policy that both Washington and Adams
had been urging for a decade and that Jefferson had condemned as a betrayal of
the spirit of ’76. Jefferson’s conversion occurred with such
breathtaking speed that hardly anyone noticed how deftly he was discarding the
chief weapon the Republicans had wielded against two Federalist
administrations. That weapon was unnecessary now, as both Jefferson and Madison
understood, because the superior organization of the Republicans at the state
level virtually assured their victory in the looming presidential
election.
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