Joseph J. Ellis (12 page)

Finally, there is Hamilton’s enshrinement of the urban elite—the merchants, bankers, and business leaders—as the central figures in the emergent American society. These were the kind of men who had rescued him from obscurity in the tropics as a youth and then, once he had displayed his brilliance, welcomed him into the inner circles of New York society. Hamilton himself was a kind of Horatio Alger hero who aspired to fame more than fortune, but he understood the world of banking, investing, and speculating from within. He wrote no idyllic testimonials to merchants and moneymen comparable to Jefferson’s hymns to the bucolic splendor of America’s yeomen farmers, but his entire financial plan was an implicit endorsement of commerce as America’s economic lifeblood and of men of trade and commerce as its chief beneficiaries and silent heroes. Hamilton did not design his system, as his critics frequently claimed, primarily to enrich the commercial elite. He designed it to channel their talent and resources into productive activities that served the public interest. Nor did his insider knowledge of interest rates ever tempt him to take personal advantage: “But you remember the saying with regard to Caesar’s Wife,” he wrote to Henry Lee. “I think the spirit of it applicable to every man concerned in the administration of the finances of a Country.” Nevertheless,
he was excessively trusting of some of his speculator friends; and he only fired his assistant in the Treasury Department, William Duer, after Duer’s mixing of personal and public funds reached criminal proportions. Duer was the epitome of the enterprising speculator whom he trusted and who ultimately proved untrustworthy.
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To Virginians like Madison and Jefferson, on the other hand, Duer was not the exception, but the rule. The Virginia gentry were psychologically incapable of sharing Hamilton’s affinity with men who made their living manipulating interest rates. Land, not fluid forms of capital, was their ultimate measure of wealth. Investment bankers and speculators, as they saw it, made no productive contribution to society. All they did was move paper around and adjust numbers. At the nub, the issue was not rich versus poor or the few versus the many, since the planter class of Virginia was just as much an elite minority as the wealthy merchants of New York or Boston. The issue was agrarian versus commercial sources of wealth.

Nor did it help that a significant percentage of Virginia’s landed class, Jefferson among them, were heavily in debt to British and Scottish creditors, who were compounding their interest rates faster than the profit margins in tobacco and wheat could match. One cannot help but suspect that the beleaguered aristocracy of Virginia saw in Hamilton and his beloved commercial elite of the northern cities the American replicas of British bankers who were bleeding them to death. The more one contemplates the mentality of the Virginia planters—the refusal to bring their habits of consumption and expenditure into line with the realities of their economic predicament, the widespread pattern of denial right up to the declaration of bankruptcy—the more likely it seems that an entrenched and even willful ignorance of the economic principles governing the relationship between credit and debt had become a badge of honor in their world. These were simply not the kind of concerns that a gentleman of property should take seriously. In a sense, they took considerable pride in not having the dimmest understanding of what Hamilton was talking about.
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T
HE THIRD
participant in the dinner-table bargain, and the host for the occasion, was Thomas Jefferson. He was not being characteristically diplomatic when he claimed that Madison and Hamilton both
understood the issues at stake more fully than he did. After all, he had only returned from his five-year tour of duty in France six months earlier and had just taken up his post as secretary of state in March. His mind was also on other things: the recent marriage of his eldest daughter, Martha; finding suitable quarters in New York; drafting a lengthy report on weights and measures; reading dispatches from Paris on the ongoing French Revolution. The onset of his chronic migraine headache had also incapacitated him for much of May. In fact, Jefferson’s headache coincided with a veritable plague that seemed to descend on the leadership of the Virginia dynasty. Madison was laid up with dysentery, Edmund Randolph remained in Virginia to care for his wife, who had nearly died delivering a stillborn baby, and, most ominously of all, George Washington came down with the flu and developed pulmonary complications that the physicians considered life-threatening. “You cannot conceive the public alarm on this occasion,” Jefferson reported to William Short, his former secretary in Paris, adding that Washington’s demise would in all probability have meant the abrupt end of the whole national experiment.
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Slightly above six feet two, Jefferson towered over both Madison and Hamilton, and at forty-seven he was sufficiently their senior to enjoy the kind of respect accorded an older brother. Neither his physical stature nor his age, however, could compensate for his lengthy absence abroad throughout the great constitutional reforms of the late 1780s. Madison had kept him apprised of the debates at the Constitutional Convention (no better source existed on the planet), and Madison had also beaten down the rumors circulating in the Virginia ratifying convention that Jefferson was at best lukewarm on the constitutional settlement itself. The rumors were in fact true, though on all constitutional questions Jefferson deferred to Madison’s superior judgment, so he could accept the offer to become America’s first secretary of state without political reservations. It also helped that foreign policy was the one area where he believed the nation should speak with one voice. Beyond that elemental level, his views on federal power were unknown, in part because he had not been involved in the great debates of 1787–1788, and in part because his own mind did not operate at Madisonian levels of specificity and legalistic clarity. “I am not a Federalist,” he declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If
I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” The temporary capital in New York was hardly heaven, but he had agreed to go there in the spring of 1790 with his allegiances undeclared and his own lofty political principles uncontaminated by the kind of infighting that Madison and Hamilton had perfected to an art.
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He had come reluctantly. This was part of a lifelong pattern of reticence, dating back to the prerevolutionary years in Virginia, when he had first emerged from the mists of the Blue Ridge Mountains to attend William and Mary, study law with George Wythe, and win marginal acceptance by the Tidewater elite. He gained his reputation as an effective writer against British encroachments but was a reclusive non-presence in debates. In the Continental Congress, John Adams had described him as a staunch advocate of independence who never uttered more than two or three sentences, even in committees. His lasting fame, indeed immortality, derived from his authorship of the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776, but few Americans knew about that role in 1790. The Declaration was still regarded as a product of the whole Continental Congress, not the work of one man, and had yet to achieve the symbolic significance it would in the nineteenth century.
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His service as wartime governor of Virginia had ended disastrously when British troops burned the capital as Jefferson galloped off and into official disgrace. Though later cleared of any wrongdoing, he vowed never to accept public office again. The hurly-burly of politics did not suit his temperament, which was only comfortable when ensconced on his mountaintop and redesigning his mansion at Monticello. Always poised for retirement, he had accepted the diplomatic post in Paris to escape the painful memories of his wife’s premature death in childbirth, had performed his duties ably, and had even gained a semblance of fame in France as Franklin’s successor as the Gallic embodiment of the archetypal American in Paris. His protestations when offered a position in the new government in 1789 were utterly sincere, but Madison had been his usually persuasive self and, more to the point, America’s only indispensable figure had suggested that Jefferson was also indispensable. One did not turn down George Washington.

The dinner invitation he had extended to the embattled Madison and Hamilton was perfectly in keeping with his character. Put simply,
Jefferson could not abide personal conflict. One of the reasons he was so notoriously ineffective in debate was that argument itself offended him. The voices he heard inside himself were all harmonious and agreeable, reliable expressions of the providentially aligned universal laws that governed the world as he knew it, so that argument struck him as dissonant noise that defied the natural order of things. Madison, who knew him better than any man alive, fully realized that there was an invisible line somewhere in Jefferson’s mind above which lay his most cherished personal and political ideals. Cross that line and you set off explosions and torrents of unbridled anger of the sort that got spewed at George III in the Declaration of Independence. (Jefferson did not regard such occasions as arguments, but rather as holy wars to the death.) But short of that line, he was endlessly polite and accommodating, genuinely pained at the presence of partisan politics. This was clearly his posture in June of 1790.

There were also practical reasons why he wanted to broker a compromise. As a former foreign minister now serving as secretary of state, Jefferson required no instruction on the international implications of America’s debtor status. Until her foreign debts were paid and her credit with the Dutch bankers in Amsterdam restored, the United States would simply not be taken seriously in Europe’s capitals. Jefferson had learned this the hard way during his Paris phase. He therefore felt even more sharply than Madison that the fiscal goals of Hamilton’s plan were absolutely essential. Without credit, the new nation would remain a laughingstock in foreign eyes. And therefore when those same frenzied Virginians who were writing Madison about the fatal curse of assumption also wrote him, he was even less supportive, though characteristically elusive. “It appears to me one of those questions which present great inconveniences whichever way it is decided,” he wrote his new son-in-law. Or when Henry Lee flooded him with apocalyptic premonitions if assumption somehow were to pass, he counseled patience and greater trust in the wisdom of Congress. “In the meanwhile,” he observed rather elliptically, “the voice of the nation will perhaps be heard.” While vague, the intended effect of the Jeffersonian message was to calm his fellow Virginians. “My duties prevent me from mingling in these questions,” he explained to George Mason just a week before the dinner: “I do not pretend to be very competent to their decision.
In general I think it necessary to give as well as take in a government like ours.”
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T
HE GIVING
and the taking on the location of the permanent national capital had been positively fierce ever since the question had come before Congress in September of 1789. The Constitution had provided for Congress to identify a “seat of government” not to exceed one hundred square miles in size to be purchased from the proximate states. The question was where. From the start, the prospect of congressional representatives reaching an easy consensus on the location was problematic at best. One newspaper editor had sagely, if cynically, observed that “the usual custom is for the capital of new empires to be selected by the whim or caprice of a despot.” While this was obviously not the republican way, perhaps an exception was justified. Since George Washington, as the editor observed, “has never given bad advice to his country,” did it not make practical sense to “let him point to a map and say ‘here’?”
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What became known as the “residency question” was a logistic nightmare. All the regional voting blocs—New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the South—could cite plausible reasons for claiming primacy. And each of the twelve states—Rhode Island did not show up in the Congress until June of 1790—could imagine schemes whereby the capital fell within its borders or the support for another location promised collateral benefits to be negotiated at a price. The crisscrossing patterns of regional and state bargaining were further complicated by two political considerations almost guaranteed to preclude consensus: First, legislation had to pass both the Senate and the House, so as soon as an apparently victorious option made its way through one branch of the Congress, the opposition mobilized against it in the other; second, early on a decision was made to choose a temporary location, which would serve as the capital for ten to twenty years, then a permanent location, which would presumably require the extra time to ready itself for the federal occupation. This distinction played havoc with congressional debate by creating doubt that the temporary location, once chosen, would ever be abandoned. As a result, by the time Jefferson had arrived in New York in March, sixteen possible sites had been proposed
but had failed to muster a majority. The leading candidates (in alphabetical order) were: Annapolis, Baltimore, Carlisle, Frederick, German-town, New York, Philadelphia, the Potomac, the Susquehanna, and Trenton. Given its geographic centrality, some location in Pennsylvania appeared to have the edge.
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“The business of the seat of Government is become a labyrinth,” Madison reported back to a fellow Virginian, “for which the votes printed furnish no clue, and which it is impossible in a letter to explain to you.” The political wheeling and dealing inside the Congress and out had reached such epidemic proportions that Madison was given the unofficial title “Big Knife” for cutting deals: “If the Big Knife would give up Potowmack the Matter would be easily settled,” one Pennsylvania man reported to Jefferson. “But that you will say is as unreasonable as it would be to expect a Pennsilvanian to surrender at Discretion to New York. It therefore amuses me to see the Arguments our grave politicians bring forward when I know it will be determined by local Interests.” While the Virginians were not accustomed to thinking of their interests as merely local, by the eve of the dinner at Jefferson’s the prospects for a Potomac site had faded and Madison’s formidable skills as a political negotiator had assumed a wholly defensive posture—coordinating opposition to a Pennsylvania victory.
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