Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (33 page)

Jefferson was distraught. “I know not which mortifies me most, that I should fear to write what I think or my country bear such a state of things,” Jefferson wrote. “Yet Lyon's judges … are objects of national fear.” Lyon himself found strength and vindication in the conviction. He reported to jail, sought reelection to the House from prison, and won.

For Jefferson, the Alien and Sedition Acts were a cause of both near-despair and wonderment. “What person who remembers the times and tempers we have seen could have believed that within so short a period, not only the jealous spirit of liberty which shaped every operation of our revolution, but even the common principles of English whiggism would be scouted, and the tory principles of passive obedience under the new fangled names of
confidence
and
responsibility,
become entirely triumphant?” he wrote New York chancellor Robert R. Livingston.

N
ever one to stay out of the fray, Jefferson privately lobbied Republican candidates to run for office. In early 1799 he pleaded with John Page to seek a congressional seat. “Pray, my dear Sir, leave nothing undone to effect it.… For even a single vote may decide the majority” in the makeup of the House.

More dramatically, Jefferson secretly drafted resolutions for the state legislature in Kentucky protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts. (Madison did the same for Virginia.) The vice president of the United States was thus at work on an official rebuke for one of the American states to send to the president of the United States. The Kentucky draft was a purely Republican document, though Jefferson went far down the path to endangering the Union he loved so. In the resolution he endorsed the idea of nullification—the right of a state to refuse to comply with federal laws that it deemed unconstitutional. Here was the great advocate of a stronger, more effective national government proposing a mechanism for chaos and almost certain disunion.

Viewed in terms of philosophy, the contradictions between Jefferson the nationalist and Jefferson the nullifier seem irreconcilable. Viewed in terms of personality and of politics, though, Jefferson was acting in character. He was always in favor of whatever means would improve the chances of his cause of the hour. When he was a member of the Confederation Congress, he wanted the Confederation Congress to be respected. When he was a governor, he wanted strong gubernatorial powers. Now that he disagreed with the federal government (though an officer of that government), he wanted the states to have the ability to exert control and bring about the end he favored. He was not intellectually consistent, but a consistent theme did run through his politics and statecraft: He would do what it took, within reason, to arrange the world as he wanted it to be.

John Breckinridge, a Kentucky Republican and speaker of the State House, reported that the Kentucky Senate had balked at the nullification language. “In the Senate,” wrote Breckinridge, “there was a considerable division, particularly on that sentence which declares, ‘a Nullification of those acts by the States, to be the rightful remedy.' ” On reflection, Jefferson confided his faith in a middle course to Madison. “I think we should … leave the matter in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to push the matter to extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render prudent.”

If Jefferson had overreacted with his talk of nullification, he was coming to a more settled view of the nature of faction. “In every free and deliberating society, there must from the nature of man be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these for the most part must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time,” he wrote John Taylor in June 1798. “Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch and debate to the people the proceedings of the other.… A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight.”

T
he last years of the eighteenth century were unhappy ones for Jefferson, but he never despaired. He knew politics was an intimate enterprise, and he took care to assuage his foes where he could. “No one can know Mr. Jefferson and be his
personal
enemy,” said Supreme Court justice William Paterson, who had presided over the Lyon sedition trial. “Few, if any, are more opposed to him as a politician than I am, and until recently I utterly disliked him as a man as well as a politician.” Then the two men had occasion to travel together, talking and getting a sense of each other. “I was highly pleased with his remarks,” Paterson said, “for though we differed on many points, he displayed an impartiality, a freedom from prejudice.”

To Elbridge Gerry, Jefferson made a testament of political faith in January 1799.

I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another: for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents. And I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches; and not for raising a hue and cry against the sacred name of philosophy …
[and not]
to go backwards instead of forwards to look for improvement, to believe that government, religion, morality, and every other science were in the highest perfection in ages of the darkest ignorance, and that nothing can ever be devised more perfect than what was established by our forefathers.… The first object of my heart is my own country. In that is embarked my family, my fortune, and my own existence. I have not one farthing of interest, nor one fiber of attachment out of it, nor a single motive of preference of any one nation to another but in proportion as they are more or less friendly to us.

Still, Jefferson was not overly dreamy. He solicited friends to author attacks on the alien and sedition laws, among other measures, and discussed public-opinion strategies with Madison. The public mind was open to the Republican case, Jefferson said, which made him “sensible that this summer is the season for systematic energies and sacrifices. The engine is the press.” He sent Republican pamphlets to Monroe to promulgate. “I wish you to give these to the most influential characters among our country-men.… Do not let my name be connected with the business.” On another occasion he asked the chairman of the Virginia Republican committee to distribute some tracts. “I trust yourself only with the secret that these pamphlets go from me,” he wrote.

Jefferson could only do so much as vice president. “A decided character at the head of our government is of immense importance by the influence it will have upon public opinion,” John Taylor wrote Jefferson in February 1799. Taylor was talking about the governorship, but the point applied, as he and Jefferson knew, to the presidency as well.

THIRTY

ADAMS VS. JEFFERSON REDUX

I should be unfaithful to my own feelings were I not to say that it has been the greatest of all human consolations to me to be considered by the republican portion of my fellow citizens, as the safe depository of their rights.

—
T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

I
T
WAS
NOT
the most sophisticated of strategies, but it worked. On Monday, February 25, 1799, the Republicans in the House planned to take up petitions against the alien and sedition laws. The Federalists, with a bare but sufficient majority, caucused beforehand and decided, Jefferson told Madison, “that not a word should be spoken on their side in answer to anything which should be said on the other.”

On the floor, when Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born Pennsylvania Republican House leader, addressed the Alien Act and Virginia congressman John Nicholas the Sedition, the majority sabotaged the proceedings in the most elemental of ways: by drowning out the speakers. The Federalists “began to enter into loud conversations, laugh, cough etc.”

The din of the House was disorienting and dispiriting. The Republicans felt powerless. “It was impossible to proceed,” Jefferson said.

At Monticello in the Albemarle spring, Jefferson worried that Adams was going to raise a “Presidential army, or Presidential militia,” the formation of which would “leave me without a doubt that force on the Constitution is intended.” He believed, too, that Hamilton would be the real power behind the new regiments. “Can such an army under Hamilton be disbanded?” Jefferson wrote in April 1799. The debate turned violent. In the House, John Randolph of Roanoke, a Jefferson cousin and lawmaker, attacked the idea of a standing military establishment, referring to regular soldiers as “mercenary forces” and “ragamuffins.” The next evening two marines accosted Randolph at the New Theatre; he was, Jefferson said, “jostled and [had] his coat pulled.”

As the eighteenth century ended, the presidential contest was the supreme battle in the war of ideas and personalities in American politics. Jefferson was determined to seek the top office again. He had seen enough of what he had called a “reign of witches” to underscore his conviction that republicanism was in danger.

So much seemed at stake. A correspondent reported that Hamilton had led a louder cheer and toast to George III than to John Adams at a dinner of the St. Andrews Club of New York. “No mortal can foresee in favor of which party the election will go,” Jefferson said in March 1800.

H
yperbole was the order of the day. For Republicans, Adams was an aspiring monarch. Americans, one Republican wrote, “will never permit the chief magistrate of the union to become a
King
instead of a president.” For Federalists, Jefferson was a dangerous infidel. The
Gazette of the United States
told voters to choose “
GOD
—
AND
A
RELIGIOUS
PRESIDENT
” or impiously declare for “
JEFFERSON
—
AND
NO
GOD
.”

Jefferson's views on religious liberty, however, appealed to many more moderate voters. New Jersey Republicans charged that Jefferson's enemies used religion as a means of assault “because he is not a fanatic, nor willing that the Quaker, the Baptist, the Methodist, or any other denominations of Christians, should pay the pastors of other sects; because he does not think that a Catholic should be banished for believing in transubstantiation, or a Jew, for believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Still, the religious refrain about Jefferson's unconventional faith was a frequent one. From the federal bench, Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase, a devoted Federalist, had “harangued” a grand jury with what Monroe reported were “allusions which supported by Eastern calumnies” about Jefferson. “He declared solemnly that he would not allow an atheist to give testimony in court”—an implied reference to Jefferson.

Chase also moved to indict and try the Scottish-born newspaperman James Thomson Callender, a virulent Republican—whom Jefferson had supported financially—for sedition. The immediate cause of the charges was a little book with a high-minded title—
The Prospect Before Us
—but a slashing style. “The reign of Mr. Adams has, hitherto, been one continued tempest of
malignant
passions,” Callender wrote. “As president, he has never opened his lips, or lifted his pen, without threatening and scolding. The grand object of his administration has been to exasperate the rage of contending parties, to calumniate and destroy every man who differs from his opinions. Mr. Adams has labored, and with melancholy success, to break up the bonds of social affection, and, under the ruins of confidence and friendship, to extinguish the only beam of happiness that glimmers through the dark and despicable farce of life.”

Jefferson told Callender that the tract “cannot fail to produce the best effect.”

Reading it, Abigail and John Adams seethed.

George Washington died in December 1799 at Mount Vernon. As solicitous as Jefferson had been to his old president in private, the two men were so far apart politically that Jefferson believed it the wisest course to remain at Monticello rather than to attend any of the many ceremonies commemorating Washington's life. Jefferson admired Washington's gifts in the art of leadership but could not help but see the first president as what he had become: a Federalist icon whose party, Jefferson thought, was moving the United States in the wrong direction.

Theirs had always been a complicated relationship. Eager to please the older man, Jefferson had been less than honest about his support of Philip Freneau and the
National Gazette,
preferring to mislead Washington rather than force a confrontation over the Republican attacks on the first president. It was Hamilton, not Jefferson, who had emerged as Washington's political son. “Perhaps no man in this community has equal cause with myself to deplore the loss,” Hamilton said after Washington's death. “I have been much indebted to the kindness of the General, and he was an
Aegis very essential to me.
”

Reacting to the flood of tributes to Washington, Freneau wrote some verses to check the popular tide:

No tongue can tell, no pen describe

The frenzy of a numerous tribe,

Who, by distemper'd fancy led,

Insult the memory of the dead.

He was no god, ye flattering knaves,

He own'd no world, he ruled no waves;

But—and exalt it, if you can,

He was the upright, Honest Man.

This was his glory, this outshone

Those attributes you doat upon:

On this strong ground he took his stand,

Such virtue saved a sinking land.

J
ames Madison was also striking somber notes about the Federalists. “The horrors which they evidently feel at the approach of the electoral epoch are a sufficient warning of the desperate game by which they will be apt to characterize the interval,” he wrote Jefferson in April 1800. To his sister Martha Carr, Jefferson connected the sedition laws to the 1800 race. “The batteries of slander are fully opened for the campaign which is to decide the Presidential election. The other party have begun it by a furious onset on the printers, that they may have the field to themselves, and allow no means to return their fire.” To Patsy he said: “Our opponents perceive the decay of their power. Still they are pressing it, and trying to pass laws to keep themselves in power.”

Jefferson harbored a real hope in the good sense of the people. His belief in democracy was not a pose, but a conviction: Educate the public, he believed, and by and large a majority would find its way to the right place.

Now, in 1800, Jefferson was sure the “madness and extravagance” of the Federalists was too profound and evident to fool the voters. “The people through all the states,” Jefferson said, “are for republican forms, republican principles, simplicity, economy, religious and civil freedom.”

In early May, Adams made some cabinet changes, nominating John Marshall to replace Timothy Pickering as secretary of state and naming Samuel Dexter to take the place of Secretary of War James McHenry. On taking office, the second president had chosen to keep Washington's cabinet intact, a decision that had given him less control over the government than he would have liked for much of his tenure. Adams also disbanded what Jefferson had called “the Presidential militia.” To his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., Jefferson noted that the Federalists “are, on the approach of an election, trying to court a little popularity, that they may be afterwards allowed to go on 4 years longer in defiance of it.”

O
n the eve of Fourth of July celebrations in 1800, the Baltimore
American
published rumors that Jefferson had died at Monticello after “an indisposition of 48 hours”—a detail that, in its specificity, lent credence to the report. Several papers followed suit, and the
Gazette of the United States
said that the report “appears to be entitled to some credit.” By July 6 the truth—that Jefferson was alive and well—was known, prompting a letter from the French economist Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours in New York. “I thought I had lost the greatest man of this continent, the one whose enlightened reason can be the most useful to both worlds,” he wrote. “I spent several days in unutterable despair.”

In Sharon, Connecticut, a Federalist enclave, the Reverend Cotton
Mather Smith dined in a small gathering that included Uriah McGregory, a Jefferson supporter. “I found him an
engaged Federal
politician,” McGregory said. Smith had asked McGregory if he truly wanted to see “Mr. Jefferson [in] the Presidential Chair?”

McGregory had answered yes, he did, prompting, “with much other malicious invective,” a diatribe about alleged financial and legal misconduct on Jefferson's part. The claim from Smith: that Jefferson “had obtained … property by fraud and robbery—and that in one instance you had defrauded and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate, to which you [were] executor, of ten thousand pounds sterling; by keeping the property and paying them in money at the nominal amount that was worth no more than forty for one.” McGregory refused to believe it, and said so. Smith was adamant, replying that “it was true and that ‘it could be proved.' ”

Writing Jefferson in July 1800, McGregory noted the uniqueness of the dinnertime attack. “I know, Sir, that you suffered much abuse in this state—and from faithful inquiry believe it to be unmerited and malicious—but never, until the above instance, knew that the vilest of your traducers had ventured to impeach your honesty in pecuniary concerns.” He thought Jefferson should know of the charges, and he hoped to be armed with a reply. “I wish to have it in my power, Sir, to publish a clear and full refutation, together with the vile assertion.”

Jefferson denied it all—there was no basis for the assertions—and lamented such rumors. On the whole, Jefferson had to count on the coming of “a day when the false witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his slanders.”

I
n the fall of 1800 a conspiracy organized by a slave named Gabriel in Henrico County, Virginia, unraveled on the night of its execution. A sprawling effort, the insurrection would have used recruits to take over part of Richmond, Norfolk, and Petersburg. The white authorities struck back mercilessly, hanging twenty-six conspirators.

From jail in Richmond, James Callender told Jefferson, “Their plan was to massacre all the whites, of all ages, and sexes; and all the blacks who would not join them; and then march off to the mountains, with the plunder of the city. Those wives who should refuse to accompany their husbands were to have been butchered along with the rest, an idea truly worthy of an African heart!”

Like the warfare on St. Domingue, Gabriel's conspiracy underscored Jefferson's view that there was no sustainable future in a society in which blacks and whites lived freely in proximity to one another. In the wake of the Gabriel episode and a panic over slave violence in Virginia, the state's House of Delegates asked Jefferson to explore whether a foreign land might be open to receiving American blacks. An approach was made to the Sierra Leone Company, but negotiations lapsed for various reasons.

P
olitically, in New York, Alexander Hamilton was unhappy that Republicans were doing well in his home state under the leadership of Aaron Burr. In the spring of 1800, New York election results had effectively given the Republicans, who had won what Jefferson called “a great majority in their legislature,” the votes they needed to carry the presidential ballot in the winter. (Legislatures chose presidential electors in New York and ten other states; in only five of the sixteen states in the Union were the electors popularly chosen.) In New York, Edward Livingston reported, there was “a most auspicious gloom on the countenances of every Tory.”

Hamilton and his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, appealed to John Jay, now governor of New York, to change the state's election laws before the new Republican majority took office, effectively overturning the verdict of the vote. It was a classic Hamilton maneuver: “In times like this in which we live,” he entreated Jay, “it will not do to be overscrupulous.” The overriding goal, Hamilton said, was to “prevent an
atheist
in religion and a
fanatic
in politics from getting possession of the helm of State.”

Governor Jay was unmoved. On Hamilton's letter he wrote “Proposing a measure for party purposes, which I think it would not become me to adopt.” The Republican win in New York would stand, opening a path to the presidency to Hamilton's nemesis.