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Thomas Jefferson

CHAPTER THREE

Creating a New Republic and Launching It in the World, 1789–1809

1. THE WASHINGTON PRESIDENCY

There was no precedent for Washington. It had been centuries since there had been even a marginally serious republic and there had never been a constitutional one. The whole notion of constitutional government was fragmentary. In Britain, some of the Swiss cantons, parts of the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and a few of the German and Italian jurisdictions there were some institutional restraints on executive authority and some rights vested in individual citizens. But the Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, insurance against capricious prosecution, just compensation for seized property, the presumption of innocence for accused, access to counsel, prompt justice, reasonable bail (almost all of which have become pretty moth-eaten in practice at time of writing)¹ and the attribution of unallocated powers to the states or the people themselves showed at least a conceptual respect for individual liberties that was unique in the world and was widely acclaimed as such.

There was no assumption in the late eighteenth century that government had any purpose except defending the country, maintaining internal order, overseeing a currency of integrity, and generally administering laws and facilitating lawful and useful activities as defined from time to time. Washington had challenged the Continental Congress, when he took leave of his demobilized army in 1783, to maintain adequate armed forces, honor the Revolution’s debts with a reliable currency, maintain an indissoluble union, and promote a spirit of sacrifice and cooperation among all the states. The Congress and the states had completely failed to do any of that, and he intended to provide them himself. He saw himself, with perfect justice, as the emblem and symbol of the nation, not only for having led the armies of the Revolution to victory and presided over the assembly that wrote the Constitution, but as the man summoned by popular and general demand, and without opposition, to take the headship of the new nation and, by his conduct, define its presidency. In his inaugural address, he spoke of an “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.” This was a rather unspecific message of exhortations and velleities, more remarkable in its serenity by the fact that Washington had lost a lot of money during the Revolution and had to borrow $100 at 6 percent interest just to attend his own inauguration.²

Washington toured most of the country in stages, reassuring people with his majestic presence, and promised in famous letters to the Newport synagogue and to the Roman Catholics of America (through the bishop of Baltimore) that their congregants and co-religionists would not be discriminated against in the new nation as they probably had been in the countries they or their forebears had departed. To the Jews, he wrote: “The Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. . . . May the children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” To the Roman Catholics he wrote: “May the members of your society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free government, enjoy every spiritual and temporal felicity.” He had not been as loquacious as Franklin in expressing confidence that the United States would relatively quickly become the premier nation of the world. But the whole ambiance of the new nation, the tenor of the wording of its earliest and most basic state papers, exuded confidence in the exalted and exceptional destiny of America, and of its unique and evangelical status as a light unto the whole world, showing the way forward for the rights of man and the organization of government. Implicit in this was America’s predestined and natural right to expand across America and become a country on a grander scale than any European nation.

This notion of destiny and exceptionalism was in part simply true and evident in the world’s only and revolutionary constitutional republic, in part reasonable supposition of growing immigration and the settling of the generally rich and largely vacant land westward to and beyond the Mississippi, and in part an act of levitation and denial, to rise above inconvenient facts, such as that there were other democracies in the world, that slavery was objectively evil, and that to patch the country together, indecent electoral Danegeld had had to be paid to the minority of the states where it was established. Washington, as president in Philadelphia, where the law was that after six months’ residence slaves were automatically free, cycled his slaves in from Mount Vernon for a little over 20 weeks and then platooned them with others, to avoid emancipation of them. To be arbitrary, the American claim to moral leadership was one-third pure virtue, one-third ambitious but plausible striving, and one-third humbug and hypocrisy. The virtue would be strained at times but not discarded or altogether sullied; the ambitions of the most ardent patriots to world leadership would be attained in prodigies of courage, imagination, and diligence; but the fraud and corruption would constantly nag and periodically haunt the nation through all the astounding times ahead.

Foreign affairs were to be entrusted to a department of state, which was directed ad interim by John Jay, and then by the first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. At first, there was little to do in foreign affairs, though loose ends remained with the British, and France began her revolutionary perturbations with the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris less than three months after Washington’s inauguration. The American fiscal shambles was to be addressed by the brilliant, bold, and vehement Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the Treasury. Armed forces were in the hands of the secretary of war, Henry Knox, a journeyman colleague from the Revolutionary War, who presided over a permanent army of 5,000, the navy, shipyards, the armory, and Indian affairs. He was not at all of the quality of Jefferson and Hamilton, and nor was the attorney general, Virginia’s Governor Edmund Randolph, who did not have an office but took a retainer as the government’s lawyer. In these brave and halcyon days, what became the United States Department of Justice was not even an embryo. Samuel Osgood was the first postmaster general. Washington’s confidence in John Adams had been shaken by his advocacy of an all-militia army, and during his incumbency his office was, and would long remain, anomalous, although relations between the two men were satisfactorily revived later in the administration. It was a cabinet of only seven. But one of the very most important figures continued to be Congressman James Madison, who was Washington’s most trusted adviser, the champion of the Bill of Rights, and generally recognized and deferred to as the principal author of the Constitution. This group of five (Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison), who with Franklin are generally considered the principal founders of the United States, continued through all of the decade, and Jefferson and Madison through the first quarter of the next century, as leaders of the new republic’s public life, assuring and symbolizing continuity.

Washington’s only rival as the very greatest American and co-founder of the nation, Benjamin Franklin, finally passed away on April 17, 1790, aged 84. He had seen the new government in and fairly launched. Benjamin Franklin was universally saluted as a great man, statesman, scientist, inventor, writer, and publisher, and especially as a unique, wholly admirable personality. When he was buried, approximately half the whole population of Philadelphia, about 20,000 people, crowded the few blocks to the Christ Church cemetery, and the casket was preceded by all the clergy of the city, of every denomination.³

The main focus of the administration was in the complex series of measures very skillfully formulated and advanced by Hamilton to create fiscal and monetary stability. Hamilton’s plan came in three main proposals from January 1790 to March 1791: foreign debt, mainly in the hands of the former French and Dutch allies, was reckoned at $11.7 million, and was to be honored entirely with payment in guaranteed interest-bearing notes. The domestically held debt of the defunct Confederation and the states was estimated at about $67 million, and all of this was to be “assumed,” which meant placed in a sinking fund where it would yield interest and be retired eventually. Hamilton had softened the onerousness of these assumptions of debt by quietly buying some of it at heavily discounted prices, but it was a very controversial plan. There was general agreement on the foreign debt but the uneven distribution of state debt led to fierce debate and it was initially narrowly rejected by the House of Representatives at the urging of Madison, but Hamilton arranged with Madison, in a deal brokered by Jefferson, that the debt-assumption proposals would be accepted in exchange for moving the capital of the country from Philadelphia to a new site on the Potomac adjacent to Virginia.

This instantly gave the U.S. government a respected fiscal status, competitive with the stronger European nations, put a lot of money in the hands of the administration’s grateful friends, presaged a number of Keynesian and monetarist policies of 130 to 150 years later, created a lively American capital market, subordinated the states to the central government, and deprived the states of much of their argument for access to tax revenues, as their debt vanished.

Hamilton’s second measure was the establishment of the Bank of the United States as the handler of large money transfers, the manager of the national debt, principal institutional lender, and issuer of supplementary currency as debt certificates. This generated heated constitutional argument with Jefferson, who considered it ultra vires to the government, but Hamilton’s view of the “implicit powers” of the government prevailed with Washington and Congress. Only 35 at this time, Hamilton, who had caught Washington’s attention as a young volunteer from the West Indies early in the Revolutionary War, was undoubtedly a man of genius, as all his contemporaries, including worldly figures such as the timeless French foreign minister, Talleyrand, agreed. Almost at a stroke he massively reinforced the basis of American government and union and planted the fast-growing seeds of American finance and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, events that would change and astonish the whole world. A mint was established in January of 1791 to give America its own coinage and end the miscellaneous circulation of British, French, Spanish, and even German currency in America.

To ensure adequate revenue to deal with the debt assumption and the operations of the federal government, Hamilton proposed tariffs (with the additional benefit of stimulating manufacturing) and excise taxes, including a tax on distilled spirits. The tax fell heavily on the hinterland agricultural communities, as this was the chief destination of unsold grain for the distillation of spirits, and was strenuously challenged and often defied, in the Carolinas and Pennsylvania especially, and eventually led (in July 1794) to the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Washington mobilized 15,000 militiamen, and under General Henry Lee, accompanied by former colonel Hamilton, the disobedience was suppressed. Two men were convicted of treason, but pardoned by Washington. The effect of these measures, including the unambiguous enforcement of the excise taxes, was to establish the unquestioned authority of the United States government as a fiscally responsible national administration that soon had a better international credit rating than the main European powers, and as an unchallengeably authoritative occupant of its constitutional jurisdictions, whose writ would run in all matters and throughout the land.

Hamilton’s proposed measures for encouraging manufacturing were not immediately adopted, but were very prescient and even visionary. In a report of nearly 100,000 words, Hamilton outlined proposals that went beyond the House of Representatives’ request for a plan to make the United States independent of foreign sources for military supplies. Hamilton “elaborated his grand vision of a powerful, integrated, and wealthy war-making nation that would be the equal of any in Europe, including Great Britain.”⁴ The political economy of the Federalists, hinted at in broad strokes by Washington and hammered into detailed proposals fit for legislation by Hamilton, was a fast track to an economic and military powerhouse. Despite the Jefferson-Madison advocacy of a rather bucolic and adjudicatory state, their political astuteness would bring them to the highest offices within a few years, where they were no less nationalistic than their Federalist predecessors. From right to left, country to city, South to North, patricians to the lower bourgeoisie, the small but talented American political class was straining like whippets to attract immigrants, settle the West, build industry, and make America a mighty nation in the world. And there was never the slightest hesitation to include military power and its application as a chief criterion of the new nation’s potential influence.

Washington and his Treasury secretary not only had got control of the debt problem that had been building and festering for nearly 10 years and established a strong currency, but had done so in a manner that was in accord with the adopted Constitution and was susceptible only to technical legal arguments by Jefferson and his followers, but not to comparisons with the unrepresented taxation and high-handed collection measures of the British. Almost at once, the new nation had a solid fiscal regime.

Where Washington desired a rather mystic national commitment to thrift, unity of purpose and sacrifice, with a balance between urban industry and agriculture, and Jefferson professed the greater virtue and desirability of rural life, Hamilton saw clearly the economic future and eschewed laissez-faire capitalism in favor of government participation to encourage centralized government, promotion of manufacturing and heavy industry, and a headlong pursuit of pure capitalism (pure apart from the fact that the government was channeling the direction of its progress). Hamilton saw the huge advantage the British and Dutch had over the other powers because of their private capital markets and sophisticated methods of funding public debt, compared with Colbert’s authoritarian methods of official financial regimentation in France.

Jefferson, though an elitist, favored a broad suffrage. Washington trusted the people less than Jefferson, but wanted them ultimately responsible for their own government, with an edge for more accomplished people, which in practice meant wealthier ones. Hamilton was fairly liberal in matters of civil rights, but was both a monarchist at heart and a meritocratic authoritarian in matters of devising and implementing public policy. Adams the Bostonian, despite his personal and intra-party disputes with Hamilton, partly shared the political and economic designs of the New Yorker, while Madison sided with Jefferson, his fellow Virginia plantation owner. Jefferson’s Enlightenment utopianism based on man’s inert decency and capacity for self-improvement vied with a Hamiltonian blend of Hobbesian cynicism, Adam Smith capitalism, and far-sighted industrialism. As in all things, Washington hovered majestically above it all, seeking excellence in men and policies and making it up as he went along. He thought Hamilton more practical in economic terms, but relied heavily on Madison for adaptation of the Constitution. It must be said that, on balance, the Constitution was so intelligently designed and the principal founders of the country so capable and highly motivated that the United States started its life with four to five decades of what would, in later periods, if not always at the time, be regarded as good government.

Washington had unsuccessfully demanded, and then promised, indissolubility of nationhood, adequate armed forces, fiscal integrity, and an example of incorruptible sacrifice. Having led in the establishment of the new nation, he wished now to do all he could to maximize the likelihood of its swift growth and undisturbed progress among nations, which at that time numbered only the five Great Powers in Europe that came through the Seven Years’ War (Britain, France, Austria, Russia and Prussia), the secondary powers (the Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman, and Dutch Empires as well as Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and a few of the German and Italian kingdoms and principalities), and on rumor and belief, mysterious entities in the East, most conspicuously China. With its house increasingly in order, the United States was already reaching the upper levels of the second tier of powers, as its population passed the level of half of Britain’s at about the end of Washington’s presidency, when it reached 5 million to Britain’s 10 million. And where the old empires were in decline, the United States, glamorized by its revolution and mythologized by the stirring tenor of its originating state papers, was, from its earliest days, a dazzling and steeply ascending comet among nations.

Washington was not trying to lead the Congress in a legislative program, beyond the instances and criteria of serious sovereign statehood that he had promised to pursue after the failure of the Congress and states to do so in the interregnum between Yorktown and Philadelphia, but he was determined to establish the presidency as a very republican but majestic office that was above faction, region, and partisanship. He alone was responsible for patronage and was very circumspect in resisting the importunity of office-seekers and filling the senior positions and federal bench with highly qualified people. (John Jay was a superlative choice as first chief justice.) Washington had an elegant (but not ostentatious) carriage, with six matched cream-colored horses, held rather ceremonious levees, and entertained somewhat opulently, with profusions of wigged footmen in full livery. Washington in public addresses referred to himself in the third person, and the iconography of his presidency, especially official portraits and medals, was an imitation of European monarchy. He never dined in a citizen’s private home and traveled somewhat elaborately but not with absurd trappings, as in his trips about New England in 1789 and through the South in 1791. There were criticisms that he had monarchical flourishes but he had made it widely known that he would resist at any cost any suggestion of such a transition for the presidency, and he encouraged Madison to oppose Adams’s effort to have the president referred to as “His Most Benign Majesty,” which would have reduced the office to an absurdity. (Adams was a terrible fidget with styles of address, and ruminated nervously aloud in the Congress about what he would be called when President Washington visited the Congress, since that title would preempt his as president of the Senate. The answer effortlessly emerged: Mr. Vice President.)

The United States quickly achieved, though the retention of this felicitous balance would vary with Washington’s successors, a fine combination of the solidity and dignity of monarchy with the spirit and effervescence of popular democracy. Not until the Fifth Republic of France, 165 years after the tumultuous founding of the First, would the fiercely contesting French national traditions of monarchy and republicanism be reconciled in a president with immense powers and a renewable seven-year term, an elected sovereign, the fusion (in Charles de Gaulle) of monarchy and republicanism. In other major European republics, such as Germany and Italy, the post–World War II presidents would be just stand-ins for deposed monarchs. In the United States, and in the latest of the French Republics, the president is chief of state and head of government. Madison devised and Washington inaugurated, this brilliant novelty of government.

Another indication of the grandiose ambitions of the new nation was the engagement of the French engineer Pierre-Charles l’Enfant to design a splendid capital of grand straight boulevards in what was an unpromising swamp but grew in one long lifetime to be an elegant and monumental capital of a great nation. None of the founders of the republic, and as far as can be discerned, none of its founding citizens either, dissented from the cult of predestined greatness that Washington, especially, but all of the founders according to their means and talents, lavished upon the national experiment as if from giant and constantly swinging incense-pots.

2. THE RIVALRY BETWEEN HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON

Under Jefferson’s influence, Madison moved away from his friendship with Hamilton, which had flowered while Jefferson was in Paris, and Madison and Hamilton, with John Jay and a few others, were writing the Federalist Papers. Jefferson found Hamilton’s cynicism, materialism, and brusqueness, his lack of the idealism of the contemplative Enlightenment and disrespect for the gracious civilities of France, jarring. He and Madison took to referring to Hamilton and his entourage as “speculators, stock-jobbers, and Tories,” the last an especially odious word in the aftermath of the Revolution. With the death of Franklin, Jefferson was able to hold himself out as the worldly traveler and connoisseur of civilization at its rich sources, protesting all the while to be the true democrat, patrician and elitist though his notions of democracy were. Washington, who remained above attack, even after his whole-hearted support of Hamilton’s suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, was trying to run a government whose principal cabinet members were starting to splinter badly apart. The spirit of party and notion of opposition was not immediately respectable, but Jefferson and Madison began press attacks on Hamilton and Adams.

A battle developed between rival newspapers, John Fenno’s strongly Federalist Gazette of the United States, founded in 1789, and Philip Freneau’s opposition National Gazette, founded in 1790. Freneau was incentivized by being named an official interpreter by the State Department and his newspaper was a fire-breathing spigot of billingsgate and sensationalism directed at Hamilton, Adams, the Federalists, and, by implication, the president himself. The government was accused of promoting monarchism and an aristocracy, as well as a sleazy commercialism, and subverting republicanism and Jefferson’s notions of democracy (which were, to say the least, idiosyncratic). Fenno took the gloves off at once and directly attacked Jefferson as a scheming and treacherous enemy of the Constitution. It was an improbable and swift descent into an ear-splitting slanging match between Fenno and Freneau.

British precedents were somewhat replicated, as Hamilton and Adams were portrayed by their enemies as “the court,” the Tories around Washington’s crowned majesty, while Jefferson and Madison fancied themselves the country gentry loyal opposition, with Jefferson having the aspect of the sly Whig grandee with popular, if far from egalitarian, affectations, a new Walpole. The Whigs became the Republican Party, and the Federalists evolved from the supporters of the Constitution, which soon had general adherence, so almost everyone was in that sense a federalist, to a more urban and commercial bloc that Freneau and his sponsors labeled, as tendentiously as possible, Tories. It was a preposterous state of affairs, as the two senior cabinet members hurled muck at each other, and Jefferson employed in the government an anti-government propagandist flinging vitriol at the administration of which Jefferson was a senior member. Washington urged Hamilton to reply to Jefferson, to reassure general opinion, and tried to assure Jefferson that there was no such plot against the Constitution and to promote monarchic leanings, as he feared and alleged.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson were urging Washington to take a second term, but the cabinet meetings by mid-1792 had the two senior cabinet secretaries quarrelling, as Jefferson said, like roosters. Washington wrote to both in July 1792, asking for “more charity for the opinions and acts of one another.” Both men replied the same day to Washington, Hamilton in terms of forthright grievances against Jefferson’s attacks on his policies and on Hamilton personally. Jefferson sent a rather labored attack on Hamilton and spent much of his letter defending the hiring of Freneau at the State Department. Given the brilliance and historic importance of the men, it was a disappointingly immature performance, a schoolyard shouting match, in which Hamilton seemed several grades more advanced than his rival. Jefferson wrote Washington that he would retire soon but that “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment when history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head”—pretty juvenile carping from the author of the Declaration of Independence, and vulgar snobbery as well, toward the illegitimate son of a Scottish West Indian merchant who had rendered invaluable service to the new nation.⁵

3. WASHINGTON’S SECOND TERM

By simply not responding to endless requests from all sides that he allow himself to be selected for another presidential term, Washington backed into his reelection, again unanimously. Adams ran more strongly for vice president than he had four years before, clinging tightly to the president’s coat-tails, and was irritated to have come only 77 votes to 50 ahead of the long-serving governor of New York, George Clinton, who just four years before had been one of the leading opponents of ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton had feared that Jefferson might manage to slip into the vice presidency over the less agile Adams. The Treasury secretary was less preoccupied with personal disparagements of Jefferson, but regarded him as “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination entertaining and propagating notions inconsistent with dignified and orderly government.”⁶ In January 1793, Jefferson’s followers moved five motions of censure against Hamilton in the House of Representatives, all of which Hamilton had rejected handily, probably with the known support of the unanimously reacclaimed president.

Lost in the controversy was the testimony Washington’s unanimous reelection gave to the unquestionable success, great dignity of office, and successful economic policies of the first presidential term. The American system was just starting to show its distinctive characteristics. It was at this time not acceptable for a man to campaign for an office, as the clever but mistrusted young New York lawyer Aaron Burr was said to have done, very unsuccessfully, for the vice presidency. Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson had stood for election to anything in the new constitutional regime, and when elections were contested, there was no campaign and the voter turnout was often as low as 5 percent.⁷

The emerging Democratic-Republican opposition was a two-headed beast from the beginning—disgruntled southern slaveholders, distressed by the urban, industrial, and commercial nature of Hamiltonism, and along with them the northerners, who were in rebellion against the financial establishment of Hamilton’s friends. The first group wanted to put the brakes on the Hamilton economic system; the second wanted to accelerate it and make it more open and meritocratic. It would take no less talented a political chameleon than Jefferson to keep this broad church under the same roof and lead it anywhere useful. These were the origins of the modern Democratic Party. The anti-Federalists were called Republicans, and later, Democratic-Republicans, and were in fact what are now known as “Democrats.” Jefferson sold the idea that the Federalists were essentially British Tories, monarchists, cronies, corrupt speculators, warring alike on the hard-working bourgeoisie and the virtuous and tranquil South, a society that was paternalistic, rather than exploitively slave-holding. (The Federalists eventually, in the 1820s, became National Republicans, then a decade later Whigs, and finally, in the 1850s, Republicans.)

The French Revolution had a huge impact on Europe, which lingers yet, but it proceeded in a haphazard, often absurd sequence. France was Europe’s greatest nation by any measurement—27 million people in 1789, almost three times as populous as Britain, with the richest agriculture and most admired literature and intellectual community in Europe.

But Louis XIV’s wars and monumental grandiosity, especially the Palace of Versailles, strained the treasury, which relied on taxation of the lower classes, and his wars, in the end, accomplished only a minor extension outwards of the northeast frontier. The wars of the eighteenth century were horribly expensive and achieved nothing for France, as in the American Revolutionary War, and the Seven Years’ War had been a disaster.

Finally, in May 1789, to raise revenues, Louis summoned the Estates General, which had not met since Richelieu had dismissed it in 1614. The first estate, the clergy, had 300 of the 1,200 delegates, owned 10 percent of the country’s land, and paid no tax. The second estate, the nobility, had 300 delegates and owned about 30 percent of the country’s land, and about half of their delegates were somewhat reform-minded. The remaining 97 percent of the people were represented by the 600 delegates of the third estate, though most of them were lawyers, business people, and the bourgeoisie; the rural peasantry and urban poor, at least 60 percent of the population of France, were not represented other than in whatever altruistic thoughts their socioeconomic betters had for them.

After a few weeks, the first two estates tried to exclude the third, who repaired to a covered tennis court and, joined by 47 nobles, swore to pursue reform, which was not why they had been summoned. They declared themselves to be the National Assembly, and the king attempted to dissolve them on June 27. Riots ensued, culminating in the seizure of the Bastille, a prison and arsenal in Paris, on July 14. It contained only five counterfeiters and two deranged prisoners, and 250 barrels of gunpowder. (The half-mad dissolute, the Marquis de Sade, had been released a week before.) The governor of the Bastille was decapitated and his head bobbed on a pike at the head of tens of thousands of angry marching demonstrators, after they had blown up and burned down the Bastille.

On August 4, the National Assembly voted to abolish almost all aristocratic and clerical privileges, and on August 26 adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Man largely based on the American Declaration of Independence. On October 5, a mob of 5,000 women, and men dressed as women, marched to Versailles and compelled the return with them of the royal family to the Tuileries Palace (the Louvre) in central Paris, where they were more or less detained.

The Count Mirabeau was the principal figure of the National Assembly, and he was a constitutional monarchist who was adept at preventing the extremes from making inroads. Unfortunately, he suddenly died in March 1791, following a particularly frolicsome evening with two dancers he brought home with him after an evening at the opera. A new constitution establishing a monarchy of limited powers which Mirabeau had been working on was proclaimed on May 3, 1791. Maria Theresa’s daughter, Queen Marie Antoinette, persuaded the king to flee Paris, which they did on June 20, 1791, disguised as servants. They crowded everybody into a slow carriage and foolishly stopped for the night at Varennes, not far from the frontier of the Austrian Netherlands, where the king was recognized, captured, and ignominiously returned to Paris.

The moderates felt betrayed by the king’s flight and the extremists vindicated. Marie Antoinette’s brother, Emperor Leopold II, asked for all Europe to help restore the French monarchy. On August 27, he and the Prussian king, Frederick William, joined by Louis’s brother the Count d’Artois, met at Pillnitz and urged pan-European action to restore Louis to power. Nothing came of this except the rage of the National Assembly, which achieved its apotheosis with France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792.

Except for one year, war would continue until 1815, taking about 750,000 French lives and a larger number of other nationalities as war engulfed Europe from Cádiz to Moscow and from Copenhagen to Naples and, briefly, spread into Egypt and Palestine. The Revolution moved steadily to the left and ever further from its declared goals, and violently devoured ever greater numbers of innocents, until the Committee of Public Safety, which had implemented the Reign of Terror, was itself executed on the guillotine, to the delight of the fickle, blood-thirsty mob. Reaction and corruption ensued, followed by the Bonapartist dictatorship and empire.

If the king had had any notion of how to govern, he would not have had to call the Estates General. If he had had any political acumen, he could easily have set himself at the head of the reformers and been the indispensable man. If he had even managed the flight to Varennes and beyond properly, he could have returned to Paris eventually, as his brothers did, in the baggage train of the Duke of Wellington’s army.

One of the great watersheds of Western history was a sanguinary and tragicomic farce that presaged the ambiguity of the legacy of the Enlightenment itself. The moderate civilizing evolution advocated by Voltaire, Franklin, and their friends degenerated into terror, licentiousness, dictatorship, endless war, and futile reaction. The first claimants to emulation of the American Revolution soon became a horrifying cautionary tale.

France joined America as a republic in 1792—the first of five republics in France (to date), interspersed with a directory, consulate, two empires, two restorations, a “popular monarchy,” two provisional governments, a government in exile, and an undefined “French State,” governing in the name of a foreign occupier. The First Republic would last only three years.

American cartwheels of delight, solidarity, and legitimization of events in France would not be durable. Jefferson went impetuously cock-a-hoop for the French revolutionaries, delighted that the monarch to whom he had presented his letters of credence was executed as “a criminal,” and soon subsumed into the breezy assurance that “The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants.” Jefferson was not only a bigoted and delusional Francophile and Anglophobe; he was a poseur. He sincerely believed that revolution was a discrete movement that must sweep Europe and ensconce America as its legitimizing trailblazer, or perish and imperil the American Revolution with it. Both Hamilton and Jefferson urged on Washington a proclamation of neutrality, which he did issue on April 22, 1793, and Jefferson’s true colors as a romantic revolutionary sobered by a political opportunist and a champion of inherited and slave-holding property became more visible.

Unlike Thomas Paine and some other American true believers, Jefferson knew that what had occurred in America wasn’t a revolution at all. It was a forced national disembarkation of the colonial power, a national self-empowerment, in which the land-owning and professional and leading commercial classes reinforced their control over the disaffected country, covering the whole drama in the stirring vocabulary of liberty and obscuring a tax dispute that flared into a continental war of liberation. What was unfolding in France was a much more profound and very violent upheaval temporarily destroying an entire civilization built in rich distinction over 15 centuries. What Jefferson professed to regard as a revolutionary movement productive of human liberty was just anarchism, soon seized by an authoritarian militarist and translated into an orgy of aggressive conquest and spoliation killing several million people across Europe, although France was certainly not solely responsible for the carnage. Jefferson ran with the revolutionaries and rode in a carriage with the established and inherited interests, and reconciled it all artfully, one of history’s first and greatest limousine liberals. In 1793, he urged Madison to reply to Hamilton’s successful denunciations of the French Revolution in newspapers and pamphlets. Madison dutifully tried, but his heart wasn’t in it, and nor were the unfolding forces of history, as the French Revolution became steadily more impossible to defend.

Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson all agreed that the United States must maintain its neutrality between France and Britain. In the sage beginning of what would be a vastly successful policy for nearly 150 years, the United States would generally abstain from Europe’s quarrels, and grow steadily stronger as Europe’s penchant for internecine bloodbaths became ever more sanguinary. Washington said that with 20 years of peace and economic growth, the United States would be fully capable to see off any European intruder. This was only slightly optimistic, and did not, of course, address America’s own Achilles’ heel, the ineluctable tumor of slavery.

4. RELATIONS WITH FRANCE AND BRITAIN

Problems between neutralist America and the compulsively belligerent revolutionary government of France were not long in coming. The French minister, the bumptious and completely unqualified “Citizen (Edmond Charles) Genêt,” aged just 29, arrived at Charleston on April 8, 1793, and commissioned four privateers to prey upon British shipping in American waters and also commissioned overland attacks on British and Spanish targets on the borders of the United States. He proceeded, amid considerable celebrations and extravagant greetings, to Philadelphia, where he arrived on May 16. Washington received him coolly on May 18, and on June 5 Jefferson handed him a letter from the president telling him that his privateers could not infringe U.S. territorial waters and no prizes taken would be permitted in U.S. ports. The letter noted in the sparest terms a serious trespass on U.S. national sovereignty. Genêt promised to do as Washington demanded but soon rechristened a British vessel that had been taken as it was being refitted in a U.S. port, and when warned not to allow the ship to sail, he did so anyway and threatened to appeal over Washington’s head to the American people. Both Hamilton and Madison, in the midst of their newspaper debate, supported the president. On August 2, the cabinet, including Jefferson, agreed with Washington’s demand for Genêt’s recall. Washington sent his full correspondence on the issue to the Congress with a message saying that Genêt was trying to plunge the U.S. into “war abroad and discord and anarchy at home.”

The Democratic societies had been supporting Genêt, but the great majority of Americans backed Washington’s firm and sensible response, and the whole affair then rapidly descended into farce. Genêt lingered in America but had no status, as the Revolution in France moved toward its most extreme phase. Genêt’s successor, Joseph Fauchet, arrived in 1794 and demanded Genêt’s arrest and extradition to France in chains. Washington, in a typical gentlemanly flourish, refused and gave him asylum, and Genêt became an American and married a daughter of Governor and future vice president George Clinton. Support for France was also diluted by Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The Age of Reason, which sold scores of thousands of copies in America but was an attack on all religion, raised the strenuous opposition of all denominations, and brought the entire clergy of America into the Federalist camp, instantly cured of any sympathy for the French Revolution, which Paine had served as a member of the National Convention. It also destroyed much of his historical standing and caused otherwise kindred spirits to defect from his admirers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who generally referred to him as “a filthy little atheist.”⁸

The Treaty of 1783 had recognized American independence and ended the the American Revolutionary War but did not resolve all issues between the United States and Great Britain. Britain continued to occupy a series of forts and trading posts in the Northwest that were recognized as American but that the British still operated. The British justified their retention by the failure of the Americans to pay pre-revolutionary debts to British merchants and promised compensation to loyalists whose property had been confiscated. The British had promoted the creation of an Indian buffer state in the Ohio country, and the Americans believed that the British had incited attacks on American settlers and had generally retarded the western progress of the United States. Orders in council of June and November 1793 authorized the impressments into British service of American crews seized on the high seas, an act of war the Americans could not ignore (and Madison did not when his time came to deal with such matters).

Canadian and West Indian ports were closed to American ships, and the British, once war broke out with France in 1792, arrogated unto themselves the right to seize American cargoes intended for France, and to detain indefinitely American ships and sailors. The Federalists responded by making war-like noises and building up the country’s armed forces, an army of 20,000 and a vigorous program of naval construction, following Washington’s long-held maxim that to preserve peace one must prepare for war. The Jefferson-Madison Republicans wanted to avoid war but engage in a complete boycott of any imports from Britain, which was impossible to enforce, punitive to certain regions, especially New England, and would have had no leverage opposite the British, since the United States provided only about 15 percent of their trade, which could be replaced. This was a mad suggestion, because tariffs on British imports were what chiefly financed Hamilton’s sinking fund for Revolutionary War and Confederation debt, the country’s standing army, and any incentivization to manufacturing such as the secretary of the Treasury proposed. In trade matters, the Americans had started out with a naïve idea of free trade with everyone, and the Confederation had empowered a commission of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson to pursue such agreements with all countries. Only Prussia, Sweden, and Morocco agreed, countries with which America’s trade was negligible.

The Federalist plan seemed to have helped motivate the British to end their policy of wholesale seizures of American shipping, which gave Washington the latitude he felt he needed to send John Jay to negotiate an agreement with the British. Madison and Jefferson were raving that any war preparations were part of a Hamiltonian plot to foist a military and monarchical dictatorship on the country in the guise of avenging wrongs from England, but that any effort to negotiate a settlement was the first step to dishonoring the nation with a sell-out of the republic’s interests to the former abusive colonial master. As was his practice, Jefferson left it to Madison to make these implausible arguments, reserving the necessary room to maneuver and dissemble, as he did in the Genêt affair. Jefferson retired as secretary of state in July 1793, with effect at the end of that year. The crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion confirmed the Republicans’ fear that Hamilton, behind the cloak of Washington’s prestige, was cranking up to use the militia to curtail popular liberties.

Jay signed with the British a draft treaty on November 19, 1794, which assured the British withdrawal from the Northwest posts and forts by June 1, 1796; admitted U.S. vessels to British East Indian ports, and to West Indian ports if they did not carry over 70 tons of cargo; and renounced the right to ship from the West Indies cotton, molasses, sugar, and other staples. Joint commissions would take up pre-revolutionary debts, a dispute over the northeast border with Canada, and compensation for illegal seizures of American vessels. Trade between the two countries was upgraded to a most-favored-nation status. Impressment of sailors had been officially abandoned and compensation for impressed sailors and for deported slaves taken by the British were dropped as a complaint, as was, on the British side, compensation for loyalist property that had been seized. Various concerns about the Indians, including responsibility for their alleged aggressions, were not dealt with, leaving the Americans a free hand to resolve matters by force, as they were more than pleased to do.

There was fierce opposition from the Republicans (again, Jefferson and Madison), because of treatment of debts, West Indian shipping rights, and, for the southerners, fugitive slaves. Washington acknowledged that the agreement, known at the time and since as Jay’s Treaty, was imperfect, but he recognized that given the correlation of forces, it was a commendable effort. Furthermore, it was brilliant general policy, because it levered on a military build-up to magnify the trade relationship with Britain, which sharply increased tariff and excise revenue and strengthened the American central government and directly increased and spread American prosperity. The sources of revenue safeguarded by Jay’s Treaty, the tariffs, financed the military build-up that gave America the leverage to extract the revenue from its arrangements with Britain. The treaty, and Jefferson and Madison’s response to it, showed the superiority of the Washington, Hamilton, Jay, and later Adams policy, which had been pioneered by Franklin, of playing on the British vulnerability in Canada and manipulating Britain and France against each other. It was profoundly sensible strategic thinking, rigorously implemented by Washington, Hamilton, and Jay.

The Jefferson-Madison policy of a trade embargo would have severely enfeebled America without much harming the British. Hamilton led the fight for ratification, against Madison, and the treaty was voted through by the Senate, except for the West Indian trade provisions. Madison led a battle in the House to block appropriations for enforcement. The House asked Washington for the papers of the treaty negotiations. Washington refused, establishing an important precedent. In April 1796, in a stunning defeat for Madison, even the appropriations were passed, as sensible opinion warmed to the virtues of Jay’s Treaty, while the Reign of Terror unfolded in France in 1794 and during its seedy aftermath.

Randolph (again, Jefferson’s cousin), who had succeeded Jefferson in the State Department, was accused of conspiring with Fauchet, the French minister, to sandbag the treaty, on the basis of captured letters, and resigned, in order to avoid being fired by Washington, and was replaced by Timothy Pickering, in August 1795. Hamilton retired as secretary of the Treasury and was replaced by Oliver Wolcott. Pickering had replaced the rather plodding Knox at the War Department, and was succeeded by James McHenry, though Washington was his own secretary of war, as many future presidents would be their own secretaries of state. (McHenry was only Washington’s fourth choice for the War Department, and Pickering was his seventh choice for State—the atmosphere was becoming inflamed and many of the best-qualified people declined to enter public life.)⁹ Hamilton continued to be a strong influence and counselor to the president, and it was an entirely Federalist cabinet.

The British claims for pre-revolutionary debts were finally settled by mutual agreement in 1802 at $2.66 million. In October 1795, Thomas Pinckney, minister to Britain and special envoy to Spain, signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo with Spain, which conceded points Spain had sought to withhold from America when Jay had negotiated with the Spanish in 1786, especially the unfettered navigation of the Mississippi. In 1796, Washington and Pickering recalled James Monroe as minister to France, when it came to light that he had implied to the French that he could negotiate an American loan to France of $5 million, and showered his hosts with other obsequious deferences that completely exceeded his diplomatic remit.

Washington, Hamilton, and Jay’s sensible and profitable and honorable foreign policy, to navigate around a general European war, was a complement to their very successful financial and economic policies. Hamilton’s assumption of state debts had, as had been intended, led to a drastic reduction in state taxes and had encouraged a huge increase in American prosperity by all indices. American imports from Britain increased from $23.5 million in 1790 to $63 million in 1795, and American exports enjoyed a parallel increase in the same time. The European war and Jay’s suddenly popular treaty had raised the demand and price for all agricultural commodities. Thus began, with as great a success as it ever enjoyed in subsequent centuries, including under Ronald Reagan 190 years later (Chapter 16), the application of tax cuts and supply side economics to American spending, saving, investment, and job creation. Although the administration was decisively successful, Washington, ever mindful of his reputation and a tireless enemy of the spirit of party and faction, had found the partisan back-biting tiresome, and declined publicly and in good time to seek a third term as president.

This was another immense contribution to the stability of American politics and to the public’s trust in the presidency. It was notoriously clear that he could have retained his office as long as he wished, and his handing over of it, especially in the light of the blood-stained chaos and pelagic corruption in France, reflected great honor on him and on the young republic he had secured, had helped design, and had launched. His farewell address is generally considered another of the great state papers in the nation’s history. A first version was written four years earlier by Madison and, without being delivered, was heavily modified by Hamilton, and then substantially refined by Washington himself. The message was delivered by hand and never publicly read by the president. It extolled the virtues of religion, morality, knowledge, and financial soundness, and then dealt at length with foreign policy and warned against “permanent, inveterate antipathies” and “passionate attachments” to other countries. Washington called for commercial relations but “as little political connection as possible” to foreign countries. “Temporary alliances” might be appropriate in “extraordinary emergencies.” But the United States should “steer clear of permanent alliances,” as it was “folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another.”¹⁰

Washington and Franklin had been the principal American collaborators in the British removal of the French threat from America’s borders, the first strategic initiative of the Americans, even if in a very secondary role to the British. He and Franklin were the principal architects of the first and most important autonomous American strategic undertaking: the revision of and American emancipation from the British relationship. They would have accepted a less abrupt and complete version of this than actually occurred, but not one more ambiguous in terms of emergent American sovereignty. Jefferson was the principal expositor and propagandist of the Revolution, and Washington, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton were, in different ways, the chief authors of America’s third move of strategic genius, the Constitution. Washington was the creator of the fourth great strategic achievement, a distinguished and respected presidency, and, importantly assisted by Hamilton, was the creator of an effective executive branch and, with Hamilton, of extremely imaginative and successful economic and foreign policies for the new nation. It had been a masterly progression.

George Washington had led the new nation successfully in war and in peace for a total of 23 years with no pay except out-of-pocket expenses, and had voluntarily surrendered his supreme offices when many wished him to continue in them. He would carry into retirement the profound admiration and gratitude of his countrymen and the well-earned esteem of the whole known world. The immense regard Americans had for him while he lived has withstood the closest historical analysis and has not wavered or declined in the more than two centuries since his death. He is universally recognized as having been a capable general, a fine statesman, an outstanding president, and one of history’s great men.

5. JOHN ADAMS AS PRESIDENT AND THE CRISIS WITH FRANCE

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the two most prominent candidates to replace Washington, and General Thomas Pinckney ran to be Adams’s vice president, and Aaron Burr, without encouragement from Jefferson, sought the same office. Ballots were not separated; Electoral College members each wrote two different names on ballots, office unspecified. The person with the highest number of ballots became president, and the person in second place became vice president, provided there was a majority. Washington was concerned that, though Madison had done the dirty work, Jefferson had sponsored much criticism of him and that Jefferson’s victory would be interpreted as a rejection of the outgoing president. He was also concerned that Virginia not seem to be entitled to permanent occupancy of the presidency, so he publicly endorsed Adams, who was elected by 71 electoral votes to 68 for Jefferson, 59 for Pinckney, and 30 for Burr. Jefferson, as recipient of the second-largest vote total, would take office as vice president. Wolcott, Pickering, and McHenry retained the Treasury, State, and War departments, and Hamilton’s influence on them also continued. It had been a fine launch for the country, exalting the presidency, navigating the international currents, and building the foundations of prosperity and union. It was about to become more complicated, and more difficult, without Washington’s fine judgment and immense prestige.

Both Jefferson and Hamilton were sensitive to criticism and reckless in their conduct and correspondence. Jefferson sent a letter to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, in 1796, which was republished in the United States the following year. Jefferson had written that “An Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party” was subverting the Revolution, and America was being led astray by “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 England.” (GSW235) This was widely interpreted as a slur on Washington, a step Jefferson had often skirted. He declined to comment and Washington would not deign to refer to it, and the controversy passed eventually. It did confirm that Jefferson’s was the party of the Enlightenment, religious and industrial skepticism, the landed gentry, and the common people; but not of faith, capitalism, or a modern economic future.

Hamilton, who, though brilliant and courageous, was young and impetuous, had in 1792 had an adulterous affair with a Mrs. Maria Reynolds, and to avoid publicity, as he was the 37-year-old Treasury secretary, had paid blackmail to her husband. When interrogated by some opposition members of the Congress, including then senator James Monroe, about his private use of Treasury funds, Hamilton foolishly confessed the affair, and five years later it came to light. A duel between Hamilton and Monroe was narrowly avoided, ironically, as it would turn out, by the suave and ambitious Aaron Burr. Monroe too was a hothead, and almost challenged President Adams to a duel in 1797, after Adams described him as “a disgraced minister, recalled in displeasure for misconduct,” only a slight exaggeration.

Despite the provision in the 1778 France-America Treaty of Friendship for free trade and navigation, France responded to Jay’s Treaty like an angry uncle, and began seizing American ships without any pretext of legality, much as the British had been doing. It refused to receive General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, brother of Adams’s vice presidential running mate, whom Washington had sent to replace Monroe as minister in Paris after Monroe’s recall. Adams called a special session of Congress for May 1797, accused the French of trying to drive a wedge between the government and the people of the U.S., and vowed that the United States would not cower in “a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority,” nor “be the miserable instruments of foreign influence.”¹¹ Congress approved the calling up of 80,000 militiamen, the fortification of ports and harbors, and the completion of three frigates. Adams followed the successful precedent of his predecessor and tried to replicate the Jay mission to Britain in 1795. He considered sending Madison, a political foe but reliable patriot, but eventually sent the Federalists Charles C. Pinckney and John Marshall, a distinguished Virginia lawyer and assemblyman (who had declined Washington’s offers of the War office and the ministry to Paris), and the Republican Elbridge Gerry, as a commission to iron out relations with France.

At this point, France had a string of astounding military successes, having harnessed the Revolution’s exaltation of soul to a meritocratic basis of military promotion, which had thrown up some brilliant field commanders. The most conspicuous of these was the 28-year-old (in 1797) Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in one of history’s great campaigns, had just flung the Austrian Empire out of Italy with a ragtag army that had not been properly clothed when he took it over. There were mutinies in the Royal Navy and food shortages in Britain, but the Admiralty assured Parliament that the British Isles would, yet again, be successfully defended as necessary. The French foreign minister, the preternaturally cunning former bishop Charles Maurice Talleyrand, who would have a scandalous but rich and brilliant career serving a kaleidoscope of successive conflicting French regimes in high offices for another 40 years, had lived in the United States during the Terror, and felt he knew American opinion. (Washington had refused to receive him because he was cohabiting with an African-American woman.) Talleyrand was unimpressed with American threats and was being secretly advised by his Jeffersonian friends not to give Adams another Jay’s Treaty.

Subordinates of Talleyrand (later known as X, Y, and Z) told the American commissioners that the foreign minister would receive them only if they apologized for Adams’s anti-French remarks to Congress in May, assumed France’s debts to individual Americans, made France a sizeable loan on excellent terms, and paid Talleyrand a direct bribe of 50,000 pounds (over $1 million today). They also said that France, which was now governing the Netherlands, Switzerland, and chunks of Germany and Italy, was taking the position that neutrality was tantamount to animosity and that American neutrality was unacceptable. Intoxicated with military success, the French were back to the mad official egotism, tinged with rampant corruption, of the Genêt school of diplomacy. Pinckney and Marshall indignantly departed, leaving the Republican Gerry behind because Talleyrand had implied that if all the commissioners departed, it could result in war. Gerry subscribed to the Jeffersonian admiration of France and belief in the imminent French crushing of Britain. (Gerry was no political angel himself, and though his name was pronounced with a hard G, his redistricting practices gave rise to the expression “gerrymandering” for refreshing congressional districts in the contorted shape of salamanders.)

Adams informed Congress of the failure of the mission to France in March 1798, and requested congressional approval of the arming of American merchant vessels. Jefferson denounced his former (and future) friend Adams’s conduct as “almost insane” and, in a bitter debate that followed, called for release of the diplomatic correspondence, having no idea how incendiary it was. Adams obliged and the effect was devastating to Jefferson and the Republicans, whom Federalist orators had taken to referring to as Jacobins, to assimilate them to Robespierre and St. Just and the Terror that had sent thousands of innocents to the guillotine, before the leaders were toppled and taken on carts past jeering crowds to the guillotine in a principal public square and decapitated as a much-appreciated public entertainment, their severed heads held up to the delight of the blood-crazed masses. Adams regained control of Congress in 1798, and Congress embargoed all trade with France and canceled all treaties with that country, ordered 15 more warships, and approved a naval budget for 1799 greater than the entire history of American naval expenses prior to that. Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the new army and Hamilton his second-in-command and inspector general. (Washington expressed concern that accepting the nomination might be seen as a “restless act, evincive of my discontent in retirement.”)¹² An independent Navy Department was established with Benjamin Stoddart of Maryland as the first secretary.

Along with this military preparedness came a domestic political hysteria that would be replicated in America from time to time over the next 175 (or more) years. There suddenly arose a widespread paranoia about recent Irish, Dutch, German, and French immigrants, who were suspected of being French agents. (One of the targets was Albert Gallatin, the very capable Swiss immigrant who succeeded Madison as Republican leader in the House of Representatives.) The Federalists rammed through a series of reactionary measures, as Adams ponderously replied to testimonials of loyalty and fealty from all over the country. Again and again in American history, such patriotic fervor would flair up and then subside quickly (like the brief spikes in reactive popularity in the Bush administrations roughly 200 years later), and leave the incumbent president looking like he oversold the crisis, mismanaged it, or tried to exploit it for partisan gain.

6. THE NATURALIZATION, ALIEN, AND SEDITION ACTS

In June and July 1798, Adams rushed through the Naturalization Act, which raised the period of residency needed for citizenship from five to 14 years (repealed in 1802); the Alien Act, which expired in 1802 and authorized the president to expel any alien judged dangerous or suspected of “treasonable or secret” ambitions; the Alien Enemies Act, which empowered the president to arrest, imprison, or expel in wartime any alien judged to be acting in the interest of an alien power; and the Sedition Act, which provided for fines and imprisonment for citizens or aliens who collaborate to frustrate the execution of national laws or prevent a federal officer from carrying out his duties, to aid or promote “any insurrection, riot, unlawful assembly, or combination,” or to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” disparaging the U.S. government, the Congress, or the president. The Sedition Act would expire in March 1801, but it was clearly aimed at partisan opponents, and the anti-publication section was used against 10 Republican editors, including James Thomson Callender, who had revealed Hamilton’s affair with Mrs. Reynolds.

The Republicans were outraged by the Sedition Act, and not overly delighted with the rest of the program. Jefferson, an astute political tactician, however woolly he might be about international affairs and the economic future of the country, was a sincere supporter of civil liberties and wrote a series of resistant resolutions adopted by the new state of Kentucky (admitted with Vermont in 1792), while Madison composed resolutions for Virginia. Kentucky claimed a right to nullify federal legislation that violated the constitutional delegation of unallocated powers to the states and citizenry, while Virginia, under Madison’s guidance, only charged states with having to “interpose for arresting the progress of evil.”

Both states repeated their firm adherence to the Union, and softened their resolutions in response to the objections of other states, but for Jefferson to raise the flag of state nullification, on its own authority, of federal laws it judged ultra vires, was opening the door to severe internecine strife. This sequence created an extremely nasty atmosphere, and Adams, who had the advantage with the XYZ affair and backlash against foreign meddlers, must be held responsible for allowing, and in some respects encouraging, the poisoning of the atmosphere, and especially the straight partisan prosecution of Republican editors. Washington would never have sponsored such extreme measures or allowed the atmosphere to become so overheated, though he did publicly support the Alien and Sedition Acts as necessary in the circumstances. (To give the measures some perspective, the British five years before had prescribed transportation to Australia for up to 14 years for any dissent from the war with France. The French Revolution brought down a frenzied atmosphere, particularly in France itself, where any offense, real or imagined, resulted, for a time, in immediate public execution.) The Sedition Act passed the House by only 44 to 41, and was actually milder than the existing seditious libel laws.

Hamilton was still very influential with the Federalists and with Wolcott, Pickering, and McHenry, and he aspired now to be the commander of the new army that was being created. When there was an uprising of German Americans in northeastern Pennsylvania in 1799, Hamilton urged drastic action. Adams sent 500 militiamen, who put the small disobedience down promptly and without casualties. The ringleader, John Fries, was condemned to death, but pardoned by Adams. Hamilton was advocating a new program he had cooked up, including war with France in alliance with Britain, to take over all of what are now the southern and central states of the U.S.; promotion of revolt in Latin America under American leadership by a large army he would command; higher taxes to pay for the large European-sized military establishment and an extensive system of roads and canals to accelerate population growth and economic development; a more extensive court system to regiment the population more closely; and the fragmentation of Virginia and some of the other large states to reduce their importance relative to the federal government (though fragmenting Virginia into three states would have tripled the number of Virginia senators).¹³

Hamilton, practicing law in New York and well away from Washington’s guidance, had become an authoritarian militarist. Jefferson was backsliding toward an almost confederationist view. Adams held the political center, but without the grasp of the political arts necessary to make it a position of strength. He did move to excise Hamilton’s influence in May and June 1800 by firing McHenry and Pickering, and named the formidable John Marshall secretary of state.

Adams also had moved to cut Hamilton off at the end of the limb by sending a new commission to France, after Talleyrand publicly stated that an American minister would be respectfully received. The new minister, William Vans Murray; the chief justice of the U.S., Oliver Ellsworth (John Jay had retired to become governor of New York, replacing Clinton); and the governor of North Carolina, William Davie (replacing Patrick Henry as a delegation member, who declined because of age and health and died shortly after the others departed in the spring of 1799) were the commissioners and were courteously received in Paris. All the saber-rattling had got the attention of the French, who did not need war with a fierce and rising America at this point, as they contemplated the ancient puzzle of how to suppress their trans-Channel foes, after Admiral Horatio Nelson had defeated the French Navy in the Battle of the Nile in October 1798, deferring indefinitely any possibility of a French invasion of England and stranding Bonaparte in Egypt. Adams was in danger of losing public opinion to Jefferson, but his policy was successful, as a new treaty with France, the Convention of 1800, was signed on September 30, 1800, superseding that of 1778 and ending any defensive alliance while normalizing relations with France.

American Revolutionary War. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

George Washington had died just 17 days before the end of the century of which he had been one of the greatest historic figures, an event observed with universal respect. His last view of Mount Vernon, where he peacefully passed away, aged 67, was of his estate covered in snow. In his will he emancipated his slaves and provided financially for their welfare. General “Light Horse” Harry Lee, congressman (and father of General Robert E. Lee), in his moving official eulogy on December 26, 1799, spoke nothing but the truth in describing the late president as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” The event caused only the briefest pause in the wild political blood-letting that had so appalled the deceased leader.

After a decade of its new constitutional arrangements, the United States had enjoyed a 70 percent gain in population and a tripling of the national economy, and had gone to the brink of war with first Britain and then France and extracted favorable arrangements with both. Washington had briefly lost public opinion with Jay’s Treaty, and Adams lost many of his partisans with the Convention of 1800 without gaining much from Jefferson, who favored the French treaty but was still agitating the country over the kangaroo courts that convicted 10 of his editors. Adams, ex-diplomat as he was, proved strategically competent but politically vulnerable. Hamilton, who was becoming increasingly irrational, lashed out at Adams with a 54-page letter for the Federalist establishment acidulously assessing Adams’s presidency, published with rejoicing by the Republicans as soon as they got hold of it in the summer of 1800. Hamilton was trying to promote Charles C. Pinckney’s candidacy over Adams but must have known that the inevitable beneficiary would be Jefferson, whom Hamilton now perversely claimed to respect more than Adams.

7. JEFFERSON AS PRESIDENT

The divisions among the Federalists seemed to assure Republican victory in 1800. The main issues were the Alien and Sedition Acts, the increased taxes to pay for the larger military budget, and the revival of anti-British sentiment—while French-American relations started to improve, the British went back to seizing American ships and sailors. These were all negative issues for the Federalists, and the disaffection of Hamilton and his powerful faction redounded to Charles C. Pinckney’s benefit opposite Adams but also helped the Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The electoral votes came in 73 votes each for Jefferson and Burr, 65 for Adams, 64 for Pinckney, and one vote for John Jay. It could be assumed at first that this would assure Jefferson’s election, but as no distinction was made on the ballots of the division of office between two candidates, it was a tie for the presidential vote, which Burr now professed to have been seeking. There being no majority, the election moved from the Electoral College to the House of Representatives, where the delegation of each state caucused to decide on a candidate and then cast a single vote for that candidate. The Federalists had the majority in the House and preferred the suave and charming but devious and, in policy terms ambiguous, Burr over their ancient foe, Jefferson.

But against this trend, Hamilton was convinced that Burr was a scoundrel and an opportunist, a cunning man of no integrity, and that Jefferson was preferable to Burr, as he was also to Adams, because of what Hamilton professed to consider a betrayal by Adams in seeking reconciliation with France. Hamilton applied his almost demonic energy to supporting Jefferson over Burr, as Adams and Pinckney had distinctly, though narrowly, lost. There were 35 ballots between February and February 17, 1801, without a winner. There was discussion of a statutory declaration of a winner, and the Federalist House could have professed to elect Pinckney or even Hamilton president, though this would have badly snarled the process and opened it to challenge before the Supreme Court. Jefferson warned the governor of Virginia, his protégé James Monroe, that Virginia should be ready for armed resistance should any such effort be mounted.¹⁴

The Federalist senator from Delaware, James Bayard, received from a Maryland Republican, General Samuel Smith, what he professed to consider assurances from Jefferson that he would preserve the Hamilton financial program and Adams’s new navy and would only dismiss Federalist officeholders for cause. It was later denied that any such promises had come from Jefferson, but believing they had that comfort level, the Federalists arranged votes and abstentions within state congressional delegations that tilted the vote on the 36th ballot: 10 states for Jefferson to 4 for Burr, and 2 states unable to declare a choice. (Tennessee had become the 16th state in 1796.) The Jefferson Revolution had begun, and this opened the great, six-term reign of the Jefferson-Virginian Republicans. But it began narrowly and uncertainly. Jefferson and Madison had hinted at nullification of federal legislation, in Jefferson’s case on behalf of Kentucky, on the determination of the state alone; and in the electoral controversy, Jefferson and Monroe had corresponded on the possibility of an armed Virginian resistance to a Federalist, legislated election victor, not necessarily an unconstitutional solution. These were profound fissures in the constitutional beliefs of the main political groups, and that is without considering the implications of the smoldering issue of slavery.

In one of his last and most important presidential acts, Adams appointed the very able lawyer and secretary of state, anti-Jeffersonian Virginian John Marshall, as chief justice of the United States, a post he would distinguishedly occupy for 34 years. John Adams, a competent statesman and man of inflexible integrity and patriotism, retired to his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, angry and disappointed, but having rendered conspicuous service, and generally respected if not afloat on waves of public affection. He would prove to be the first of four generations of his family of eminent, public-spirited Americans, and the longest-lived of any president of the U.S. until the twenty-first century.

Jefferson’s inaugural address foresaw the steady growth in the power, extent, and prosperity of the nation. He had been an advocate of a small federal government, and thought the Articles of Confederation could have been amended to make an adequate framework, and that the presidency, as created, was an elected monarchy, “a bad edition of a Polish king.”¹⁵ Jefferson immediately set an informal tone to proceedings, dressed casually, delivered messages in writing, and received anyone who wanted to see him, simply, often in slippers, and in the order they appeared, very congenially. He sold Adams’s elaborate coach and horses and traveled in a one-horse market-cart.

Whether the Federalists thought they had an understanding with Jefferson or not, he did shrink the army drastically, and with the very capable expatriate Swiss banker Albert Gallatin (who had been discommoded by the xenophobia of 1798) as Treasury secretary, vacated tax fields, reduced spending, and reduced debt steadily through his presidency, even as the country continued to grow rapidly. He considered his administration to be Whig against the Federalist Tories, and he mastered the appearances of popular government. He considered the Bonapartist coup seizing power for the new consulate to be confirmation of his aversion to large standing armies, and had never seen any need for such a force anyway. He established the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to train Republican officers to replace the Washington-Adams military establishment, but ultimately to assure a non-political officer corps, a valuable and needed reform. Jefferson did allow himself to be persuaded by Gallatin of the merits of the Bank of the United States, and their various frugalities, especially reductions in the army and navy, helped cut the federal debt from $83 million to $57 million in eight years, despite a nearly 40 percent increase in the country’s population, to about seven million.

Jefferson continued a nationalist tradition in the defense of the nation’s interests in the world and its continued western expansion. Following the example of the British, the United States under its first two presidents had fallen into the habit of paying tribute to the Barbary pirates along the North African coast from Morocco east to what is now Libya. The Pasha of Tripoli (forerunner to Colonel Qaddaffi) increased his extortions for each ship and purported to declare war on the United States on May 14, 1801. Jefferson was less hostile to the navy than to the army, as it was less adaptable for use in domestic repression, and he dispatched a “Mediterranean squadron” that, led in the principal action by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, destroyed the Pasha’s principal vessel, the former USS Philadelphia. A blockade was imposed on the main pirate harbors, and the Pasha eventually thought better of it and signed a peace in June 1805. (Tribute, in reduced amounts, continued to be paid until 1816.)¹⁶

8. THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

Louisiana was the name for a vast territory bounded by the Gulf of Mexico and to the east by the Mississippi, and extending to the Canadian border in what would become Montana while broadening east to Lake Huron and west almost to Oregon. It was 828,000 square miles, including most of what has ever since Jeffersonian times been considered the heartland of America. The territory, as part of the settlement of the Seven Years’ War, was ceded by France to Spain in 1762, and as part of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions was taken back from Spain in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, which was confirmed with the signing of the Treaty of Madrid in March 1801. Jefferson, despite his incandescent Francophilia, was alarmed by this and feared such a powerful and contiguous French presence. He was also worried that the westward growth of the country could be stunted by restrictive French administration of the port of New Orleans and meddling with Mississippi traffic. The Spanish government in New Orleans, continuing in the name of France, revoked the right of Americans to unload cargo in New Orleans in 1802. Even Jefferson had been appalled at the conduct of the French in the Genêt and XYZ affairs, which were the two chief diplomatic encounters to date between the United States and France. Jefferson wrote the American minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, in April 1802, that “The day that France takes New Orleans . . . we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” This was an astonishing turn for the president, but demonstrated his clear-headed pursuit of the national and his own political interests when not permitted the luxury of his dilettantish biases. He told Livingston to negotiate an acquisition of a Gulf port and as much as he could of the lower Mississippi, or at least permanent and adequate rights in New Orleans.

On January 12, 1803, Jefferson named James Monroe—the former minister to France whom Washington had recalled, as Adams said, “in disgrace” for his fraternization with the Robespierrists and the Directory—as minister plenipotentiary to France to join Livingston in the negotiations and buy New Orleans and West Florida. The Congress had authorized $2 million, but Jefferson told Monroe to go to $10 million if he had to. By the time Monroe arrived in France in April, Napoleon had abandoned his ideas of a revived American empire, shocked at the unsuccessful decade-long effort to suppress a slave revolt in Haiti and wary of revived war with Britain, which continued to be invincible at sea. He did not wish to be starved out of North America as Louis XVI had been. Just before Monroe’s arrival, Talleyrand asked Livingston what the U.S. would pay for the whole Louisiana Territory. Monroe took this up on his arrival a couple of days later and boldly seized the opportunity. Agreement was reached and signed on May 2, antedated to April 30, buying the whole territory for $15 million, including U.S. government assumption of $3.75 million of French debts to private American interests. Monroe and Livingston exceeded their authority but Jefferson was delighted, and the acquisition was easily approved by the Senate in October. It slightly tested the president’s strict constructionist ideas, but, as always, he was able to adjust legal dogmas to suit a rational discharge of his office.

This was a brilliant, if entirely fortuitous, transaction that doubled the size of the country. Neither liberal historian Sean Willentz’s commendation of Jefferson for increasing the nation’s territory while shrinking its defense budget nor Theodore Roosevelt’s outrageous lampoon of Jefferson and Madison (the secretary of state) was justified. Roosevelt called them “timid, well-meaning statesmen . . . pitted against the greatest warrior and law-giver, and one of the greatest diplomats of modern times, . . . who were unable to so much as appreciate that there was shame in the practice of venality, dishonesty, mendacity, cruelty and treachery.” Napoleon and Talleyrand were as described,¹⁷ but Napoleon knew he couldn’t hold the territory against the British and Americans and correctly saw that the United States would rise up to rival and surpass the British. What he could not foresee was that the British would have the sagacity to tuck themselves in under the wing of the Americans as an indispensable ally when they could no longer lead the English-speaking world themselves. Jefferson’s and Madison’s and Monroe’s conduct in the matter was astute, opportunistic, and entirely successful. In less than 50 years since the start of the Seven Years’ War, the Americans had helped remove the French from their borders, achieved their independence, launched and established a stable republic with solid institutions and a strong currency, and more than doubled their original territory, peacefully. It had been a steadily more remarkable series of strategic successes, accomplished by a continuously remarkable group of men.

9. HAMILTON AND BURR

Jefferson’s next foray into westward expansionism was the dispatch of the expedition of Merriweather Lewis and William Clark to the Pacific and back. Lewis was a military officer and had been assigned as an aide to Jefferson when he became president. Jefferson had never been west of the Appalachians, but his father had been a surveyor who had glimpsed the Ohio country and Jefferson had long cherished a powerful and romantic notion of the potential for the westward expansion of the country. Jefferson proposed to Lewis a full scientific and exploratory expedition to the Pacific coast, which had never been reached overland from America, only by the Scot Alexander Mackenzie in Canada. Lewis agreed and selected William Clark, a fellow army officer, as co-leader. The expedition was expanded to 26 people, including scientists, experts in Indian languages, and a contingent of soldiers trained in frontier life. They set off from St. Louis in the spring of 1804, and after 1,600 miles went into winter quarters in November near what became Bismarck, North Dakota. They resumed their westward progress in April 1805, and reached the Pacific Ocean on November 15. The return journey to St. Louis, Missouri, from March to September 1806, was more direct. The maps, wildlife and botanical drawings, and diaries were of scientific value and captured the imagination of the country by focusing on the immense and abundant territory that beckoned to settlers (however disgruntled the indigenous population might be about it).

Jefferson’s war with the Federalists, and settling of scores generally, ramified quite widely. His supporters successfully impeached and removed from office federal district judge John Pickering, and impeached but failed to remove Associate Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, who had condemned the malcontent John Fries and the scurrilous blackmailer James T. Callender.

After Aaron Burr had abruptly metamorphosed from a vice presidential into a presidential candidate in early 1801, there was a widespread feeling not only that he was a scoundrel but that the system was a disaster of intrigue and chaos waiting to happen. The response was the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for separate balloting for president and vice president, which was ratified in September 1804, in time for the presidential election.

As the 1804 election approached, both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr vanished from the political front lines, where they had long been prominent. Hamilton was one of the leaders of the Federalists in denying Burr the governorship of New York, which he sought when long-serving Governor George Clinton was tapped by Jefferson to take Burr’s place as vice president. (John Jay only held the office for one term.) Hamilton joined the Republicans in crusading for Burr’s opponent, Morgan Lewis. In one of his frequent effusions, Hamilton, twiddling his thumbs impatiently in New York while Jefferson lolled in the newly completed White House, denounced Burr—who was infuriated at the imputations to him of unscrupulousness and even treachery, and at being frozen entirely out of government by Jefferson—as “a dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.” In the manner of the times, this led to a duel, in which, at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804, Burr killed Hamilton. Thus, aged only 49, there perished the third of the six principal founders of the country. Hamilton was almost a demiurge, a financial and administrative genius and a very capable military officer in both staff and combat roles. He was a relentless political schemer and operator, and when not grounded by Washington, tended to fly off unguided, combustible, and with unpredictable results. He was a monarchist and an authoritarian at heart, but he had rendered immense services to the country and glimpsed more clearly than anyone else the true and necessary development of the American economy.

Of the other principal figures at the birth of the republic apart from Washington, Franklin, and Hamilton, Adams had retired, but Jefferson and Madison remained in great offices with work to do. Aaron Burr, who had been a brilliant politician and was a gifted lawyer and inveterate schemer, was finished politically. Having been judged guilty of trying to snitch away from Jefferson his election victory in 1800, and now having killed Hamilton, he was not presentable for high office, and wandered off to the West with great but, some thought, sinister ambitions. A helplessly controversial person, Burr would be back before the country soon again, in an exotic and unflattering light.

The disillusioned editor Callender, imprisoned under the Sedition Act, became annoyed that the administration would not repay him his fine and attacked Jefferson for fathering three children with his comely slave, Sally Hemings. Jefferson ignored the allegation, which was not reprinted in respectable publications and was dismissed as the malicious scandal-mongering of a convicted felon, who in any case died in July 1803 when he blundered into a river in Richmond, Virginia, in a drunken stupor. (Callender’s allegations were correct, but not strictly relevant to Jefferson’s competence to hold his office, legally or otherwise.)

General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was nominated by the Federalists for president, and the Hamiltonian disciple and anti-slavery advocate Rufus King, minister to Great Britain and former senator from New York, was nominated for vice president. There was not really too much to run against, as Jefferson offered peace, prosperity, and a distinguished, unpretentious government, and he and Clinton won easily, 162 electoral votes to 14, and with about 72 percent of the votes.

After the death of Hamilton, Burr was indicted for murder but continued for eight months to be the vice president, in which capacity he presided in very statesmanlike and learned fashion over the impeachment trial of Justice Chase, which, to Jefferson’s acute irritation, ended in acquittal. Burr devised his next and perhaps most grandiose plan. He spoke with the British and Spanish ministers to Washington about subsidizing the creation of a new jurisdiction that Burr would set up in the Southwest. Neither the subsequent judicial proceedings nor the efforts of historians have clarified whether Burr had any treasonable intent. The American military commander in the southern Mississippi region, General James Wilkinson (who commissioned Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike’s expedition to the sources of the Mississippi and to Colorado, where Pike’s Peak is named after him, and New Mexico, in 1806–1807), was illicitly taking competing emoluments from the French, British, and Spanish, to keep an eye out for their interests in the Southwest. Burr, a great national celebrity, much admired in some circles for clearing his honor by killing an illustrious opponent in a duel, padded around the area and supplied arms from his own resources to the Louisiana militia, and added his own tangible favors to those Wilkinson was receiving from foreign powers. Burr and Wilkinson had been friendly when both had been in the Continental Army.

As rumors became more intense and far-fetched that Burr was planning to set up his own country, carved out of American and Mexican territory, Jefferson had him charged with treason on November 26, 1806. Jefferson reported to the Congress in February 1807 that the former vice president’s “guilt is placed beyond question,” oblivious of the fact that Burr had already been released by a grand jury in Mississippi for lack of evidence, but rearrested in Alabama. He was taken to Richmond for trial, while Jefferson personally worked with the U.S. attorney in Richmond, George Hay, on the prosecution’s case. Burr was a brilliant barrister and participated in the preparation of his own case, which, to Jefferson’s dismay, was judged by Chief Justice John Marshall, self-assigned for the purpose to the Fourth Circuit. In April 1807, Marshall pitched out the treason charge and reduced it to conspiracy. Burr had many supporters, including Jefferson’s cousin and successor as secretary of state and former U.S. attorney general, Edmund Randolph. Burr subpoenaed Jefferson, and the documentation between his officials and himself in respect of the case, and Marshall ruled that the president enjoyed no exemption, and that he would determine confidentially the relevance and degree of privilege and national security concerns of the material.

Burr excused Jefferson as a witness, and Jefferson helped establish an important precedent, which would be used in the Watergate affair in 1974, and handed over the material to Marshall. The trial, in August 1807, consisted of the evidence and cross-examination of the sole government witness, General Wilkinson, who was torn limb from limb by Burr and his counsel and appeared a good deal more guilty of reprehensible acts than the defendant. The jury found Burr not guilty, but in wording that implied it was not convinced that he was wholly innocent of wrongdoing. Burr departed for Europe until the murder charges against him over the Hamilton duel had been dropped, then returned to New York, where he lived quietly and successfully as a lawyer and figure of society until he died in 1836, aged 80. He was a great but unfocused talent, and was in superficial respects a forerunner to Richard Nixon, as an able politician who could not shake the suspicion of lack of probity. But Burr never got close to the presidency or great deeds.

10. RESPONDING TO WAR IN EUROPE

As war had resumed in Europe in 1803, it was not long before the high-handed conduct of the European powers, especially Britain, made America’s maritime rights again become a scorching issue. Both Britain and France claimed the right to prevent neutral countries from trading with the other, which in practice, since Britain held the scepter of the sea, meant that America was soon back to the exasperating practice of having the British seize and search her ships, confiscate cargo, and remove alleged deserters and impress American seamen into British service. It was a straight oppression by the stronger naval power of the weaker, and international law walked the plank as soon as hostilities commenced. The British invoked the Rule of 1756, successfully imposed in the Seven Years’ War, whereby European powers that had forbidden trade with its West Indian colonies in time of peace should not open trade up to neutrals in wartime. Thus phrased, it seemed to put the onus for simply squashing trade by imposition of naval force on the exporting country, though the victim would be the neutral carrier, trying to pick up from one combatant and use his neutrality to assure delivery that the combatant power with inferior naval strength (France) could not assure himself. The legalities were a little more complicated than they at first seemed. But it was all made excessively difficult by the British practice of not just inspecting American ships and seizing cargos but also dragooning American sailors, along with alleged defectors from the Royal Navy, into that navy.

The turning point came when a British court determined that the practice of the French delivering to American ports cargo that American ships then conveyed to French ports would be considered as direct commerce from the French West Indies unless the Americans could satisfy the intercepting British that they had intended originally for the voyage to terminate in an American port. This was not going to be easy to establish, but it was at least a variation on outright seizure, and the product of a British court decision and not just an executive naval command order. Madison reported the decision in a trenchantly worded report in January 1806, and the Senate condemned “unprovoked aggression” and the “violation of neutral rights.” When Britain ignored American threats and protests, the Congress voted an embargo on an extensive list of items that the U.S. imported from Britain that it could produce itself or buy from other countries. The statute was only in effect from October to November 1806, when Jefferson asked for its suspension until after the election of his successor, in December 1808. European affairs vastly surpassed the efforts of America to make itself felt. In May 1806, Charles James Fox, again British foreign secretary, had declared an absolute naval blockade of the European Atlantic coast from Brest in northwest France to the mouth of the Elbe in Prussia.

At the end of 1806, Jefferson sent William Pinckney (a member of a temporarily ubiquitous family) to London to join the minister there, the already ubiquitous James Monroe, in trying to sort out an agreement with Britain, with the imposition of the trade embargo against British goods as a bargaining chip. The British weren’t interested: a treaty was negotiated that produced only slight concessions on West Indian trade and none at all on British impressment of American sailors or the American ambition for payment of indemnities for British ship seizures. It was a painful lesson in the comparative importance of and correlation of forces between states, and Jefferson declined to send such a feeble arrangement to the Senate for ratification.

Napoleon replied to Fox with his Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806 (following his conquest of Prussia, a blitzkrieg as astounding as that of the German army in conquering France 134 years later). Napoleon purported to bar all commerce and communication between Britain and the entire continent of Europe. Jefferson then ordered new negotiations with Britain on the hopeful assumption that the British would prove more amenable after this initiative from the French emperor (who had promoted himself from first consul three years before). The British and French scarcely noticed the Americans as the greatest war in the history of the world until a hundred years later steadily grew in scope and intensity.

A very galling incident illustrated the dilemma of America and the limitations of its president’s pacifistic impulses in June 1807, when the British frigate Leopard stopped the American frigate Chesapeake beyond the three-mile territorial limit off Norfolk, Virginia, and the American ship declined to have her crew inspected for British deserters. The British ship subdued the American vessel with four broadsides killing three and wounding 18 Americans. Four sailors were seized, of whom only one was a British deserter. The incident inflamed and unified American opinion, Jefferson estimated, beyond anything since Lexington and Concord 32 years before. The U.S. demand for an apology and indemnity was simply ignored by the British, in what was now the customary manner, and Jefferson was finally forced to gamble on his economic response policy, which had been passed over in favor of the Adams-Hamilton military threat of 1798. Jefferson secured congressional approval of an almost complete embargo against trade with all foreign governments (since virtually all accessible countries were now at war with each other) and closed American ports entirely to all British shipping.

This policy was an inexcusable misreading of what should have been obvious to Jefferson and his collaborators: that the United States would be the principal victim; that the embargo would have no impact on France, which controlled almost all of Europe west of Russia, south of Sweden, and north of the Ottoman Empire; and that the British would benefit from the loss of American competition, and would import foodstuffs from South America instead. American ships at sea when the embargo was imposed simply did not return to American ports and continued as international traders, enjoying the full cooperation of the Royal Navy with any American ship that ignored the American law. An immense smuggling business was carried on through Canada, with the cooperation not only of the British but of most New England and Upstate New York commercial interests.

The embargo did not prevent British ships from delivering cargos to the United States, but it forbade them to remove American exports, so many dropped off in northern U.S. ports and picked up return cargoes in Canada. And Napoleon, astounded at the absurdity of the American measure and partially justifying Theodore Roosevelt’s disparagement of the comparative naïveté of Jefferson and Madison in dealing with such a man as he, seized all American shipping in French and French-controlled ports and waters, more than $10 million of shipping assets, claiming that any such ships were obviously British vessels with false papers, as no American would ignore Jefferson’s embargo act.

Jefferson amplified his mistake with draconian enforcement orders, dispensing with the Fourth Amendment requirement for search warrants, ordering seizure by customs officials on suspicion of infractions of the embargo, deploying the armed forces along the Canadian border, and even determining that the Lake Champlain area was in a state of insurrection. None of these measures stopped smuggling on a massive scale, but they invited nullification actions by state legislatures (including by former secretary of state Pickering in New England), the withholding of state militias for enforcement purposes in New England, and unsuccessful constitutional challenges, and they involved clear impositions of force more objectionable than those for which Jefferson had urged revolt from George III in the most empurpled terms in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. The policy was an unmitigated economic, political, and moral disaster. The export industry declined by 75 percent and standards of living, especially in New England and the main Atlantic ports, plummeted. Finally, the Congress repealed the embargo and Jefferson signed this abandonment of his policy just three days before the inauguration of his successor, on March 1, 1809.

11. ASSESSING THOMAS JEFFERSON

Jefferson had been a good president up to the economic reprisals against the warring European powers. His simple and frugal manner of government, devolving much back on the states and promoting democratic values generally, was popular, and with Gallatin at the Treasury, prosperity continued to increase. The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark and Pike expeditions were valuable in themselves in laying out settler routes and goals, and fired the nation’s imagination with the organic growth of western settlement. Because the forceful handling of the Genêt and XYZ affairs by Washington, and the strong resistance, with clear military overtones, of Adams to the original maritime impressments and seizure crisis of 1798 had been successful, Jefferson had been spared the exposure of his ill-considered economic reprisals against larger economies of much less vulnerability than America’s to misconceived and largely unenforceable laws. He was finally free to present and force through the docile Congress a policy that laid the U.S. economy low and exposed Jefferson as an innumerate blowhard and a hypocrite. He spent much of the last year of his presidency in an immobilized state, racked by migraines and digestive problems.

Only the happenstance of the Louisiana Purchase made Jefferson a more successful president than Adams, and in that as in previous offices, Jefferson did not have the steady judgment and self-control of Washington, any more than had the quirky and irascible Adams.

Yet, though Jefferson botched his mad essay at economic warfare, he was a great expander of the country, popularizer of the presidency, and decentralizer of government, and one of the most politically gifted and effective leaders in the country’s history, clearly surpassed in this regard only by Franklin D. Roosevelt and possibly by Lincoln and Reagan also. His principal rival as the greatest intellectual in the presidency, Woodrow Wilson (though John Quincy Adams, John Adams’s son, could also be a rival), wrestled 110 years later with similar maritime provocations in a European war, and had the same pacifistic tendencies as Jefferson, but, at the head of a much more powerful America, would make war rather than tolerate the humiliation of America. Jefferson had done little as the country’s first secretary of state, and less, other than in partisan organization and political rough and tumble, as its second vice president. He was a talented president, but it is not accidental that he directed that his gravestone should refer to his status as author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia statute on the rights of man, and to his status as founder of the University of Virginia, and not to his great offices of state.

Only the reputation of the Democratic-Republicans as sincere adherents to popular government (which was not an imposture), and the continued erosion of the Federalists and the absence of a galvanizing figure to rally the opposition, prevented a political upheaval in the 1808 elections. Hamilton was sorely missed. Three of the candidates for national office from the previous election ran again. Jefferson followed the Washington precedent and retired after two terms, though he could presumably have been reelected, because of the disarray of his opponents and despite the fiasco of his trade policies. He was replaced by Madison as the presidential candidate of the Democratic-Republicans (Democrats, as they became, and Jefferson and Madison are celebrated as the founders of the modern Democratic Party), and George Clinton was again nominated for vice president. The Federalists again chose Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for president and Rufus King for vice president.

Some of the Jeffersonians splintered off under the half-mad but brilliant John Randolph of Roanoke, who was a states’ rights and nullification advocate (he proposed that states could decide the federal government had exceeded its powers and simply nullify the application of the offending law within their own borders). The eastern Jeffersonians nominated George Clinton, on what amounted almost to a free-trade platform. Clinton thus became the first and to date only person in American history to be nominated and stand for election as president and as vice president in the same year. Technically, he was running against himself, as the same person could not simultaneously hold both positions. The Randolphites were known as the “Quids” (because Randolph said they were neither Democratic-Republicans nor Federalists, and were a “third something,” or Tertium Quids—it was a mark of an erudite electorate that a splinter party acquired a Latin name). They nominated James Monroe for president, but he, unlike his administration colleague Clinton, declined to allow his name to stand against his old friend Madison. The vote was closer than in the previous election, but Madison and Clinton won, by 122 electoral votes to 47 for Pinckney and six for Clinton, who had the consolation of being reelected vice president by 113 to 47 for King. The Federalists made substantial gains in the Congress, but did not secure the majority of either house. Pinckney only received about 32 percent of the votes for president against about 55 percent for Madison.

The Americans suffered their first serious strategic setback, going back 50 years to the Seven Years’ War, when Jefferson had said that taking Canada was “a mere matter of marching.” It proved to be more complicated than that, but he didn’t even endow his country with the men to make the march. If Jefferson had taken a leaf from the book of his predecessors, and built up a large army and equipped it, he could have threatened Britain with the permanent seizure of Canada, and could have forced some variance in the maritime provocations of the British. The application of simple grade-three arithmetic would have told him, as it told his opponents and the countries he was aiming to influence, that the policies he did adopt could not succeed, and their failure squandered a good deal of the political capital and credibility that had been built up by his comrades in the establishment of the United States—Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Adams.

This setback would be compounded by Madison, but was a lost opportunity, not a lasting defeat, and was more than overshadowed by the Louisiana Purchase. In strategic terms, the Jefferson presidency, though more ambiguous than its predecessors, continued America’s advance, in a world where almost all other nations were wracked by war.

1. Disclosure requires reference to the author’s legal travails as the actual basis of this reflection; they are fully described in my previous book, A Matter of Principle, and summarized in the last footnote of Chapter 16.

2. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life, New York, Penguin, 2010, p. 554.

3. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2003, p. 470.

4. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 100.

5. Wood, op. cit., p. 157.

6. Ibid. p. 158.

7. Ibid. p. 162.

8. Daniel Ruddy, Theodore Roosevelt’s History of the United States in His Own Words, New York, Harper Collins, 2010, p. 1.

9. Wood, op. cit., p. 234.

10. Wood, op. cit., p. 208.

11. Wood, op. cit., p. 240.

12. Wood, op. cit., p. 267.

13. Wood, op. cit., p. 265.

14. Wood, op. cit., p. 285.

15. By the time Jefferson was inaugurated, Poland had been carved up entirely by the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Empires and had no king.

16. Pope Pius VII said, as the Barbary pirates regularly seized hostages and held them for ransom, that “the United States had done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages.” (Christopher Hitchens, “Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates,” City Journal, Spring 2007.)

17. Ruddy, op. cit., p. 89.