Jefferson and Hamilton (44 page)

Hamilton proposed that manufacturing be facilitated through federal subsidies, liberal immigration policies, national defense contracts, government-owned arms factories, publicly assisted improvements to the nation’s infrastructure of roads and bridges, and the labor of women and children. (Bluntly, he wrote that in a manufacturing society, “women and Children would be rendered more useful and the latter more early useful.”) He asserted
that it was legally within the grasp of the national government to do these things. It required only an elastic interpretation of Congress’s authority to “provide for the Common defence and general welfare.” Even so, he said that most of the capital would come from private investors, whose ability to act would be aided by funding and the bank. He also believed that not only would Europeans eagerly sink their capital in American manufacturing endeavors, but also that many Old World capitalists would want to move to America to better manage their investments.
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Simultaneously, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures came into being, a body created to “concretize his report,” in the words of a Hamilton biographer.
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The society was the brainchild of Tench Coxe, the assistant secretary of the Treasury, but it was born with Hamilton’s avid backing and chartered by New Jersey. It sold stock to raise capital, through which it planned to purchase seven hundred acres along the Passaic River, where it would build a town replete with factories and mills that would produce shoes, hats, fabrics, wire, pottery, carpets, and paper. It might even erect a distillery.
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If the enterprise flourished, Hamilton envisaged capitalists rushing to emulate the New Jersey model.

Jefferson disapproved of neither manufacturing within his Arcadian America nor making the United States more independent of Europe, and he never complained about the prospect of women and children toiling in factories. However, he objected to the subsidization of manufacturing, which he saw as yet another step in dangerously expanding the reach of the national government. Madison also thought that part of Hamilton’s plan was intolerable, and recommended that the “parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.” Jefferson was so troubled that for the first time he complained to Washington, telling the president that Hamilton was seeking to make the “constitution … a very different thing from what the people thought they had submitted to.” Washington may not have understood it as such, but in retrospect, when Jefferson added that Americans were being made to ask “whether we live under a limited or an unlimited government,” he was as much as telling the president that the battle lines had been drawn for partisan warfare to decide the issue.
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Jefferson continued to believe that Washington would see things as he did, and he fell into the unbecoming habit of complaining, even tattling, to the president about Hamilton. Jefferson was accustomed to having his way, sometimes manipulating others to gain his ends, but in Washington he met his match. Strong, savvy, and politically experienced, the president could not be engineered. Part of Jefferson’s problem was that he misread Washington. Usually adroit at gauging others, Jefferson for the longest time credited the
image of disinterestedness that Washington presented, and it blinded him to the reality that in matters relating to domestic America, the president and his treasury secretary marched to the same drummer.

Increasingly consumed with suspicion and immutable enmity toward Hamilton, Jefferson accepted uncritically substantial portions of the truths and untruths that made up the gossip fed to him by his intelligence-gathering lieutenants. In no time, he came to see Hamilton as a superhuman puppeteer of congressmen and diplomats. He believed the tale that Hamilton had written a pamphlet early in 1776 that took issue with Paine’s
Common Sense
, and he fell for the story that his rival had left the Constitutional Convention in a fit of anger because it would not agree to his monarchical plans for America. Jefferson did not question the anecdote that Hamilton had recently raised a toast to George III at a dinner party. He gave credence to the prattle that certain New Yorkers possessed handwritten plans prepared by Hamilton for the establishment of a monarchy in the United States. Nor did he for a minute doubt the report brought by a recent visitor to London that the treasury secretary was looked on by members of Parliament as “their effective minister here.” Above all, he believed the “fiscal party,” with Hamilton pulling the strings behind the scenes, was seeking to manage the president.
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On a couple of occasions Hamilton said things that only confirmed Jefferson’s suspicions. In the spring of 1791, while dining with Adams and Jefferson, Hamilton had remarked that the sway of monarchy and commercial interests over Parliament made Britain’s government “the most perfect … which ever existed.” On another occasion, Jefferson was shaken when he heard Hamilton’s father-in-law, General Schuyler, express the view that “hereditary descent was as likely to produce good magistrates as election.” But he was far more shocked to hear Hamilton remark that the Constitution was “a shilly shally thing, of mere milk and water, which could not last, and was only good as a step to something better.”
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Jefferson took that to mean that Hamilton and his cabal were plotting monarchy for the United States.

On at least four occasions in the six months beginning in February 1792, Jefferson met with Washington and complained about Hamilton. Jefferson’s message hardly varied from one meeting to the next. He claimed that Hamilton had secretly concocted a “plan he intended to pursue” that would involve multiple initiatives and take years to complete. His “ultimate object” was America’s gradual evolution into a monarchical state. Already, the Treasury Department had grown so powerful that under Washington’s successors it would likely “swallow up the whole Executive powers.” Jefferson insisted that Hamilton’s “system” of speculation, which he characterized as “a species of gambling, destructive of morality,” had corroded Congress. A “corrupt squadron”
in Congress was “devoted to the paper and stockjobbing interest,” he charged, adding that these congressmen were “legislating for their own interests,” and those of speculators, “in opposition to those of the people.” Some were so corrupted that they “formed a corps of interested persons” who acted “steadily at the orders of the Treasury.” Time after time, Jefferson reiterated the charge that Hamilton had already made great strides in laying the groundwork for “transforming the government into a monarchy.”

Washington steadfastly defended Hamilton. He told Jefferson that he approved “the treasury system” and added that the secretary of state’s fears of monarchy were delusional. On two occasions, Washington offered to be “the Mediator to put an end” to the battling between his cabinet members, but Jefferson would have none of it. Early in 1793, Jefferson told Washington that he would not rest until Congress was “cleansed of all persons interested in the bank or public stocks,” leaving America with a “pure legislature.”
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Jefferson’s initial visit with Washington to carp about Hamilton’s program had come when the treasury secretary proposed his plan for manufacturing. As it turned out, Jefferson could have saved himself the trouble. The House of Representatives turned aside the proposition and it was not enacted, convincing Jefferson that the tide had turned and that “things were returning into their true channel.” Indeed, as historian Lance Banning pointed out, “the political mood of the country had undergone a radical change” during 1791, as criticism of Hamiltonianism grew more pronounced. Jefferson thought the turnabout was due to his organizing efforts, including his assistance in enabling Freneau. He exaggerated his influence, though it had been enormous. Given the change, Jefferson was confident that the agrarian interests would win control of Congress in the congressional elections of 1792. That alone, he said, would keep “the general constitution of it’s true ground.”
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Hamilton knew that Jefferson and Madison had opposed parts of his economic program, but was slow to realize that they had taken steps to piece together a concerted opposition. He discounted warnings about the hidden intent behind their botanizing tour and dismissed hearsay that Madison had “insinuate[d] unfavorable impressions of [him].”
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Although he and Jefferson had often disagreed in cabinet meetings, Hamilton did not at first suspect his counterpart. Jefferson’s refinement and loathing of confrontation had led him to remain polite and gentlemanly, but Hamilton was misled even more because both were serving the same president. Hamilton was not alone in his shortsightedness. It was not until eighteen months after the dustup over the bank, and a half year after Jefferson first complained to him about Hamilton’s program, that Washington said he was aware of “a personal difference”
between his two cabinet members. However, everyone else appears to have known what was occurring by the spring of 1792, when Abigail Adams remarked on the “Rage” of the Virginians against Hamilton. Spring was in full bloom when Hamilton finally deduced what was afoot. Like Jefferson, Hamilton received a combination of news and gossip from what he characterized as “many channels,” and by May everything pointed toward Jefferson and Madison as the instigators of the growing opposition to his economic designs.
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Hamilton was startled by Madison’s opposition. They had become friends a decade earlier and were colleagues in the campaign to achieve consolidation and the impost. Besides, Hamilton had not thought it possible that Madison, a Virginian, could oppose policies supported by Washington. Like some historians, the treasury secretary may have privately attributed Madison’s turnaround to jealousy occasioned by Hamilton’s having captured Washington’s favor, but he also now concluded that Madison, while “a clever man,” was “very little Acquainted with the world.”
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Hamilton was also convinced that Madison’s “exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge and virtues of Mr. Jefferson” largely accounted for his former friend’s transformation. Hamilton now saw Jefferson as a “man of profound ambition & violent passions” who was guided by an “unsound & dangerous” philosophy. Drawing on the tidbits provided by his informants, Hamilton’s impression of Jefferson was a tangle of truths, half-truths, and misconceptions. He believed that Jefferson had from the first opposed the Constitution (partially true); that he shared the “temperament” of the radical French revolutionaries, whom “he had had a share in exciting” to act (true in part, though mostly an exaggeration); that he had returned to America hoping to become the treasury secretary (incorrect); that from the first he had secretly disapproved of funding (inaccurate); and that, above all, Jefferson was consumed with an “ardent desire” to succeed Washington as president (badly mistaken). Hamilton thought Jefferson was dangerous. If he succeeded in rousing the states to “narrow the Federal authority,” the entire system of consolidation that had been achieved might unravel. It put Hamilton in mind of a “very just, though a course saying—That it is much easier to raise the Devil than to lay him.”
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Aware of the danger, Hamilton as always took the offensive. In six essays churned out in rapid succession during the summer of 1792—mostly for Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States
—Hamilton dispelled any doubt that Jefferson was responsible for the
National Gazette
or that he was the “head of a party.” He contended that Jefferson disliked the Constitution and believed the president had “administered injudiciously and wickedly” in signing the
Bank Bill. Hamilton painted Jefferson as seeking nothing less than the reduction of the national government to “the skeleton of Power,” with states elevated “upon its ruins.” If Jefferson succeeded, Hamilton warned, he would tear down a strong United States and the “reinvigoration” of the economy achieved during the past few years. In its place, a victorious Jefferson will have substituted “National disunion, National insignificance, Public disorder and discredit.”
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Hamilton knew that his biting essays would bring a response, and he imagined that Jefferson would author the rejoinders. He was wrong. Jefferson covertly assisted Freneau in framing some of his visceral essays, plied the editor with restricted Department of State materials, and persuaded Madison to take up his pen. Seldom able to say no to his friend, Madison contributed at least nineteen unsigned essays to the
National Gazette
before the fall elections in 1792. In the process, Madison and Freneau reframed the debate from a battle over the scope of government to an epic contest between republicans and monarchists. From this point forward, the Jeffersonians portrayed Hamilton and his faction as favoring an elitist system in which the citizenry remained deferential and acquiescent while the “true republicans” sought to fulfill the American Revolution.
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Madison defended political parties, which to this juncture had been almost universally condemned as existing to advance factional interests rather than the general good. Though he never said so explicitly, Madison offered a blueprint for democratic politics. He came close to embodying Jefferson’s precept that the earth belonged to the living, and that one generation could not be held in check by its forebears. Madison defended parties because they provided representation to the hitherto unrepresented, and in so doing they offered the promise of spreading wealth and power. He charged that Hamiltonianism was not only directed “less to the interest of the many than of a few” but also bottomed on the hope that control of the national government would “by degrees be narrowed into fewer hands” until it ultimately “approximated … an hereditary form.” But those who opposed Hamilton believed “that mankind are capable of governing themselves.” They hated “hereditary power as an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.” Underscoring what he and Jefferson saw as the fundamental difference in their outlook and that of their foes, Madison reminded readers that the American Revolution had been an assertion of the people against monarchical and aristocratic tyranny. He proclaimed that the Revolution, and the war that secured independence, had not been for the purpose of creating an all-powerful state, much less to perpetuate rule from the top down. The American Revolution had been a struggle against British consolidation and a battle to save liberty. Liberty had been
saved, and “liberty [was] the great end, for which the Union was formed.” It was not the government but the “people themselves” who were the “best Keepers of the People’s Liberties.” With pride, Madison referred to the anti-Hamilton faction as the “Republican party.” (It was a name that stuck, though throughout the 1790s the Jeffersonians would also sometimes be called the Democratic-Republican Party, and beginning early in the nineteenth century the faction became the Democratic Party.)
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