Alexander Hamilton (78 page)

A master legislative tactician, Madison was now recognized as the first opposition leader in House history and had most of the south lined up solidly behind him. Among other things, Madison may have resented that Hamilton had replaced him as Washington’s confidential adviser. In an attempt to stymie Hamilton, Madison tried to exert legislative control over the Treasury’s power to raise money for the army for an upcoming western expedition. Madison did not prevail, but Hamilton was aghast that his former friend tried to curtail his power so drastically. As he said afterward, Madison “well knew that if he had prevailed, a certain consequence was my
resignation.
”
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Abigail Adams saw the anti-Hamilton campaign emanating from Virginia. “All the attacks upon the Secretary of the Treasury and upon the government come from that quarter,” she told her sister, “but I think whilst the people prosper and feel themselves happy, they cannot be blown up.”
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Fisher Ames also saw systematic opposition to Hamilton coming from Virginia. “Virginia moves in a solid column,” he told a friend, “and the discipline of the party is as severe as the Prussian. Deserters are not spared. Madison is become a desperate party leader.”
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That spring, Hamilton closely monitored the
National Gazette.
While Freneau glorified Jefferson as the “illustrious patriot” and the “colossus of liberty,” he presented Hamilton in satirical terms, mocking him as “Atlas.”
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In early May, he taunted Hamilton with this verse: “Public debts are public curses / In soldiers’ hands! then nothing worse is! / In speculators’ hands increasing, / Public debt’s a public blessing!”
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Nor did Freneau exempt Washington from his mockery. When Hamilton made an innocent proposal to place Washington’s face on the new currency, Freneau saw royalist tendencies at work: “Shall Washington, my fav’rite child, / Be ranked ’mongst haughty kings?”
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That such antigovernment diatribes were being published by the paid translator for Jefferson’s State Department was finally too much for Hamilton. He concluded that Jefferson and Madison had mounted a concerted effort to drive him from office. He wasn’t being just criticized but crucified. With an imagination no less suspicious than Jefferson’s, he saw a populist conspiracy out to destroy him. After years of restraint as treasury secretary, Hamilton’s mind and emotions were now at full boil.

On May 26, 1792, he wrote a remarkable letter to Edward Carrington, a revenue supervisor in Virginia, that virtually declared war against Jefferson and Madison. Hamilton shed discretion and let his deepest feelings gush forth. He told Carrington that as early as the debates over his funding system, people had given him hints of Madison’s enmity, but he had not believed them. Now the scales had dropped from his eyes. “It was not ’till the last session that I became unequivocally convinced of the following truth:
That Mr. Madison cooperating with Mr. Jefferson is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration and actuated by views in my judgment subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the country.
”
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Of the “systematic opposition” of Jefferson and Madison, Hamilton declared, “My subversion, I am now satisfied, has been long an object with them.”
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Hamilton seemed more anguished by Madison’s betrayal than Jefferson’s. By this point, Hamilton saw the mild-mannered Jefferson as a fanatic with a settled malice toward him, if not toward the federal government itself. Madison had always impressed him as the more brilliant and honorable man. Now he concluded that Madison had fallen under Jefferson’s sway. “I cannot persuade myself that Mr. Madison and I, whose politics had formerly so much the
same point of departure,
should now diverge so widely in our opinions of the measures which are proper to be pursued,” Hamilton told Carrington. “The opinion I once entertained of the candour and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison’s character has, I acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that
it is one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind.
”
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Not for the last time, Hamilton tried to refute the grotesque fantasy that he belonged to a “monarchical party” that meditated the downfall of republican government. He conceded that he and kindred spirits held less populist beliefs than Jefferson and Madison but that they would regard “as both
criminal and visionary
any attempt to subvert the republican system of the country.” He wanted to give the Constitution every possible chance: “I am
affectionately
attached to the republican theory. I desire
above all things
to see the
equality
of political rights, exclusive of all
hereditary
distinction, firmly established by a practical demonstration of its being consistent with the order and happiness of society.”
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If he had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, Hamilton said, he would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: “I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, danger to liberty etc. etc. I would endeavour to prostrate the national government, raise a ferment, and then ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.” He denied Madison was doing this but was doubtful about Jefferson, a “man of profound ambition and violent passions.”
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Lest Carrington consider these views confidential, Hamilton indicated that he had thrown down the gauntlet to both Jefferson and Madison: “They are both apprised indirectly from myself of the opinion I entertain of their views.”
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The period of covert skirmishing had ended. Open warfare had begun.

George Washington watched this feuding in his cabinet with dismay. He was no longer the swaggering young general of the Revolution but a craggy, aging man with parchment skin. His gray eyes seemed smaller, more deeply set in their sockets. He was plagued by rheumatism, and his painful dentures crafted from hippopotamus tusks rubbed agonizingly against his one remaining good tooth. William Maclay found his “complexion pale, nay, almost cadaverous. His voice hollow and indistinct, owing, as I believe, to artificial teeth before his upper jaw.”
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Washington clung to an idealized image of the president as a citizen-king above partisanship. This pose was more and more difficult to maintain with a bitterly divided cabinet. Jefferson sniped privately at Washington as a vain, close-minded man, easily manipulated by flattery. “His mind has been so long used to unlimited applause that it could not brook contradiction or even advice offered unasked,” Jefferson complained to a friend, adding that “I have long thought therefore it was best for the republican interest to soothe him, by flattering where they could approve the measures and to be silent when they disapprove.”
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Unable to believe that Hamilton won internal arguments on their merits, Jefferson concluded that Washington was being hoodwinked. If not an intellectual, Washington was fully capable of independent judgment and could not be tricked or coerced. When Jefferson later accused him of falling under Hamilton’s influence, Washington reminded him irritably that “there were so many instances within [your] own knowledge of my having decided
against
as in
favor
of the opinions of the person evidently alluded to [Hamilton].”
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By early July 1792, it was clear that George Washington would not have the option of silence or inaction in stemming the feud between Hamilton and Jefferson. He had probably waited too long to assert control. His fine, nonpartisan stance may have only intensified the partisan mischief between his two appointees.

The slanderous hyperbole of Philip Freneau’s
National Gazette
now soared to a new pitch. To commemorate July 4, Freneau ran a front-page article listing the “rules for changing a limited republican government into an unlimited hereditary one” and mentioned Hamilton’s programs as the most effective means for doing so.
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Other articles followed with equally heavy-handed hints that Hamilton and his retinue planned to enslave America under a monarchy and an aristocracy. To provoke the president still further, Freneau had three copies of the
National Gazette
delivered to Washington each day.

Before leaving for Monticello for the rest of the summer, Jefferson again sat down with Washington to persuade him that a “corrupt squadron of voters in Congress” was in Hamilton’s pocket and voted for his measures only because they owned bank stock or government paper.
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Washington exhibited growing impatience with Jefferson’s warnings of a royalist plot and stated flatly that he endorsed Hamilton’s policies. Anyone who thought otherwise, he told Jefferson, must regard the president as “too careless to attend to them or too stupid to understand them.”
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On July 25, Hamilton planted in Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States
the opening shot in a sustained volley against Jefferson. Signed “T. L.,” this letter posed a simple query about Freneau and his State Department stipend: “Whether this salary is paid him for
translations
or for
publications,
the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs...?”
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The letter was just one paragraph, yet it could not have been more momentous: the treasury secretary was making anonymous public accusations against the secretary of state. Hamilton had returned to his old career as a bareknuckled polemicist, and Freneau relished the chance to retaliate. Three days later, he tarred John Fenno, his Federalist counterpart, as a “vile sycophant” who printed the journals of the U.S. Senate and received more money from the government than he did.
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Washington was upset by this extraordinary tumult. The nasty newspaper war was pushing things fast to the breaking point. On July 29, Washington sent Hamilton a letter from Mount Vernon, labeled “Private & Confidential,” that enumerated twenty-one grievances about his administration that he had heard during his trip home. Everyone agreed that the country was prosperous and happy but voiced concern over specific measures. Although Washington pretended that George Mason was the principal voice of these concerns, Jefferson was clearly the source. Reluctant to offend Hamilton, Washington tactfully avoided mention that the twenty-one grievances all related to Hamilton’s policies. The litany of complaints was by now familiar: the excise tax was oppressive, the public debt too high, speculation had drained capital from productive uses and corrupted Congress, and on and on. Finally, Washington told Hamilton of the rumor that the real intent of these initiatives was “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the British Constitution is to be the model.”
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By the time he received Washington’s letter on August 3, Hamilton had already posted one to Mount Vernon, urging Washington to stand for reelection and warning him that failure to do so would be “deplored as the greatest evil that could befall the country at the present juncture.”
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Washington’s letter must have reinforced Hamilton’s fear that the government was encircled by enemies and that Jefferson was plotting his ouster. Before Hamilton replied, he published a stinging critique of Jefferson in the
Gazette of the United States.
Under the guise of “An American,” Hamilton raised the stakes markedly by naming names. Freneau’s newspaper, he alleged, had been set up to advance Jefferson’s views, and Madison had been the intermediary in bringing Freneau to Philadelphia. Hamilton engaged in some wicked mockery, noting that the only foreign language the translator Freneau knew was French and that Jefferson was already acquainted with that language. He then directly accused Jefferson of disloyalty: “Is it possible that Mr. Jefferson, the head of a principal department of the government, can be the patron of a paper, the evident object of which is to decry the government and its measures?”
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Many readers must have guessed the identity of the author hiding behind the mask of “An American.”

Now in the fray, Hamilton published two more installments of “An American” on August 11 and 18, elaborating on the impropriety of Jefferson’s relationship with Freneau: “It is a fact known to every man who approaches that officer . . . that he arraigns the principal measures of the government and, it may be added, with
indiscreet
if not
indecent
warmth.”
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Even as Hamilton fired these broadsides, he composed a fourteen-thousand-word letter to Washington, vindicating his Treasury tenure. He confessed to deep hurt at the false charges hurled against him. He could endure criticisms of his judgment but not of his integrity: “I feel that I merit them
in no degree
and expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort to suppress them.”
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Hamilton listed his economic feats in office. He talked of the steep drop in the interest rates that the United States had to pay for loans (from 6 percent to 4 percent) and the influx of foreign money that had financed commerce and agriculture. Abundant money was now available for legitimate business purposes. Even speculation had proved his system’s soundness, for “under a bad system the public stock would have been too uncertain an article” for people to speculate in it.
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Hamilton denied that any member of Congress “can properly be called a stock-jobber or a paper dealer,” even if some had invested in government debt.
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Many had bought bank stock
after
the founding of the Bank of the United States, and he saw nothing wrong with that. It irked Hamilton that Jefferson claimed a monopoly on morality, and he made the following retort to his adversary: “As to the love of liberty and country, you have given no stronger proofs of being actuated by it than I have done. Cease then to arrogate to yourself and to your party all the patriotism and virtue of the country.”
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