Alexander Hamilton (87 page)

Amid this imbroglio, Hamilton wrote to Washington on June 21 that he wished to resign when the next congressional session ended in June 1794. He wanted enough time to enact the programs he had initiated and to clear his name in the ongoing inquiry led by William Branch Giles, but he was chafing under the restraints of office. He kept scribbling tirades against the French Revolution and then stashing them in the drawer.

The day after Hamilton drafted his letter to Washington, Citizen Genêt informed Jefferson that France had the right to outfit ships in American ports—and, what was more, the American people agreed with him. Hamilton, taken aback by this effrontery, termed the letter “the most offensive paper perhaps that ever was offered by a foreign minister to a friendly power with which he resided.”
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A few days later, Hamilton had a tense exchange with Genêt, telling him that France was the aggressor in the European war and that this freed America from any need to comply with their old defense treaty. When Hamilton defended Washington’s right to declare neutrality, Genêt retorted that this misuse of executive power usurped congressional prerogatives. The scene had decided elements of farce: Citizen Genêt was lecturing the chief author of
The Federalist Papers
on the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

On July 6, Citizen Genêt committed a colossal blunder that dwarfed all previous gaffes. With Washington at Mount Vernon, Genêt took advantage of his absence to inform Alexander J. Dallas, the secretary of Pennsylvania, that he rejected the notion of American neutrality. He said that he planned to go above Washington’s head and appeal directly to the American people, asking their assistance to rig French privateers in American ports. Genêt was doing more than just flouting previous warnings; he was clumsily insulting the U.S. government and slapping the face of the one man who could not be slapped: George Washington. Dallas related the story to Governor Mifflin, who passed it on to Hamilton and Knox, who passed it on to Washington. Suddenly, Jefferson’s enchantment with Genêt disappeared. “Never, in my opinion, was so calamitous an appointment made as that of the present minister of France here,” he protested to Madison. “Hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent toward the P[resident] in his written as well as verbal communications....He renders my position immensely difficult.”
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Hamilton was outraged, while also mindful that Genêt had handed him a blunt weapon to wield against France. On July 8, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Knox conferred at the State House to figure out what to do with
La Petite démocrate.
The absent Washington had already ruled that privateers armed in American ports should be stopped or forcibly seized. Hamilton and Knox wanted to post a militia and guns at a strategic spot called Mud Island, a few miles down the Delaware River, preventing the ship from escaping. Jefferson favored the milder course of dealing with American crew members rather than the ship itself. While not making promises, Genêt told Jefferson that the vessel wouldn’t sail from Philadelphia before Washington returned. Hamilton, who did not trust Genêt, wanted forcible action to prevent
La Petite démocrate
from getting away. In a memo, he wrote, “It is a truth the best founded and of the last importance
that nothing is so dangerous to a government as to be wanting either in self confidence or self-respect.
”
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But Hamilton could not prevail upon his colleagues to use force.

Washington returned to Philadelphia on July 11.
La Petite démocrate
managed to slip away and sail past Mud Island on July 12. On the spot, Hamilton proposed that the French government be asked to recall Genêt. Even Jefferson registered no protest. A few days, later
La Petite démocrate
was at sea.

As he watched Genêt’s boorish behavior, Hamilton longed to broadcast his views to the public. He was not born to be a silent spectator of events. By late June, Hamilton could contain himself no longer and rushed into print. On June 29, 1793, a writer billing himself as “Pacificus” inaugurated the first of seven essays in the
Gazette of the United States
that defended the Neutrality Proclamation. Throughout July, Hamilton’s articles ran twice weekly, their impact enhanced by Citizen Genêt’s intolerable antics.

In the first essay, Hamilton dealt with the objection that only Congress could issue a neutrality proclamation, since it alone had the power to declare war. Hamilton pointed out that if “the legislature have a right to make war, on the one hand, it is, on the other, the duty of the executive to preserve peace till war is declared.”
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Once again, Hamilton broadened the authority of the executive branch in diplomacy, especially during emergencies. He also speculated that the real reason behind the brouhaha over neutrality was the opposition’s desire to weaken or remove Washington from office. In the second essay, he disputed that the Neutrality Proclamation violated the defensive alliance with France. That treaty, Hamilton noted, did not apply to offensive wars, and France had declared war against other European powers. In the third essay, Hamilton evoked the devastation that might result if America was dragged into war on France’s side. Great Britain and Spain could instigate “numerous Indian tribes” under their influence to attack the United States from the interior. Meanwhile, “with a long extended sea coast, with no fortifications whatever and with a population not exceeding four millions,” the United States would find itself in an unequal contest.
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In subsequent installments, Pacificus presented Louis XVI as a benevolent man and a true friend of America: “I am much misinformed if repeated declarations of the venerable Franklin did not attest this fact.”
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French support for the American Revolution, he argued, had emanated from the king and high government circles, not the masses: “If there was any kindness in the decision [to support America], demanding a return of kindness from us, it was the kindness of Louis the XVI. His heart was the depository of the sentiment.”
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It took courage for Hamilton, stigmatized as a cryptomonarchist, to express sympathy for a dead king. In the last “Pacificus” essay, he defended American neutrality on the grounds that a country “without armies, without fleets” was too immature to prosecute war.
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To amplify his views, Hamilton organized rallies to demonstrate popular approval of the Neutrality Proclamation.

Hamilton was always fond of his “Pacificus” essays, which show the impassioned pragmatism that informed his foreign-policy views. He later incorporated them into an 1802 edition of
The Federalist,
proudly telling the publisher that “some of his friends had pronounced them to be his best performance.”
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Hamilton must have enjoyed bundling these essays with
The Federalist,
because they had provoked a venomous response from his main
Federalist
coauthor, James Madison. It was Jefferson who prodded Madison into taking on Hamilton over the Neutrality Proclamation. Jefferson had read the first few “Pacificus” essays with mounting dismay and decided once again to deploy a proxy to refute Hamilton. On July 7, he urged Madison to tilt lances with the treasury secretary: “Nobody answers him and his doctrines will therefore be taken for confessed. For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him.”
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Jefferson must have thought that Madison would leap at the chance to resist the expanded executive powers embodied in the Neutrality Proclamation. Instead, Madison balked. From his Virginia plantation, he complained to Jefferson that he lacked the necessary books and papers to refute “Pacificus,” and he griped about the summer heat. He blamed hordes of houseguests who overstayed their welcomes. Did even Madison tremble at the thought of confronting Hamilton? When he had exhausted all excuses, he told Jefferson grudgingly, “I have forced myself into the task of a reply. I can truly say I find it the most grating one I ever experienced.”
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In the end, Madison hammered away at Hamilton with five essays published under the name “Helvidius.” The first essay reflected the deep animosity that had sprung up between the
Federalist
collaborators: “Several pieces with the signature of Pacificus were late published, which have been read with singular pleasure and applause by the foreigners and degenerate citizens among us, who hate our republican government and the French Revolution.” Madison complained of “a secret Anglomany” behind “the mask of neutrality.”
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He flayed Hamilton as a monarchist for defending the Neutrality Proclamation. Such prerogatives, he said, were “
royal prerogatives
in the
British government
and are accordingly treated as
executive prerogatives by British commentators.
”
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In prose more pedestrian than Hamilton’s, Madison brought the perspective of a strict constructionist to the neutrality issue. He wanted full authority over foreign policy to rest with Congress, not the president, except where the Constitution granted the chief executive specific powers. Madison was both edited and supplied with cabinet secrets by Jefferson, who seemed to have no reservations about abetting this assault on a presidential proclamation.

The instigator of many articles against his own administration, Jefferson knew that they were upsetting Washington. He felt sympathy for the president but also believed he was getting his just deserts. He wrote to Madison in June:

The President is not well. Little lingering fevers have been hanging about him for a week or ten days and have affected his looks most remarkably. He is also extremely affected by the attacks made and kept on him in the public papers. I think he feels those things more than any person I ever yet met with. I am extremely sorry to see them. [Jefferson then indicated that Washington had brought the attacks on himself.] Naked, he would have been sanctimoniously reverenced, but enveloped in the rags of royalty, they can hardly be torn off without laceration.
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During that eventful summer of 1793, administration infighting grew increasingly cutthroat. On July 23, Washington held a cabinet meeting that took on a surreal atmosphere. The president wanted to ask for Genêt’s recall without offending France. This pushed Hamilton into an extended harangue on the crisis facing the government. He alluded to a “faction” that wanted to “overthrow” the government, and he said that to arrest its progress the administration should publish the story of Genêt’s unseemly behavior; otherwise, people would soon join the “incendiaries.”
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What made this dramatic scene so unreal was that the spiritual leader of that faction was sitting right there in the room: Thomas Jefferson.

That summer, Jefferson found Hamilton both insupportable and inescapable. Besides his Treasury job, Hamilton conducted a full-time career as an anonymous journalist. In late July, the
American Daily Advertiser
printed his piece called “No Jacobin,” the first of yet another nine essays that issued from Hamilton’s fluent pen over a four-week period. He began by hurling a thunderbolt: “It is publicly rumoured in this city that the minister of the French republic
has threatened to appeal from The President of the United States to the People.
”
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The leak of this secret information about Genêt’s insolent disrespect toward Washington had a pronounced effect on public opinion. In coming weeks, Hamilton continued to lash out at Genêt for meddling in domestic politics: “What baseness, what prostitution in a citizen of this country, to become the advocate of a pretension so pernicious, so unheard of, so detestable!”
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On August 1, Jefferson found himself trapped again in a cabinet meeting with Hamilton, the human word machine, who spontaneously spouted perfect speeches in every forum. The treasury secretary thundered on about the need to disclose the damaging correspondence with Citizen Genêt. From Jefferson’s notes, we can see the highly theatrical manner that Hamilton assumed in Washington’s small cabinet. “Hamilton made a jury speech of three quarters of an hour,” a weary Jefferson told his journal, “as inflammatory and declamatory as if he had been speaking to a jury.”
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One senses the laconic Jefferson’s perplexity in dealing with this inspired windbag. “Met again,” Jefferson reported the next day. “Hamilton spoke again three quarters of an hour.”
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Hamilton repeated charges made by the royal European powers that France wanted to export its revolution to their countries. Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. “What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty;
et tu Brute,
” he wrote in his diary.
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At this point, Jefferson finally aired his own views. He predictably opposed public exposure of government dealings with Genêt and also warned of the futility of cracking down on “Democratic” societies that had sprung up since Genêt’s arrival. If the government suppressed these groups, Jefferson argued, people would join them merely “to assert the right of voluntary associations.”
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His point was well taken, but he had squandered his credibility with the president, as he was about to discover in peculiarly dramatic fashion.

With heroic fortitude, Washington had tried to remain evenhanded with Hamilton and Jefferson, but he could no longer tolerate this dissension in his cabinet. A sensitive man of pent-up passion, he also could not endure the vicious abuse he had taken in Freneau’s
National Gazette.
In May, Washington had asked Jefferson to fire Freneau from his State Department job after the editor wrote that Washington had signed the Neutrality Proclamation because the “Anglomen” threatened to cut off his head. Convinced that the
National Gazette
had saved the country from monarchy, Jefferson refused to comply with Washington’s request. Now, in a cabinet session, Henry Knox happened to mention a tasteless satirical broadside called “The Funeral Dirge of George Washington,” in which Washington, like Louis XVI, was executed by guillotine. This libel was thought to have been written by Freneau. Knox’s reference lit a fuse inside Washington, and the seemingly phlegmatic president became a powder keg. In his “Anas,” Jefferson described the unusual scene: