American Experiment (31 page)

All this was just what some of his Federalist critics expected of Jefferson—an easygoing, haphazard, aimless, even careless approach to the business of the federal government, in sad contrast to the activism and purposiveness of the two Federalist administrations. In fact, from the day of his Inaugural the new President acted according to a carefully conceived “grand political strategy” that dominated his handling of administrative, legislative, and party affairs.

In shaping this grand strategy Jefferson enjoyed the sense of writing on a clean slate. “This whole chapter in the history of man is new,” he wrote his revered friend Dr. Priestley. “The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new.” He continued to view the American experiment as the supreme human venture. “The storm through which we have passed,” he wrote another friend, “has been tremendous indeed. The tough sides of our Argosie have been thoroughly tried. Her strength has stood the waves into which she was steered, with a view to sink her. We shall put her on her republican tack, & she will now show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.” Nor were they acting alone, he wrote later to a governor, “but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to shew whether man can be trusted with self-government. The eyes of suffering humanity are fixed on us with anxiety as their only hope.”

Jefferson’s grand political strategy was simple though daring in conception: to separate moderate Federalists from their “monarchical leaders”; to draw those Federalists into a new and broadened Republican majority; meanwhile to keep his own Republican following content and united through a judicious application of loaves and fishes; to forge a new party majority coalition that would sustain his policies; to kill off the high Federalists as a political power; to expect—and to try to tolerate—a new opposition rising from within the ranks of his consolidated majority party. This strategy was not simply fabricated later by Jefferson or rationalized by Republican historians
post hoc
; it was shaped by the President before he took office and was expressed time and again in communications to his friends. Thus despite his conciliatory statements in his Inaugural Address, which were cited ever after as a lofty expression of nonpartisanship, he did not design to unite all Federalists with Republicans—only those he felt he could win over to his purposes.

Noble sentiments alone did not impel Thomas Jefferson. He acted partly out of a deep and abiding anger toward the Hamiltonian and other high
Federalists. It was hard for Jefferson to hate anyone, but even after attaining the psychological and political security of the presidency, he began referring to his old enemies as a “ravenous crew,” as witch burners, gross liars and slanderers, “tyrannical.” Granted that Jefferson designed some of these words to gratify Republican correspondents more extreme than he; still, they reveal that he had been seared by Adamsites and Hamiltonians far more deeply than he had admitted to others, or perhaps to himself.

To a somewhat smaller circle Jefferson confided his plan to detach moderate Federalists from their “monarchical” leaders and consolidate them in a new Republican party coalition. A week before his inauguration he was noting that “patriotic” Federalists, alarmed by the specter of dissolution during the election crisis of February 1801, “separated from their congressional leaders, and came over to us.” But his purpose was clear. “If we can but avoid shocking their feelings by unnecessary acts of severity against their late friends, they will in a little time cement & form one mass with us, & by these means harmony & union be restored to our country…,” he wrote a friend three weeks after the inauguration. In midsummer he was advising a Massachusetts lieutenant that the “Essex junto, & their associate monocrats in every part of the Union” must be stripped of all the means of influence.

His determination only rose as the high Federalist chorus swelled against him. By early the next year he was telling Du Pont de Nemours that the session of Congress had indeed consolidated the “great body of well meaning citizens together, whether federal or republican, heretofore called.” But, he added, “I do not mean to include royalists or priests. Their opposition is immovable. But they will be vox et preterea nihil, leaders without followers.”

Did Jefferson, then, want the Federalist party to die? He not only wanted it, he expected it and planned for it. He predicted that by the end of his second year in office the “federal candidate would not get the vote of a single elector in the U.S.” in a straight party fight. He even feared that the Senate would become
too
Republican in the next election, for “a respectable minority is useful as censors.” He did not want this to be a Federalist opposition, “being the bitterest cup of the remains of Federalism rendered desperate and furious by despair.” But it was not clear just how the new opposition would come into being.

Jefferson was as skillful and hardheaded in carrying out his grand strategy as he was brilliant and determined in conceiving it. That strategy dominated his first executive action, the choice of a Cabinet. Picking James Madison for Secretary of State was inescapable: the two men had worked together in marvelous and creative harmony for decades. Madison was
pre-eminently a moderate Republican, the kind Jefferson liked; as commanding in intellect as he was unimpressive in bearing and appearance, he had an understanding of legal and constitutional nuances, and perhaps of diplomacy, that Jefferson lacked.

Apart from this Virginian, the President was determined to bring to his Cabinet Republican leaders from the middle and eastern states. The choice of Albert Gallatin for Secretary of the Treasury seemed almost as obvious as that of Madison: the Pennsylvanian had effectively marshaled Republican support in the House after Madison’s departure; he took a proper Republican approach of frugality and prudence to spending and other fiscal matters; he was only forty and energetic; and the “Frenchified” aspect of the man—his Geneva birth, pronounced accent, and “Gallic features”—that provoked his enemies was no deterrent to the President. But for his other two cabinet appointments Jefferson was determined to reach into the Federalist heartland of New England, even at the expense of choosing less notable men, so that he might achieve political and geographical balance and also attract moderate Federalists to his cause. He picked Levi Lincoln of Worcester, Massachusetts, an experienced Republican politician, for Attorney General, and Henry Dearborn, an old Revolutionary soldier of Maine (still part of Massachusetts), for Secretary of War. The President had such trouble finding a Secretary of the Navy—who would want to head a navy destined for Republican shrinkage?—that the post remained unfilled for some time.

A harsher test of Jefferson’s strategy of coalition and consolidation was patronage, or what he called “appointments & disappointments.” As usual, the latter seemed far to outnumber the former. It was hard enough to ascertain dependably which high Federalists should be removed, which good Republicans should be hired without, as Jefferson said,
“me donn [ant] un ingrat, et cent ennemis.”
The best he could do was to ask the simple questions “Is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?” It was much harder to avoid alienating moderate Federalists whom the President wished to bring over to his party, without antagonizing Republican stalwarts hungry for loaves and fishes. Angry though he was over the near-exclusion of Republicans from office under Washington and Adams, and furious over Adams’ packing Federalists into administrative and judicial offices just before leaving the presidency, he dismissed relatively few men from office, but usually waited for the slow process of death and resignation to do its work before installing Republicans. Still, he picked only Republicans.

The President’s removal of a collector in New Haven roused a great furor. New Haven “was the Vatican City of New England Federalism,”
Smelser has written, “under Pope Timothy Dwight,” president of Yale, whose younger brother had described respectable Republicans as “Drunkards and Whores / And rogues in scores.” Answering a protest from New Haven merchants over the removal, Jefferson wrote: “This is a painful office; but it is made my duty, and I meet it as such. I proceed in the operation with deliberation & inquiry, that it may injure the best men least, and effect the purposes of justice & public utility with the least private distress; that it may be thrown, as much as possible, on delinquency, on oppression, on intolerance, on incompetence, on ante-revolutionary adherence to our enemies….” The President did not exaggerate his effort; he spent endless hours corresponding about possible appointments, weighing qualifications, but always with an eye to their place in his political strategy.

Jefferson made no pretense of one-man leadership. He gave his Cabinet a central role in decision making, especially in foreign relations. He worked so closely with his Secretaries of State and of the Treasury that this
troika
provided a case study in collective leadership. Madison and Gallatin were important to him in different ways. While he consulted with Madison on almost all major political and diplomatic matters, he felt thoroughly at home in foreign policy; he saw Gallatin less often, but depended on his expertise more, for Jefferson would never have tried to serve as his own Secretary of the Treasury. Cabinet members in turn worked closely with congressional leaders and with party heads both in Washington and in the states. But no one doubted who was chief of government.

The President derided the notion that public administration had to be complex and obscure. “There are no mysteries in it,” he said; when difficulties arose, “common sense and honest intentions will generally steer through them.” His administrative technique appeared to be simplicity itself: canvassing of opinion outside the mansion, intensive consultation with cabinet and staff members, clear instructions couched in polite but firm language. He did not care for formality. Forms, he said, “should yield to whatever should facilitate business.”

Certainly the President’s mansion was more a place of business than of pomp and circumstance during these Republican years. It stood bulky and Ionic, without the porticos that later gave it more style and proportion. The great stone house was “big enough for two emperors, one pope and the grand lama in the bargain,” a newspaper observed, and Jefferson, his steward, his housekeeper, several servants, and his small executive staff hardly filled it. The President worked quietly in his library at the southwest corner of the main floor, amid tables large and small, a few chairs, and a letterpress which made copies of the letters that Jefferson wrote with his
own hand. For a time his main aide was Meriwether Lewis, a young army officer from Albemarle County in Virginia.

No First Lady graced the President’s house, as Martha Washington had in New York, or hung her clothes out to dry in downstairs rooms, as Abigail Adams had in Philadelphia. Jefferson occupied the house for almost a year before his daughters visited him there. James and Dolley Madison stayed with him for a few weeks before setting up housekeeping on their own, and Jefferson had other guests and held some grand dinners, but most of the time the place stood cold and quiet. Federalists charged that he collected rent from his guests. Jefferson’s only consolation lay in frequent visits to Monticello. Accustomed to the breezes on his mountain, he positively refused to stay in the malarial and bilious “tidewater” of Washington during the hot summer months.

Washington, Jefferson wrote a friend, “may be considered as a pleasant country-residence, with a number of neat little villages scattered around within the distance of a mile and a half, and furnishing a plain and substantially good society.” He was happy to be free, he wrote his son-in-law, “from the noise, the heat, the stench and the bustle of a close built town.” Few would have agreed with the President’s view of either the city or the social life. One “village” consisted of the President’s house and an unsightly collection of temporary government buildings and private houses extending west into Georgetown. Flanking the mansion were the brick Treasury building and the combined State and War building. A mile and a half to the east was another “village,” dominated by the huge but incomplete Capitol and radiating out in a corona of avenues, most of which were still muddy trails lined by rows of stumps.

Pennsylvania Avenue, connecting the two governmental villages, was a “streak of mud newly cut through woods and alder swamps,” in Irving Brant’s words. In years to come that avenue would come to symbolize a large distance between the executive and legislative branches, as Pierre L’Enfant had planned in laying it out. In 1801 it symbolized the closeness of the two branches, contrary to a Constitution designed to separate them, and the legislative supremacy of a man who had long extolled the importance of checks and balances between President and Congress.

On the face of it, the legislative tasks facing Jefferson seemed far less daunting than those confronting his predecessors. Washington and Adams had needed congressional support for major fiscal programs and foreign policy initiatives. Jefferson’s immediate goals were to repeal much of what had been done—to cut federal spending and the national debt, to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, to break away from alliances that might entangle the nation in foreign affairs, to alter Hamilton’s banking program. Yet even
this task of alteration and demolition would call for unity and discipline among congressional Republicans, some of whom liked particular fiscal policies, especially military spending in their own districts. The trouble was, the President complained to his friend Du Pont de Nemours, Hamilton’s policies had departed from “true principles” at the very start. “We can pay off his debt in 15 years: but we can never get rid of his financial system.” He would do the best he could.

Federalists warned of the Jeffersonian “phalanxes” in Congress but the Republican majorities in each house were mainly composed of fiercely independent, individualistic, and often unruly men. They had been accustomed to fighting the executive, not cooperating with him, a posture that was indeed an article of their Republican faith. Other factors encouraged disunity in Congress: “weak party organization,” as Robert Johnstone says, “a high rate of turnover, divergent constituency obligations, an eighteenth-century ethos of independence from party control, rules of procedure that encouraged dissent, and ‘patterned social avoidance’ among men of different regions.” Members of Congress were cut off from one another as a result of living in small boardinghouses scattered through the city, another scholar has pointed out, and acoustics were so bad in the House that representatives could not always hear one another when they did convene. Some time later, John Quincy Adams described the “typical” Republican legislator as “a mixture of wisdom and Quixotism.…His delight was the consciousness of his own independence, and he thought it heroic virtue to ask no favors. He therefore never associated with any members of the Executive and would have shuddered at the thought of going to the drawing room.”