Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (48 page)

Instead, the Republican leaders sought to have the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures answer the objections of the other states and reaffirm
the sentiments of the original resolutions. With some advice from Jefferson, the Kentucky legislature in November 1799 repeated its opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts and declared “a Nullification of those acts by the States to be the rightful remedy.”
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Even with this provocative word included, the legislature’s resolve was much more conciliatory and much less extreme than the secessionist views Jefferson had expressed in letters several months earlier.

For his part Madison on January 7, 1800, issued a notable committee report to the Virginia assembly in which he defended the earlier resolutions and warned that the Federalist plans for a consolidation would “transform the republican system of the United States into a monarchy.” If the federal government extended its “power to every subject falling within the idea of the ‘general welfare,’” the discretionary and patronage authority of the executive would be greatly expanded; this in turn would lead to insidious efforts by the chief magistrate to manipulate his repeated re-election or to increasingly corrupt and violent elections, to the point where “the public voice itself might call for an hereditary in place of an elective succession.” In addition to denying the Federalist contention that the common law—“a law of vast extent and complexity, and embracing almost every possible subject of legislation”—ran in the federal courts, Madison made a powerful case for a strict construction of the Constitution, particularly its “necessary and proper” clause that Hamilton had exploited so effectively.

Finally, he offered a brilliant defense of the freedoms described in the First Amendment, especially freedom of the press. Elective republican governments, which were responsible to the people, required, said Madison, “a greater freedom of animadversion” than hereditary monarchies. This meant “a different degree of freedom, on the use of the press”; indeed, despite the excesses of scurrility and slander, popular governments needed newspapers for “canvassing the merits and measures of public men. . . . To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses,” he concluded, “the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity, over error and oppression.”
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S
UDDENLY
,
SEVERAL DEVELOPMENTS
worked to calm this fearful and frenzied climate. British admiral Horatio Nelson’s naval victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile in October 1798 essentially destroyed the possibility of a French invasion of either England or America. With the threat of a French invasion gone, the Federalists lost
much of the rationale for their program. But more important in reducing the sense of crisis was the bold and courageous but bizarre action of President John Adams.

Adams’s presidency had been extraordinarily contentious, and Adams was never in command of his own cabinet, let alone the government. Indeed, he seemed to many to be escaping from the troubles of the capital in Philadelphia by spending more and more time at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. This short, stout, and sensitive man had been much too honest, impulsive, and passionate to handle the growing division among the Federalists over Hamilton’s ascendancy and the military buildup. Despite all the importance his political theory gave to the executive in a balanced government, he was temperamentally ill equipped to be Washington’s successor as president. He shared little of the Hamiltonian dream of turning the United States into a European-like state with a huge bureaucracy and a massive army with the capacity to wage war; indeed, Adams had been the author of the model treaty of 1776, and his ideas about foreign policy and war were closer to Jefferson’s than Hamilton’s. And Adams certainly had none of the personal Benjamin Franklin—like talents needed to deal with the intense, meddling, and high-strung personalities around him. But he was intelligent and patriotic, and he increasingly sensed that he had to do something to end the crisis.

In November 1798 he returned to Philadelphia from one of his many long vacations in Quincy determined once and for all to take command of his administration. Aware of Hamilton’s grand military ambitions and machinations and learning from various sources that the French government was finally ready to reach an accommodation with the United States, Adams decided, without consulting anyone, including his own cabinet, to send a new mission to France. On February 18, 1799, he informed Congress that he had appointed William Vans Murray as minister plenipotentiary to make peace with France. Although Murray was a former Federalist congressman from Maryland and presently minister to the Batavian Republic, he was not a major figure among the Federalists; but Adams had known and liked him in London in the 1780s, and for Adams that was enough. All things considered, it was a strange way for a president to behave.

Most Federalists were stunned by Adams’s action. While many seethed with “surprise, indignation, grief & disgust,” others thought the president had lost his mind.
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Under immense pressure from the High Federalists, including meetings that ended in undignified shouting matches, Adams
was forced to make some concessions. He agreed to add two more envoys to join Murray—Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and William Davie, the governor of North Carolina—and to delay the departure of the mission until the French gave more assurance that it would be received, which they did in August 1799. In the meantime Congress had adjourned at the end of February 1799 without further expanding the army, and Adams had gone back home to Quincy, where he remained angrily secluded for the next seven months.

The High Federalists, led by Secretary of State Pickering, were furious. With all their plans for the army and the suppression of the Republicans in disarray, they plotted to undermine the mission to France. Only when his new secretary of the navy, Benjamin Stoddard, who was not part of the Hamiltonian gang, warned Adams of the “artful, designing men” in the cabinet working against him did the morose and irritable president reluctantly return to the capital. In October 1799Hamilton, whose own high-strung temperament was being stretched to the breaking point, made a last-ditch effort to delay the mission by arrogantly lecturing the president on European politics and the likelihood of Britain’s restoring the Bourbons to the French throne. “Never in my life,” Adams recalled, “did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”
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(Of course, in 1814–1815 Britain and its allies actually did restore the Bourbon king Louis XVIII to the French throne.) Finally, by early November 1799, Adams was able to get his envoys off to Paris.

Adams’s awkwardly independent action irreparably divided the Federalist leadership between the moderates who supported the president and the extremists or “ultras” who supported Hamilton—seriously endangering Federalist prospects for the upcoming presidential election in 1800. Once the Federalist caucus had nominated Adams and Charles Cotes-worth Pinckney for president and vice-president in May 1800 (without, however, determining which person should have which office), the president felt strong enough politically to do what he should have done long before—dismiss the Hamiltonians in his cabinet, McHenry and Pickering. In one of his all too common fits of rage, Adams told McHenry that Hamilton, whom he called “the greatest intriguant in the World—a man devoid of every moral principle—a Bastard,” was the source of all the Federalists’ problems and that Jefferson was an “infinitely better” and “wiser” man.
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Learning of Adams’s tirade, and especially the reference to his illegitimacy, a deeply dispirited Hamilton concluded that the president
was “more mad than I ever thought him,” and because of his praise of Jefferson perhaps “as wicked as he is mad.”
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Abandoning all sense of prudence and perspective, Hamilton and some other High Federalists began working to find some alternative to Adams as president, perhaps by electing Pinckney over Adams, or even by calling Washington out of retirement. With his dreams of making the United States a great nation falling apart all around him, Hamilton finally exploded. If he could not instigate a duel with the president to defend his honor, then he would publish a letter that would destroy the president and promote Pinckney’s candidacy, all in “the shape of a
defence of my self
”—a delicate task that was beyond his angry mood.
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In the summer and fall of 1800 he wrote a fifty-four-page privately published
Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States
.

In this work, which apparently was originally intended to circulate only among select Federalists, including Federalist electors, Hamilton described Adams’s career in detail, praising here and there but mostly criticizing the man for his “eccentric tendencies,” his “distempered jealousy,” his “extreme egotism,” his “ungovernable temper,” and his “vanity without bounds.” He also attempted to answer Adams’s “virulent and indecent abuses” of himself, especially Adams’s charge that he was “the leader of a British Faction.” In his counter-charge Hamilton said that Adams, with his many “paroxysms of anger,” had undone everything that Washington had established in his presidency, and if he were to continue as president, he might bring the government to ruin. Despite saying that he had “the unqualified conviction of [Adams’s] unfitness” for the office, Hamilton ended his diatribe strangely enough by supporting the president’s re-election. Apparently he was hoping for some sort of combination of electoral votes that would result in a Pinckney victory.
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Republicans published excerpts of the leaked
Letter
in newspapers, a far from dignified forum, which compelled a horrified Hamilton to release the whole to the press. Although the
Letter
was not entirely wrong in its assessment of Adams’s quirky temperament, when widely circulated, it became a disaster both for Hamilton personally and for the Federalist party. The Federalists were appalled, and the Republicans were gleeful. It was ironic, to say the least, that Republican editors were going to prison for saying some of the very things about the president that Hamilton said
in his pamphlet. Although Hamilton’s
Letter
may not by itself have prevented Adams’s re-election, its appearance was evidence of the deep division among the Federalists that made Jefferson’s election as president more or less inevitable.

That division was brought about by Adams’s decision to send a new mission to France, the issue that Hamilton most dwelled on in his
Letter
. Adams, always ready to bemoan his country’s neglect of his achievements, considered this decision to try once again to negotiate with France, as he never tired of telling his correspondents, to be “the most disinterested, prudent, and successful conduct in my whole life.”
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This controversial decision may have been precipitate and injudicious, as Hamilton claimed it was, but it did effectively end the war crisis; and thus it undermined the attempts of the extreme Federalists to strengthen the central government and the military establishment of the United States. After months of negotiations, France, under First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, who would soon make himself emperor, agreed to terms and in 1800 signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine with the United States that brought the Quasi-War to a close and suspended the Franco-American treaty of 1778, thus freeing America from its first of what Jefferson would refer to as “entangling alliances.” Unfortunately for Adams, word of the ending of the conflict did not reach America until the Republicans had won the presidency.
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8
The Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800

Born in reaction to the popular excesses of the Revolution, the Federalist world could not endure. The Federalists of the 1790s stood in the way of popular democracy as it was emerging in the United States, and thus they became heretics opposed to the developing democratic faith. To be sure, they believed in popular sovereignty and republican government, but they did not believe that ordinary people had a direct role to play in ruling the society. They were so confident that the future belonged to them, that the society would become less egalitarian and more hierarchical, that they treated the people with condescension and lost touch with them. “They have attempted,” as Noah Webster observed, “to resist the force of public opinion, instead of falling into the current with a view to correct it. In this they have manifested more integrity than address.”
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Indeed, they were so out of touch with the developing popular realities of American life, and their monarchical program was so counter to the libertarian impulses of America’s republican ideology, that they provoked a second revolutionary movement that threatened to tear the Republic apart.

Only the electoral victory of the Republicans in 1800 ended this threat and brought, in the eyes of many Americans, the entire revolutionary venture of two and a half decades to successful completion. Indeed, “the Revolution of 1800,” as the Republican leader and third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, later called it, “was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”
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He and his Republican party took over the presidency and both houses of the Congress in 1801 with a worldview that was fundamentally different from that of the Federalists. Not only were the Republicans opposed to
traditional monarchies with their bloated executives, high taxes, oppressive debts, and standing armies and in favor of republics with the least government possible, but they also dreamed of a world different from any that had ever existed, a world of democratic republics in which the scourge of war would at last be eliminated and peace would reign among all nations. It is not surprising that Jefferson’s election helped to convince a despairing Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant leader of the Federalists, who more than anyone had pursued the heroic dreams of the age, “that this American world was not meant for me.”
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