Jefferson and Hamilton (29 page)

Publicly, Washington and Hamilton spoke of preparing for the defense of
the United States, though in fact both were adherents of what historian Richard Kohn termed a “vigorous nationalism.” Washington wanted a strong United States that could rapidly open the region beyond the Appalachians, territory that had been closed to expansion for twenty years. Hamilton was more interested in strengthening the United States against possible predatory behavior by the great powers in Europe, and he likely already had dreamed of encroaching on Spanish America. Both Washington and Hamilton were mortified by state sovereignty and the new nation’s “total disability” to cope with the national interest, as Hamilton put it.
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Both knew how close the United States had come to losing the Revolutionary War. Neither wanted to chance another national emergency with an emasculated national government, and neither wanted American soldiers to suffer again as they had during the War of Independence. Both had hazarded everything during the long struggle to create the new American nation, and both fervently wished to assure its survival.

In May, Washington submitted his recommendations. He said with a straight face that he was opposed to “a large standing Army,” but he advocated the maintenance of a peacetime army of 2,600, a force several times larger than Great Britain had kept in the colonies before the French and Indian War. He urged that the soldiery be garrisoned along the Canadian border, the Ohio River, here and there on the Atlantic coast, and throughout Georgia and South Carolina. He additionally suggested drastic revisions in the militia system. Washington, who had looked with contempt on militiamen since the French and Indian War, championed a plan that would compel each state’s militia to conform to national standards with regard to organization, equipment, arms, and training. To see that this was done, he advised Congress to name a national inspector general to enforce the regulations. While Hamilton was pushing for economic consolidation, General Washington was doing the same with regard to the military.
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The lone member with a military background, Hamilton dominated the committee. It ultimately issued a report that adhered to Washington’s recommendations, differing only in that it proposed a standing army even larger than the commander had recommended.
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Hamilton rushed matters, hoping that Congress might act before word arrived of the official end to hostilities. He succeeded, but to no avail. Late in June, four days after the committee submitted its report, Congress was forced from Philadelphia by a mutiny among soldiers in the Pennsylvania line. When the congressmen reassembled in Princeton, the nationalist delegates tried to save matters by inviting Washington to town. He came and plumped for the report, but few in Congress were sympathetic. To many, it sounded as if Washington and Hamilton
were espousing a peacetime garrison state, and some feared that once a standing army was sanctioned, it would inevitably grow by leaps and bounds. The nationalists’ plan died. Within two years, the United States army had shrunk to a few hundred men.
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Hamilton was ready to leave Congress when it fled Philadelphia, but he stayed on for four additional weeks until word of the definitive peace treaty arrived.
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He spent the month drafting a resolution urging Congress to summon a constitutional convention. Military necessity required a more robust national government, he said. He justified augmenting the powers of Congress as essential for funding commutation and compensating creditors who had “cheerfully lent their money” during the war. He proposed a new national government with separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and he advocated that Congress be vested with the power to levy taxes, regulate trade, and superintend military matters. He also sought the elimination of the Articles’ stipulation requiring the assent of two-thirds of Congress to pass bills of “principal importance.”
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Hamilton recorded his thoughts at nearly the moment that Jefferson, at Monticello, was writing
Notes on the State of Virginia
, a book that included his latest draft constitution for Virginia. Hamilton’s emphasis could not have been more different. Hamilton was absorbed with establishing a sovereign and powerful national government capable of protecting the national interest. Jefferson, in contrast, was driving to achieve uniform representation and universal manhood suffrage for free white males, with the ultimate goal of giving every citizen “an equal voice in the direction of its concerns.” As Hamilton’s core conviction was that “Inequality is inherent,” he believed that representation should reflect wealth, and he was silent about social justice, popular self-rule, and facilitating the realization of the will of the people.
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Hamilton never introduced his resolution. He knew it would be futile to do so in “the present state of things.” That is not to say that he intended to abandon his quest for consolidation. He was leaving office, supposedly forever, though it seems apparent that Hamilton planned to watch for an opportunity to continue the fight, to wait on events and changing sentiments. He knew that the new American nation had “so far happily escaped” its perilous situation, as he put it in the resolution that he drafted, but “it would be unwise to hazard a repetition of the same dangers and embarrassments in any future war … or to continue this extensive empire under a government unequal to its protection and prosperity.”
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In July, a month prior to Washington’s arrival in Princeton, Hamilton resigned and left for home. “We have now happily concluded the great work of independence,” Hamilton exalted, but he quickly added: “much remains to be
done to reach the fruits of it.” He knew that during his eight months in Congress he had achieved nothing to remedy “the inefficacy of the present confederation.” Nothing could be done, he sighed, until there was a “return to reason.”
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No one did more than Madison to get Jefferson back into public life. Madison believed that Jefferson had much to offer the country and also feared for the welfare of his friend, isolated at home with his dark, melancholy memories. Two months after Martha Jefferson’s demise, Madison persuaded Congress to once again offer Jefferson a position among the peace commissioners in Europe, a post he had declined a year earlier. This time, Jefferson jumped at the chance for a “change of scene,” telling Madison that he would “lose no time … preparing for my departure.” He still grieved, and would for a very long time. Twenty months after Martha’s death, he acknowledged his pervasive “gloom” and spoke of the “sun of life” having crested and subsided for him. Many years later, in his memoirs, Jefferson seemed to say that he had accepted the diplomatic position in 1782 more from a desire to escape Monticello than from a yearning to serve “the public interests.”
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He reached Philadelphia just after Christmas, about two weeks before General McDougall and his fellow officers arrived from Newburgh to urge commutation and spread rumors of a possible officers’ mutiny.
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Hamilton, of course, was a member of Congress, and it is probable that he met Jefferson sometime during the Virginian’s nearly seventy-five days in town, especially as both counted Madison as a friend.

When Congress had agreed to Jefferson’s inclusion on the team of peace commissioners, it was already aware that negotiations were under way in Paris. In mid-February, before Jefferson could sail, news arrived that the preliminary peace accord had been signed. Congress instructed him to wait for further word. He languished for six agonizing weeks. Finally, on April 1, Congress suspended his appointment.
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Having gotten away from the gloom of Monticello, Jefferson was in no hurry to return home. He swung by Richmond, most likely to meet with the principal assemblymen and inquire about being added to the state’s congressional delegation. He eventually arrived home in May, five months after his departure, and he remained at Monticello for six months. Jefferson need not have lingered at home for such a long time, as he learned in June that he had been appointed to Congress. He said merely that he was obliged “to stay pretty closely at home for some time to get my affairs into such a state as they may be left.” Considering that only recently he had anticipated a protracted absence, one that could have lasted for years, his excuse was unpersuasive.
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More likely, given the talk swirling that summer that a convention was imminent for drafting a new constitution for Virginia, Jefferson—as had been the case in 1776—preferred participating in that endeavor to sitting in Congress. But when the movement for a new constitution failed, Jefferson, on October 16, at last set off for Congress. He left Polly and the infant Lucy Elizabeth with Elizabeth Eppes—his late wife’s half-sister—but took eleven-year-old Patsy with him.

Jefferson traveled first to Philadelphia, where he arranged for Patsy to study with a French tutor and live with the widowed mother of a friend. On the very day he arrived in Princeton, the peripatetic Congress voted to move to Annapolis. When it reconvened on November 25, Jefferson at last became a congressman once again. He did not serve with Hamilton, who had resigned four months earlier.

Jefferson had been eager to serve in Europe, and it is possible he believed that serving in Congress would lead to his appointment to an overseas diplomatic post. Indeed, that may have been a factor in his decision to have Patsy study French. All Americans had known in early spring that the end of the war was at hand. News of the definitive peace, the Treaty of Paris—in which Great Britain recognized American independence and also terminated hostilities with France and Spain—reached Congress shortly before Jefferson took his seat. In fact, on the very day that Jefferson reentered Congress, the British army evacuated New York and General Washington led the Continental army in a victory parade down Broadway, a festive return to Manhattan, from which the rebel forces had been driven in 1776. A month later, two days before Christmas, Jefferson watched as Washington appeared before Congress and resigned his commission.
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Jefferson was the only delegate who had been a member of Congress in 1775 on the day when Washington set off for the front to take command of the Continental army.

If Jefferson hoped Congress would quickly dispatch envoys to Europe, he was disappointed. A month after he reached Annapolis, only six states were represented. The lack of a quorum “stops all business,” he reported. In January there was still an insufficient number of congressmen present to meet. Toward the end of February he yet again complained that “we cannot make a house.” Congress, he said, had not met “above 3 days … in as many weeks.”
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Never one to idle away his time, Jefferson toiled with his committee assignments, preparing for the day when Congress would again be able to take up business. He wrote thirty-one reports in four months, some uninvited. For instance, he drafted a paper on coinage, proposing the dollar as the unit of coinage and a simple proportional plan of values for different coins. His recommendations were adopted in 1785, a year after he left Congress.
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Jefferson also kept busy by planning an exacting study schedule for Patsy. “If you love me then, strive … to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power,” he added. He also instructed her to at all times to be “cleanly and properly dressed…. Nothing is so disgusting” to men as “want of cleanliness and delicacy” in a woman, as it inevitably leads to the conclusion that the female is “a sloven or slot.”
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In March, with a sufficient number of delegates at last present, Congress opted to grapple with one pressing issue while it was possible to do something. “We shall immediately try what we can do with the Western country” was how Jefferson put it.
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Trans-Appalachia had suddenly become an urgent concern. Not only had the United States just received the area as far west as the Mississippi River in the Treaty of Paris, but settlers had also begun flooding across the mountains almost as soon as Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Order, and possibly peace with the Indians who inhabited the region, required that some form of governance be established.

Jefferson chaired the committee that prepared a plan of government for the west. Having first considered the matter as early as 1776, and having tended to it while Congress was idled by the lack of a quorum, he was ready in no time with a plan. He recommended the creation of fourteen territories of roughly equal size. He named them in some instances for people or events from the American Revolution (Washington and Saratoga), and in some cases he combined classical and Indian nomenclature (Illinoia and Pelisipia). He proposed that the territories proceed to statehood in stages, according to the size of their population, and he urged self-government for the residents. All adult, white, male residents were to have suffrage rights, and at every stage of the progression toward statehood, the qualified voters were to choose their rulers, write their constitutions, and make their own laws. The national government was to have virtually no role in the governance of the territories. Jefferson’s report contained one more controversial recommendation: After 1800, slavery and indenture servitude were to be illegal in every territory. His recommendation was silent on the matter of colonization, so that any slaves taken into the territory prior to 1800 would be permitted to remain.
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