Jefferson and Hamilton (57 page)

Skepticism would have been even more widespread had the public known the circumstances under which Hamilton drafted his confession. He hurried to Philadelphia, where he composed his pamphlet while lodging in a rented room in a boarding house. It had never been his practice to leave home to draft his essays and pamphlets, and this departure in his behavior raises questions. Hamilton’s best biographer attributed his uncustomary conduct to an unwillingness to “face his family” as he “confessed his sins.”
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Another explanation is that Hamilton wished to peruse the Treasury Department’s ledgers. It is unlikely that the slavish Wolcott would have objected, and there was little danger that he would blow the whistle should emendations be made.

Hamilton wanted redemption, but he was also determined to find who had leaked the documents to Callender. He knew that Muhlenberg and his colleagues who had investigated the matter in 1792 had made copies of the materials they turned up in their probe. Within a few weeks of that initial investigation, Hamilton also knew that “whispers” were circulating in Virginia about the affair, and he must have suspected that William Giles’s investigation, launched merely three months after Muhlenberg’s inquiry, stemmed from knowledge of the payments he had made to Reynolds.
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Someone in Virginia who knew of the affair was talking. Both Venable and Monroe, who had joined with Muhlenberg to look into the matter, were Virginians. Of the two, Monroe had a motive for retribution. The year before, President Washington had recalled Monroe as American minister to France, a humiliating end to his embassy. The president had acted on the advice of an entirely Federalist cabinet, and he had dispatched a Federalist in Monroe’s stead.

Actually, there was another possible suspect. Venable told Hamilton that he did not know how “these papers got out, unless by the person who copied them,” John Beckley, at the time the clerk of the House of Representatives, and a Virginian. Wolcott said the same thing to Hamilton. But from the outset Hamilton focused exclusively on Monroe. Of the three congressmen who
had investigated the matter in 1792, Monroe was the most important politically, and he was close to Jefferson. Hamilton burned with desire to secure his absolution, but at the same moment he wanted to harm Monroe by revealing that he had been the culprit who leaked the documents to Callender.
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Hamilton immediately called on Monroe, who by happenstance was visiting relatives in Manhattan. Though Hamilton had long dominated others through his combative manner, it did not work when he confronted Monroe, a gritty Southerner. Like Hamilton, Monroe had soldiered for several years, first in the infantry, where he saw considerable combat (and received a life-threatening gunshot wound in the attack on Trenton), before serving as an aide-de-camp to General Stirling. Hamilton and Monroe had met during the war, and in fact Hamilton had recommended him for a field command in the African American regiment that Colonel Laurens hoped to raise. But they split in the partisan 1790s. Monroe, a Republican senator, fought tenaciously against what he called the “monarchy party.” The Federalists’ payback came when they induced Washington not only to recall him from France—it was Hamilton who had actually persuaded the president to summon Monroe home—but to do so in a letter so harsh that it threatened his political career.
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It is not likely that Monroe would have truckled to anyone, especially any Federalist in the summer of 1797, and he most certainly was not going to permit Hamilton to push him around.

Their meeting was stormy. An observer described Hamilton as “very much agitated” when he entered the house. He wasted little time before accusing Monroe of turning over the documents to Callender. Both men spoke with “some warmth.” At one point, Monroe said that if Hamilton “would be temperate or quiet for a moment,” he would “answer him candidly.” That silenced Hamilton long enough for Monroe to point out that he had only returned from France two weeks earlier. He acknowledged that Muhlenberg and Venable had asked him to keep the sealed packet containing the papers from their inquiry, and he added that he had entrusted it to a “friend in Virginia.” Hamilton responded by calling him a liar, and Monroe in turn replied that his accuser was a “Scoundrel.” Hot-tempered as always, Hamilton shot back: “I will meet you like a Gentleman.” Monroe did not flinch. In a flash, he replied: “I am ready get your pistols.” Only the intervention of friends who were present prevented an immediate duel.

Hamilton, who remained “extremely agitated” while Monroe was “quite cool,” shifted gears. If he could not persuade Monroe to acknowledge his role in passing along the documents to Callender, then Hamilton demanded that the Virginian at least repudiate the remarks made in a deposition he had taken from Jacob Clingman, Reynolds’s confederate, back in 1792. Clingman
had stated that Hamilton’s supposed romance with Maria Reynolds was an artifice designed to conceal the treasury secretary’s crimes. Monroe had copied the statement and passed it on to Venable and Muhlenberg without comment. Callender had made it public. Indeed, for Callender, it was the heart of his case against the former treasury secretary. Hamilton pressed Monroe to discredit Clingman’s allegation. Monroe was evasive. He agreed only to ask Muhlenberg and Venable to join him in a letter acknowledging that their inquiry had produced no evidence of financial impropriety by Hamilton.
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Within a week, Hamilton had such a letter, but he thought it insufficient.
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During the next half year, he deluged Monroe with letters demanding that he formally refute Clingman. Monroe demurred. This was his retaliation against an old political foe, one who had repeatedly insulted him. In letter after letter, the desperate Hamilton charged Monroe with responsibility for Callender’s publications, alleged that the Virginian had done so from a “design to … drive me to the necessity of a formal defense”—which, if true, was successful, for Hamilton did not publish his account of the Reynolds affair until six weeks after his confrontation with Monroe—and assailed him as “malignant and dishonourable.” In December, Monroe came close to formally challenging Hamilton to a duel, and announced that Aaron Burr would be his second. But Burr thought a duel pointless, especially as Monroe never believed, or charged, that Hamilton had acted illegally while treasury secretary. Furthermore, by refusing to deliver some of the correspondence between Monroe and Hamilton, Burr prevented the rhetoric from mushrooming to an intemperate level that would have made a duel inevitable. In the end, the imbroglio withered away. No duel was fought. Burr, in 1797, may have saved Hamilton’s life.
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At the outset of 1798, Adams asked his cabinet to consider what steps he should take if the news from the three envoys he had sent to France was bad. McHenry immediately turned to Hamilton for direction, then passed along the advice to his colleagues, each of whom recommended to the unsuspecting president what the former treasury secretary had outlined. Hamilton desired military preparations, including the augmentation of the army, which he had failed to obtain in 1797, and the suspension of the treaties with France, which he had unsuccessfully sought in 1793. He wanted the regular army increased to twenty thousand men and an additional, or “
provisional
army” of thirty thousand also to be raised. Hamilton told the cabinet that he did not want war, as the United States was not prepared for hostilities with a major power and there was “a strong aversion to war in the minds of the people.” Besides, there was nothing to gain—neither trade nor territory—from a war with France. He coached his minions to tell Adams that the military build-up
would induce France to negotiate, and he even encouraged them to advise the president to declare a national day of prayer, which he said would be “very expedient” politically.
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About a month after the cabinet advocated Hamilton’s covert recommendations, Adams heard from his three diplomats in Paris, and the news was indeed bad. The French government had not received Marshall, Gerry, and Pinckney. Instead, it sent out agents, later identified as “X, Y, and Z,” to demand that the United States apologize for Adams’s truculent speech to the special session of Congress, abandon claims for French spoliations on the high seas, and pay bribes to leading officials. Only after these conditions were met would France open talks with the envoys. France’s conduct was outrageous, and Adams was duly outraged. He consulted his cabinet, which again secretly touched base with Hamilton. His advice remained the same as it had been a month earlier, save that Hamilton now urged the cabinet to implore Adams to make a “
temperate
, but
grave solemn
and
firm
communication” to Congress. It was to be premised on the far-fetched notion that American independence was threatened by France’s conduct.
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After listening to his cabinet, Adams shredded the first draft of a rage-filled speech to Congress and replaced it with one that was more moderate. Even so, Adams declared that no hope existed for reaching an accommodation with Paris, and he proceeded to recommend everything his cabinet—and Hamilton—wanted, save for a call to increase the size of the army. (Privately, Adams remarked that “there is no more prospect of seeing a french Army here, than there is in Heaven.”) Wishing to prevent a wave of war hysteria, Adams revealed only that France had refused to accept America’s envoys.
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Jefferson listened to the speech and exploded with anger. Thinking Adams had been astonishingly provocative, Jefferson said the president’s remarks were “insane.” Adams, he concluded, had become the “stalking horse” of the “war gentlemen” within the Federalist “war-party,” extremists who were manufacturing a crisis that would lead to hostilities, and who knew what else. Jefferson thought the Republicans should play for time, insisting that no steps be taken until the congressmen could go home and meet with their constituents. That would defer any action until December, by which time, he reasoned, France would have won the war, or be on the cusp of victory, and the “Hamilton party” would not dare go to war.
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But Jefferson’s plan was thwarted when Giles and other alarmed Republicans in the House demanded the release of the communiqués sent home by the commissioners. That was a drastic mistake. Once the documents were made public, the nation was made aware of France’s provocative actions. Outrage swept the land. Even Jefferson condemned France’s behavior as “very
unworthy of a great nation,” though he did not think it cause for war, in part because he believed that much of John Marshall’s account was a fabrication. (He spoke of “the XYZ dish cooked up by Marshall” and “Marshall’s XYZ romance.”) However, Jefferson was not sanguine that hostilities could be averted, as the revelations had caused such a “shock on the republican mind” that many members of his own party had jumped on the war bandwagon. But what really plunged Jefferson into gloom was his belief that Hamilton was not only more powerful than Adams among Federalists but also bent on hurrying the United States into war before “Great-Britain will be blown up.”
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Jefferson had painted the Federalists with a broad brush. In fact, not all Federalists thought alike, any more than all Republicans marched in lockstep. As has not infrequently been the case with American political parties, there were at least two factions among Federalists, and one—sometimes called the Ultra Federalists, sometimes the High Federalists—consisted of conservative extremists, Anglophiles bent on frustrating the Republicans’ alleged hopes of radical social and political change. Hamilton was both a High Federalist and an opportunist, and he saw in what Adams called a “half war with France”—what historians have ever after referred to as the Quasi-War—a fortuitous vehicle for achieving ends that he had long desired.
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Hamilton did not want war, but he desired a more militarized state and the severance of all ties with revolutionary France. To be sure, he was more than willing to play on the popular anger and fear for partisan advantage.

What had been an affront to the United States was made into a crisis by leading Federalists. As historian John Miller wrote, “the party elders … induced hysteria and then turned it to party purposes.”
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The Federalist press went into overdrive to whip up anti-French fury and convince the public that thousands of untrustworthy, potentially dangerous, pro-French “serpents” lived within the United States. Hamilton did his part, rushing out a seven-part series titled “The Stand.” “[O]ur independence is menaced” by France, he declared. To that, he added: “ ’Tis not in their power” to harm America, unless internal enemies provoked an “abject submission to their will.” Those enemies were real, he claimed. There were “tools of France” and “satellites of France” within the United States, and they “prostituted to a foreign enemy.” Through “treasonable and parricidal sentiment,” they were “willing that their country should become a province to France.”
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Adams joined in with numerous addresses bristling with bellicose language. His motivation was not to heighten the crisis, but to mold public opinion behind the dogged steps he saw as necessary to bring France to the negotiating table. Adams had long been respected for his protracted service to the nation, but his tenacity in this critical period transformed him into a
revered figure. Abigail Adams remarked that nearly all of her countrymen were now happy that her husband had won the election in 1796, as under Jefferson “all would have been sold to the French.”
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Swept off his feet by his newfound popularity, Adams went along with nearly everything the Federalists could push through Congress.