Joseph J. Ellis (24 page)

To make matters worse, the debate over the treaty prompted a constitutional crisis. Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the singular status that Washington enjoyed was the decision of the Constitutional Convention to deposit the minutes of its secret deliberations with him for safekeeping. He therefore had exclusive access to the official record of the convention and used it to argue that the clear intent of the framers was to vest the treaty-making power with the executive branch, subject to the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate. Madison, however, had kept his own extensive “Notes on the Debates at the Constitutional Convention” and carried them down to share with Jefferson, who was in retirement at Monticello.

Although a careful reading of Madison’s “Notes on the Debates” revealed that Washington was correct, and indeed that Madison himself had been one of the staunchest opponents of infringements on
executive power over foreign policy at the Convention, Jefferson managed to conclude that the House was intended to be an equal partner in approving all treaties, going so far as to claim that that body was the sovereign branch of the government empowered to veto any treaty it wished, thereby “annihilating the whole treaty making power” of the executive branch. “I trust the popular branch of our legislature will disapprove of it,” Jefferson wrote from Monticello, “and thus rid us of this infamous act, which is really nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislatures and people of the United States.”
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The actual debate in the House in the fall and winter of 1795 proceeded under Madison’s more cautious leadership and narrower interpretation of the Constitution. (Jefferson’s position would have re-created the hapless and hamstrung conditions that he himself had decried while serving as minister to France under the Articles of Confederation, essentially holding American foreign policy hostage to congressional gridlock and the divisive forces of domestic politics.) Madison instead argued that the implementation of Jay’s Treaty required the approval of the House for all provisions dependent on funding. This achieved the desired result, blocking the treaty, while avoiding a frontal assault on executive power.
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Madison served as the floor leader of the opposition in the House during the debate that raged throughout the winter and spring of 1796. At the start, he enjoyed an overwhelming majority and regarded his position as impregnable. But as the weeks rolled on, he experienced firsthand the cardinal principle of American politics in the 1790s: whoever went face-to-face against Washington was destined to lose. The majority started to melt away in March. John Adams observed bemusedly that “Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale, withered, haggard.” When the decisive vote came in April, Madison attributed his defeat to “the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism” led by “the Banks, the British Merchts., the insurance Comps.” Jefferson was more candid. Jay’s Treaty had passed, he concluded, because of the gigantic prestige of Washington, “the one man who outweighs them all in influence over the people.” Jefferson’s sense of frustration had reached its breaking point a few weeks earlier when, writing to Madison, he quoted a famous line from Washington’s
favorite play, Joseph Addison’s
Cato
, and applied it to Washington himself: “a curse on his virtues, they’ve undone his country.”
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W
HAT COULD
Jefferson’s extreme reaction possibly mean? After all, from our modern perspective Washington’s executive leadership throughout the debate over Jay’s Treaty was nothing less than we would expect from a strong president, whose authority to shape foreign policy is taken for granted. We also know the course he was attempting to steer, a middle passage between England and France that required tacking back and forth to preserve American neutrality and avoid war, turned out to be the correct policy. But in this instance, hindsight does not make us clairvoyant so much as blind to the ghosts and goblins that floated above the political landscape in the 1790s. What we might describe as admirably strong executive leadership struck Jefferson and his Republican followers as the arbitrary maneuverings of a monarch. And what appears in retrospect like a prudent and farsighted vision of the national interest looked to Jefferson like a betrayal of the American Revolution.

For Jefferson also had a national vision and a firm conviction about where American history was headed, or at least where it ought to be headed. The future he felt in his bones told him that the true spirit of ’76, most eloquently expressed in the language he had drafted for the Declaration of Independence, was a radical break with the past and with all previous versions of political authority. Like Voltaire, Jefferson longed for the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The political landscape he saw in his mind’s eye was littered with the dead bodies of despots and corrupt courtiers, a horizon swept clean of all institutions capable of coercing American citizens from pursuing their happiness as they saw fit. Thomas Paine’s
The Rights of Man
(1791) captured the essence of his vision more fully than any other book of the age, depicting as it did a radical transformation of society once the last vestiges of feudalism were destroyed, and the emergence of a utopian world in which the essential discipline of government was internalized within the citizenry. The only legitimate form of government, in the end, was self-government.
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Shortly after his return to the United States in 1790, Jefferson began
to harbor the foreboding sense that the American Revolution, as he understood it, had been captured by alien forces. As we have seen, the chief villain and core counterrevolutionary character in the Jeffersonian drama was Alexander Hamilton, and the most worrisome feature on the political landscape was Hamilton’s financial scheme, with its presumption of a consolidated federal government possessing many of the powers over the states that Parliament had exercised over the colonies. Under Hamilton’s diabolical leadership, the United States seemed to be re-creating the very political and economic institutions—the national bank became the most visible symbol of the accumulating corruption—that the Revolution had been designed to destroy. Jefferson developed a full-blooded conspiracy theory in which bankers, speculators, federal officeholders, and a small but powerful congregation of closet Tories permanently alienated from the agrarian majority (“They all live in cities,” he wrote) had captured the meaning of the Revolution and were now proceeding to strangle it to death behind the closed doors of investment houses and within the faraway corridors of the Federalist government in New York and Philadelphia.
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Exactly where Washington fit in this horrific picture is difficult to determine. After all, he presumably knew something about the meaning and purpose of the Revolution, having done more than any man to assure its success. (As Jefferson’s critics were quick to observe, the man ensconced at Monticello had never fired a shot in anger throughout the war.) Initially, Jefferson simply refused to assign Washington any culpability for the Federalist conspiracy, somehow suggesting that the person at the very center of the government was wholly oblivious to the schemes swirling around him. At some unspoken level of understanding Jefferson recognized that Washington was the American untouchable, and that any effort to include him in the indictment immediately placed his entire case against the Federalists on the permanent defensive.

Jefferson’s posture toward Washington shifted perceptibly in 1794. The catalyst for the change was the Whiskey Rebellion, a popular insurgency in four counties of western Pennsylvania protesting an excise tax on whiskey. Washington viewed the uprising as a direct threat to the authority of the federal government and called out the militia, a massive thirteen-thousand-man army, to squelch the uprising. Jefferson regarded the entire affair as a shameful repetition of the
Shays’s Rebellion fiasco nearly a decade earlier, in which a healthy and essentially harmless expression of popular discontent by American farmers, so he thought, had prompted an excessive and unnecessary military response. While his first instinct was to blame Hamilton for the whole sorry mess, Washington’s speech justifying the action could not be so easily dismissed.
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Jefferson denounced Washington’s speech as “shreds of stuff from Aesop’s fables and Tom Thumb.” In Jefferson’s new version of the Federalist conspiracy, Washington was an unknowing and somewhat pathetic accomplice, like an overaged “captain in his cabin” who was sound asleep while “a rogue of a pilot [presumably Hamilton] has run them into an enemy’s port.” Washington was certainly the grand old man of the American Revolution, but his grandeur had now been eclipsed by his age, providing the Hamiltonians with “the sanction of a name which has done too much good not to be sufficient to cover harm also.” Washington simply did not have control of the government and was inadvertently lending credibility to the treacheries being hatched all around him. Washington, in effect, was senile.
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While hardly true, this explanation had the demonstrable advantage of permitting Jefferson’s vision of a Federalist conspiracy to congeal in a plausible pattern that formed around Washington without touching him directly. Jefferson was also careful never to utter any of his criticisms of Washington in public. But in his private correspondence with trusted Republicans, he developed the image of an old soldier past his prime, reading speeches he did not write and could not comprehend, lingering precariously in the misty edges of incompetence, a hollow hulk of his former greatness. The most famous letter in this mode—famous because it eventually found its way into the newspapers against Jefferson’s will—was prompted by the passage of Jay’s Treaty. “It would give you a fever,” Jefferson wrote to his Italian friend Phillip Mazzei, “were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot of England.” Since there was only one person who could possibly merit the mantle of America’s Samson and Solomon, Jefferson’s customary sense of discretion allowed him to make his point without mentioning the name. But everybody knew.
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One final and all-important piece of the Jeffersonian vision transcended
the troubling particularities of domestic politics altogether. As Jefferson saw it, the American Revolution had been merely the opening shot in a global struggle against tyranny that was destined to sweep over the world. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously,” he predicted, “is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe.” Whereas Washington regarded the national interest as a discrete product of political and economic circumstances shaping the policies of each nation-state at a specific moment in history, Jefferson envisioned a much larger global pattern of ideological conflict in which all nations were aligned for or against the principles that America had announced to the world in 1776. The same moralistic dichotomy that Jefferson saw inside the United States between discernible heroes and villains, he also projected into the international arena. For Jefferson, all specific decisions about American foreign policy occurred within the context of this overarching, indeed almost cosmic, pattern.
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Therefore, while Jefferson could talk with genuine conviction about American neutrality and the need to remain free of European entanglements, thereby sounding much like Washington, his version of American neutrality was decidedly different. He did not view the clash between England and France for supremacy in Europe as a distant struggle far removed from America’s long-term national interest. Instead, he saw the French Revolution as the European continuation of the spirit of ’76. He acknowledged that the random violence and careening course of the French Revolution were lamentable developments, but he insisted they were merely a passing chapter in the larger story of triumphant global revolution. “I am convinced they [the French] will triumph completely,” he wrote in 1794, “& the consequent disgrace of the invading tyrants is destined, in the order of events, to kindle the wrath of the people of Europe against those who have dared to embroil them in such wickedness, and to bring at length, kings, nobles & priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with blood.” In one moment of revolutionary euphoria, he dismissed all critics of mass executions in France as blind to the historic issues at stake: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of that contest,” he observed in 1793, “and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it
should have failed I would rather have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.”
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If France was the revolutionary hero in this international drama, England was the counterrevolutionary villain. Jefferson’s highly moralistic language castigating George III and the English government in the Declaration of Independence was not just propaganda, at least for Jefferson. It reflected his genuine conviction that England was an inherently corrupt society, the bastion of monarchical power, aristocratic privilege, and courtly intrigue. Since Washington had spent eight years sending American soldiers to their death in battle against Great Britain, one might expect that he harbored even more hostile opinions toward his former adversary. But he did not. Jefferson’s Anglophobia was more virulent in part because it was more theoretical, a moral conclusion that followed naturally from the moralistic categories he carried around in his head. (If he wanted to stigmatize a political opponent, the worst name he could call him was “Angloman.”) For Jefferson, France represented the brightest future prospects; England represented “the dead hand of the past.” At the nub of his opposition to Jay’s Treaty, then, was his utter certainty that it threw the weight of the United States onto the wrong side of history. “The Anglomen have in the end got their treaty through,” he observed from his mountaintop in 1796, “and so far have triumphed over the cause of republicanism.” But their victory, painful as it was to witness, had also exposed their vulnerability. For it was now quite obvious “that nothing can support them but the Colossus of the President’s merits with the people, and the moment he retires, that his successor, if a Monocrat, will be overborne by the republican sense.… In the meantime, patience.”
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