The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 019509381X, 9780195093810

Table of contents :
Cover
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: Modes of Thought and Feeling in the Founding Generation
1. Making Sense of the American Revolution
2."Court" and "Country" Mentalities in Eighteenth-Century England
3."Court" and "Country" in the New American Republic
4. The "Court" Persuasion in America, and Other Questions
CHAPTER I: Legitimacy
1. George Washington, Republican
2. Roman Simplicity
3. The Executive Establishment
4. Advise and Consent
5. A Bill of Rights and a Judiciary System
6. Revenue, Tariffs, and Tonnage
7. Legitimacy Ratified
CHAPTER II: Finance and Ideology
1. James Madison: The Political Economy of Anglophobia
2. Alexander Hamilton and the Mercantile Utopia
3. The Projection
4. The Political Economy of Anglophilia
CHAPTER III: The Divided Mind of James Madison, 1790: Nationalist Versus Ideologue
1. Madison on Funding
2. Madison on Assumption
3. The Resolution
CHAPTER IV: The Republic's Capital City
1. Theories of Culture
2. Jefferson and the Federal City
3. The Idea of a City
4. The Idea of a Capital
5. An Imaginary Capital City
CHAPTER V: Jefferson and the Yeoman Republic
CHAPTER VI: Jefferson as Secretary of State
1. The Nootka Sound Affair, 1790
2. The Bank
3. Jefferson and Hammond
CHAPTER VII: The Emergence of Partisan Politics: The "Republican Interest"
1. Hamilton's Industrial Vision
2. Madison Revises The Federalist
3. Hamilton Beleaguered
4. The Philadelphia Newspaper War, 1792
5. Investigating Hamilton
CHAPTER VIII: The French Revolution in America
1. How Two Peoples Have Viewed Each Other
2. First Responses to the French Revolution
3. The Revolution as Seen by Certain Concerned Americans
4. Citizen Genet and His Mission
5. Defining American Neutrality
6. Collapse of the Genet Mission
7. The French Revolution and Partisan Politics in America
8. Afterthought: The View from Paris
CHAPTER IX: America and Great Britain
1. Politics and Commerce
2. Washington and the War Crisis, 1794
3. A Vision of the Commercial Future
4. Negotiating Jay's Treaty
5. Ratifying the Treaty
6. The "Golden Shower"
CHAPTER X: The Populist Impulse
1. The Democratic Societies
2. The Whiskey Insurrection
3. Popular Sovereignty and the End of the Rebellion
CHAPTER XI: The Retirement of Washington
1. Logic of the Farewell Address
2. Monroe in Paris
3. The State of Politics in 1796
CHAPTER XII: John Adams and the Dogma of "Balance"
1. The Trouble with Adams
2. Preparing for Crisis
3. First Phase: The XYZ Mission
CHAPTER XIII: Adams and Hamilton
1. Second Phase: The Fever of 1798
2. February-October, 1799: Adams Temporizes
CHAPTER XIV: The Settlement
1. The Naval Quasi-War
2. The Convention of 1800
CHAPTER XV: The Mentality of Federalism in 1800
1. The Aliens and the Seditious
2. The Apotheosis of Matthew Lyon
3. Sedition and Subversion in England and America
4. Hamilton's Army
5. Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
6. Federalism and the "Campaign" of 1800
7. Burr and the Revolution of 1800
8. "We are all Republicans ..."
NOTES
INDEX
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Citation preview

THE

AGE OF FEDERALISM

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T H E

AGE OF

F E D E R A L I S M

Stanley Elkins AND

Eric McKitrick

OXFORD New York

U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS Oxford

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1993 Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick First published in 1993 by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314 First isssued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1995 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Elkins, Stanley M. The age of federalism / Stanley Elkins, Eric McKitrick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-19-509381-0 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-19-506890-0 (cloth)

. United States—Politics and government—Constitutional period. 1789-1809. I. McKitrick, Eric L. II. Title. £310.£45 1993 973-4-dc20 92-33660

141312 Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of Richard Hofstadter

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter encouraged us many years ago to undertake this subject. They gave us their friendship many years before that, even before we had left graduate school. Other friends and colleagues have given us a wide variety of assistance, such as advice in their special fields of competence or helping us to locate out-of-theway sources; of these persons there have been a great many. By now some may have forgotten what they did, but we have not. They include Edith Abbott, Robert Averitt, Jason Bitsky, Lawson Bowling, Howard Brown, David Cannadine, Elizabeth Capelle, John Catanzariti, Jack Chatfield, Barbara Chernow, Laura Downs, Joseph Ellis, Dorothy Fennell, Eric Foner, Peter Gay, Carl Hovde, Nelly Hoyt, Mary-Jo Kline, Mary McGovern, Diana Meisinger, Mark Nackman, Robert Paxton, Caroline Pierce, Jacob Price, Robert Rutland, David Schuyler, Craig Thurtell, Dorothy Twohig, Leo Weinstein, and Isser Woloch. Benjamin DeMott, with fine Jamesian perspicuity, insisted that our tale should break off exactly where it now does, and that no tedious "Conclusions" were called for. R. Jackson Wilson loyally read the entire manuscript, as he has done with much of our previous work, making many valuable suggestions and forcing our attention upon some questions we would otherwise have overlooked. Mention must be made of two in particular whose combined impact on this enterprise required a whole year for us to absorb and come to terms with in the process of final revision. Kingsley Ervin, Headmaster of Grace Church School in New York, has occupied much of a distinguished career in helping others to know and to say more clearly what they mean. He did this for us, with his scrutiny of every line of our text and jottings on nearly every page—the sum of which, we believe, has made considerable difference in the outcome. Herbert Sloan of Barnard College performed a similar office with the same thoroughness, not only with his own sense of style but through a command of the pertinent literature that is in every way fabulous. He tactfully filled in more than one patch of ignorance on our part and saved us from some real blunders. Our gratitude to both these friends is scarcely expressible. The authors' families have been—as the stereotyped formula goes —"supportive" and "forbearing"; they have also given some very measurable assistance. Natalie Lamken and Dorothy Elkins read proof; Enid McKitrick took authori-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

tative charge (and with the ocular equivalent of perfect pitch) of computerizing a hopelessly sprawling manuscript. Edyth McKitrick's eye was likewise critical, in both senses. (As one of many such instances, in an earlier version we had Thomas Paine's father as "a mild and rather ineffectual corsetmaker"; her laconic marginal query was: "Do you mean his corsets fell down?") Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton allowed us time for attention to some of the most difficult phases of the work; without such assistance the work would have taken even longer than it already has. India Cooper, whose underground reputation in the New York publishing world was already formidable, showed us that copy editing can be not just an art, but a fine art.

S.E. E.McK.

C O N T E N T S

I N T R O D U C T I O N Modes of Thought and Feeling in the Founding Generation 3 i. Making Sense of the American Revolution 4 2."Court" and "Country" Mentalities in Eighteenth-Century England 3."Court" and "Country" in the New American Republic 18 4. The "Court" Persuasion in America, and Other Questions 21

C H A P T E R

I

Legitimacy 31 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

George Washington, Republican 34 Roman Simplicity 46 The Executive Establishment 50 Advise and Consent 55 A Bill of Rights and a Judiciary System Revenue, Tariffs, and Tonnage 65 Legitimacy Ratified 74

58

C H A P T E R Finance and Ideology 1. 2. 3. 4.

I I 77

James Madison: The Political Economy of Anglophobia Alexander Hamilton and the Mercantile Utopia 92 The Projection 114 The Political Economy of Anglophilia 123

79

13

C H A P T E R

I I I

The Divided Mind of James Madison, 1790: Nationalist Versus Ideologue 133 1. Madison on Funding 136 2. Madison on Assumption 146 3. The Resolution 153

C H A P T E R

I V 163

The Republic's Capital City 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Theories of Culture 164 Jefferson and the Federal City 169 The Idea of a City 182 The Idea of a Capital 184 An Imaginary Capital City 186

C H A P T E R

V 195

Jefferson and the Yeoman Republic

C H A P T E R

V I

Jefferson as Secretary of State 1. The Nootka Sound Affair, 1790 2. The Bank 223 3. Jefferson and Hammond 244

C H A P T E R

209 212

V I I

The Emergence of Partisan Politics: The "Republican Interest" 257 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Hamilton's Industrial Vision 258 Madison Revises The Federalist 263 Hamilton Beleaguered 270 The Philadelphia Newspaper War, 1792 Investigating Hamilton 293

282

C H A P T E R

V I I I 303

The French Revolution in America 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

How Two Peoples Have Viewed Each Other 303 First Responses to the French Revolution 308 The Revolution as Seen by Certain Concerned Americans 311 Citizen Genet and His Mission 330 Defining American Neutrality 336 Collapse of the Genet Mission 341 The French Revolution and Partisan Politics in America 354 Afterthought: The View from Paris 365

C H A P T E R I X America and Great Britain 375 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Politics and Commerce 375 Washington and the War Crisis, 1794 388 A Vision of the Commercial Future 396 Negotiating Jay's Treaty 406 Ratifying the Treaty 415 The "Golden Shower" 431

C H A P T E R The Populist Impulse

X 451

1. The Democratic Societies 451 2. The Whiskey Insurrection 461 3. Popular Sovereignty and the End of the Rebellion

C H A P T E R The Retirement of Washington 1. Logic of the Farewell Address 489 2. Monroe in Paris 498 3. The State of Politics in 1796 513

X I 489

474

C H A P T E R

X I I 529

John Adams and the Dogma of "Balance" 1. The Trouble with Adams 531 2. Preparing for Crisis 537 3. First Phase: The XYZ Mission 549

C H A P T E R

X I I I 581

Adams and Hamilton

1. Second Phase: The Fever of 1798 581 2. February-October, 1799: Adams Temporizes

C H A P T E R

618

X I V 643

The Settlement 1. The Naval Quasi-War 643 2. The Convention of 1800 662

C H A P T E R

X V

The Mentality of Federalism in 1800

691

1. The Aliens and the Seditious 694 2. The Apotheosis of Matthew Lyon 706 3. Sedition and Subversion in England and America 4. Hamilton's Army 714 5. Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 710 6. Federalism and the "Campaign" of 1800 726 7. Burr and the Revolution of 1800 743 8. "We are all Republicans ..." 750

NOTES

/jrj

INDEX

911

711

THE

AGE OF FEDERALISM

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

Modes of Thought and Feeling in the Founding Generation

This book is an extended encounter with firstness. It begins with the first appearance of the United States as a self-acknowledged nation, at the moment when the nation first put on the organizing structure under which it still functions. But though the structure is still there, the character and substance of what was first contained within it have altered beyond recognition, a process which in fact was in motion almost from the beginning. Our book seeks to recover something of this earlier substance, some measure of what it was like—the difference it made— becoming a "nation" after having been something else, especially in the experience of those persons most directly implicated in bringing this entity into being and setting it afoot. Our scope is defined by the opening cycle of the nation's public life, one we are calling the Age of Federalism. Federalism, as a way of perceiving a society's purposes and guiding its collective affairs, did not have a very long life. We wish to account, to whatever extent is possible, for Federalism's ascendancy, decline, and eclipse, and to discern something of what displaced it. A familiar way of viewing this historic cycle (which might also, with some justification, be called the Era of Washington) is to think of it as something of a Golden Age. In some sense it may well have been that; but any forceful figure of speech has a way of evoking images which exclude others equally pertinent, perhaps more so. In this case the age of the lawgivers, with its serene echoes of Roman antiquity, is an image that renders its object even more remote than in fact it already is. The remoteness has itself become a major problem, even as one concedes that much of what the lawgivers left has held up tolerably well. Indeed, well into the twentieth century writers on the subject, whatever the other differences among them, tended to approach the post-Revolutionary era in a spirit that was on balance essentially benign, finding as they did much to respect in the good sense and realism of the founding generation.1 This habit changed somewhat abruptly in the late 19505 and 19608, giving way to a decidedly different emphasis. The Federalist period now came to be seen, as Marshall Smelser aptly

3

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

phrased it, as an "Age of Passion" —a figure of speech which in this case had the salutary effect of chasing most prior images into at least provisional hiding. "American political life during much of the 17908," asserted John Howe, was gross and distorted, characterized by heated exaggeration and haunted by conspiratorial fantasy. Events were viewed in apocalyptic terms with the very survival of republican liberty riding in the balance. Perhaps most remarkably of all, individuals who had not so long before cooperated closely in the struggle against England and even in the creation of a firmer continental government now found themselves mortal enemies, the basis of their earlier trust somehow worn away.2 There seems little doubt that it was in fact such a time, and high among our concerns will be to make what we can of the passion that permeated the Age of Federalism and to grasp something of its depth and meaning. It becomes almost immediately apparent that these currents of feeling had little reference in any primary way to private interests. They arose out of deep anxieties as to the very character the new republic was to assume, the moral direction it would take, and the sorts of men who would give it its predominant tone. They were expressed in the bitterest contentions over the newly established Treasury and its system of public finance, and over the possible consequences— for the complexion of society, the rights of individual states, and the condition of public morals —of a Treasury-dominated central government. They emerged with equal intensity over the state of America's relations with the two leading powers of Europe, powers that were at war with each other throughout most of the 17905, and the extent to which the American republic ought to attach its sympathies to the fortunes either of revolutionary France or of the former mother country England. The most visible embodiment of the burning ferocity that underlay such questions was of course the colossal enmity that arose, early in that decade, between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

I Making Sense of the American Revolution Still, it is evident—though it has not always been so—that no effort to penetrate the meaning of these passions can go very far without some concern for the manner in which, in those interludes not dominated by their passions, the people of that generation did their thinking, on society, government, and the human state. A great deal of study has been made of that subject over the past thirty years: of the patterns of thought that animated these men's understanding of the parts they played in the coming of the Revolution and in the subsequent effort to create a constitutional union. These writings are sufficiently important, having provided succeeding historical scholars with a steadier base of comprehension than anything that was previously there, that they constitute in themselves some-

.4

INTRODUCTION

thing of a historical event. We shall have to turn aside for a moment or two and take some account of them. Worth noting, moreover, is that these writings — foremost among them being those of Bernard Bailyn, J. G. A. Pocock, and Gordon Wood3—were accomplished in the face of almost unimaginable difficulty. They represent an extraordinary effort of rescue, a retrieval of something which in the course of time had become all but lost. What that something was, and why lost, is itself an important question, one seldom put into words by most students of the American past. Meanwhile it has been asserted over and over that the most effective and influential portrait ever drawn of this society was Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, published over a century and a half ago. The reasons for the cumulative impact of Tocqueville's work are still being debated.4 But whatever they all are, the primary one has to be that the extent of what can be recognized in the portrait is considerable. This would almost certainly not be the case with a comparable one from the year 1790, even had it been done by another Tocqueville. It can probably be said that the principal components for a structure of norms and social values most appropriate to the workings of a capitalist, democratic, equalitarian culture were fully in place by about 1830, though not very much before then, and that Democracy in America is the first—and perhaps partly for that very reason the freshest— picture of modernity that we have. But it may be doubted whether Tocqueville could have seen and heard what he did, or drawn his conclusions and made his projections with the same confidence and clarity, if he had made his visit (183132) even a few years earlier. Probably no subsequent rearrangements of value or transformations in modes of thought and feeling could compare in magnitude to those that occurred in the fifteen years or so prior to 1830^ Thus the mind and sensibility of the founding generation—more inclusively the Revolutionary generation—has been exceedingly difficult to recover: substantial portions of that mentality have long since ceased to strike echoes and resonances. A society in which, for instance, the term "democratic" is not yet one of approval, or in which the significances of "private" and "public" are so inverted from those we attach to them now, is a society sufficiently different from ours that though we may, in a manner of speaking, "see" it, we do not report what we see in the voice of easy recognition. It is in the face of such obstacles that the work of retrieval has had to proceed, a work not so much of rediscovery and revelation as of painstaking reconstruction of pieces which may have been there all along but whose full pattern had long since disappeared from sight. Such was certainly the case with Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which set the direction for everything that followed it.6 Bailyn's subject was a particular configuration of ideas, a particular way of viewing public events and thinking about them, that had come to be very widespread in colonial America long before the Revolution and long before there was any thought of rebellion and separation. These ideas have as much to tell us about the origins of the Revolution as does the accumulation of grievances, because they

.5

THE

AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

served not so much to "rationalize" the grievances but something like the reverse: they gave meaning to the grievances when they appeared, and shaped the sense of how they ought to be responded to. Colonial writers on public affairs who had any degree of education and reading—Bailyn had occasion to meet great numbers of them through the hundreds of pamphlets from the Revolutionary era he examined—had a tendency to cite "authorities" at every step of their arguments, so we have a fair notion of what they read and of those ideas to which they were especially receptive. They were drawn from a variety of sources, though with a notable degree of selectivity: the ancient classics, especially those relating to the era of the declining Roman Republic (Plutarch, Cicero, Tacitus); Enlightenment rationalism (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau on natural rights and the implicit "contract" between governors and governed); some strains of Puritan covenant theology; and perhaps most fundamental of all, the reform writings, or later adaptations, of the leading radical "Commonwealth" spokesmen of the English Civil War period, Harrington, Milton, Neville, and Sidney. Their leading ideas had been updated and codified early in eighteenth-century England for purposes of opposition to the inordinately long and reputedly corrupt ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. In this form they reached the American colonies in a continuing stream and were read there with an exceptional degree of intentness. Among Bailyn's most striking achievements was his locating and giving specificity to the principal channels for the transatlantic movement of ideas in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century. The opposition polemicists and pamphleteers of the Walpolean age, the voice of the "Country party" attacking "Court" policies, remained for all their bitter persistence a fringe element with little influence within England itself. Their writings were, on the other hand, enormously influential in America. Foremost among them were the essays of The Independent Whig and Cato's Letters, written collaboratively by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, appearing in serial as well as book form beginning in the 17208, and circulating in the colonies probably more widely than anything else of its kind. Another notable "Country" paper was The Craftsman, mouthpiece for the anti-ministerial philippics of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Why these writings should have made so profound an impression in America but not at home is a question whose answer lies somewhere between the nature of the ideas themselves and the self-perception of the provincial society that received them. The political thought of the eighteenth century began with one governing assumption underlying everything else, a kind of substructural given. The central fact of civic life, by which every political collision and its outcome could be understood, was the irreconcilable antinomy of liberty and power. Power is by its nature aggressive, encroaching, unstable; liberty is passive, exposed, subvertible. The lust for power, left unrestrained, is the most dangerous of human appetites; the safeguarding of liberty (or law, or right) requires unsleeping vigilance, virtue, and will. History abounds with melancholy examples of peoples (Venice, Sweden, Denmark) who through disregard, luxury, and sloth had allowed their liberties to be plucked away and themselves brought under the rod of tyranny.

6

INTRODUCTION

The English, on the other hand, were a uniquely favored people, the freest in the world. They owed this felicity to the marvelous excellence of their mixed constitution of king, lords, and commons—the one, the few, and the many— marvelous because the aggressive tendencies of any one of these elements were held in check by the other two. It was the resulting balance, inhibiting the incursions of arbitrary power and preventing such tendencies from taking their ultimate form (royal despotism, aristocratic oligarchy, or popular anarchy and mob rule), that served to maintain the liberties of the English nation. On this much, agreement was all but universal. The never-ending face-off between liberty and power, and the blessings of the balanced English constitution, were axioms more or less accepted on all sides, court and country, metropolis and colonies. But the opposition polemicists drew from them special implications and gave them a special emphasis. They asserted that the balance, though still there, was being insidiously undermined year by year through a deadly process of corruption in high places, a kind of rot spreading into every level of English public life. A power-grasping ministry was already at work to paralyze the independence of Parliament through the arts of bribery, the sale of honors and offices in government and Church, and the control of pocket boroughs, thus giving rise to luxury, extravagance, profligacy, dependence, and servility. The time might not be far off when the ministry, with its legion of parasites, pensioners, and placemen, a subservient Church, a rising and compliant money power, costly wars, everheavier taxes and excises, public debts, and eventually an overgrown standing army, would enfold the entire people in coils of oppression and enslavement. Interspersed with cries of doom were calls for reforms to strengthen the waning vigil and arrest the rot, reforms that were nevertheless scarcely thinkable in Hanoverian England. They included a more equitable suffrage, elimination of rotten boroughs, representation based on population, representatives bound to their constituencies by residence and instruction, full freedom of the press, and the removal of government control over religion. But what appeared in England to be the Utopian ravings of an impotent fringe were in America not Utopian at all, but rather the common sense of things. They served on the one hand as a certification of rights and liberties which for the most part the colonies already had, and on the other as a series of warnings of what these free, virtuous, providentially situated, and still-uncorrupted provinces of the English community would do well to watch for in times to come. The mentality of the outsider was being diffused throughout a whole society of outsiders. Thus when in the i/6os the warnings of horrid possibility gave way to what now appeared as horrid reality—taxes of a sort hitherto unknown, a new and augmented corps of placemen in the colonial customs service, the threat of an Anglican church establishment throughout the colonies, and at last the suspension of their assemblies, the closing of their ports, and the quartering of redcoat regulars in their midst—the colonials were in full possession of a language and a grammar to delineate in utmost extent and detail what was revealing itself, a deliberate conspiracy by ministers of the Crown to take away their liberties, step by step, and reduce them to slavery. .7

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

The Bailyn paradigm of an eighteenth-century belief system converted to an ideology of revolutionary response has generally served, in the best work subsequently done in and around this subject, as an opening up rather than a delimitation of possibilities.7 Such work has tended for the most part not to alter the design but to enlarge and extend it. That of J. G. A. Pocock is a conspicuous example. Pocock's writings, of which The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975) represents a kind of summation, have laid out a much enriched and chronologically lengthened context for viewing the political intelligence of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American community. That intelligence had its birth—or rebirth, considered in the light of its classical ancestry—in the city-states of Renaissance Italy. The rebirth amounted in sum to a revived perception of the collectivity of public life, perhaps even of the thought that there was such a thing as "public life," which men might think about and be a part of, and in reference to which individual men might measure their own worth and their own fulfillment. Pocock out of his great learning has made a place in our vocabulary for certain essences that we can no longer imagine having once done without. He has given currency to a term, "civic humanism,"8 which provides a kind of synoptic notation and an associative unity to a tradition of thought whose tangled filaments are otherwise all too easy to lose track of. In addition, he has given a fresh insistence to a word—"Virtue"—which was central to political thought from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century but whose meaning in modern times has become entirely disjoined from what it was then. The time of troubles of the Florentine republic in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries confronted a few intellectuals of that time—men of education who were making their way in law, diplomacy, or the state bureaucracy—with a problem of peculiar urgency, one of self-understanding, for the definition of which the categories of medieval Christian thought furnished no satisfactory vocabulary. The Heavenly City was one thing, but it had become imperative to formulate in adequate words what was happening to the earthly republic here and now, or what might happen and why; and how the actions of men, both immediately and over time, could bear on its fate, which required a conception clearer than anything then current not only of an ideal commonwealth and its constituent parts but also of an optimum sphere for the temporal strivings of man himself. The result, seen most prominently in the writings of Francesco Guicciardini, Donato Giannotti, and above all Niccolo Machiavelli, was a reconstruction from Aristotle's Politics and Polybius' Histories of the mixed and balanced constitution as that kind least unstable, as well as of such a commonwealth's providing the most ample setting for men's own self-realization. Thus the "Machiavellian Moment" was a point in the history of thought at which thought, under strains of temporal experience which reason found no longer tolerable, transformed itself. To the man of reason it presented a model which could be seen as comparable, to some perhaps

8

INTRODUCTION

even preferable, to a life of contemplation upon things eternal and beyond time. It was the model of citizenship, a life of action in the commonwealth, of reason armed against fortuna and responsive to contingency and history, to temporal cycles of generation and decay. His arms, if he will take them up, are those of virtue: virtu, conceived not simply as "manliness" but as "humanness" at meridian, that quality under which he fulfills the totality of his nature in service to the republic. Another of Pocock's "Machiavellian Moments" (he can be read as depicting several) was that in which this civic humanism made its way into the thought of seventeenth-century England and effected another transformation there. Foremost among the theorists of the Interregnum was James Harrington, whose Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) projected a mixed and balanced republic, very much in accord with the Florentine ideal, and gave an enhanced depth to the more radical side of his contemporaries' social and political awareness. Harrington imported two principles in particular upon which he conceived a fully realized participatory citizenship must rest. One was the right to bear arms in the community's defense, a derivation of Machiavelli's theory of a citizen militia in place of condottieri available for hire by any prince or ruler. The other was freehold property as the fundamental safeguard and guarantee of the citizen's independence of judgment, action, and choice. A final mutation of Renaissance-Commonwealth thought in the early years of the eighteenth century—"neo-Harringtonian," as Pocock terms it—both brought it in line with the logic of the post-Restoration settlement and reshaped it for a rhetoric of opposition in the Walpolean era, defining as it did a new polarity, that of "Court" and "Country." Harrington's ideal constitutional balance, formulated as it was during the Interregnum, had consisted of only two orders, the "few" and the "many" (a kind of rotating "natural" aristocracy of talent, and the people at large) and had not included a royal "one." With the monarchy's return this had to be replaced by the more familiar three. Yet the primary polarities of Renaissance civic humanism — constitutional balance and instability, liberty and power, virtue and corruption—remained in full vigor. "Corruption" in particular, in the writings of Andrew Marvell, Trenchard and Gordon, Bolingbroke, Andrew Fletcher, and Charles Davenant, received a vastly expanded meaning. A generic term not limited to simple bribery, "corruption" embraced the entire range of means whereby the executive power through its ministers and subordinate agents might sap the independent will of Parliament, abet the growth of divisions, factions, and parties, and pervert its collective functions of vigilance and supervision. Members decoyed by the lure of patronage and pensions might give their assent to measures—mounting excises, national debts, standing armies—the disposition of which might run beyond anything Parliament could any longer control. The end-product of corruption would be an end of the balance and an end to liberty. Such was the lineage and provenance, and such the form, of a political language that had played on the nerves of colonial Americans for a half-century and more before 1776.

9

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

The structure of historical understanding erected by Bailyn, then furbished and enlarged by Pocock, was still further extended and brought to a grand completion with Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787? Wood's subject was what he saw as a kind of culminating phase in the course of civic humanist thought—or, as he preferred to call it, the Whig tradition of classical republicanism—with the Americans' completion of their revolutionary undertaking and the formation of the Federal Constitution. Wood's contention was that a critical reordering in the categories of political thought had occurred by the end of the eleven-year period during which the Americans endeavored, at first less than successfully, to give specific form to their classical-Whig-republican understanding of what the exemplary commonwealth ought to be. The eventual product, the Constitution, represented a master innovation in the science of politics, while the Framers' perception of what they had done, and their effort to account for it, so transformed political thought as to mark a virtual terminus to the entire tradition in which their political awareness had been shaped. The deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation formed only a part, and probably the lesser part, of the urgency that had steered them toward this outcome. Decidedly more consequential was the experience, undertaken at the beginning of the Revolution in high optimism and clouded at the end of it in relative disenchantment, of fashioning republican constitutions in the several states and then observing how they worked. The force that had driven the colonies into armed resistance was the conviction that the ancient balance of king, lords, and commons which had hitherto preserved the liberties of Englishmen was being all but fatally destroyed by incursions of executive influence corrupting the rightful functions of Parliament, the embodied guardians of the people's health and safety. The predominant impulse, then, in state after state was to so fashion the new republics, and so rebalance their governing powers, that no such abuses could ever again occur. Governors were rendered little short of impotent, their powers of veto, appointment, and convocation being drastically curtailed from those previously held by the royal governors, while legislative control over the making of laws, functioning of the courts, and disposition of revenue was vastly extended. Provision was made for frequent elections, usually annual, with elective districts and representation proportioned according to population (there would be no rotten boroughs in these republics), all with the two-fold object that the assemblies be as direct a reflection as possible of the character and desires of the people at large, and that governors have little or no scope for manipulating them. As a result, in most of the states the popular assembly had become for practical purposes the supreme sovereign power. And yet these same assemblies, in state after state, began almost at once to wield their powers in capricious, short-sighted, and irresponsible ways. Out of this experience, received modes of political understanding, "republican" though they might be, came under extraordinary strain. For one thing, it had become apparent fairly soon that the image of the "mixed" constitution under which the differing claims of the social "estates" were held in balance (the one, 10.

INTRODUCTION

the few, and the many) was no longer very compelling, no matter which way people might wish to adapt it. Though republican theory had not necessarily ruled out some form of kingship,10 it was obvious that annually elected governors, whatever their formal powers, could in no way be "sovereigns"; likewise the logic of an upper house could not rest on any approximation of a hereditary nobility, none having ever existed in America. What social orders, then, did the commonalty have to check and balance, other than itself? If balance were to persist as an imperative—as of course it would—in people's thoughts on how a commonwealth governed itself, it would have to materialize in some other way, and in some new form. Moreover, there began emerging in more and more minds—most notably that of James Madison—the increasingly worrisome question of what had become of virtue itself, anywhere in these scattered republics. There had always been a place in classical theory for a choice few, men out of the common run whose superior talents and wisdom ("enlightened views and virtuous sentiments")11 were at the commonwealth's service for the just guidance of its affairs. Such spirits now seemed little in evidence, especially with the resumption of peacetime pursuits. The state legislatures, as Madison and many another viewed them, had become a babel of narrow-minded parochial concerns, their members men of selfish interests and untutored understanding, oblivious of minority rights, passing unjust laws (such as legal tender acts whereby debts people owed each other could be paid in worthless currency), and all unchecked by any overriding vision of the public good or what it might consist of. It could even be that virtue was too hard to find, or had too pinched a scope, in small republics. Perhaps it was time to try again, to make a new beginning, to widen that scope and turn this uncertain league of commonwealths into one great Republic. Wood's crowning achievement was to locate and mark out what appears in retrospect to have been the only course of thought whereby a resolution of all such strains was possible or even conceivable. The ultimate question, at that time still very much an unsettled paradox, was that of sovereignty: what sovereignty was, where it lay, and how people ought to think about it. The sovereignty of the people was not in itself a new idea, having been present in Whig theory from the time of the English Civil War. But it had always been something of a platitude, conveying little practical meaning. In the normal course of things the people's "sovereignty" lay dormant, being exercised in full directness only in extreme instances of rebellion against tyranny. Meanwhile the supreme authority of the realm, the operative sovereignty, from which there could be no appeal, lay in Parliament—"Parliament" conceived for the purpose as "king-in-Parliament," or more precisely, king, lords, and commons. Nor was sovereignty divisible. There was no province of government from which Parliament's authority could be excluded; and sharing any portion of it with any other body would be imperium in imperio, a solecism, a logical absurdity. The debates of the 17608 and 17705 over what Parliament rightfully could or could not do to the colonies were at best inconclusive on the question of sovereignty. Whereas sovereignty in theory may have been indivisible, and the Amer11,

THE

AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

icans were never quite able to say it was otherwise, still, it had somehow seemed in practice as though it could be divided and had been all along—that Parliament in practice exercised one portion of it and their own assemblies another—but they had no vocabulary for saying so. With independence, of course, the idea of popular sovereignty took on an immediacy it had never previously had. Yet the full logic of sovereignty—how it might be divided, or parceled out, or delegated, or even whether it could be—remained as indeterminate as ever. Especially since, if sovereignty were now seated in the several states, as seemed to be generally taken for granted, it was a real question whether the Continental Congress could claim any of the attributes of sovereignty at all. A diversity of factors—at one end, the extension and heightened intensity of participatory action in community life during the Revolution, and at the other, the perplexities and discontents of the 17808—made for an emerging awareness that sooner or later the whole question of sovereignty would have to be asked in a new way. For one thing, it was evident from a variety of out-of-doors doings, ranging from vigilante action to ad hoc conventions, that the people's sovereignty was anything but an inert and dormant quantity. It was further evident that the scope of such sovereignty was not confined to the formal agencies of government, and that perhaps it ought not be thought of as residing in government at all, or even as having been transferred or delegated there: that sovereignty, without moving from where it lay, could retain full control of its forces and powers while deploying them in any direction the people might choose. And it was obvious in still a further way, with the people turning out to be just as suspicious of their own elected representatives as they had ever been of royal governors, judges, and magistrates, that there was something wrong with the idea of an unfettered assembly as a fully adequate reflector of the people's will, and that the sovereign mind was having its second thoughts about the allocation it had made of sovereignty's instruments. The outcome was a new synthesis, probably most clearly articulated by James Wilson, out of which was drawn the formula whereby defenders of the Federal Constitution in 1787-88 could counter every objection its opponents could bring against it. The sovereignty of the states, the Antifederalists claimed, had been invaded on behalf of a consolidated government which now had executive powers that were shockingly great, and which had been brought about by illegally circumventing the Articles of Confederation, no part of which could be amended except by unanimous consent of the state governments. The reply was that state sovereignty was not being invaded because sovereignty had never resided there. Sovereignty resides not in rulers or magistrates, nor in state governments, nor indeed in governments of any kind, but in the whole body of the people, who can never allow it to be taken anywhere else. And such is the supreme authority of the people that although the people may not, indeed cannot, part with any portion of that sovereignty—which is to say that sovereignty is in some final sense indivisible after all—they may still distribute its functions in as many ways as they choose, and yet again revoke them should prudence so advise it. And should the people still further conclude, through conventions chosen for the purpose by 12.

INTRODUCTION

themselves, that the powers of sovereignty ought to be balanced in a new way— not, say, between social orders but among departments of government — and should majorities of them consent, the people would thereby be obeying no other ruler, no prior laws or charters, no higher power than themselves. The argument, at least in that form and for the time being, proved unanswerable.

2

"Court" and "Country" Mentalities in Eighteenth-Century England The writings just discussed—those of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood—have invested the concept of ideology with a refinement it did not previously have, and have fashioned that concept into a device exceptionally useful for illuminating sequences of political action and cycles of historical change. Ideology, here conceived as a shared body of reference—a configuration of more or less formal abstract ideas, unified through conviction and held in place by the hopes, fears, anxieties, and prejudices that normally accompany them—is nevertheless not to be thought of as a "cause" for the actions people take. Nor ought it be seen primarily as a "justification" for actions they have already taken. Ideas may exert a great deal of influence on the direction in which such actions go; they may also be highly useful in "rationalizing" them afterward. But that is not quite the point. The true relation is closer still: ideas are simply there; they inhabit the same field of force in which any action occurs, and in reality are never absent from it. People do not, indeed cannot, act in any concerted way without some conception of a meaning for what they do; ideology, expressed in acts of thinking, speech, and writing, may be seen as the medium whereby they reach for it. These ascriptions of meaning, then, must in the most basic sense be fashioned out of what is already there. The clusters of ideas, the values attached to them, and the modes whereby they are put into words must be drawn from some common reservoir; otherwise there can be no echoes, no recognition, no meaning. To quote Pocock's now-famous phrase: "Men cannot do what they have no means of saying they have done; and what they do must in part be what they can say and conceive that it is."12 Thus ideology, whatever its "rationalizing" function, has a limiting function as well. The language people draw upon sets bounds to the range of action they can imagine; they are never quite free to do whatever they might please or to fashion any language whatever to justify it—or, more precisely, to give it meaning. This principle is certainly not without its paradoxes and perplexities, which meet us at more than one point in the public life of the eighteenth century, both in England and in America. People might take sharply adversarial positions on fairly basic issues and still find their meanings within essentially the same structure of ideas and values, the same body of reference.13 Or, to turn the case around, overwhelming numbers of them might support the same cause—say, the American Revolution—from a variety of divergent individual motives and interests, yet still

13

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

be drawing upon the same enveloping tradition of thought for whatever community of purpose and meaning they might reach.14 The "Court" and "Country" contentions of Hanoverian England give a sharp sense of this paradox, of how mutually acknowledged values might be put to very different, indeed opposing, purposes. The party divisions that had vexed English politics in the closing years of the seventeenth century and opening years of the eighteenth (though Whigs and Tories cannot quite be thought of as "parties" in any modern sense) had become substantially dimmed by the time of Walpole's rise to power in the 17208 and with the consolidation of a predominantly Whig interest in Parliament. These former divisions were now replaced, or at least overlaid, by something more elemental in character: the suspicions and resentments of an outsider state of mind, a Country viewpoint with its vocal center in the landed gentry, leveled against the Court establishment of an entrenched executive ministry in alliance with the emergent powers of money and exchange in the City of London and upheld in Parliament through a selective distribution of Crown patronage. This Court-Country polarity is of special interest to us for several reasons. Not only did it define the predominant temper of a half-century and more of English politics, but a strikingly similar counterpart of it would reappear in the America of the 17908. Moreover, the words reached for to invest it with meaning were drawn from a substantially shared vocabulary: so much so that the two sides—in England at least—may even be said to have functioned, as more than one writer has put it, in a kind of "symbiotic relationship."15 The "Financial Revolution" of the 16908 marked a profound turning point in the history of both the economic and political life of England, inaugurating as it did a new and essentially modern conception of the mobilization and management of government resources, and bringing into existence two formidable new institutions—a funded public debt and a large central bank with quasi-public functions. The system of public finance which thus had its birth during the reign of William III was subsequently brought to a state of considerable maturity and stability by the ministries of Walpole and Henry Pelham under the first two Georges. But it also provided a key term in the emerging tensions of Court and Country: "government by money." William Ill's policy of war against the France of Louis XIV, while it had the public's general support, proved vastly more expensive than anything of the sort the nation had previously undertaken. With current taxes and ad hoc private loans clearly inadequate to meet unprecedented and continuing costs, William's Treasury officials arranged with a group of London's wealthiest merchants for the first of a series of exceptionally large loans, to be secured by specific future taxes, in return for which the financiers would be granted a charter with monopoly privileges for certain forms of banking. The resulting Bank of England (1694) would handle government deposits, assist in organizing future borrowing by government, do private commercial business, and issue notes which could circulate as public currency. (Two other great chartered monopolies, the East India and South Sea Companies, would also, for a time, handle large portions of the public debt.) This transformation in public finance brought long-term consequences in two broad

14,

INTRODUCTION

spheres, one in the nation's business life and the other in the workings of government itself. A financial revolution on this order had of necessity to be accompanied by an administrative revolution.16 Extended periods of war, which would recur at more or less regular intervals throughout the eighteenth century, together with the growing public debt needed for maintaining them —a debt which nonetheless would prove more than adequately supportable by a very sound base of government credit—combined to bring into being a vastly expanded money market, new forms of investment, and a substantially new trading class concerned primarily with the movement of public securities and allied varieties of negotiable paper, and with the kinds of transactions which made them profitable. Meanwhile these same factors — an intermittent war footing and greatly increased sums available for expenditure by government— required a much expanded bureaucracy in the Treasury, Admiralty, and War offices for handling them. The purposeful allocation of this patronage and other forms of royal preferment in such a way as to assure government of dependable majorities for its policies in the House of Commons was brought to something of a fine art by Sir Robert Walpole.17 To the extent that the resulting Country opposition had a community of sentiment and purpose, it derived from a somewhat indeterminate mixture: a sense of exclusion, suspicion of the new kinds of power and new ranges of influence that money seemed to be opening up in London and Westminster, and hostility to men who appeared to be threatening the standards and values of which rural squires had customarily seen themselves as the hereditary custodians. The Country voice, to which were added those of a variety of literary types, was loud in judgment. A perilous new era, as the Country saw it, had arrived, one in which the decisions and choices that most affected the nation's liberties, well-being, and morals were more and more removed from the hands in which they had traditionally been safest—from the body, that is, of the nation's landed proprietors — and were now lodged elsewhere and out of reach. Though the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 had supposedly blown away the last traces of the divine right of kings, the Crown's executive power had nevertheless taken on a new weight, exercised in new ways, and now appeared more pervasive and menacing than ever. The houses of Parliament could no longer be seen as an independent force in government or as the guardians of liberty and virtue in the nation's life, because the base upon which virtue in public service was presumed to rest—landed property and freehold tenure as the safest guarantee of independent judgment and action— was being sapped by the power of money. While the burden of a rising national debt and the costs of continuing wars were being principally borne by the gentry through the land tax and the excise,18 men in the City whose wealth was based not on the real value inherent in land but on the ephemeral values of paper and credit were enriching themselves at the nation's expense. Meanwhile the royal ministry, with its enhanced latitude of initiative and action, and with this new class at its beck and call, was perverting the independent will of Parliament and purchasing its subservience to the Crown's own will through offices, honors, and 15,

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

perquisites. The sacred balance of the constitution, the venerable equilibrium of king, lords, and commons, was teetering over an abyss of corruption. Consequently the direction assumed by the Country opposition might be taken as either the impulse of reform or resistance to change, or both. Looking back to a time when the king supposedly "lived of his own" but was obliged to consult Parliament each time on anything, such as an occasional foreign venture, that went beyond routine expenses, Country spokesmen sounded a continuous call for a return to cheap, simple, and honest government. They attacked the excise and land tax as impoverishing the nation, wars and funded debts for the same reason (and because both the burdens and the profits fell on all the wrong people), the standing army because of what it boded for the nation's liberties, and all these things because of their potential for corrupting the nation's virtue. Meanwhile, in defense of the balanced constitution and genuine mixed government they kept bringing up Place Bills to limit the Crown's patronage powers and to keep down the numbers of pensioners and placemen sitting in Parliament, and they called for more frequent elections in order to check the range of temptations laid before a too entrenched membership in the House of Commons. There was even some talk of reforming the vote, though nothing of a "democratic" tendency, neither Court nor Country having the least interest in extending the franchise to the unpropertied. (If anything they would have liked to raise the qualification rather than lower it.) It was more a question of adjustments in representation and electoral practice that would give more weight to the landed interest and less scope for courtiers and stock-jobbers to buy their way into Parliament. In short, every argument the Country made, for or against change of any kind, referred back in some way to the swollen power of the Court, the threat to the balanced constitution and civic virtue, and behind it all the corrupting power of money. The response of Court-minded—or non-Country-minded—publicists to the Country polemics was not made in a language that challenged in any fundamental way the principles the Country stood for. Indeed they professed, by and large, to hold all the same principles, other things being equal. They put their emphasis, however, on the practical and technical considerations in government, foreign relations, and economic life that must modify a too literal construction of those principles. England's mixed and balanced constitution, as all proclaimed, was beyond doubt the best in the world. But the parts could in no strict sense be independent of each other; the balance would actually be upset if they were. There must be a balance of liberty and authority, also an equilibrium of all the most important and powerful interests in the state. These included not only the landed but the commercial, moneyed, professional, and religious interests as well, all of which government must both represent and reconcile. King, lords, and commons were all combined in one supreme authority, yet this too involved a balance, which required harmony rather than separation. The Crown—the executive side—must have its own part in maintaining that balance, and could not do so without the Crown's positive and purposeful exercise of those prerogatives still remaining to it: control of foreign policy and, most especially, of conferring office and honors.

16.

INTRODUCTION

Neither harmonious relations nor informed debates were possible unless the executive had its spokesmen in the legislature, just as the Commons must have theirs at court. Nor was it fair to claim that giving a man a place automatically corrupted his conscience. How otherwise were merit and loyalty to be given recognition? Place Bills could actually be said to strike at the principle of virtue itself: if the king chose men of quality and talent to be his servants and such men were thereby excluded from the Commons, or if as members of Parliament they were forced to choose and elected to remain where they were, one or the other—Crown or Parliament—would be deprived of a prime source of virtue in the public service. Court supporters could be as ready as anyone to deplore the burdens of war, to admit the possibility of the debt getting out of hand, or to acknowledge that standing armies needed watching, or to concede that money, commerce, and virtue did not always go together. Nevertheless the world of the eighteenth century had become immensely widened in scope for the interests of the British nation. A far-flung network of overseas trade, a colonial empire, and a due weight in the power relations of Europe all required an active foreign policy and a professional military and naval establishment for giving effect to it. Moreover, such commitments and responsibilities would scarcely even be thinkable without a dependable system of public finance to support them. Thus while such received civic humanist values as those concerning luxury, corruption, and virtue may not have been exactly repudiated, Court language certainly showed a decidedly revised slant on them. For instance, whatever the virtue once inherent in citizen militias in preference to standing armies, it was now out of the question to send off such a body to be destroyed in France or anywhere else. As for the public debt, the very size of it and the sound credit of the government on which it rested could be seen as testimony to the patriotism and good faith of the class willing to invest their money in it. And as the nation prospered and commerce flourished, luxury itself need not be thought of as leading to certain corruption if it brought refinement and amenity to the common life. So the emergent financial system, the government structure that administered it, the men of affairs who both supported and profited from it, and the beneficent consequences for the nation that could be claimed to flow from it were all defended in strong accents against the prophecies of doom from the Country. With regard to the basic arrangements of English society and the management of its public affairs, the preponderance of sentiment in the political nation by the middle years of the eighteenth century had come to rest heavily on the Court side. And as time went on, more and more circumstances combined to make the issues between them appear, for all their rhetorical stridency, as matters somewhat short of life and death. For one thing, the political nation itself—the governing class and its voting constituency—was still relatively small in relation to the population at large, and most elements within it had a strong common interest in keeping it that way. Moreover, anyone, Country-minded or otherwise, with more than a passing acquaintance of life at the center of things knew that the world of high affairs, either of government at Westminster or of trade and exchange in the City, had long since taken a course that was not likely to be reversed. The British 17,

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

structure of government finance under Walpole and his successors, for all its perplexing intricacies, had emerged as stronger, stabler, and more advanced than that of any other country—in marked contrast, say, with Bourbon France, whose antiquated financial patchwork would be in a state of collapse on the eve of the French Revolution. Meanwhile the interconnections of private facilities for credit, insurance, and exchange radiating outward from the commercial houses of London were infinitely more sophisticated than those available anywhere else. (This had more than a little to do with the prosperity of the American colonies.) There were a fair number of limits, then, on what the Country could imagine itself doing to alter any of this, or even wanting to. And not the least of them was a set of assumptions that permeated all levels of political life with regard to the propriety of a permanent, formed opposition. Virtually nobody was yet prepared to argue that regular parties might be a good thing; Court and Country each charged the other with stirring up faction; and many a country gentleman, true to his picture of his own independent self, shied away from joining in any sustained and systematic effort to discredit the Court's established policies and drive the sitting government out of office. Whatever the dissenters said and did, they must be seen to stand on the most elevated ground without thought of profit for themselves, warning the king from time to time against the designs of wicked councillors, and always with their foremost care being for the safety of the constitution and the soundness of the nation's moral health. All in all, the interests and associations which Court and Country held in common probably counted for more than did those dividing them. In 1740 James Thomson, a Court pensioner who wrote Country poetry, composed an ode which was set to music in that same year by Thomas Arne, a London singing master and sometime impresario who longed for royal preferment but never quite got it. Yet the ode was a tremendous success everywhere, one in whose haughty cadences all voices could join, and did: "Rule Britannia." 3

"Court" and "Country" in the New American Republic Returning now to the subject of this book, the America of the 17908, one is presented with what seems—at least at first glance—an extraordinary repetition of historical experience. There appears to be a striking parallel between the CourtCountry divisions of Georgian England and those that subsequently appeared in Washingtonian America. The principal concerns of the Country viewpoint in England, as Lance Banning has asserted, re-emerged with an exceptional degree of similarity in the new republic and gave form at virtually every turn to the opposition temper which developed in very short order in response to the policies and actions of the new federal government. The anxieties and apprehensions, though at first muted, were nevertheless all there, ready and waiting from the start. With the government 18-

INTRODUCTION

barely weeks old, Elbridge Gerry, for one, was opposing a single head for the Treasury, the Treasury being the customary base for power-grasping British prime ministers. As early as July 1789 William Maclay thought he discerned the makings of a "court party" scheming to bring about through ministerial influence and the arts of corruption a consolidated government which would swallow up the states and destroy republican virtue. 'The fuse was laid. And Alexander Hamilton was ready with the match."19 As the Hamiltonian program revealed itself over the next two years —a sizable funded debt, a powerful national bank, excises, nationally subsidized manufactures, and eventually even a standing army—the Walpolean parallel at every point was too obvious to miss. It was in resistance to this, and everything it seemed to imply, that the "Jeffersonian persuasion" was erected. Not only may the Court-Country parallel be taken as a key term for penetrating the logic of opposition; it could also be extended, as Drew McCoy has done, well beyond its more obvious political and constitutional implications. McCoy sees the Jeffersonian and Madisonian response as more than simply reactive; it consisted rather of an already well articulated alternative conception of the republic's economic and moral future, to which Hamilton's system appeared as a mortal challenge. Theirs was a particular version of political economy as well as one of republican government. "Political economy" as understood in the eighteenth century was something quite different from the largely value-neutral science of "economics" that would eventually displace it, not only referring to the management of a state's economic affairs but embracing as well the entire range of relations between government and the social and economic order, and having a clear moral component.20 Enlightenment thought in this realm was not, generally speaking, an undifferentiated depiction of social progress. There was a distinct strand in it, to which the Jeffersonians were highly sensitive, that took for granted a kind of cyclical movement from youth to age, and that all civilizations must eventually reach a stage of decline and decay. The problem for political economy was that of prolonging the stage of youthful vigor and making the onset of decay as remote as possible. A master variable, moreover, was assumed to be the pressure of population growth, well before Thomas Malthus produced his celebrated essay on that subject toward the close of the century. A predominantly agricultural society was seen as the kind inherently most virtuous, the freest from corruption, the kind best constituted for resisting decay, and the one most to be desired for the American republic. Its growth and expansion, the Virginians believed, should occur across space rather than through time; its vigor might best be retained, its decline postponed, and time thus be thwarted, as long as its surplus population could keep moving into virgin land and as long as such land remained abundant. The counter-picture, which stood as a kind of warning, was the example of Great Britain. Here was a society sufficiently advanced—or rather sufficiently aged, far enough along in the process of decay—that, with its open land gone, found itself with an ever-expanding population which could no longer be supported in agriculture and was spilling into the cities, kept alive at worst by beggary and at best through employment at bare subsistence in manufacturing establish-

19.

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

ments producing luxuries for the aristocracy, great amounts of which also went out for export, and swollen wealth for their owners. One part of society was sinking in venality and luxury, the other in poverty and brutishness. Meanwhile a misconceived system of political economy—the term for it was "mercantilism" — took for granted that the nation's prosperity could only be advanced through a structure of privileges and monopolies for its domestic commerce, while giving the law to the rest of the world with elaborate trade regulations for protecting a far-flung network of overseas markets. An all-pervading government thus sought to dominate the channels of international trade and support an overextended series of foreign involvements through naval power, standing armies, and a growing burden of debt, while the nation's true wealth was being perverted to the unnatural enrichment of its moneyed and commercial classes. The entire society was being recklessly propelled toward a final stage of degeneration, corruption, and collapse. Yet for all such warnings and dangers, the Americans knew they could not conceive their republic simply as a continuously expanding agricultural Utopia in a state of primitive Spartan virtue. Despite an inherent disjunction between virtue and commerce, and though "commerce" must forever be a figure of suspicion, never possessing in itself the kind of liberating force ascribed to it by such as Hamilton, they were nevertheless acutely aware that they could not do without it. Nor could they do without some form of manufacturing. Yet they were still free, they thought, to make a series of vital distinctions through which their republic might for an indefinite term be spared the consequences they feared from the example that was before them. There must be commerce and there must be manufactures. But these could be, and must be, of the right kind. For the wellbeing of the nation's agriculture, a commerce functioning primarily as carrier of its surplus produce to worldwide markets was indispensable. As for manufactured goods, the wrong kind, the kind a republican people did not need, were the superfluous luxuries turned out in the great industrial workshops of England. The right kind, those fully adequate to an existence of modest comfort, could be produced at home through household industry or artisan enterprise. To be sure, the line drawn by such a mind as James Madison's between luxuries and necessities arriving in British cargoes was always apt to be a bit blurred. Madison tended to talk of laces and silver buckles, even as his compatriots were buying woolens, cottons, cutlery, tools, and pottery in grades and quantities to be had from no other source. Still, what was above all to be avoided was an unholy alliance of commerce, manufacturing, money, and public credit, fostered by an intrusive and interfering government. The right kind of commerce could flourish, in a world of free trade such as that envisioned by Adam Smith in his famous indictment of mercantilism. Such a world, as the Americans knew all too well, did not yet exist. Yet it could be brought into being with the right kind of foreign policy, one that required no wars, military forces, or great funded debts and excises to sustain it. The masses of Great Britain and Europe, they imagined, needed our foodstuffs, and their merchants and manufacturers needed our raw materials, more than we needed their luxuries. Upon that need might be fashioned a policy of peaceable coercion, 20

INTRODUCTION

of discriminatory duties and other sanctions on their trade, an instrument of potential use for persuading them to do justice to ours and to allow it and that of the rest of the world to flow in their "natural" channels. Both Jefferson and Madison were strongly attached to such a policy, and would in fact begin efforts almost at once to get some form of it enacted into law. A final way of viewing the Court-Country polarity, as proposed by John Murrin, would be to make a direct comparison between the two societies, America's and Britain's, in which "Country" challenged "Court," to observe how the challenge was resolved, and then to consider what kind of parallel—and how much of one— it really was. It would then be seen that while the vocabularies may have been strikingly similar, the outcomes were drastically different. Murrin's own comparison is made in the context of the respective "Revolution Settlements": England's in the thirty-year period subsequent to the Glorious Revolution of 1689, and America's in the two or three decades following its War for Independence. In both Britain and America the Court-Country tensions were an accompaniment to the process whereby each society reached its Revolution Settlement and acquired the rough shape of its eventual modernity. But for England it was beyond question a "Court" settlement; for America it was clearly and definitively a "Country" settlement. In Britain political, social, and economic change were all bound up together, eventuating in a centralized state and an integrated economy destined to become with all its worst and best consequences the most dynamic in the world, having its center in London along with a government whose own character had been shaped in part by what it saw, mistakenly or otherwise, as the nation's vital requirements. A comparable degree of economic integration in the United States would not be reached until the middle third of the nineteenth century, and political supervision would have little to do with it. By that time the republic's political arrangements had long since been so fixed—its Revolution Settlement completed —as to rule out anything like a Court option. Such an option had, to be sure, appeared as briefly thinkable in the troubled times of the republic's birth and earliest life. But with their successful challenge to Federalism in 1800, and with Country principles as their index of meaning, the Jeffersonians would proceed for practical purposes, as Murrin puts it, simply to detach national politics and government altogether from the "larger patterns of economic and social change."21 A central question for this book will be that of exactly how the "Court option"—the Federalist version of a republican future—was smothered in the 17908, and the degree to which it smothered itself. 4

The "Court" Persuasion in America, and Other Questions What, then, did the Court option consist of; what was the "Federalist persuasion"? Actually there would be two versions of it, one at the beginning and the

21

THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

other at the end, though most accounts tend to blur them by lumping it all together. But in neither form did it have the rootedness, nor indeed the selfassurance, of the Country view, while its initial acceptability rested on a premise that would prove to be somewhat tenuous. One side of the premise was that the work done at Philadelphia, at a historical moment both portentous and uncertain, might open the way for a stable and spacious though as yet unspecified national vision. The other was that Federalism could accommodate a range of values and expectations not out of keeping with those generally supposed to have been tested and certified in the Revolution. And indeed it might have appeared for a moment as though all this were true. But that aspect was shortly to be transposed into something not wholly expected, something novel and idiosyncratic that seemed not quite to fit, and no one individual did more, or nearly as much, to impart this altered face to Federalism than Alexander Hamilton. The initial version, logically enough, was The Federalist itself, that remarkable sequence of numbered statements designed to convert doubters objecting to the new Constitution. The extent to which The Federalist actually performed this function cannot of course be measured, and was in any case largely limited to the state of New York. But more important is that these same papers represent in aggregate the outer bounds as well as the central substance of what their authors conceived was the claim they could make—the object being above all persuasion—on their readers' experience, aspirations, and habits of thought. Read in this way, the papers are a striking reflection not so much of points being debated as of values either negotiable or held more or less in common. It is obvious, for instance, that the world in which they all functioned was hardly a "democratic" world (likewise the case between Court and Country in England) but an elite one, and that the pseudonymous collective author "Publius" (Jay, Madison, and Hamilton) was unaffectedly candid about this. A key theme was public service by men whose special merits an expanded commonwealth might make more available than they currently seemed to be. References to "virtue" abound, with great deference of course to that which resided in the people. But it seems that the people's virtue was still primarily to be thought of as their capacity less to act than to choose wisely, "to obtain for rulers," as Madison put it in Number 57, "men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good," men so preferred as "will be somewhat distinguished also, by those qualities which entitle them to it. .. ,"22 Other, more focused, aims were held up, and about these too Publius was honest and straightforward. "Energy" in government was something each of the Publiuses talked about, taking for granted that such energy was mainly to be welcomed after the irresolution and drift of the years just preceding, in order to evoke the respect of foreign powers as well as that of the people's own national self. Each pointed to the military weakness of the ancient confederacies. Nor was Madison the only one to make the argument for a large republic, as he did in his famous Number 10, nor even the first. Jay and Hamilton had already done this in the preceding numbers. The importance of a sound public credit was repeatedly referred to, as was the paramountcy of the government's uncontested freedom to ,22,

INTRODUCTION

tax. None believed that government's power to raise military or naval forces in peacetime should be essentially impeded or qualified either. Hamilton even went so far as to question directly the traditional argument against standing armies. His essays on this subject were referred to elsewhere by Madison in support of his own views.23 But as with any exposition of first principles, these were essentially abstractions. There was little if anything in The Federalist that gave any real hint of the specific shape and detail Federalism would shortly take on with the issuance of Hamilton's Treasury papers on public credit, taxation, a national bank, and a program of government-encouraged manufactures. And when it did, a strikingly patterned response was activated which may have been as unsettling to Hamilton as to anyone else. What he had presented, though some details of it could doubtless have been predicted, was a comprehensive design for which few were quite prepared, least of all his erstwhile co-author Publius-Madison. For when it was fully unrolled, many of them thought they were standing before a sinister exact copy of post-Walpolean British mercantilism, a transplanted system of Court influence, corruption, and government by money. Whereupon sprang into existence an exact copy, or seemingly so, of the Court-Country face-off in which the Court had overwhelmingly prevailed and could, for all anyone knew, prevail here, especially with the final piece at the end, a potent military force. Yet in America it would all work otherwise, and in reality was no "copy" at all. The two situations were altogether different. Actually both the "Court" and "Country" positions in America were abstractions, even at the point of highest articulation, having none of the context of direct experience and time, or accommodations forced by the density of life and affairs in metropolis and empire, or the self-awareness of a thick social fabric, that had characterized their counterparts in Britain. Here the Country case, the older of the two, had been abstracted from something out of sight and at a distance, which gave it a symmetry not encumbered by an excess of known facts or by the knots and snags of circumstance, though it had already served with great force as a glossary of meaning for the most efficient and least wasteful revolution in history. And yet much of the same abstractness could be said to characterize the Court option as well, such as it was, when it took the form Hamilton gave it. Hamilton, with an imperiousness scarcely matched by any American statesman to succeed him, had fashioned his design for national greatness, also at a distance, out of what was then the most advanced system of political economy in the world, the product of a century of trial and evolution, and presumed to set this British model down in an environment which could provide little or no context for receiving it, and with no base, either in experience or in prepared resources, material or human, on which it might rest. Still, it too could claim to have had, in an earlier form, a test of sorts in the Revolution. The first germ of the Federalist vision was a product of what might be called the "Continentalist" side of the war effort, a side most sharply perceivable from the vantage point of Washington's staff, or of the diplomatic missions, or of the war committees of the Continental Congress, rather than that, say, of the state and local governments. This was the side so

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AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

placed as to be most driven by the urgency of a common purpose, of coordinating thirteen separate revolts against a common enemy and against the cross-purposes of local authorities and local populations. It was here, and in the experience of those most associated with this side of the endeavor, that a nationalist vision could exert its greatest attractions.24 Yet this Continentalist side was in most ways the lesser side in contrast to the localist one, most people's perceptions of the Revolution being shaped by what went on more or less in front of them, in their own states and neighborhoods. Aside from a universal veneration for the Commanderin-Chief, which would of course persist long after Federalism was gone, Federalist values and their acceptance probably reached their meridian with the form they took in The Federalist. The Country persuasion was an ideology of suspicion and resistance, tough and serviceable for purposes of revolution, though less of an asset when it came to nation-building. Still, when it rose up almost at once in challenge to Hamilton's variant projection of a national future, and was applied with the kind of literalmindedness which is possible with unqualified abstractions having widespread currency, it operated somewhat as a contagion against which there is no adequate immunity system. The Court and its adherents had little in the way of defense that was at all comparable to the resources on which the Court in England could draw, the self-possession that could come from assured support, long experience, and prior results.25 The choices individuals thereupon felt they had to make became within a very short time quite stark. They had to choose one abstraction or the other, and soon found themselves forming parties, in spite of themselves. They did so in the face of an inherited value-system which took for granted that party and faction were in all ways bad, and to which they themselves continued to subscribe. It was this—the emergence of parties—that proved to be the true novelty of the age, though the unacknowledged evasions inherent in the first steps make for a great deal of ambiguity in any effort to trace a pattern in the political passions, and the charges of plots and conspiracies, that ran through it. In any event the response of Federalism was that of righteousness under siege, and amounted to little more in the end than a sterile defense of constituted order against the forces of insubordination and sedition. What had become of Federalism by then did not make a pretty picture. True, in the beginning there were clear interests at large in the society, each with its own particular version of what the future ought to hold for it, and for each of which Federalism in some form might make a difference. There were private interests and a variety of public ones as well. A number of state governments had something substantial to gain by way of rescue from a sea of troubles. There were states hemmed in by the commercial regulations of neighbor states, others with exposed and threatened military frontiers, still others with burdens of debt no longer supportable by their own taxes. Of the private interests, some were straightforward enough: merchants with disposable capital who had invested in the war debt, and for whom any central government with the power to honor its obligations was reason enough for supporting it; or merchant shipowners who could see any measure of national power as a better guarantee for the safety of ,24.

INTRODUCTION

their voyages than any they currently had. As for the "agricultural interest/' once seen as a natural salient against Federalism everywhere,26 much depended on local circumstances for a Federalist direction to imply either benefit or injury, or neither. The great planter interest of South Carolina embraced Federalism for one reason; the great planter interest of Virginia repelled it for another reason. In rural western Massachusetts, where widespread debt and foreclosures had brought on Shays's Rebellion, the weight of the state's tax structure was much eased by the federal assumption of state debts, and in the aftermath that same region would emerge as the solidest and most persistent bastion of Federalism in all of New England, indeed anywhere. Nevertheless when the entire design of Federalism was eventually in place, there was not enough in it for any of them, or else the claim any particular interest could make on the others was too tenuous, so that for any lasting or positive purposes the design never quite added up. For some it was a downright rude awakening. Such was evidently the case for the community of city artisans, who at first saw in Federalism a saving force to which they might look for protection against foreign competition, and who in New York City had paraded in a body to celebrate the new Constitution with a great float inscribed HAMILTON. They seem to have undergone a certain disillusionment as it dawned on them that when Hamilton himself later talked of "manufactures," what he had in mind was not the kind they made. Few groups thereupon did more, according to Sean Wilentz, to fashion the language of American republicanism: "country" thoughts, as it were, in a city voice.27 Still, there remains the question of exactly how all this is to be charted—the motions, that is, whereby thought and feeling came to be either hardened or loosened, or altered, transformed, or turned around—in the course of that historical cycle we are calling the Age of Federalism. We find that the categories of "intellectual history," indispensable as they have been in preparing the entire subject for our own understanding, cannot quite contain it here. Nor, it seems, can any one formal mode of inquiry; all may be necessary, none is sufficient. One name for the process being traced, if there has to be one, is "political," and politics can be assured of a great deal of attention. But so also must diplomacy, economic affairs, and matters of military concern, each in some places to a degree of unavoidable technical depth. What may perhaps be seen running through all of it is something almost requiring a literary sense to penetrate: the makings of a cultural settlement, not entirely unmeditated by those who had a hand in it, that would give "national civilization" a different meaning in America from what it has, or has had, anywhere else. The process must in some way be shown happening, to whatever extent our capacities can control it, and not in one way but many. There must be some view of actual experience, an occasional grasp of what things may have looked like on a given day, the behavior of groups and of individuals in their encounters, what they said to each other and how we might know or guess they felt about it or did about it afterward. Some individuals, perhaps two or three, should come off .25,

THE

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passably well. Very few others will get through a scrutiny, detached though we may presume it to be, without something or other to answer for. Readers attracted to Great Men may get either less or more than they are prepared for. Two of the figures they are to meet—Hamilton and Jefferson—will appear in all the scale we believe anyone supposes they deserve, but each touched with a dimension of almost tragic irony, a self-deceiving obstinacy that had many a consequence for the whole temper and tendency of their times. As for the generality of Federalists, Hamilton among them, one sees them doing a surprising number of things right, at least from day to day, and leaving a surprisingly tidy house for their successors to move into. But how this is to be read, in view of the shambles of spirit they made of their own mission, is a question perhaps not to be ventured until after one follows them through it. Moreover, we have encountered a number of gross phenomena that seem scarcely classifiable at all, almost one of a kind, not reducible to more general categories and not to be seen in any other setting than this one. We might mention a few of them. One is an "interest" that seems to fall outside any of the others, in some ways more compelling than all of them combined. It might be thought of on one level as the interest of a relatively small number of individual careers, converging at a point of exceptional possibility for each of them. But the level is raised to a point scarcely conceivable if such possibility is seen by those affected, in pride or humility, as something not unlike immortality. Those present at a moment evidently occurring once in an age must, however they do so, rise to it, lay hold of it, and make it their own before it slips away. The "young men of the Revolution," as we have elsewhere referred to them, who appeared at Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 were certainly such a company.28 Their picture of themselves, of their own capacities and worth, had to rest on the view to be taken of what they did there by those who came after them, and on how this would define them. Opportunity, profit, and reward have knowable meaning in such a setting only if such opportunity—of having a hand in nation-building—can in any way be measured against the lure of lesser ones. By far the preponderance of the men gathered there, as well as those who journeyed to New York for the First Congress, became Federalists and remained so, in their own eyes a special elite, a chosen few.29 Little of their behavior, there or thereafter, is quite separable from their sense of their own firstness. In this respect no courtier in England, of origins however ancient or noble, had ever experienced such an event, or felt such a weight. But to this phenomenon should be added another which might, for want of a better term, be called the "Virginia principle." Here was another elite, also of a special sort, of men out of a special setting whose talents, experience, and standing disposed them to see everything in what can only be called, perhaps helplessly, a Virginia way. By far the greater part of them—with a few such exceptions as Washington, Marshall, certain of the Lees, and not many others— would very shortly come to feel themselves and their sort left wholly out of the Grand Design. Their leading spirits, Jefferson and Madison, would do more than

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INTRODUCTION

any two other individuals to shape the opposition, set its tone, and define the enemy. Of the only high officials of the first administration to become disaffected from it, all three were Virginians.30 Further features will appear in the following pages that seem to leave little choice but to allow for "Virginia" a singular classification. One of them was a passion that served in one way or another to underlie or overrule almost any other category of thought and most other considerations of high policy as seen through Country eyes. This was an anglophobia that could make "England" a word capable of tainting almost anything. Few other individuals were more propelled by it in all they thought, said, and did than Jefferson and Madison, and nothing was more of a constant than this same anglophobia in the hostility to Hamiltonian Federalism, which depended for its very life on a prosperous commerce with England, or to give body to the wild francophilia— or "Gallomania" as the Federalists sullenly called it—that persisted throughout the 17905. Still another phenomenon, which owed everything to its Virginia genesis and to the anti-metropolitanism that permeated it, was the choice of a location in which to set the capital of the new republic. Placing it on a stretch of uninhabited wasteland on the Potomac and thus keeping it out of a central city, as a tradeoff for the votes Hamilton needed for the assumption of state debts in 1790, may have had more implications for the cultural future than anything else the Virginians did. A fragmented, polycentric, and essentially provincial culture, peculiarly innocent of a detailed and intricately shared sensibility, may well have been a consequence not wholly separable from this initial act of choice. Culture too, like government, needs a focus of authority, and cultural authority to be effective needs to function in close proximity with political, economic, and other kinds. In most civilizations that have flourished, the leading edges of each kind have been gathered in the same place, and have worked upon each other. Moreover, people have actually lived there, and in such a place government itself will take some part in conferring what legitimacy there is, in the society's system of values, on the satisfactions and worth of urban life. American civilization has had to do its flourishing without that kind of legitimacy. The Country persuasion, then, was the one that prevailed. It might appear that the principal substance of the Country option, Jeffersonian Republicanism, was a kind of extended localism and parochialism, and little more—just as Federalism ended up as little more than a kind of strident exclusivism. But that would stop well short of its full meaning for the American future. The Jeffersonian ascendancy was to have at least two latent functions, or unanticipated consequences, which would not be entirely evident until some time after the point at which the present study closes. For all its anti-commercial rhetoric—certainly from Jefferson himself—it was Jeffersonian Republicanism and not Hamiltonian Federalism that would provide the political opener for the emergence and growth of nineteenth-century middle-class capitalism in America, and for the values that accompanied it.31 The ambitious young men who in one commercial town after

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another formed the Jefferson committees early in the new century did not do so under the inspiration of any elaborate economic ideology, but in consequence of something else, which might simply be called the politics of inclusion.32 Whatever its elite sources, this other latent function of Jeffersonianism had been made necessary, and no doubt inevitable, by the earliest exigencies of opposition: a politics of recognition and welcome to all comers for which Federalism, situated as it was, could have little or no room. Here too the comparison with Great Britain, which begins with an illuminating parallel, must end with the vast differences in the reaching of our respective Revolution Settlements. The effective political nation in Britain was small and manageable; in America it was for most practical purposes universal, and manageable only in ways yet to be found. The Jeffersonians themselves did not form such a political nation, nor had they anything to do with determining its size. It was already there, waiting for them at the time of the republic's birth. The conditions for it, indeed, had been present in the very beginnings of the American colonies, in two institutional devices. One was the individual freehold, widely distributed; the other was the representative assembly, of which there was one in every colony. They resulted from choices made in England as to how to populate and run the colonies most cheaply, in preference and sharp contrast to those made by Spain, the other great colonizing power in the New World. It is true that provincial assemblies as well as local governments remained under the control of small and fairly stable cohorts of notables everywhere down to the Revolution, and that habits of deference tended to govern most of the relations between them and their constituencies. Nevertheless beneath all this—whatever the de facto distance between the dominant figures in any provincial government and the most obscure members of any assembly, or between the selectmen of any town meeting and the householder who could speak his mind there if he insisted on doing it, or between the grandees on Court Day in any Virginia county and the yeoman freeholders whose votes they courted with rum punch—there was a kind of de jure continuum that included them all, one that had been established by these two earliest institutional conditions. In the Revolution the continuum was exposed for what it potentially always was, on the one hand by the reduction of any local elite of which Loyalists had composed a part, and on the other by the flood of problems that any wartime community faced, with the claims in participation that they made on everyone. Politically those communities in 1790 were no longer quite as they had been in 1775.33 WTiat the Jeffersonians and their successors did to those communities—perhaps more pertinently, what the communities and the political nation did to them—would constitute the true basis for the Revolution Settlement and all that followed it. Politics itself became an "interest." It would have its own logic, distinct from and on a par with any other interest. Or to put it another way, when "party" and "faction" were at last scrubbed of their illegitimacy and put to more or less constructive uses, the Settlement would be complete. With this would come a final transformation of the civic humanist conception of virtue, and a tolerable resolution of the classical antithesis of liberty and power. ,28.

INTRODUCTION

The resolution would be of the need for something more than simply checking men's insatiable appetite for power, but rather for a way of directing it in the most benign and least destructive channel to be found for it, for containing and regularizing contention and faction, and for conceding, in a political nation of this magnitude, a place for the appetites of anyone, high or low, who dwelt lawfully within it. This channel would not be fully conceded, as we have said, until after the time marked by our final pages. It would be a precondition for the full satisfaction of all the other interests, admirable or otherwise, that this society would come to define for itself. And only when it was so found and conceded could it be said that "democracy" had become that society's predominant abstraction and governing value.34 Meanwhile what we attempt here is to catch the first glimpses of the forces that would push this tendency forward, and at the same time to take due account, give due weight, and accord due justice to the forces holding it back.

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C H A P T E R

I

Legitimacy

The Continental Congress did its last business on October 10, 1788, and went out of existence forever.1 The change was not "revolutionary" in any obvious sense; it had occurred without upheaval. There were no political prisoners, no bloodshed, and few of the aspects of coup d'etat which characterized even the succession of republics in post-Napoleonic France, to say nothing of many other states in the two hundred years between that time and now. But time flattens out everything, and this orderliness could be taken somewhat more for granted than it ought to be. It was only achieved in the face of resistance, and not without great exertions. The first phase of the movement for a new federal constitution had contained many elements of conspiracy, subversion, and illegal manipulation. In view of popular inertia, and inasmuch as the only effective power in the country was dispersed and located in the several states, controlled by ruling groups not at all anxious to see that power diminished, it could not have been otherwise. Initially, the energy of the movement was the energy of determined individuals rather than that of popular support and consent. The latter was not automatic, and not to be achieved in a single step. It had to be sought, cultivated, and labored after. The steps themselves could not be announced in advance, nor could they be taken more than one at a time. The initial call for a constitutional convention had been represented as being merely "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation/'2 not of doing away with them. When the Convention did meet, its sessions were conducted in utter secrecy, by delegates from twelve of the thirteen states. The procedure for ratifying the new Constitution was cleverly devised and quite outside legal boundaries, as the law then stood. It could go into effect after nine states had accepted it, as opposed to the unanimous consent required by the Articles. The machinery for "consent" was not a popular referendum. Nor was it to be given through the state legislatures, several of which would either have refused outright or strewn obstacles in its way, but rather

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THE AGE OF F E D E R A L I S M

through conventions of more or less uninstructed delegates. Two of the states did, in fact, fail to ratify; in four of the others the fight was hard and close; in all but three there was a formidable Antifederalist opposition. By the time the ninth state had ratified, as New Hampshire did on June 21, 1788, the new organic law had nominally superseded the old. But even when the tenth and eleventh—the powerful states of Virginia and New York—accepted it within the next five weeks, there was still, as yet, no New Republic. On paper, the new frame of government certainly looked stronger than the old, and ratification had made that strength at least potential. But in fact it had as yet no more power than the former one. It could not as yet make anything happen, nor could it yet restrain or coerce anyone. Not that the new Constitution was "unpopular," once its contents became generally known and more and more people had thought about it. By the end of the summer of 1788 it had probably through one means and another come to be supported, at least in an anticipatory way, by a majority of the public. But was this enough? Such support still had to make itself fully evident, acted out in the sight of all. The Federalists—the supporters of the Constitution—had been more deeply committed, had cared more, and had outmaneuvered the less energetic opposition. But the Antifederalists were still there, and the depth of their disgruntlement remained unclear; nor was it clear what, or how much, was needed to conciliate them and to neutralize the "country-party" sentiments they represented. The Constitution contained no bill of rights, and this had been a grave obstacle to ratification. One or more states might still change their minds. A legislature or two might try to undo the work of their ratifying conventions. A coalition of states might insist on a series of crippling amendments. There had even been talk of calling a second constitutional convention. And finally, if the fall elections of 1788 were to register less than wholehearted enthusiasm for the new model of national government, producing less than a decisive Federalist majority, then the new government stood little more chance of survival than the old. The problem, in short, was not simply that of acceptance, but the more fundamental one of legitimacy. It was a problem whose resolution ought to begin even before the new government was organized, and could not be seen as complete until some time after it had begun to function. This new government must have competence, authority, and respect, and all this must be believed. Meanwhile each step it took would be taken for the first time, and would thus be weighted with a double significance, symbolic as well as practical. Each of these acts, depending on how performed, would have a special bearing on the achievement of legitimacy. True, deep discords were shortly to reveal themselves within American society and within the circles of American government. But these discords would for a time be remarkably muted. The first year of the New Republic—which should for present purposes begin not in the spring of 1789 but in the fall of 1788, and extend to the fall of 1789—was to be a record of strikingly consistent success. It could be said that the key to its successes, which included virtually every decision

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it made and every step of any consequence taken during that year, is that they were the successes of legitimacy. The first elections to the new Congress would return heavy Federalist majorities. Yet since this outcome could hardly be taken for granted before it happened, the friends of the Constitution once again made great exertions. They met opposition in every state except Georgia. Nor was it apparent until after the first of the year that they would be generally successful, since all the state legislatures had to enact new electoral laws and were slow in doing so; some of the elections were not held until February and March 1789. Indeed, in the strongly Antifederalist state of New York, senators were not elected until July, owing to the paralysis of a divided legislature there, and presidential electors from that state were not chosen at all. Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina had Antifederalists in their congressional delegations. And yet viewing the Congress as a whole after the returns were finally in, the Federalists had reason to be relieved. There were no more than eleven Antifederalists out of fifty-nine representatives, and only two out of twenty senators. St. John de Crevecoeur, writing to Thomas Jefferson from New York in November 1788, could worry over "how rankly antifederal" the Assembly of Virginia had become, but as early as October 20 he had felt guardedly optimistic about most of the other states. "The murmurs of partial discontent, cloaked under what is called here antifederalism," he said, "seems now greatly to abate; there remains but one wish, which is, that those country partys may not preponderate in the choice of federal Senators and Delegates; if a majority of federalists can be obtained in those two bodies, every thing will go smoothly on/'3 In the work of persuading the public, the friends of the Constitution had shown considerably more energy than their opponents. But Federalist energy and Antifederalist inertia can explain just so much. Alongside their efforts must be placed an event which required no effort at all to bring about, the unanimous election of George Washington as first President of the United States. The Continental Congress in September had directed that presidential electors be chosen on January 7, 1789, which meant that the issuing of proclamations by state governors, the summoning of legislatures to write new electoral laws, the bringing forward of candidates, and the voting all had to take place within a very short time. These electors were chosen by popular vote in five states; in the remainder they were appointed by the legislature or, as in New Jersey, by the governor and council. Yet however chosen, each group of electors, meeting in their respective state capitols on the same day (February 4, 1789) with no direct knowledge of what any of the other delegations were doing, cast unanimous ballots for Washington. Federalist or Antifederalist, no one thought of any other person. John Adams, who was elected Vice-President, received less than half the number of votes given to Washington, the remainder being scattered among ten other candidates.4 The general expectation that Washington would be the first President, which was not seriously disputed anywhere, dated back at least to the completion of the Constitution in September 1787, and probably before. This expectation thence-

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forth underlay almost every notion that might arise regarding the great changes about to be embodied in a new national government, and it must have accounted in great part for the heavy Federalist successes in the first congressional elections. Even before that, the very process of ratifying the Constitution had been incalculably advanced—perhaps even made possible when it would otherwise not have been—by something more than simply Washington's support: the assumption that he and no other would preside over the republic created by it. But why this unquestioning unanimity? Why should the only thinkable candidate have been George Washington? He was the country's most preeminent military figure, but military figures as such were not accorded automatic deference in the ideology of the Revolutionary generation. They were just as likely to be objects of suspicion. Nor was Washington to be seen simply as an august figurehead, brought forth from retirement as a cover for the purposes of other men. It was rather that Washington's person—more pertinently, his prior career and what was known of it—represented much that was most essential not only to legitimize a republic but also to conciliate the fears, passions, and prejudices of a republican citizenry. Washington had been much more than commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Since 1775 he had been performing executive functions for the states in combination, and thus for the country as a whole, not simply in a military capacity but in one which was civil and political as well, and in a range and scope exceeding that undertaken by any other individual. These functions, moreover, had been dependent at virtually every point on a high degree of voluntary consent—the Revolution could not have been sustained otherwise—and Washington's actions were a continuing demonstration of how he was governed by this principle. He had also taken for granted that whatever powers he exercised both began and ended through the sanction of the legislative authority, and he had shown himself willing in 1783 to surrender those powers in a manner that was to all intents and purposes final. As a result Washington's authority, both direct and symbolic, had been growing for nearly fifteen years. He had in a certain sense been acting as President of the United States since 1775.

I George Washington, Republican The reasons which made the choice of George Washington as commander-inchief appear so logical even in 1775 were quite comparable to those which made a similar choice so logical in 1789. They were based in both instances on what he had made of his career prior to that time, a career exposed in an exceptional way to public scrutiny. There were elements in it which made it both representative and special, and could probably not have existed anywhere but in the province of Virginia.5 A sharp turning point, probably in some degree fortuitous, occurred in Washington's very early manhood. It had to do with his military aspirations, which were considerable, and it perhaps did as much to determine the quality of his

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subsequent life, as well as his own conception of himself, as a casual circumstance could do. We do not ordinarily recollect that Washington's achievements in the frontier warfare of the 17505 against the French were a matter of general knowledge throughout the colonies, or that his name was personally known to King George II when Washington was still in his early twenties. Distinction for bravery at Laurel Mountain and Fort Necessity, and gallant behavior as Braddock's aide-de-camp at Fort Duquesne, were already behind him by the time he had become, at twentythree, commander-in-chief of Virginia troops with the rank of colonel. It was his responsibility to protect the entire exposed line of the Virginia frontier, 350 miles long. From this time until 1758, when the French finally abandoned Fort Duquesne, permitting the British to erect Fort Pitt on its ruins, Washington's latent administrative capacities had much ungrateful material on which to test themselves. He had to deal with problems of recruitment, supply, and personnel under conditions of frustration not dissimilar to those he was to face again twentyfive years later. And yet just as important for the future was that by the end of 1758 George Washington, at the age of twenty-six, had turned away from a military career, to all intents and purposes forever, and begun what was in many ways an entirely new one. He was elected to the House of Burgesses, where he would serve for fifteen years; he resigned his commission; through the provisions of his brother's will he came into full possession of Mount Vernon; and shortly after the New Year he married Martha Custis, an amiable young widow with substantial property and two children. During the five-year period between his coming of age and his assuming the life of a gentleman planter and man of public affairs in a civilian capacity, George Washington had been intensely ambitious. He remained so, but the character and quality of his ambition henceforth underwent transformations of an intricate and interesting kind. Rather than remain an officer in the Virginia militia, Washington originally had very much wanted a regular commission in the King's forces, and had done everything within the limits of propriety to obtain one. But his claims had somehow got themselves buried in the mysterious recesses of the mid-eighteenth-century British patronage system, and with them his hopes of royal preferment. Yet Washington managed also to bury his own disappointment, and apparently without the sort of strain that might be expected in a man of normal egotism. He continued to be greatly concerned with his reputation. Yet this was now to be supported not by feats of glory but rather by the good opinion of his Virginia neighbors. Closely related to this shift in Washington's sense of what nourished a man's reputation was another shift, having to do with his grasp of just where ultimate authority was really located, in fact if not in theory, for the particular world in which he moved. It may have been mostly a change of emphasis, occurring without his fully realizing it. But the direction, in any case, would be from the throne of Great Britain, where the emphasis had once rested, to the Assembly of Virginia. We shall return to this point. Meanwhile another form of ambition, and a very consuming one, had been

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driving the young Washington even before he was out of his teens and well before his taking over Mount Vernon. He was obsessed with the idea of amassing land in the West, tremendous amounts of it, putting it all under cultivation and bringing commerce and people there. This cycle of acquisition and development began very much as the expression of a "private" self, of private ambition and private interest. He was fully determined that it should bring him wealth, possessions, and status. He would in fact expend much time and effort on this, revealing considerable executive capacities in the course of it, while some of his dealings— especially with men who seemed to get in the way of his projects and ambitions — were exceedingly sharp and even ruthless. During his military service, having already used his earnings as a surveyor to acquire several thousand acres on the Virginia frontier, he got his first sight of the rich bottom land along the rivers of western Pennsylvania. He subsequently bought fifteen thousand acres of it in the Fort Pitt area. Eventually he badgered Governor Botetourt of Virginia into making good on promises of land to the veterans of his former regiment, whereupon he proceeded, through swift action, advance surveys, and purchases of other men's bounties added to his own, to engross an inordinate amount of it—over forty thousand acres—for himself. Meanwhile his mind brimmed with designs of access and transportation by land and water, ever more extensive and detailed, which to be successful would require an ever-widening network of cooperation from neighboring communities, for opening up the western country.6 This cycle of private ambition, however, would terminate quite differently from the way it began. Time and circumstances would bring Washington to see that the rich returns he had once imagined for himself were not to materialize. Moreover, he was acquiring, layer by layer, an additional self. It was one that would preoccupy him in a multitude of other ways, even while his vision of the West, on quite another plane, remained undiminished. The two questions mentioned above, that of reputation and that of authority, with their implications, may impart a special logic to the direction George Washington's career was taking in the 17608 and 17705. In addition to continuous service in the Virginia House of Burgesses, which should be reckoned as a key constant, he served also as justice of the peace for Fairfax County, vestryman and later warden of Pohick Church in Truro Parish, and chairman of the meeting which adopted the Fairfax County Resolves of 1774. Meanwhile, as master of Mount Vernon, he accepted a status in his neighborhood which was itself quasi-public in nature. In addition to building up with considerable patience and labor what had been a depleted estate, supplementing his tobacco crop with wheat, building a flour mill, exporting fish caught in the Potomac, and adding to his holdings in the West, he took on a range of small and not-so-small responsibilities on behalf of those near and about him. They might regularly include such matters as executing a will, qualifying as guardian for a neighbor's son, counseling a tenant on problems touching the law, lending money (which for all the prudence he observed in his own handling of money, he did freely and continually), and so on. Since he had become, moreover, the most successful of the Washingtons, Mount Vernon became the base and center of all that family's many affairs and

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concerns. It was thus a man of both substance and experience, as well as the object of wide respect, who went as a delegate to the first Provincial Convention at Williamsburg in August 1774. There he was elected to go to the First Continental Congress. He went, attended the sessions faithfully, and impressed the other delegates by the unobtrusive soundness of his judgment when he chose to give it. He was elected again, and went to the Second Continental Congress in 1775. It was this body, choosing one of its own members, that elected Washington commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary forces, and the choice was unanimous. In view of the place which Washington came to occupy in the tablets of history, and in view of the man's own reserve, the question of his character, his personality, his essential being, has induced endless crises of mind in most of his biographers, especially those of the present century. The most distinguished of them, Douglas Freeman, toward the close of many years of work tempered by a restraint in keeping with the subject itself, admitted somewhat helplessly that so far as he could discover George Washington was, and had been all along, almost exactly what he appeared to be. The face in the Charles Willson Peale portrait of 1772, as Marcus Cunliffe has said, is that of an "upright man," "at peace with the world," "the master of himself and his surroundings." So he was seen, with hardly a known exception, by the other men of his time. But the differences between that time and our own, regarding both the formation of personality and the manner in which such matters were thought of and defined, are considerable. This applies to the entire world of the eighteenth century, but perhaps with a special pertinence to that of pre-Revolutionary Virginia. A point of some interest is the use that was made of the noun "character" as something objectively visible, and as something both different and more inclusive than the same term today. Washington, when he became President, would announce his intention to appoint, if possible, only "the first Characters" to high public office. The word meant either an individual or something he possessed. It still does, but the application in both senses has changed significantly. In Washington's day "character" had essentially a public meaning; it was virtually synonymous with "reputation." It also had its private side, as it does now, but the distinction between that and the public side was considerably more vague: the term "personality" was hardly needed then, and was seldom used.7 It is in this sense that the character of George Washington might not have to be regarded as quite such a mystery. The sum of what the man was could be plainly seen in the appearance he made and the acts he performed. And by the same token, "reputation" had as much to do with his own judgment of himself as with that of his community. Thus for a representative man of Washington's world and time, the allocation of energies between the private and public sides of his being seems to have been weighted a good deal more heavily toward the latter than may seem "natural" today. Among other things this may account for the greater formality of that age, as well as for the fact that two generations later, the emergence of "individualism" as an acknowledged value had to be accompanied by something of a psychic revolution. If a man was to count for anything in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia, he had

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to assume responsibility for a range of concerns and people. The society itself, as well as the aspirations available in it and the rewards it conferred, was so organized that his "private affairs" were not really private. They touched on the affairs of too many others. A wealthy planter of Washington's class presided over a domain all of whose members from the slaves on up—tenantry, neighboring yeomanry, and an extended group of kinship and cousinage—were in some way attached, directly or indirectly, as dependencies. But equally significant was that although such a man stood at the top of the social scale, he was not part of a hierarchy. Or rather, the hierarchy was peculiar in that it had no apex. His membership was in a community of peers, and for his ultimate sanctions, of whatever nature, he looked not upward but laterally. The embodiment of this system was a collectivity, the House of Burgesses, and the Burgesses in their corporate nature ratified a man's reputation. And yet before he could be one of them, he had to be elected— not by his Burgess-peers but by his neighbors, large and small, and to this extent he depended upon his dependents.8 With the culmination of the revolutionary crisis in the 17708, all the colonies embraced the idea of republicanism in a way that now seems almost automatic, and not to be explained without reference to an already long history of representative government. But it appears to have been more automatic, and in many ways more natural, in some colonies than in others. One may wonder why it is that Virginia—of all places—should have emerged so plainly as the very model of a republican commonwealth, more emphatically even than others whose social and political life was in practice more "democratic." Why should the political, the military, and the doctrinal leadership of revolutionary republicanism have been drawn so prominently from Virginia? And why should a republican character have been adopted with such relative swiftness there, with such comparative unanimity, with so little strain, and without the opposition—as in so many of the other colonies—of a Tory class of any standing or importance? Again the answer points to the House of Burgesses, and what it represented in Virginia life. The Burgesses as a group represented the social, economic, and political elite of Virginia, and its members ran the affairs of the province. They could do so in the conviction that they acted in the interests of the whole people, a conviction that appeared to be regularly ratified by elections in which a substantial proportion of the freeholders voted. Exclusively a planter elite, this group had a homogeneity of interest not found in any of the northern colonies, and of the various southern elites it was easily the oldest and stablest. This stability was reflected within the House itself in a remarkable continuity of membership, while the speakership, clerkship, and chairmanships of the standing committees were held by the same men over long periods of time. Factionalism over matters of either interest or influence was seldom the problem in the Burgesses that it often was elsewhere. But though the internal structure of the House was stable, it was certainly not rigid. Its considerable esprit de corps, made possible by security of tenure and power, created a setting in which talent could be recognized, developed, and rewarded. From time to time young men of ability might be placed on important committees, and even in chairmanships, relatively soon after their first appearance

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in the House, and over the heads of colleagues more senior in service. Thus for a variety of reasons a successful career, promoted as it had to be from within the Virginia planting gentry, required a man to win the respect and support of a company of equals. Alternative paths to success, either (as with the elite of New York) through other callings or through English connections, were relatively few in Virginia.9 As with the other colonial assemblies in the period prior to about 1760, the House of Burgesses had steadily acquired and assumed a range of prerogatives and powers having to do with finance, military policy, appointments, elections, districting, and public works. Concurrently it had built up an enormous sense of its own dignity and privileges. The result was that when those privileges and powers were challenged—as they began to be at a number of explicit points by the Crown and Parliament in the years after 1763—the response could occur with a remarkable unity of spirit. The Stamp Act drew resolutions of resistance from the Burgesses and from all over Virginia, and the man who had been appointed as stamp distributor was forced to declare before an angry mob at Williamsburg that he would proceed no further in his work "without the assent of the General Assembly of this colony/' When the Burgesses asserted, in a petition of protest over the Townshend Acts in 1768, "the right of being governed by such laws only, respecting their internal Polity and Taxation as are derived from their own Consent," the Governor dissolved them. They thereupon met illegally and adopted an agreement of non-importation, which was observed throughout the colony. After the Coercive Acts of 1774, the Burgesses ordained a day of fasting and prayer "to give us one heart and mind firmly to oppose, by all just and proper means, every injury to American rights." Each of these actions was a response to what these men, individually and collectively, could see as a challenge—a challenge in a very immediate way, to them. As was not fully the case in many other colonies, the doctrinal radicalism of, say, a Patrick Henry—who was of course a member of this same elite—could be absorbed by a variety of temperaments with a minimum of disruption. There was thus a logic to the process whereby all this could be converted into explicit republican principles, to be spelled out eventually for all the colonies by another member of this elite, Thomas Jefferson. A challenge to a representative assembly, acting for the people of Virginia, could be generalized into a threat to all the liberties of the commonwealth.10 George Washington, in the very midst of this, never questioned the necessity of resistance. Washington made something of a contrast to Patrick Henry, who spoke often, was not the best of listeners, and had a tendency to laziness. Yet his and Henry's had been essentially the same experience, and their responses, each in its way, moved to the same end. Moreover, for neither man could a setting have been more aptly designed to form the implicit, and then explicit, conviction that there could be no legitimate claim to power and obedience which did not rest upon the final sanction of legislative authority. Washington went to the First Continental Congress in 1774 in company with Patrick Henry, Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, and Edmund Pendleton. Henry fired the hearts of all with his decla-

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ration "I am not a Virginian, but an American." Washington, as always, said little but listened carefully to this and all the other proceedings. He heard long debates, and observed the mutual suspicions and clashes of interest that would have to be reconciled before a common effort was possible, but unlike a number of others he betrayed no irritation or impatience. When the Second Congress met shortly after Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775, Washington, again elected as a delegate, attended the sessions in his military uniform. This seems not to have been seen as anything beyond a symbol of his conviction that a general resort to arms was probable, and that he was ready for it. He assumed that he would command the Virginia militia. He was placed in charge of two committees and made a member of a third, all having to do with matters of defense and military stores. His judgment proved consistently good; his talent for making sound choices among a variety of alternatives showed to advantage, and he was obviously better informed on military questions than his colleagues. It quickly became apparent that if the large forces then gathering for the relief of Boston—mostly from New England but from other colonies as well—were to be kept together, Congress would have to take charge of them. And the best guarantee of support from the southern colonies would be to put a Virginian in command of them. Washington was not anxious to take the command, did not believe his abilities equal to it, and refused to accept any pay.11 But the logic of it, concerning as it did a man whose qualities everyone by then had come to know quite well, was fairly selfevident. The nomination was made by John Adams of Massachusetts, seconded by his cousin Samuel Adams, and accepted with little or no opposition. Meanwhile Washington's own acceptance rested on a curious balance consisting of his "full intention," already privately expressed, "to devote my life and fortune in the cause we are engaged in," his abhorrence of any public honor which might be open to the least suspicion of his having sought it (his reason for taking no pay), and his equal abhorrence of what his "character" might suffer from refusing to do his duty. In the early stages of Washington's experience as commander-in-chief there was something of a reversion to his youthful relish for martial exploits. He took for granted that military success required pugnacity, and assumed that the primary mission of an army was to give battle to the enemy. His conception of strategy and tactics was not overly refined; his actual training was minimal. Thus he had to depend heavily on his innate capacities of judgment, which were on the whole reliable, but did not always save him from error, even occasional rashness. Twice during the remainder of 1775 he was for throwing a direct assault against occupied Boston; both times his subordinates persuaded him otherwise. The town was eventually reduced by siege. He wanted to fight it out with Howe on Long Island in 1776, but in leaving his left flank unprotected, and then reinforcing his lines after it was too late instead of evacuating them, he nearly lost his army. His defeats at Brandywine and Germantown might have been less costly had they been fought with more caution. Yet Washington was chastened again and again by the intractable realities of both inferior strength and unpredictable support. In his military capacity he came ,40-

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to see very early that a revolutionary strategy required above all that he keep an army in being, which meant avoiding general engagements. The one exception was Yorktown, which had been carefully planned, massively organized, and fought with forces heavily superior to those of the enemy. But Washington's role was in the last analysis only partially that of a leader of troops. "He was," according to Freeman, "one-tenth field commander and nine-tenths administrator." Even this does not do justice to the variety of functions he was called upon to perform. The very nature of the Revolution, an undertaking prosecuted in varying ways by thirteen separate governments, made for an inevitable vacuum in executive presence whenever it was a question of almost any kind of concerted effort. Since Washington's army was the pivot upon which the entire effort must ultimately turn, its commander found himself in a role whose requirements went far beyond the tactical, or even the administrative. It was political as well, executive in the broadest sense.12 It even included functions of foreign as well as domestic diplomacy. He had to overcome his own provincialism. He repressed his initial distaste for the Yankee ways of his predominantly New England troops, and at the same time built a staff of bright young men from every colony. This may have had the effect of personalizing his own commitment to what was still for most people rather an abstraction, the "United States." The volume of his paperwork was enormous. He had to deal with a flood of problems involving recruitment, supply, clothing, food, and pay for his troops—which in turn required endless negotiations with committees of Congress, state governors and legislatures, and the leaders and populations of the states within which his army operated.13 In preparing for Yorktown he even had to negotiate, successfully as it turned out, for the services of the army and navy of Bourbon France. Congress, itself recognizing the executive vacuum which the revolutionary crisis made so manifest, voted Washington what amounted to dictatorial powers for a six-month period late in 1776. But these could not really be used in a dictatorial spirit, so in that sense they had little meaning. Few of the dealings Washington had with local, state, or congressional authorities, with suppliers, or even with his own troops could be realized on terms that did not involve a high degree of voluntary consent. It was the perpetual awareness of this that did as much as anything to set the limits within which Washington operated all through the war, and it formed an essential element in the restraint and self-discipline that characterized most of what he did during those years. On the other hand, the deference he showed to Congress was probably largely unforced. Respect for legislative authority had been a part of his training long before, at least since the days when he himself had been a legislator and had himself been accustomed to receiving that same respect. Moreover, Washington's actions were subjected to repeated investigations, and were more or less constantly open to public view. The opinions people formed of him and his merits, as time went on, could at least be formed from a growing body of publicly available evidence. And it was probably inevitable that Washington's very person should eventually take on a symbolic character; his personal example came both to symbolize and to reinforce a determination by a significant 41

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part of the population to see it all through to the end. The self-pride of people everywhere came to be bound up with a figure whose stature had grown, nationally and internationally, as the stature of the country and its cause had grown. The praise heaped upon Washington by his royal and noble French allies must have been deeply satisfying to any provincial American who read or heard it. "I mark, as a fortunate day," wrote one of Rochambeau's officers, "that in which I have been able to behold a man so truly great."14 Washington's restraint failed him at least once, after it was all over, when he had to take leave of his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York. It was a scene which those present remembered all their lives. No speeches were made. The Commander-in-Chief, after trying to eat some of the food and to drink the wine that had been laid out for the company, asked each of them to come up and take him by the hand. The huge Henry Knox, his chief of artillery, a onetime Boston bookseller who had been with him from the beginning, was the first. It was here that Washington's emotions, almost never displayed, seem to have got the better of him. Blinded with tears and unable to part with a mere handshake, he put his arms about Knox and kissed him. He did the same with the others, none of whom could speak; he thereupon turned, walked out the door, and strode down the wharf to Whitehall, where a barge was waiting to take him across the river. At Powles Hook he took horse for the first stage of his journey home. When he reached Annapolis, where Congress was then sitting, he presented himself briefly to that body and returned his commission. He arrived at Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve 1783. By this time, Washington's influence and renown had become immense. And yet one thinks of other societies so constituted that leadership in them can assume a character decidedly different from that of this particular career. The name of Simon Bolivar, the "Liberator," has often been linked with that of Washington. Bolivar was "the Washington of Latin America"; each man was the "savior of his country." But in reality these two present an extraordinary antithesis, and the contrast lies in the way each man conceived his own relationship to authority. Bolivar was an aristocrat, but hardly in any "Virginian" sense: he drew few if any of his social or political sanctions from his peers. All authority, and all glory and preferment, descended from the person of the King. With Napoleon's invasion of the Spanish peninsula the power of the Crown was swept away, which meant that in the New World colonies a man of towering ambition, as Bolivar was, could suddenly make his own glory and his own authority. He could fashion the role all by himself, depending solely on personal "charisma" (a term that has been applied mistakenly, and somewhat clumsily, to Washington). Like Bonaparte, whose motives and inner drives his own so much resembled, Bolivar through his military exploits made himself a king in all but name. He had the conquistador's impulse to fling aside the law, and then to redeem his acts through conquest. He treated cabildos and other legislative bodies with lofty contempt. He wrote and promulgated his own constitutions. Though he was capable of strong affections, his personality was actually quite self-sufficient; thanks to his egotism it had little need to depend upon others, a principle that applied to all his military and .42.

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political subordinates as well as to his mistresses. He recognized no peers, least of all the other great revolutionary leaders of Latin America. He detested San Martin, the liberator of Peru, who was doing all the same things there that he himself had done in Venezuela, and it was Bolivar who delivered Miranda over to the Spaniards. Truth served him in much the way it served Bonaparte. He pretended to be a republican while hoping to reconstitute the Empire under himself. "Have no fears about the colored people," he once told a confidant. "I flatter them because I need them; democracy on my lips, and"—pointing to his heart—"aristocracy here." In the relationships that define authority, the two "Washingtons" were as far apart as were the two worlds in which they moved.15 Even after Washington's "retirement," which followed his having divested himself of all formal authority, he continued to function as a kind of moral executive. Mount Vernon swarmed with visitors of all ranks, seeking his opinions and soliciting his advice. As early as the spring of 1784 he found himself once more involved in an affair of national concern. Bitter attacks on the Order of the Cincinnati— the recently formed society of Revolutionary officers—as a "foreign conspiracy" (because of its French members) and as a "perpetual aristocracy" (because of its hereditary membership), led Washington as president-general to recommend sweeping changes in its structure and rules so that all causes for offense might be removed.16 Then, a visit to the headwaters of the Ohio in the fall of 1784 to look into the state of his landholdings in that area proved to be the first in a chain of events which culminated less than three years later in his presiding over the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia. Once again, private concerns found themselves almost unwittingly absorbed into public ones as Washington's interest was drawn first to problems of water transportation to the West, and eventually to the entire range of limitations which prevented the Confederation government from doing anything effective in categories of action of which commerce was but one. Plans for improving the navigation of the Potomac, first undertaken in Virginia under Washington's direct inspiration, broadened to include the participation of Maryland. An agreement upon such lines was concluded in the spring of 1785 at Mount Vernon. This in turn led to the Annapolis Convention of September 1786, called to discuss matters of common commercial concern, and attended by delegates from five states. It had been hoped that all thirteen would be represented. The impotence of the Confederation had by this time become apparent, and the report of the Annapolis meeting, drafted by Alexander Hamilton, included a proposal for a general convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. A year before, Washington had already written: "Illiberality, jealousy, and local policy mix too much in all our public councils for the good government of the Union. In a word, the confederation appears to me to be little more than a shadow without the substance. . . ,"17 This judgment seemed more than confirmed in the winter of 1786-87 by Shays's Rebellion, the debtors' uprising in western Massachusetts which convinced Washington that a government unable either to redress popular grievances or to maintain civil order was no government at all.

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Washington did not want to go to Philadelphia in May 1787, and finally did so only with the greatest reluctance. He is sometimes pictured as having been pushed into it by the leading spirits of the constitutional movement, among whom Hamilton and Madison were prominent, playing upon his fears of anarchy in New England. But this somewhat misrepresents Washington's own initiative, and the public implications of virtually every move he had made since relinquishing his commission. There were actually two lines of effort, ending at Philadelphia but having in effect merged well before. The better-known one is that with which the names of Hamilton and Madison are primarily associated, the single-minded determination to set up an entirely new frame of government. The other was the movement to extend inland water transportation westward, of which the leading exponent was Washington himself. The major steps taken in this direction—the passage of legislation, the chartering of stock companies, the calling of conventions—were taken on Washington's initiative and in deference to his known desires. They could probably not have been taken otherwise. "The earnestness with which he espouses the undertaking is hardly to be described," wrote Madison to Jefferson in January 1785, "and shows that a mind like his, capable of great views, and which has long been occupied with them, cannot bear a vacancy."18 Back of all this was the extent to which Washington's "character" —in the word's special eighteenth-century meaning—had been committed by eight and a half years of public toil to the success of the Revolution and of a united country. It was as though any sign that things were not as he had conceived they ought to become—any indication of fundamental discontent, of tumults, of unwillingness or incapacity to promote designs for the common benefit—somehow reflected on him, and was in some way his responsibility. In this sense Washington never "retired" at all. He never relinquished his leadership, and though it would not do to represent each of the steps toward Philadelphia as having been taken first by Washington, it would hardly be wrong to say that most of them had been marked out by his example, and taken under his aegis. When the moment arrived, he was universally assured that success was not thinkable without his presence. For all his reluctance, he could give himself no satisfactory reasons for staying away. When he arrived, he was unanimously elected president of the Convention. The emergence of the American presidency under George Washington as an effective executive force—considering the grasp of the role which Washington himself was to show, as well as the disorganization and suspicion that characterized the country just prior to his assuming it—may contain an element of the fortuitous. Yet it seems rather less so in view of Washington's extraordinarily long preparation for the role—much longer, and more thorough, it would appear, than that of any of his successors. The final rehearsal came at Philadelphia. There, for four long months, the best minds in the country spelled out for Washington in great detail what the country thought it needed in the way of executive authority, the limits on that authority which the country might be expected to insist on, the range of alternatives that were open as well as of those that were not open, and the theoretical and historical principles which might justify the right choices as well as warn against the wrong ones. Washington, listening intently as always, was ,44.

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given as comprehensive a course of lectures on all these matters as could be obtained at another seat of learning anywhere, at any time.19 Yet for Washington this was not simply a matter of instruction. Much of it was in the nature of a reminder as well, a codification both of what he already knew and of what he himself had already done. For most of the delegates were aware, even as they spoke, that the man whose theoretical attributes they were defining was in fact sitting before them. Most of them assumed, even then, that Washington would be the Executive. The balance they struck was almost certainly arrived at with reference—other than George III, they had no point of reference— to what they already knew of Washington. What they decided, in short, was whether the strength they wanted, as well as the restraint, were to be found in Washington, and whether the weakness they feared, or the despotism they abhorred, were likely to appear under Washington's hand. The executive powers, Pierce Butler wrote, would probably not have been so great "had not many of the members cast their eyes toward General Washington as President; and shaped their Ideas of the Powers to be given to a President, by their opinions of his Virtue."20 Washington's journey from Mount Vernon to New York in the spring of 1789 for his inauguration, despite his own efforts to make it as unostentatious as possible, proved to be a stirring eight-day processional, in the course of which the people of six states symbolically witnessed and ratified what they and their representatives had done. The General departed by coach on April 16, was given a civic dinner at Alexandria, crossed the Potomac, and was escorted into Baltimore by the First Maryland Infantry and given the honors of the city. Further honors met him at Wilmington. At the Pennsylvania line he was greeted by a delegation headed by the chief executive of the state, and after another grand dinner and parade at Philadelphia he was accompanied to Trenton by the City Troops of Horse. The bridge over Assunpink Creek, where he and his Continentals had resisted the British advance in January 1777, was now decked in greenery, and its approaches were lined with young women in white costume strewing flowers in the hero's path and singing an ode composed in his honor. There were civic ceremonies at Princeton, New Brunswick, and Elizabethtown. The booming of cannon signaled his approach to every town along the way, and at several of them the General had to quit his coach and mount a handsome horse that had been put at his disposal for the occasion. (He made a good figure, being one of the best horsemen of his day.) On the 23rd a decorated barge brought him across Newark Bay and into New York Harbor. There salutes were fired, and upon that signal every vessel in the harbor broke out flags. The city had stopped work amid the ringing of bells, and the waterfront was packed with thousands of cheering citizens. "All ranks and professions expressed their feelings, in loud acclamations, and with rapture hailed the arrival of the Father of his Country." The day ended with a dinner at the house of the Governor.21 Washington, emotionally spent, had just been the central figure in an extended rite, eight days long and spontaneously performed, of legitimacy. A week later at Federal Hall, on an open portico overlooking Wall Street, he underwent another.

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Robert R. Livingston, Chancellor of the State of New York, administered the oath of office. When he had finished, the Chancellor turned to the people with a wide, exulting gesture of his arm and cried: "Long live George Washington, President of the United States!" 2

Roman Simplicity For about three weeks, beginning with the day of Washington's arrival in New York, the attention of the Senate and House of Representatives, and to some extent of Washington himself, was occupied with a problem which caused no little stir at the time, but which has not agitated any subsequent American government. This was the general question of titles, ceremony, and official etiquette. By the middle of May 1789, most aspects of it had been settled with such finality that they never needed to be reopened. Yet the warmth that attended these discussions and debates was such that they came to occupy a peculiar place in nearly every history of the time that has since been written. The proportion which the episode properly ought to have thus remains something of a question. The proportion which it does have, on the other hand, would not be what it is were it not for the influence of two specific individuals, both very strong-minded, one of them being John Adams, the Vice-President, and the other William Maclay, the senator from Pennsylvania. The two men quarreled publicly over titles and other matters of style and procedure. Most of the evidence on the quarrel comes from one of the participants, the fullest record we have of it being the personal journal of Senator Maclay. Neither of the two shows to good advantage here. In insisting on the propriety of titles, Adams laid himself open to charges, which he never fully lived down, of secretly favoring monarchy. As presiding officer of the Senate, and thus to some degree responsible for the etiquette and procedure with which the Presidentelect was to be received and the affairs of government set in motion, Adams somewhat resembled a nervous hostess anxious that everything should be just so. Moreover, he appears to have abused his prerogatives to the point of breaking in frequently upon other members with his own views, which he gave in the form of little lectures. Maclay was equally trying. He too was something of a hairsplitter; and being from the frontier region of Pennsylvania he tended to be suspicious on principle of seaboard influence, particularly that of Massachusetts. He was one of those, to be met at almost any meeting, who are always rising to points of order. He and Adams between them took up a large share of the Senate's time, and one clue to the senators' votes during this interlude may very well be simply the balance of their irritation with the one and indulgence with the other as it shifted back and forth. On April 23, upon Adams's instigation, the Senate appointed a committee to confer with the House on "what style or titles it will be proper to annex to the office of President and Vice President of the United States," and how the forth-

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coming inauguration ceremonies ought to be conducted. The next day Maclay tried to get the part about titles thrown out, but was voted down. Adams wanted to know whether the Speaker of the House should be addressed as "Honorable"; the Senate voted No. On the 25th Adams asked the Senate in which of his capacities—as President of the Senate or as Vice-President of the United States — he ought to receive the President. Nobody was certain, and Maclay heaped ridicule upon Adams in his diary. Whether he did so publicly is not a matter of record, though he noted, "I was up as often as I believe was necessary." On April 30, the day of the inauguration, Adams was in a great fret. "The President will, I suppose, address the Congress. How shall I behave? How shall we receive it? Shall it be standing or sitting?" It was apparently decided, after some confusion, that they should stand while the President addressed them. When Washington finally appeared, the Vice-President stumbled over his phrases of welcome, and even forgot for a moment what he had planned to say. Maclay was pained by the President's own awkwardness in delivering his inaugural remarks. When the ceremony was over, a Senate committee was appointed to prepare a reply.22 When the minutes were read next morning, Maclay—since the other members seemed less than fully attentive—thought he should as a matter of principle object to the words "his most gracious speech," and did so strenuously. He insisted that these words (which Adams had directed the secretary to use) were the same as those customarily applied to a speech from the British throne. Adams, greatly displeased, saw nothing objectionable in them, but after some argument the Senate decided to strike them out. Another question that had been agitating both houses was the manner of transmitting messages back and forth between them, and whether the messenger should make "obeisances" coming in and gding out. A Senate resolution of the 23rd had specified that he should, but the House in derision struck out the obeisances. The Senate did not insist. Meanwhile President Washington had been trying to decide how to draw the line between his public and private social life, and had been making somewhat furtive requests for advice. (Senator Maclay, already notorious for his tirades against pomp and ceremony, was delicately sounded out on this point by General Arthur St. Clair, acting on behalf of the President.) Then in a debate on May 7 over the Senate's proposed reply to the President's speech, Maclay moved to strike out a reference to the "dignity and splendor" of the government. The Senate voted to leave it in, while Adams exulted. And it was during these same few days that the whole question of titles was brought to a head.23 On May 5 a joint committee of the House and Senate reported that it was "not proper to annex any style or title to [those] expressed in the Constitution." The House immediately accepted the report, but on the 8th the Senate rejected it and began a lively debate which went on until the i4th. The Vice-President and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia were the strongest exponents of titles, Lee insisting that "all the world, civilized and savage," had to have them. Maclay was up constantly, declaring that it was "impossible to add to the respect entertained for General Washington," and that the President of the United States needed no other title. Adams, in one of his many interruptions from the chair, sourly

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remarked that the mere word "president" made him think of the president of a fire company or a cricket club, and that dignity required something more. A new Senate committee on titles was thereupon appointed, which promptly reported in favor of the title "His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties."24 The Senate asked the House for a conference committee to take up the question anew, and on the nth, after debate, the House agreed. But when the committee met, the House members would still have nothing to do with titles. Thus on May 14 the Senate, "desirous of preserving harmony with the House of Representatives," finally voted that "To the President of the United States/ without addition of title," should be the proper address. At no point during the entire affair had Washington himself given any hint of his wishes (if he had, Maclay observed in his journal, "I would have heard it"), but he did unburden himself about it afterward. "The truth is," Washington wrote in a private letter, the question was moved before I arrived, without any privity or knowledge of it on my part, and urged after I was apprized of it contrary to my opinion; for I foresaw and predicted the reception it has met with, and the use that would be made of it by the adversaries of the government. Happily the matter is now done with, I hope never to be revived.25

It was, in fact, never revived. Nor was the outcome, for all the momentary see-sawing, ever in much real doubt. What had governed just about everyone was a principle which gave a strong accent to the ideology of the Revolution: the austere simplicity of the Roman Republic. The imagery of the Latin classics had penetrated their lives, words, thoughts, and acts in endless ways ever since they could remember. The almanacs of the day, with lines from Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, had sung the praises of virtuous husbandry. The chief propagandists of the Revolution had been classical scholars, and had signed their tracts with classical pseudonyms. The non-importation agreements had been supported by the symbolism of Roman frugality and abstinence. The entire literature of the Revolution was permeated with the imagery of republican Rome menaced by the approaching shadow of the Caesars, and it was thus appropriate that in the Constitutional Convention appeal should repeatedly be made to the history of the ancient republics. The very nomenclature of government—"president," "senate," "congress" — as well as the official iconography, the mottoes of state, even the architecture, would all be heavily Roman. Somehow their behavior ought to be Roman too. James Madison (whose expression, according to one observer, "was that of a stern Censor") said on the day titles were debated for the last time in the House of Representatives, "The more simple, the more Republican we are in our manners, the more rational dignity we shall acquire."26 The epitome of the Roman citizen, logically, was Washington himself. He was hardly unaware of this, having in fact been playing the role for years. By this time the parallels between Washington's own life and those of the great heroes of the Roman Republic, Cincinnatus, Fabius, and Cato, had been proclaimed again and again. In his youth he had read Addison's Cato with Sally Fairfax; years later he ,48.

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had the play performed for his troops at Valley Forge; by then, people were saying he was Cato. It was the military tactics of George Washington that first brought the adjective "Fabian" into the English language. And when the war was over he became Cincinnatus, and returned to his plough. "You have often heard him likened to Cincinnatus," wrote Brissot de Warville after a visit to Mount Vernon in 1788; "the Comparison is accurate. This famous general is now merely a good countryman entirely devoted to the care of his farm. . . ." Three years later the young Chateaubriand met Washington, after having caught a glimpse of him out driving with a coach and four, and wondering whether that was quite the proper transportation for Cincinnatus. "However, when I presented to him my letter of introduction I recognized the simplicity of the old Roman."27 In addition to simplicity, the personal style of the Executive had to allow for both dignity and duty. Finding the right balance was perplexing, and Washington thought it prudent to make some private soundings before he finally struck it. Should he appear at parties? Make visits? Give entertainments? Receive calls? Under what circumstances, and how often? How was he to protect his working time? During the opening days, he said, "I should have been unable to have attended to any sort of business unless I had applied the hours allotted to rest and refreshment to this purpose." Perhaps he ought to give no invitations at all, nor receive any. "But to this I had two objections: . . . first the novelty of it I knew would be considered as an ostentatious show of mimicry of sovereignty; and secondly that so great a seclusion would have stopped the avenues to useful information from the many, and make me more dependent on that of the few; but to hit on a discriminating medium was found more difficult than it appeared to be at first view. ..." He finally decided to make no calls, accept no invitations, and give no large entertainments, but to go to the theater occasionally and to hold one hour-long levee a week, asking a few of the guests each time to remain for dinner. A contemporary account of one of these levees—which seem to have been rather grave affairs — describes the President as dressed in black velvet; his hair in full dress, powdered and gathered behind in a large silk bag; yellow gloves on his hands; holding a cocked hat with cockade in it, and the edges adorned with a black feather about an inch deep. He wore knee and shoe buckles; and a long sword, with a finely wrought and polished steel hilt, which appeared at the left hip; the coat worn over the sword, so that the hilt, and the part below the folds of the coat behind, were in view. The scabbard was white polished leather. He stood always in front of the fire-place, with his face towards the door of entrance. . . . He received his visitor with a dignified bow, while his hands were so disposed of as to indicate, that the salutation was not to be accompanied with shaking hands. This ceremony never occurred in these visits, even with his most near friends, that no distinction might be made. As visitors came in, they formed a circle around the room. At a quarter past three, the door was closed, and the circle was formed for that day. He then began on the right, and spoke to each visitor, calling him by name, and exchanging a

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few words with him. When he had completed his circuit, he resumed his first position, and the visitors approached him in succession, bowed and retired. By four o'clock this ceremony was over.28

In addition there would be a period in each day when callers might see the President on official business. With this regime, as Freeman puts it, "he did not seek the glorification of his office but the simplification of his work."29 Thus the Roman standard in public conduct required both simplicitas and dignitas, and here there was no disagreement on fundamentals.30 Even in the debate over titles, both sides had used "Roman" arguments, one claim being that the Romans had not used titles, the other that they had. What about Vir amplissimus, Vir Clarissimus, Vir amplissimus Consul, Vir Summus? "These," expostulated John Adams, "were familiar among them in the simplest times . . . [and] I say farther that Patres Conscripti was an higher Title than my Lords. . . ."31 So everyone was more or less Roman. George Washington ranked first, and John Adams was the next Roman below him. Adams "always wrote for the public," according to Howard Mumford Jones, "as if he had a toga on." It was just that John Adams, like a fair number of others, was not as yet certain how long this particular republic would last. Some visible mark of distinction, conferred upon a few of its leading officers, might cause the people to accord it greater veneration. A majority of those who considered it, however, seem to have decided that the legitimacy Adams was reaching for would have to be achieved in less direct ways.32

3 The Executive Establishment

In the beginning there were no executive departments—no Treasury, no State Department, no War Department, or any others—nor was there any clear idea what such departments might be like once they were organized, or who would really control them, or to whom they would be finally responsible. The Constitution had said nothing about any of those questions, and there was no automatic way of settling them. Before Congress had confronted them and debated them, before specific enactments had been made, and before clear standards had been established for appointing anyone to office, the pervasive suspicions of the Revolutionary era—rooted in what the Americans had known of British politics — might have overflowed and caused the problem to be settled in any of several ways. Fears of executive power, and especially the corruptions of the British patronage system which had undermined the virtue of the English nation, were at the core of what had seemed to make the Revolution necessary. Such questions, facing the Americans all over again, were therefore not to be disposed of lightly. Moreover, the principles upon which they were finally settled would not have had the clarity they were eventually given were it not for the intellectual and parlia-

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mentary leadership of James Madison, the thirty-eight-year-old congressman from Virginia. It is sometimes assumed that the initial decision to define cabinet officers as the President's assistants, responsible to him and for whose acts he in turn took responsibility—rather than as ministers whose functions to some extent rivaled his own—was simply up to Washington, and was made by him. This is only partially true. The departments first had to be established, and it was up to Congress to decide at whose pleasure, and under what conditions, the head of each of them would hold office. Meanwhile the departmental officers of the old Continental Congress of the Confederation—John Jay as Secretary of Foreign Affairs, the members of the Treasury Board, and Henry Knox as Secretary of War—would have to carry on ad interim as holdovers. They would do this until September 1789, and in one case until March 1790. On May 19, 1789, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, after an extended debate on the tariff, proposed that Congress establish a Department of Finance. Egbert Benson of New York shifted this to the prior question of all the departments, and of which ones ought to be established. He suggested Foreign Affairs, Treasury, and War. It was at this point that Madison took charge of the question. He agreed that all the departments should be organized. But knowing exactly what he wanted, and realizing that to discuss the Treasury first would be to open the debate on the most potentially controversial of any department, Madison opened with a proposal for a "Department of Foreign Affairs, at the head of which there shall be an officer, to be called the Secretary to the Department of Foreign Affairs, who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate; and to be removable by the President." The phrase "removable by the President," as Madison well knew, was the key to everything else. If the Senate's advice and consent were required for removal as well as for appointment, or if the only other way was by impeachment, then the entire relationship of the President to the heads of departments would be profoundly altered. Madison argued, moreover, that the President's removal power should not be regarded as having been conferred by legislative grant, but simply acknowledged, since it had been there all along, already inherent in the Constitution.33 After long debate, Madison carried his point. But the matter did not end there. In the Senate, the question was complicated not only by the usual suspicions of executive power but also by jealousy of the Senate's own prerogatives and a feeling that the House was bent on cutting them down. (There had already been a touch of this in the fight over titles.) Maclay was convinced that Madison was at the head of a plot to control the Executive himself and to "exalt the President above the Constitution, and depress the Senate below it." The Senate's vote on the removal power, which could not be taken until July 16, resulted in a tie. Much to Maclay's chagrin, it was broken by the casting vote of the Vice-President, and the House's position was sustained.34

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The same battle, in more complicated form, occurred over the organization of the Treasury. There was the question of whether that department ought to be headed by a single person, or by a board as had been the previous practice. There was also the problem, more acute than in the case of foreign affairs, of how extensive the Treasury's functions, power, and authority should be, if exercised by one man, in a realm that included the nation's finances, revenues, and credit. Madison again took the lead in urging that the department, under a single Secretary, be allowed the maximum power and energy consistent with the President's ultimate control under the removal power. He won his point that a treasury board would divide responsibility and dilute energy, but there were vigorous objections to the proposal that the Secretary should "digest and report plans for the improvement and management of the revenue, and the support of the public credit," that being a power rightfully belonging to Congress. But the eventual compromise— that the Secretary would "digest and prepare" such plans—turned out to be not very different. Once more the Senate showed its intransigence. It wanted, as before, to limit the President's removal power by its own advice and consent; Madison, in announcing this to the House, recommended that the House refuse the change, which it did; and on August 25 the Senate reluctantly agreed. Again the vote was a tie, and again the tie was broken by Vice-President Adams.35 At what point Madison knew that his friend Alexander Hamilton would be the first Secretary, and to what extent, if any, Hamilton himself had a hand in this legislation, is unknown. But Madison had in any case won at every point, and Hamilton, in retrospect, gives every appearance of having been the man the post was designed for. He was nominated by the President on September n, 1789, was confirmed by the Senate on the same day, and assumed the duties of office immediately. The next day the nomination of Henry Knox, who had been reappointed as Secretary of War, was also confirmed. Thomas Jefferson, Washington's choice to be Secretary of State (that department's functions had been enlarged, and its name changed from "Foreign Affairs"), was nominated on September 25 and confirmed on the 26th. In Jefferson's case, it was not to be until March 22, 1790, that the new Secretary would assume charge of his department. With respect to the President, another ambiguity left over from the Philadelphia Convention had been clarified. The Constitution had already provided for a strong and independent Executive. Now, once his Secretaries had been appointed and approved, he was to have full control over them. They were to be unquestionably "his."36 The next stage in legitimizing his administration—of so filling the various positions therein as to win for it the support of the country at large—was now up to him. Here too, there was more than one way he might have gone about it. Standards for the making of appointments were neither automatic nor self-evident. They had to be consciously chosen. One visible precedent was to be found in the history of eighteenth-century England. Seventy-five years earlier, Sir Robert Walpole had deliberately and successfully used the royal patronage to bring a high degree of stability to English political life. Patronage involved money and perquisites; more important, it involved power and influence. By a purposeful distribution of offices, the precise

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value of each of which could be measured, graded, and thus generally understood, Walpole in the 17205 and 17305 did much to bring an end to the debilitating struggles for power between Whig and Tory aristocracy that had kept English politics and government in a chronic state of disruption for some years after the Glorious Revolution. The interlocking system of status, place, and power among the aristocracy and gentry which he created by this means came ultimately to be known as the "Establishment," the governing class of England, something that had never existed before on quite so orderly a basis. The offices used in its formation—everything from doorkeeperships, stewardships, Church deaneries, army and navy commissions, baronetcies, and colonial governorships to membership in the Privy Council—enabled Walpole to stabilize political behavior both in the local constituencies and at court, and thus to guarantee stable majorities year after year in the House of Commons.37 This was well and good, except that it also created, as we have seen, around the outer fringes of politics and beyond the pale, the Country mentality, the psychology of the outsider. Disaffected Tory squires, "independent Whigs," habitues of the London coffee-houses — all despised the "Robinarchy" and denounced its corruption, its luxury, its rotten boroughs, and its armies of placemen, relatives, and parasites. It was a mentality, meanwhile (as we have also seen), to which the American colonies were peculiarly susceptible: by and large, the fundamentals of their own political understanding rested not on the Court but on the Country attitude.38 From out of their past experience, therefore, "patronage" to Americans was a highly sensitive subject. At almost every point where the British patronage system—so inscrutably sinister in its mysteries—touched their affairs, as it did with royal governors, customs officials, and military garrisons, there was built-in trouble. In their experience, patronage appeared always as something that was controlled by somebody else, over whom anyone they knew was powerless; and in their imagination the power that could, in turn, be wielded through patronage was all but limitless, and mostly evil. It was against this background, and all the prejudices and suspicions created by it, that George Washington in 1789 had to decide how to distribute offices in the Federal Republic.39 He could, of course, go to the opposite extreme, and use his power of appointment not to reward friends and punish enemies, but to place the ablest men he could find in each office at his disposal. In one sense this is what he did, or tried to do, and he would in fact defend his practice on just such grounds. But Washington's alternatives may not be conceived in terms so simple, and he himself did not so regard them. The standard of expertise, of pure technical competence, individual training and individual ability—the "merit system" as seen by the civil service reformers of a later day—still fell a good deal short of what Washington required of his appointees. He wanted more than simply "merit" in this sense; he most typically referred not to the "best men" but to the "first Characters." These were not incompatible, but they were not the same either. In one sense Washington's problem was really not so different from Walpole's, in that his appointments too had to serve broader purposes going beyond the

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simple filling of an office, and being essentially political in nature. He, too, was concerned with the manner in which his patronage might or might not bind loyalty to his government. But the materials with which he had to work in effecting this purpose were altogether different. The basic units of power with which he had to deal and make terms were not leading families, but local communities. "First Characters" were men who by virtue of their abilities and records of public service stood first, as it were, in the respect of their neighbors. Washington in effect had to deal with a set of quasi-autonomous republics, and republics within republics. Until the officials appointed to function in a given community should be acceptable to that community—as measured by the reputation they had already made there, and thus by claims superior to those of other candidates—the federal government itself would not have attained full legitimacy in these places. "It is the nature of Republicans, who are nearly in a state of equality," Washington wrote, to be extremely jealous as to the disposal of all honorary or lucrative appointments. Perfectly convinced I am, that, if injudicious or unpopular measures should be taken by the Executive under the New Government with regards to appointments, the Government itself would be in the utmost danger of being utterly subverted by those measures. So necessary is it, at this crisis, to conciliate the good will of the People: and so impossible is it, in my judgment, to build the edifice of public happiness, but upon their affections.

Two years later, Washington's Postmaster-General observed: "An office which in its execution is confined to a particular state, ought to be exercised by a citizen of that state. In like manner an office which especially regards a county or a town, should be held by an inhabitant of such county or town—if it afford a person qualified to execute it. This principle has evidently governed the President of the U. States in his appointments."40 A geographic distribution of the higher offices, Supreme Court and cabinet, was adhered to with some nicety. The balance of Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia in the cabinet gave general satisfaction, as did that of six states on the Supreme Court, whose first Chief Justice was John Jay of New York. But in all the offices—these and the 3^o-odd others Washington filled—the fundamental standard was that of "first character ship." Presumptive evidence for it was to be found in personal merit, talent, and prior public service—in the same office under the Confederation, in elected office, or in some capacity, military or civil, during the Revolution—all of which added up to what Washington most wanted for his appointees, the esteem of their fellow-citizens. It was summed up in the reasons he gave for nominating as Naval Officer of the Port of Savannah a certain Benjamin Fishbourn, who, he told the Senate, "must have enjoyed the confidence of the militia Officers in order to have been elevated to a military rank; the confidence of the Freemen to have been elected to the Assembly; the confidence of the Assembly to have been selected for the Council; and the confidence of the Council to have been appointed Collector of the Port of Savannah." 41 Thus it was that the ties of family—which had been vital in binding the British

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system together—would be of limited value in constructing the far more tenuous web of loyalty that would have to do in America. No primary claims could be made upon such ties; quite the reverse; these were actually to be avoided in the making of appointments, and were thus a downright liability. Washington's nephew Bushrod discovered this for himself in the summer of 1789 when his uncle informed him: You cannot doubt my wishes to see you appointed to any office of honor or emolument in the new government, to the duties of which you are competent; but however deserving you may be of the one you have suggested, your standing at the bar would not justify my nomination of you as Attorney to the Federal district Court in preference of some of the oldest, and most esteemed General Court lawyers in your own State, who are desirous of this appointment. My political conduct in nominations, even if I was uninfluenced by principle, must be exceedingly circumspect and proof against just criticism, for the eyes of Argus are upon me, and no slip will pass unnoticed that can be improved into a supposed partiality for friends or relatives.42

Forty-eight years before, an outraged Sir Robert Walpole had exclaimed in the House of Commons: Has my conduct been different from that which others in the same station would have followed? Have I acted wrong in giving the place of auditor to my son, and in providing for my own family? I trust that their advancement will not be imputed to me as a crime, unless it shall be proved that I placed them in offices of trust and responsibility for which they were unfit.43

Washington had protected himself from all this; indeed, his protection was already there, in his having to deal with a political community quite different from that of Walpole. Here, old Roman republican standards were not only appropriate; in a way they were unavoidable. His favors were to be bestowed on the basis not of noblesse oblige but of civic virtue. 4 Advise and Consent

On Saturday, August 22, 1789, President Washington appeared in the Senate chamber, accompanied by Secretary of War Knox, to ask the Senate's approval for the project of a treaty he wished to negotiate with the Southern Indians. Senator Maclay in his journal gives the impression that this was done precipitously, on less than a day's notice, that the effect of it was to embarrass and overawe the senators, and that he, Maclay, rescued them from their discomfiture by insisting that the matter be deferred until they could give it mature and uncoerced consideration. Washington, his dignity affronted, left in a state of high displeasure, having been balked of his intention to "tread on the necks of the Senate." According to another story, the President "said he would be damned if he ever went there again."44 55

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The truth of the first story is partial; for the second, the evidence is dubious. But the incident did occur. It occurred, however, after the President and the Senate had each been considering for more than two weeks the entire question of oral communication between them, and had fully agreed upon a procedure. During these same two weeks the Senate had been in full possession of the facts regarding the Indian troubles, and was fully aware that a treaty was being contemplated. Moreover, Washington did go back again, at which time (two days later) the Senate agreed to everything he had asked for, though it is true that such a method of consultation was abandoned after that. Still, the affair is instructive, whatever its exact details, because of its nature as both a positive and negative precedent. Some procedures need to be acted out before their unworkability becomes fully apparent, and the unintended consequences then become themselves a kind of precedent. In this case a new clarity was given to the idea of the Senate's "advice and consent," and a new depth of refinement not only to the nature of executive-legislative relations but also to the nature of the presidency itself. The President was not to be precisely a sovereign, but even less was he to be a prime minister.45 Washington at this time still assumed that he ought to seek the Senate's advice and consent before embarking upon any diplomatic negotiations which would result in the making of a treaty. That was what the wording of the Constitution seemed to require. How it should be done, however, remained unclear, and it was the Senate that took the first steps to explore the question. On August 6 a committee was appointed to "confer with [the President] on the mode of communication proper to be pursued between him and the Senate, in the formation of treaties, and making appointments to office." The committee met twice with Washington, who, between times, asked Madison for advice on what position he ought to take. At the first meeting, he felt that oral communications were "indispensably necessary; because in these treaties a variety of matters are contained, all of which not only require consideration, but some of them may undergo much discussion; to do which by written communications would be tedious without being satisfactory." At the second meeting, he was less sure. Perhaps they should sometimes be oral, at other times written. The committee was quite satisfied to do it any way the President wished, and its report to this effect was agreed to by the Senate. It was against this background that Washington on August 21 sent his message announcing that he would "meet the Senate, in the Senate Chamber, at half-past eleven o'clock to-morrow, to advise with them on the terms of the treaty to be negotiated with the Southern Indians."46 When the President and General Knox duly appeared, and all had taken their places, it quickly became apparent that something was wrong. For one thing, it was hard to hear much that was said, since there was considerable noise outside from carriages clattering up and down the street. Washington had put a great deal of work into his presentation, and thought he had digested it all into the simplest possible terms, in the form of a short paper containing the background of the Indian problem, together with seven questions upon which he wished the Senate's advice and consent. It was read to the Senate by Vice-President Adams,

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who seems to have gone through it with undue haste. Robert Morris thereupon apologized for not having heard it all, because of the noise in the street, and asked that the paper be read again. So it was read again, after which the VicePresident immediately re-read the first question (making this the third time) and concluded by putting the question, "Do you advise and consent, etc.?" There was a dead silence, nobody knowing quite what to say. Nerves must have been frayed enough already when Senator Maclay, who could always be counted upon to make difficulties, rose from his seat and asked for a reading of all the prior treaties and other related documents. "It is our duty," he announced, "to inform ourselves as well as possible on the subject." This took up more time. When it came around again to the first question, which was about the Cherokees (this was now the fourth time it had been read), someone suggested that a messenger from that area, expected momentarily, might provide more information. At this point Washington, with what patience he could muster, said he had no objection to that question's being postponed. They got no farther than the second question, when a long and laborious discussion arose over whether they were really going about the business in the right way after all. Though some members had already begun to grumble, Maclay nevertheless made another speech, in which he argued that it should all be referred to a select committee, who would then make a report. By now Washington had had enough. As I sat down [Maclay wrote], the President of the United States started up in a violent fret. "This defeats every purpose of my coming here," were the first words that he said. He then went on that he had brought his Secretary of War with him to give every necessary information; that the Secretary knew all about the business, and yet he was delayed and could not go on with the matter.

He then cooled down, and said he would be satisfied to have the question postponed until the following Monday. Nothing more was said about a committee; the President and Secretary Knox withdrew, and the Senate adjourned for the weekend. On Monday morning he reappeared, this time relaxed and serene, and the Senate agreed to all the remaining points of his project. But no further sessions of this sort were held, either by Washington or by any succeeding President.47 The full implications of this episode were latent, and not immediately discerned. In retrospect, one of the more obvious ones was that this was a first step in discovering the drawbacks of open prior consultation, on any terms, in matters of diplomacy. Washington would continue for a time to communicate in writing with the Senate before making treaties, but this too was eventually abandoned when, in the delicate state of international affairs which emerged in the 17908, secrecy of negotiation came to be seen as indispensable. This difficulty would have emerged in any case. But it was already becoming apparent that the operative term was "consent," not "advise," and that the latter term constituted little more than a legal formula. It had been so, indeed, with legislative enactments in England since the time of Henry VII, and the American Constitution-makers had probably copied the formula without giving much thought to the distinction.

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Another implication, strongly conveyed by Maclay, was that the Senate's dignity was being affronted by the President's appearing before them to assert the force of his majesty, and that the senators' response was such as to discourage him from doing it again. But there is not much evidence that this was the way the rest of the Senate saw it. In this case it is more likely that the senators' embarrassment reflected not so much resentment as an acute sense of the constraints that operated upon Washington himself as well as on them. The episode was not in the last analysis a challenge to Washington's authority but a dramatic confirmation of it, and the legitimacy of the presidency—in the peculiar form given it by the American Constitution—was thereby deepened rather than lessened. That is, Washington's restraint in following what he regarded as the letter of the Constitution in not assuming full initiative in treaty matters was shown in the sight of all to be impracticable. He was appearing, as a prime minister might do, to present his case to a legislative body, and was being told, by the response that greeted him, that he was more than a prime minister, and did not need to lay his prestige on the line in any such way. There would, in the future, be consultations. But they would occur in private. The Executive would defend its actions and policies to the Senate, but it would be done informally. The Secretary of State, not the President, would do it, and it would take place not in the open Senate but in closed committees, and sometimes through channels less formal than that. The "advice" aspect, in short, was to become almost wholly unofficial. It might be said that all such implications were "inherent" right along. But the subtleties were such that a test of some sort was probably required to show that they were inherent. When it occurred, a direct confrontation of the executive and legislative branches on such a level—the level of formal argument—was shown to be so disruptive, from a variety of causes, as to be henceforth out of the question. 5 A Bill of Rights and a Judiciary System

The Constitution of the United States in the course of its history has seldom if ever been amended lightly. After the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, sixty years were to pass before there would be another, and the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Amendments were separated in time by forty-three years more. Only five amendments would be added to the Constitution between 1798 and 1913, a total span of 115 years. Moreover, every amendment beginning with the Eleventh has been framed with a very specific object, in response to what was seen as a substantive need. It may well be wondered, then, why the first ten— familiarly known as the Bill of Rights — should have had so different a character from the others, and why they should have been framed in what seems, in retrospect, inordinate haste, the federal government being scarcely six months old when they were completed. There was little in them that was specific, in the sense ,58.

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that later ones would be; they were broad, general, and diffuse, and most of them did little more than state what was already clearly present in existing commonlaw practice. In order to frame them, moreover, it had been necessary for Congress to delay a mountain of business that was exceptionally urgent and that many regarded as more immediate. The reasons for this haste are not to be found in any need for which the amendments provided a specific remedy. The need was general, being of a political rather than legal nature. It involved, as did so much else that was done during that first year, the legitimacy of the government itself, and of the very Constitution under which it functioned. Washington, ever sensitive to the possibility that he might be accused of overstepping his powers (such as in presuming to initiate legislation), forbore in his inaugural address from telling Congress what measures he thought it ought to take—with one exception. His single recommendation was that the amending power of the Constitution be used to make certain that "the characteristic rights of freemen" might be "more impregnably fortified." Behind this proposal for a bill of rights —deferentially and indirectly stated but unmistakably desired—lay a year and a half of tension and open political strife. This tension had been clearly present since the adjournment of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787, and had by no means disappeared when Washington in his Inaugural referred to the "objections which have been urged against the System" and "the degree of inquietude which has given birth to them" on April 30, I789.48 In the closing days of the Philadelphia Convention, after all the major compromises had been made and the form essentially set, George Mason of Virginia had proposed that the new Constitution be prefaced by a bill of rights. This was voted down, mainly because the delegates, who had toiled all through a warm summer, were anxious to wind up their work and had no heart for the delays that would most certainly be incurred in opening up an entirely new issue. In minimizing the urgency of a bill of rights, however, they were to some extent the victims of their own impatience. On the other hand, in not making his proposal earlier, Mason left himself open to suspicions of sabotage. A number of his ideas on other matters had been disregarded by the Convention, and he had by this time become disaffected on general grounds. A day or so before adjournment he drafted a set of "Objections to this Constitution of Government," at the head of which was the statement that the document contained no bill of rights. He then left ("in an exceeding ill humour," according to Madison) without signing. Mason's "Objections" were subsequently printed and circulated through all the states, and the absence of a bill of rights thereupon became a rallying point for any who had reason for opposing the Constitution. "To alarm the people," Washington wrote exasperatedly, "seems to be the groundwork of his plan."49 In the battle over ratification during the months that followed, the Federalists found again and again that the point at which they were most vulnerable was their neglect of a bill of rights. It was principally because of this that North Carolina and Rhode Island failed to ratify. A demand for amendments that would guarantee personal rights threatened to block ratification in all but three of the other states. There were several devices the Antifederalists tried to get their con-

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ventions to adopt. One was that of "previous amendments'': a state would prepare a series of proposed amendments and then announce that until these had been substantially adopted it would withhold its ratification. (This was what Patrick Henry and his supporters tried to do in Virginia.) Another device was "conditional ratification": a convention would ratify, but upon condition that the state might withdraw if within a specified time the changes it desired had not been made. A move of this sort—which, as Madison pointed out, would be no ratification at all and "worse than a rejection"—was narrowly defeated in New York. Still another was the plan of calling a second federal convention to amend the Constitution. Such a plan was still being discussed in New York and elsewhere as late as the spring of 1789, and must have been very much in Washington's mind as he considered his pending Inaugural. The compromise whereby these potential obstacles had for the moment been avoided was that hit upon by Massachusetts and adopted by other conventions, which was to ratify without conditions but to accompany the ratification with a list of recommended amendments. Meanwhile a number of the religious sects, most prominently the Baptists, were expressing strong doubts. A Baptist convention in Virginia had considered whether the new Constitution "made sufficient provision for the secure enjoyment of religious liberty; on which, it was agreed unanimously, t h a t . . . it did not." Such in brief was the state of things when Congress took up the question of amendments in June i789.50 In this, as with most of the other measures of the first session, the dominating voice was that of James Madison. Madison had at first been among those who felt that a federal bill of rights was unnecessary, such rights being already provided for in most of the state constitutions. The amending power, moreover, might become a great force for mischief if resorted to before the Constitution went into effect. Many of the advocates of amendments clearly wanted to go beyond bills of rights and to limit federal powers in ways that would make the Constitution something quite different from the instrument that had been adopted, with its many fragile compromises, at Philadelphia. But as for the principle itself of enumerating the rights of citizens, Madison had already begun to change his mind (as had Washington) by the time of the Virginia convention, and to concede that such an enumeration ought to be added to the Constitution soon after the new government was in operation. The vindictive Henry, playing upon local suspicions, had successfully worked to prevent Madison's being elected to the Senate. These suspicions might have cost Madison a seat in the House of Representatives as well, had he not in the meantime given clear promises. He declared his "sincere opinion that the Constitution ought to be revised, and that the first Congress meeting under it ought to prepare and recommend to the States for ratification, the most satisfactory provisions for all essential rights, particularly the rights of Conscience in the fullest latitude, the freedom of the press, trials by jury, security against general warrants &c." He thought this would provide "additional guards in favour of liberty," but his primary purpose was that of "satisfying the minds of well meaning opponents" of the Constitution. It was in this spirit that Madison on May 4, 1789, gave notice that he intended three weeks hence to open debate

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on the subject of amendments to the Constitution.51 The House was not able to get to the question until June 8, and would not have done so then but for Madison's persistence. Having to contend with a number of opposing difficulties, Madison managed his campaign with considerable skill, and was almost solely responsible for the eventual success of it. A number of strong Federalists wanted no amendments at all, and complaints over the delaying of pressing business in order to consider them were heard from Federalist and Antifederalist alike. But Madison wanted it done as soon as possible, and in Congress rather than in another convention. Public opinion, moreover, now seemed to be on his side. He had taken care to announce his intentions in advance and to make his position widely known. His views were embodied in a series of proposals which he read to the House on the first day of debate, and most of them—in a number of cases with Madison's own phraseology—eventually found their way into the Constitution.52 As to their nature and extent, here again Madison had to contend with both strong Federalist and Antifederalist pressures. The total number and variety of amendments proposed by the various states had been enormous. Moreover, a good many Antifederalists, especially those powerful in their respective states, were inclined to lump state rights with personal rights, and to regard the former as equally if not more important. Most Federalists, on the other hand, wanted nothing that would threaten the authority and energy of the government, a concern which Madison still shared, but many would have been glad to avoid such a threat by staying away from amendments altogether. Madison's solution was to concentrate on personal rights, avoid everything that encroached on federal power, and emphasize general principles rather than detailed provisions. The result—involving freedom of speech, press, and conscience, trial by jury, security of person and property, and various other rights—was referred to a committee, whose report underwent many delays and much debate. On August 24 it was sent to the Senate in the form of seventeen proposed amendments. They came back on September 10 reduced in number to twelve, and by September 25, having been put in final form by a joint conference committee, they were finally approved by both houses. In the subsequent process of ratification, two of the proposed twelve amendments—one concerning the basis of representation and the other the salaries of members of Congress—would be lost by the wayside, and the remaining ten incorporated as the Bill of Rights.53 A year before Madison completed his work, and when he was just beginning to change his mind, he had begun by conceding that a bill of rights, properly framed, would do no harm. But in the course of time he had found more positive grounds. Believing as he did that the greatest likelihood of tyranny and the true danger to liberty lay in abuses by the majority rather than by the government (the government being but the majority's instrument), Madison reasoned that a bill of rights would function not so much as a specific set of rules but as a kind of public standard. Its benefits were of a sort that would accrue over time, the values which it embodied being gradually internalized by the whole society. "The political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fun,61

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damental maxims of free government, and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion." Then if, on the other hand, liberty should from time to time be endangered by government, such a standard would be "a good ground for an appeal to the sense of the community." And, as Jefferson wisely reminded him, there was a "legal check which it puts into the hands of the judiciary."54 Even so, it was not the long-term benefits that Madison had primarily in mind in his urgency to get a bill of rights through. He was concerned first of all with legitimacy and acceptance. He knew that a bill of rights would be the most dramatic single gesture of conciliation that could be offered the remaining opponents of the government, and would provide the most convenient possible formula whereby they might change their minds. The proof would soon be at hand. Washington was informed by the Rhode Island legislature in September that the amendments had "already afforded some relief and satisfaction to the minds of the People of this State," and there was similar news from North Carolina. That state joined the Union in November 1789, and Rhode Island would do so the following spring.55 With the Constitution now completed to the satisfaction of most, the question remained as to the nature and form of the judicial system that would interpret it as law. That question had been to all intents and purposes wide open when the senators who framed the Judiciary Act of 1789 began their work in the spring. Article III of the Constitution had given them virtual carte blanche: The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. . . . The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority. . . .

Had they fully put their minds to it, they might have fashioned under these sanctions, and at this critical juncture, one of the most effective of all conceivable instruments of nationalization. They might have established a system of courts sufficiently numerous and widely enough distributed as to be conveniently accessible everywhere, and then given them the widest jurisdiction allowed under the judiciary article of the Constitution, common law as well as statute law. This would have enabled the Supreme Court in effect to supervise the court systems of the states, through ready appeal and through the body of precedent that would thus quickly accumulate. The result would be to create, in time, a fully unified system of national law and judicial procedure. The framers of the Act did not do this, and so no such result followed. The Judiciary Act of 1789, completed in September of that year, was to lay down the basic terms and assumptions upon which federal justice has operated ever since, and there never has been a consol-

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idation of state and federal law into a unified body of national law. But then the framers had other things to contend with besides the desirability of a rational, nationwide system of law. The same need to conciliate, to secure acceptance, operated upon this set of decisions as it had upon most of the others of 1789. The Special Judiciary Committee appointed on April 7, with Oliver Ellsworth as chairman, consisted of ten members, one from each state as the Senate was then constituted. In view of this geographic distribution, and since there were men with strong state-rights and even Antifederalist leanings included (notably Richard Henry Lee of Virginia), it became likely that most of the gross differences of view would be adjusted within the Committee, and before its proposals reached the floor of the Senate. This, with certain exceptions, seems to have been what happened. In principle, the strong Federalist broad-construction view was that the Constitution had given wide powers to the federal courts and that Congress, once it had established such courts, was not entitled to withhold any of these powers from them. On the other hand, a strong strain of the Antifederalist criticism of the Constitution, ever since the Convention, had concentrated on this very point. The critics either wanted no inferior federal courts at all, or else wanted to give such courts as little jurisdiction as possible. They wanted original jurisdiction in most federal questions given to state courts, subject only to the appellate power of the Supreme Court, and it was in this direction that a number of the proposed constitutional amendments had looked. Neither side fully had its way, and Chairman Ellsworth, himself a good Federalist, seems to have assumed from the first that this would be so. But even Ellsworth had probably not anticipated how restrictive his committee's bill would in the end turn out to be. In any case, when the Act reached its final form—proceeding from Ellsworth's earliest ideas to the Committee's draft bill, and from there through the Senate's amended version and to the bill that was eventually reported by the Senate-House conference committee—it became apparent that the nation's system of courts had been shaped less by the sanctions of the Constitution, literally read, than by the requirements of a political compromise. The Act did provide for a six-member Supreme Court and a system of federal district and circuit courts, as contemplated by the Constitution, and in the face of some opposition with regard to the inferior courts. But the districts were very large, and the courts within them were few in number, confined to one or two points within each state. Their accessibility and convenience, in comparison with similar state courts, was thus limited. The Supreme Court justices, moreover, were required to hold two circuit courts a year in every state under primitive conditions of transportation, which made for delays, postponements, and much general inconvenience. As for the broad grant of jurisdiction which the Constitution had apparently made to the national courts, extending "to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority," such jurisdiction was defined in a relatively narrow way.

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Though the Act granted the right of appeal to the Supreme Court from the highest state courts on all federal questions, original jurisdiction in the great bulk of civil cases involving such questions was given to the state courts. The federal courts, moreover, had no common-law jurisdiction except for criminal offenses against the United States. Federal jurisdiction in diversity cases—those involving parties of different citizenship, either of another state or of a foreign country— was similarly limited. The matter in dispute had to be greater than five hundred dollars in value, and—far more important—one of the parties had to be a citizen of the state in which the suit was brought. This, plus the provision in Section 34 that "the laws of the several states .. . shall be regarded as rules of decision in trials at common law in the courts of the United States," would in effect prevent the development of a body of national common law. Consequently the nationalizing potential of a federal judiciary system would henceforth be limited in scope by a variety of local systems.56 It has been argued that all this represented a very long departure from the intentions of those who wrote the Constitution.57 So it might appear, yet appearances in this case may be deceiving. Evidence that the judiciary branch raised issues of absorbing importance is actually rather sketchy. The amount of attention and discussion given to the judiciary in the Constitutional Convention was only a fraction of that devoted to the executive and legislative branches. The resulting article was broadly worded, making wide grants or narrow grants of power equally possible, and this had been one of the arguments used in the Convention for so wording it. Indeed, the Federalists' main concern was simply that the authority of the United States be judicially enforceable, and that there be some ultimate guarantee of appeal in disputes between the United States government and those of the states, or between the states themselves. This had not in principle been seriously questioned in the Convention, and was in fact amply provided for in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Perhaps a few Federalists like Alexander Hamilton or Gouverneur Morris may have imagined a powerful and highly articulated system of national courts and national law. But even they did not think very specifically or concentratedly about this particular problem, being preoccupied with others, and Federalist thought in general never showed the degree of unity or focus on judiciary matters that might have been expected.58 The fact was that a national judiciary as a branch of government was still something of an abstraction, substantially less real than were the other two. Far more real to Federalist and Antifederalist alike were the already existing legal institutions of the states, going well back into colonial times and having been little altered by the Revolution, and the strong vested interests they had accumulated through time and tradition. Thus when it became a question of spelling out a federal system in detail, efforts to protect those interests and to resist encroachments upon state authority were only to be expected. Even the most thoroughgoing Federalists had little inclination to resist them, even assuming the alternatives to be self-evident, which apparently they were not. The natural drift, therefore, was toward conciliation.59

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6 Revenue, Tariffs, and Tonnage On the face of it, one of the most neutral and matter-of-fact of all the questions Congress had to deal with in its first session was that of revenue. All agreed that a federal revenue act was essential for meeting the expenses of government. All further agreed that most of the revenue would, as a matter of course, have to be provided through a federal impost, a tariff on goods imported from foreign countries. Such an impost had already been proposed during the Confederation period, and although the rule of unanimity which then prevailed had obstructed it from going into effect, the fact was that every state but one had accepted it. So there should have been no reason to expect trouble in 1789, especially inasmuch as James Madison proposed, as the very first order of business after organizing the House, that the impost of 1783 simply be enacted now.60 And yet Madison would not quite let it go at that, and there was trouble. The provision for tonnage duties which he added to this otherwise straightforward proposal would have had the effect, as he well knew, of striking at the shipping of Great Britain. The resulting debates went well beyond matters of revenue. They touched upon the deepest feelings that had been left over from the Revolution, and foreshadowed one of those crises of spirit in the life of a new nation in which the supposed harmony between its material interests and its ideological convictions becomes highly uncertain. The opening phase of debate on the Tariff of 1789 was somewhat misleading. It concerned the nature and amount of import duties—the tonnage aspect would come later—and it was characterized by some colorful oratory and a good many sharp words. And yet this phase, for all its warmth, was more like a kind of bargaining forum than a basic struggle over first principles. It was contained; the boundaries were more or less clear; the objects and interests were immediate and measurable; and there was a minimum of hard feelings. The first feature in Madison's proposal of April 8 was an ad valorem tax of 5 percent on all imports, exactly following the 1783 impost. To this there was no objection. The second was a short list of enumerated articles (rum, wine, tea, molasses, and the like), to be taxed by duties of a specified amount. This too had been a feature of the 1783 impost, and the list of articles offered by Madison was virtually the same, item for item, as that proposed in 1783. Though he had left the amounts blank, to be filled in by Congress, Madison nonetheless felt that the wisest course for the moment would be to adopt more or less the same schedule that had been agreed to before. This would be the simplest way to get a revenue measure passed at once, and to take fullest advantage of the spring imports. All of this made excellent sense, and a more permanent and comprehensive system, if needed, could be worked out later. But the enumerated list was not to get by so quickly, even as a temporary measure. Changes had occurred in the country's business life since 1783, and the free-trade assumptions generally prevailing at that time—tariffs being regarded

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only as a device for obtaining revenue, and not for the protection of home industry—had likewise changed. Domestic manufactures that had developed during and after the Revolution were adversely affected by the influx of cheap British products in the mid-i/Sos; a number of states, meanwhile, had erected their own impost systems in order to service their state debts; and it was thus logical that the revenue aspects of these systems should be combined with experimental efforts to protect industries that had grown up within the state and that had suffered most from outside competition. At any rate, a taste for protection had already been implanted, local vested interests were already in evidence, and no sooner had debate begun on the Tariff of 1789 than Madison's list of enumerated articles began to grow. As the list mounted, the vivacity of the haggling over individual duties mounted also.61 Thomas FitzSimons of Pennsylvania, for example, gave a good foreshadowing of what that state's behavior would be throughout a century and a half of future tariff history. FitzSimons, a worthy precursor of "Pig-Iron" Kelley, wanted taxes systematically laid upon nails, spikes, tacks, brads, slit iron, rolled iron, iron castings, and steel in all forms, not to mention saddles, shoes, hats, gloves, carriages, and a host of other items, all of which happened to be produced in respectable quantities in the state of Pennsylvania. FitzSimons, on the other hand, was prepared to be reasonable. "When we come to consider them, article by article . . . , gentlemen will be at liberty to object; and if they offer good reasons for it, they may get them struck out. ..." (He later proved willing to have tacks and brads struck out.) Thomas Tudor Tucker of South Carolina, like future South Carolinians, would have been glad to eliminate the enumerated articles altogether, believing that most of the duties would bear heavily on his state, which did little manufacturing. He repeated these sentiments nearly every day. But he also conceded that "if gentlemen are content with moderate duties, we are willing to agree to them. ..." (Tucker's colleague Aedanus Burke, meanwhile, urged a duty on hemp, to encourage the production of that item in South Carolina.) Probably the choicest language of the entire debate was that used by Fisher Ames, the young and talented member from Massachusetts, in his zeal to prevent a high tariff being laid on molasses. Enormous amounts of molasses were imported annually into the state and used for the widest variety of purposes (including the manufacture of rum), the purchase of it being financed in large part by exports of fish. Higher prices for molasses, Ames ominously warned, would bring ruin to the fisheries and melancholy to all classes of the Commonwealth. "No decent family," he said, "can do without something by way of sweetening. . . . Mothers will tell their children, when they solicit their daily and accustomed nutriment, that the new laws forbid them the use of it, and they will grow up in a detestation of the hand which proscribes their innocent food and the occupation of their fathers...." Ames's energy was rewarded. "Another molasses battle has been fought," he wrote briskly to his friend George Minot afterwards. "Like modern victories, it was incomplete, but we got off one cent."62 But although much time was spent in this fashion, the arguments were based largely on local interest rather than on doctrinal convictions regarding free trade

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or protection. Such convictions at this stage were still quite fluid. Although the principle of protection was certainly discernible in the Act which finally emerged, it was balanced throughout by the primary consideration of revenue and of what the government in any given case might reasonably hope to collect. Madison, for example, thought that generally speaking " commerce ought to be free" (Fisher Ames thought one of his speeches had been taken right out of Adam Smith), yet Madison found it no strain to make any number of exceptions in favor of protection. Ames, on the other hand, whose major effort might have been read as a free-trade polemic, admitted that "the navigation and manufactures of America cannot well be too much encouraged." The Tariff of 1789, in short, was mildly protective, in the sense that most interests with a reasonable claim to protection received at least a token of it, consistent with the government's claim to revenue.63 The debate on tonnage, however, which followed that on tariffs, would be a very different matter. One side, at least, of that debate would be founded not so much upon interest, narrowly conceived, as upon deeply felt doctrines of national independence dating from the Revolution. The third feature of Madison's April 8 resolution on revenue—in addition to those on the ad valorem tax and the tariffs on enumerated articles—was introduced by him in a deceptively off-hand and deprecating way as "a clause or two on the subject of tonnage." In reality, it was to this feature that Madison was more tenaciously committed than to any of the rest, and it was probably for this reason that he tried at first to underplay its importance. His proposal was that all ships bringing goods of any kind into American ports be taxed according to tonnage, and that such taxes be levied upon three categories of vessels. Americanbuilt and -owned ships would pay the lowest duties; ships of nations with which the United States had commercial treaties would pay a somewhat higher duty; and ships of all "other powers" would pay the highest duties of all. What this specifically meant was that, since the United States had a treaty with France and none with England, the American government would in effect be adopting a policy of systematic discrimination against British shipping in favor of French.64 The discriminatory features of the tonnage measure (which was eventually written up as a separate bill) did not at first provoke heated debate. Or rather, the debate was slow in coming to a focus, even when Madison made it quite clear that his principal target was Great Britain. The first outbursts of opposition, indeed, came from a minority quarter—South Carolina and Georgia—and were directed not at the discrimination between other countries and England but at any principle of discrimination, between all foreign shipping and American, which would result in higher freight charges on southern produce carried in foreign vessels. This aspect of the bill, on the other hand, found favor with most of the other members, especially those from New England, since it offered solid advantages to American shipping as well as incentives for its future growth. A thirtycent duty per ton on ships of nations with whom the United States had treaties, a fifty-cent duty on all others, and only a six-cent duty on American ships represented a differential which, on the face of it, any American shipowner could only welcome. Even the discrimination against England was in principle hardly

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unreasonable. American shipping was itself already discriminated against by the British policy of excluding American vessels from the West Indies and of allowing them to carry none but American goods in the direct trade to England, and this had caused intense irritation in every shipping center on the Atlantic seaboard. The result was that Madison, arguing his case with great cogency as always, got his tonnage bill through the House by a good majority. Only a flash of outright opposition from New York and some murmurs of misgiving from New England could have foreshadowed what was to happen to the bill in the Senate.65 Between May 7, when the House took its vote, and June 17, when the Senate sent back its amended version of the bill with the special discriminations struck out, there had been a welling up of resistance against any policy that might provoke commercial hostilities between the United States and Great Britain. Precisely how this resistance developed is not a matter of record, but that it originated among mercantile groups in the seaport cities—probably first among those in New York—seems fairly clear. It represented the first serious impasse of principle to appear within the new government, one upon which, as it turned out, no compromise was possible, and in the face of which one side or the other would have to back down. Twice the House, as Madison labored to prevent his votes from slipping away, refused the Senate's amendments, while the Senate as adamantly refused to recede from them. Even as the House gave in, which it finally did on July i, Madison, normally the conciliator, took the result in stubborn bad grace and made it clear that he would try again as soon as the chance arose.66 Madison's position, which he insisted was one involving "the common good" and "the vindication and support of our national interest," certainly had a historical basis. There was a kind of self-evidence in the assumption that freeing America's commercial life from the arbitrary pleasure of Great Britain had been one of the objects of the Revolution, and that keeping it so should be the constant care of the new federal government. Nor could there be any better perspective from which to view the arbitrary side of British mercantile practice than the experience of Virginia, more or less passively dependent as its planters had been for decades upon an outsider class of Scottish middlemen. These convictions and this experience led to one clear version of what form national policy should take, and one way, indeed, of visualizing the whole national future. But it was not necessarily the only version, or the only way. In the northern cities, where commercial relationships with the mother country had historically been direct rather than indirect, intricate and predictable rather than simple and arbitrary, a new era of well-being had by 1789 already begun. Old connections had been reknit, new ones had been formed, and expectations were justifiably on the rise. Herein were the makings of a variant version of "the common good" and the "national interest," and a consequent reluctance to take steps that might conceivably threaten them. Herein also were the makings in embryo of a conflict not simply of interest but of principle. An incipient ideological divergence, involving in its simplest form the question of American behavior toward foreign powers, had made its appearance. It would, 68

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in the course of its growth, acquire a variety of forms, of which the original was but one, and embrace any number of aspects of the national life. Madison's plan of discrimination on tonnage, implying as it did a distinct line of policy in foreign relations, was no spur-of-the-moment inspiration. It was rather the product of reflections and experience that went back five years or more, to the time when Madison's close friend Thomas Jefferson first went to Europe in 1784 to negotiate commercial treaties for the Confederation. Jefferson, who had gone to join Adams and Franklin as a member of a commission formed for that purpose, had then succeeded Franklin as United States minister to France, and would remain at that post until September 1789. His major concern all during this period had been commerce, and he had not had an easy time of it. In proportion to the hopes he had entertained and the considerable efforts he had expended, Jefferson's achievements had been minimal. And yet in the course of his stay he developed a number of very strong opinions about the nature of commerce, and on the uses to which commerce ought to be put as an instrument of national policy.67 The gross fact upon which everything had to turn was the virtual monopoly of American trade possessed by Great Britain. Meanwhile, within this orbit of trading relationships, many limits had now been placed upon the Americans' freedom of action by England's reimposition of the old navigation system. Under that system they had once enjoyed many advantages as English colonials, but it applied to them now as citizens of a foreign nation, and was full of odious restrictions. The principal ones were their exclusion from the lucrative West Indies trade and the limitation of their direct trade with England to goods produced in America. During the peace negotiations there had been a moment when the liberal-minded Earl of Shelburne considered a kind of commercial union, under which the shipping of each country would be accorded special privileges by the other. Shelburne himself, however, came to realize that his government would never tolerate such an arrangement, and nothing came of it. The British attitude was made only too clear by the Earl of Sheffield in his Observations on the Commerce of the United States, published in 1783. There was no reason, Sheffield argued, for England to grant any particular concessions to American trade; there was, indeed, every reason for not doing so. Great Britain already had as much of the American states' trade as her interest required, and now without the expense of governing them. The Americans' interest, moreover, was well enough served in their own view that they would continue to carry on the bulk of their trade with England whether their government liked it or not. Given the credit facilities extended in London and available nowhere else, and given the superior development of British manufacturing and the cheapness and quality of British goods, they had no choice. On the other hand, England would be acting directly contrary to her own interest in granting the Americans access to the West Indies. Allowing them thus to expand their shipbuilding and carrying trade would be at the direct expense of British merchants, British shipowners, and—in view of the inducements to British seamen—the British navy. "The Navigation act, the basis of our great power at sea," Sheffield insisted, "gave us the trade of the world: if we alter .69-

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that act, by permitting any state to trade with our islands, or by suffering any state to bring into this country any produce but its own, we desert the Navigation act, and sacrifice the marine of England." With the British Order in Council of July 1783, whereby the principles of the Navigation Act were reaffirmed in all their vigor, the British government in effect followed Sheffield's advice.68 Dealing directly with England in an effort to work out mutual arrangements was no part of Jefferson's plan or wish. His great vision was that of a world in which America's dependence on a hostile power might be ended altogether, and his great instrument was to be the attractions of American trade to the other nations of Europe. A series of commercial treaties with them would in effect create a free-trade community which Great Britain could no longer monopolize, and in the presence of which she would be forced to alter her policies. Unhappily, the commission's efforts to conclude such treaties proved almost wholly fruitless. Most countries were indifferent to them; the others did not have colonial possessions; and none was in the least willing to grant special privileges beyond the "most favored nation" formula, which in the Europe of the eighteenth century meant very little in the way of real advantages. When the commission's term expired, its members had next to nothing to show for their work. Jefferson's next thought, as he took up his new duties at Paris in May 1785, was to concentrate upon France. He reasoned that if free trade was for the moment out of the question, then the next best thing would be to divert as much American trade as possible away from America's chief enemy to America's chief ally. The ministry of Vergennes, which had its enlightened side, was not unreceptive to Jefferson's argument that the French must provide markets for American goods if they expected Americans to buy French goods, that French merchants ought to be more flexible in their willingness to extend credit, and that French manufacturing ought to adjust to the tastes and requirements of the American market. The negotiations did, indeed, achieve some successes. The market for whale oil was granted exclusively to the American fisheries, and a number of French mercantile firms were persuaded to import quantities of Georgia and Carolina rice. The tobacco trade to France from America had been engrossed by monopolies in both countries, and although nothing could be done about the monopoly held by the Farmers-General on the importation and sale of tobacco in France, the one that had been granted to Robert Morris on the sale of tobacco from America to France was dissolved. Through these and a number of lesser concessions, the French market by 1789 was open to American trade—at least in theory—to a greater degree than ever before. Yet none of this could make much of an imprint on the real patterns of American trade, with either France or Great Britain. That with France remained about the same as it had been, whereas in England a cycle of unprecedented expansion in manufacturing, both in efficiency and in quantity of output, pointed to an even greater volume of exports, to America as well as elsewhere, than had been the case before. Indeed, British success in the American market had been and would continue to be the product of a series of advantages that were irresistible. They included a detailed knowledge of that market based on long experi,70,

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ence; a close network of trading relationships; and a generous reservoir of credit, for which those very elements of knowledge and experience gave the security. They included, moreover, a vast trading center at London, an emporium in which an American merchant's agent could exercise a wide range of choice in making up return cargoes as well as disposing of those his ships had brought in. They included, finally, the most advanced manufacturing techniques in Europe. The result was that the bulk of the hardware, cutlery, iron and steel manufactures of all kinds, earthenware, glassware, and woolens used by Americans was Britishmade, and 87 percent of America's import trade in manufactures between 1787 and 1790 was done with Great Britain.69 By contrast, America's trading relationships with France were simple, sketchy, and few. They were clouded with mutual suspicions and ignorance, and there was little of substance—beyond a certain benevolent courtesy in high places—on which they might be nourished. Of what there was, the Yankees had all the better of it. Neither the state of French manufacturing, the mentality of the French bourgeoisie, nor the condition of the French economy as a whole could provide the least basis for theorizing that France was America's "natural" trading partner, or even that France might become, in the foreseeable future, a major commercial power. For one thing, the French had had very limited experience with the American market, almost all of it bad. The increased numbers of French cargoes coming into American ports immediately after the Revolution represented, for the most part, a disaster to their owners, who had very little knowledge of the people they hoped would buy them. Made up ineptly and with considerable guesswork, they consisted of products that were either badly packed, inappropriate to the season, unsuited to the tastes of the public, or else inferior to similar goods furnished cheaper and better by the British. Unable or unwilling to extend credit, requiring quick payment, in constant fear of being cheated, and having few established connections, the owners—or rather the ship captains or supercargoes they often used as their agents — in case after case were constrained to dispose of these lots hastily and at a loss in order to get rid of them at all. The terms of trade, moreover, heavily favored the Americans. The French had opened several of their West Indies ports in 1784, and American trade with them was far greater than with metropolitan France, where the imbalance was as much as five or six to one. Basically, Americans were not interested in French goods. Between 1784 and 1790 their imports from France amounted to no more than a twentieth of those they took from England. They consisted mainly of luxury items, such as brandies, wines, Mediterranean fruits, and women's finery. As for the balances earned on American products sold to France, they would almost invariably be taken straight to England, and spent for English manufactures.70 Nor was there much encouragement for French manufacturing to be roused from its sluggish inefficiency, in view of France's antiquated structure of internal tariffs, export duties, and excise taxes, which meant that French products had to compete with the burden of roughly a 15 percent surcharge already upon them. Thus when the royal ministers in a burst of misguided enlightenment concluded a limited free-trade agreement with England in 1786, the results were calamitous. .71

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As they ought to have foreseen, their own manufacturers were drowned in the ensuing flood of British goods. The final element that effectively prevented the formation of external trading patterns in any way comparable to those of Great Britain was the conservatism of the French merchant class itself. Its mentality tended more toward that of the rentier than of the entrepreneur, concerned mainly with protecting and stabilizing what they already had rather than with reaching out for new fields of enterprise. The chambers of commerce in the port cities of France accordingly resisted concessions to American trade at every turn, since such concessions could only invade and disrupt in some way their own engrossment of France's internal market.71 Thus the climate in which Jefferson conducted his talks with French ministers and aristocratic intellectuals in the years just before the French Revolution had about it a certain benevolent mistiness. The French were certainly well disposed, though somewhat dilettantish, being not much attuned to the realities of French economic life. The Physiocrats, under whose influence the 1786 Eden Treaty with England was concluded, were so doctrinaire in their attachment to free-trade theories that they had little idea what a bad bargain they were making. With regard to America, it was thought by Lafayette, Condorcet, and Jefferson's other friends that expanded trade relations would be an excellent thing. But they never appreciated that the benefits could in no sense be really mutual. Jefferson did have some success in securing entree to French markets not previously open, but the Americans in practice failed to reciprocate. They tended to spend their money not in France but in England, and for things they could get nowhere else. Jefferson did as the rest. Once, having looked vainly all over Paris for oil lamps of a model lately invented, he found just what he wanted on a visit to England. Another time, he apologized somewhat helplessly to Lafayette for buying English harness: The reason for my importing harness from England is a very obvious one. They are plated, and plated harness is not made at all in France as far as I have learnt. It is not from a love of the English but a love of myself that I sometimes find myself obliged to buy their manufactures.72

In any event, neither Jefferson nor the Ministry had much contact with the French bourgeoisie, and judging from what they did, the latter's complaints must never have seemed fully real to them. The time was shortly to come when the bourgeoisie would itself have something to say in the councils of state, whereupon this official good will on questions of commerce would come to an abrupt end. With the French Revolution and the ascendancy of the Jacobins, there would be no more talk of free trade. The official policy would thenceforth be one of rigid economic nationalism.73 In the America of the mid-i/Sos, languishing in depression, resentment against England for reimposing the Navigation Act was fairly general. Alexander Hamilton wrote of retaliation. The merchants of Boston in 1785 voted to "do all in our power" to prevent further commercial relations with British agents resident in that city. John Adams thought it might be necessary for Americans to have their own navigation act. The correspondence of Jefferson and Madison all during .72.

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the Confederation period bristles with hatred of England and all things British. And yet united in resentment as most of them were, there was an underlying divergence. From the viewpoint of New York and New England, of Hamilton and Adams, the principal object of policy was to persuade England to ease and modify. For Jefferson and Madison on the other hand, the object, ideally, was nothing short of detaching America altogether from commercial dependence on Great Britain.74 By the summer of 1789 the divergence was more or less in the open. Prosperity had returned, American traders were discovering new outlets, and expectations were on the rise. Specie balances for use in the direct trade with England were being replenished to the point where it was once more the benefits, rather than the constraints, of that trade that seemed to make the greater difference. The first ventures in the China trade had already begun, and increasing numbers of American vessels were appearing in the Russian ports of the Baltic. More important, the British West Indies, though closed by law, had in fact again become remarkably accessible to enterprising American shippers. With the connivance of local planters, governors, and customs officials, through forged papers and other stratagems, virtually regularized, the wants of the sugar islands were being almost as well supplied as ever by 1789, despite all the efforts of Nelson's squadron on the Caribbean station. And finally, Jefferson's own work in France, influencing as it did the widening of American privileges in the French islands, contributed in spite of itself to the same overall end, the revival and renewed prosperity of AngloAmerican commerce. Thus although the same bellicose formulas of a few years before were still being voiced in 1789, it was no longer with quite the same depth of conviction. "I feel the necessity of having a more equal and reputable trade with the British," wrote the Boston merchant Stephen Higginson to John Adams, "but I am not yet satisfied that we can either compel or conciliate them to more reciprocal terms—the latter however at present is, in my mind, more eligible and promising."75 When James Madison, with his tonnage proposals in the spring of 1789, declared himself for discrimination against Great Britain, he offered several leading arguments for it. The channels through which American commerce with Great Britain flowed were "artificial," and gave that country "a much greater proportion of our trade than she is naturally entitled to." Moreover, the British needed our trade more than we needed theirs; most of the manufactures presently being imported from them would soon be produced in the United States. And finally, after reciting the various ways in which American commerce was being favorably regarded by France, Madison declared that "our policy .. . ought to be calculated to give it that impulse which nature directs." Senator Maclay remarked that Madison was thought to have "labored the whole business of discrimination in order to pay court to the French nation through Mr. Jefferson, our Minister to Paris."76 Madison was challenged by Representative John Laurance, a merchant of New York City, who insisted that such a policy could only lead to ruinous commercial warfare, that there was no need for it, that the United States could better achieve its ends by moderation, and that Great Britain had far greater capacity to injure

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America than America to injure her. Still, the hostile response was slow in crystallizing, and Madison's position was upheld in the House. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts was beginning to have some misgivings about Madison. "Very much Frenchified in his politics," he noted on May 3, and two weeks later: "I think him a good man and an able man, but he has rather too much theory, and wants that discretion which men of business commonly have."77 By the time the tonnage bill reached the Senate, the mercantile community had taken alarm. Their predictions of the evils to which discrimination might lead seem to have been convincingly impressed upon leading senators, inasmuch as the Senate moved with virtual unanimity to strike that feature from the bill. When it passed in final form on September 19, the duty had been fixed at six cents a ton on American shipping and fifty cents on that of all other countries, regardless of whether they had commercial treaties with the United States. Ames, who meanwhile had made up his own mind, was much relieved. "The Senate . . . as if designated by Providence to keep rash and frolicsome brats out of the fire, have demolished the absurd, impolitic, mad discrimination of foreigners in alliance from other foreigners."78 The issue was thus laid to one side, but only temporarily. It would remain in some form to shape and to polarize virtually every other theme in American political life for the next twenty-five years.

7 Legitimacy Ratified The first session of the First Congress was adjourned on September 29, 1789. Any tensions which may have arisen in the course of it—and which could not yet be said to have produced serious divisions or factions—were thereupon dissipated. Until the first Monday in January, the national government had in effect reverted to the Executive. Washington, though ever a grave and cautious man, could have much reason for satisfaction, and almost for the first time felt he could afford to breathe a little. But he was also curious to know whether his own guarded optimism as to the success so far of the new government was justified by the spirit and sentiment of the country. He thereupon decided to make a personal sounding, in the form of a visit to New England. Six months before, his reception on the inaugural trip from Mount Vernon to New York had been an overwhelming expression of favorable expectations, of confidence in the future. A similar trip now would be to some degree a test of things already done. He departed from New York on October 15, and was gone about a month. The results were all Washington could have wished. As before, there were receptions, parades, dinners, and joyous throngs of citizens everywhere. Perhaps the climax came with the welcome he was given at Cambridge, where he had first taken command of the Continental Army in 1775, and in Boston, where decorated arches commemorated the relief of that city in 1776. Washington's diary, normally very dull, almost comes to life as the delighted President notes the cheering, the .74.

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music, and the "vast concourse of people/' He was carrying the government in person into New England—where he had not as yet been in his presidential capacity—and most particularly into Massachusetts, the key not only to New England but to so much else that concerned the well-being of the new Republic.79 (A similar visit to Rhode Island the following spring—that state having by then finally ratified the Constitution—would produce similar results.) After his New England tour, and as he prepared to do business with the returning Congress early in the new year of 1790, Washington for the first time in many weeks found enough leisure to write a lengthy private letter. It was addressed to Catharine Macaulay Graham, an Englishwoman who had once been a guest at Mount Vernon. He touched on various subjects, but the central theme— his satisfaction over the events of the year just past—was almost luminous. That the government, though not absolutely perfect, is one of the best in the world, I have little doubt. . . . It was indeed next to a miracle that there should have been so much unanimity, in points of such importance, among such a number of Citizens, so widely scattered, and so different in their habits in many respects as the Americans were. Nor are the growing unanimity and encreasing goodwill of the Citizens to the Government less remarkable than favorable circumstances. So far as we have gone with the new Government (and it is completely organized and in operation) we have had greater reason than the most sanguine could expect to be satisfied with its success.80

The tone, for the opening of the year 1790, was undoubtedly justified. But Washington would never again, in a comparable buoyancy of spirit, write another such letter.

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C H A P T E R

I I

Finance and Ideology

Of all the events that shaped the political life of the new republic in its earliest years, none was more central than the massive personal and political enmity, classic in the annals of American history, which developed in the course of the 17908 between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. The struggle ensuing from it derives its classic proportions from classic circumstances. It was in one sense personal, quickly progressing from caution to suspicion, and then to a mutual hatred that gave little quarter, but it mattered greatly that this hatred was one subsisting between the two highest officers of Washington's government. It would in time attach to itself two rival hosts of followers and form the basis for two political parties professing two rival sets of principles. The character and quality of national life in the 17905 are thus not to be understood aside from the warfare of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. Worth noting, however, is that the groundwork for Jefferson's side of it was laid not by Jefferson himself, but by his friend and fellow Virginian, James Madison. It is to James Madison's estrangement from his friend, Alexander Hamilton, that one must go as a first step in plumbing the political passions of the 17908. To contemporaries, the Hamilton-Madison rupture and its consequences would not have seemed predictable in any obvious way, though historians in long retrospect have offered rationalizations which make it appear as part of a certain unerring drift. The Federalist-Republican polarity which was the outcome of that rupture has been seen on one level as the expression of a basic conflict between the interests of commerce and money on the one hand, and of agriculture on the other. On another level, it seems to range the supporters of a powerful national government against those of state rights. And on still another, the forces in conflict are no less than those of elitism and those of an incipient democracy. None of these versions is wrong; each provides a way of understanding the problem at long range. And yet on a more immediate and more human level, they do not begin to account for the explosion which shattered a friendship between two men ,77.

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whose ideas and interests, in the things that mattered most to them, had been at one time harmonious. What sets the men of this generation apart from those of any other in American history is that their every response to virtually every question of a public nature was conditioned by their having just been through a revolution. We have long since turned our revolutionaries into "Founding Fathers," a title which may be the real measure of their success. But such an ascription is also a measure of how difficult it has become to see their motivations in terms that are psychologically believable, or to imagine these "Fathers" as anything but "rational." Any view we take of these men and their actions must allow for the revolutionary's volatile sense that his very next step, or anyone else's in the historical movement which he has had a part in fashioning, could affect the destiny of future generations. A by-product of the revolutionary movement had been a republican ideology. But in imposing an ideological order on all matters concerning government, society, liberty, and authority there emerged—especially for those at the center of things —an intensely personal side. With the enlargement of a man's view of the world came an enlargement in his own consciousness of the difference he made in his power to characterize that world, to impress upon others that it operated in such and such a way, and to prescribe that its health and welfare be sought in this direction rather than that. There was thus a sense in which the personal attributes of leading men, their thoughts and actions as individuals, and the everyday relations between them, had more than a casual bearing on the society which they were in the act of re-creating. Their commitment to that society was not limited to mechanical categories of "interest." It was total: they had identified their very personalities with a particular understanding of it, and thus a challenge to that understanding would be a fundamental challenge to them. The energies that could be generated in such a setting were prodigious, as the careers of some of these men clearly show. Commitments formed in the Revolution were reinforced and intensified by the experience of remodeling the government once more, four years after the Revolution was over, and of persuading the country to ratify what they had done. Throughout all this, the necessity of "first things first" had maintained a certain singleness of purpose and a rough ideological unity. But once the new government was in being and its legitimacy established, a new kind of ideological problem, hitherto not of the first urgency, became insistent. The Revolution had made the United States republican, and now it had been determined that these states were no longer a republican confederation, but a republican nation. But what else? Beyond the words of the Constitution and the republican values represented by General Washington, what was to be its character? At the beginning of 1790, the answer still lay very much in the future. Now that it lies in the past, we find it hard to imagine how heavily this question could have weighed upon the leaders of the time. A primary stress in the emotional and ideological life of new nations in the twentieth century has been the problem of national self-definition. What sort of face, or character, the nation is to exhibit to the rest of the world; in what manner its economic life should be organized, how extensively and with what degree of

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independence; the quality of its ties with other nations; and above all, the way in which it defines itself with reference to the former mother country: such questions have generated tensions and even upheavals in the world of today that have seemingly rested on no "rational" basis. Problems of national economy have been addressed by some societies in ways that appear to bear only indirectly upon their true material interests. The bitterest of ideological factionalism has erupted over differences in cultural orientation which to outsiders seem almost unreal.1 Like most other nations founded upon revolution, America did not escape such strains. It was in fact no less a problem than this that wrecked the personal and political relations between James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

I James Madison: The Political Economy of Anglophobia From the most constructive period of Madison's career, that spanning roughly the decade between 1780 and 1790, there remains a picture of the man that has become more or less traditional. It is the picture of the modest conciliator, the statesman of compromise. James Madison comes to us as the man of sagacity and intelligence, of great learning in the realms of history and political science, who nevertheless does not insist upon himself. He is the quiet builder, mindful of other men's ideas and feelings, willing both to channel their energies and to allow them the credit. He is self-effacing, resourceful, and tireless, his accomplishments being due in no small part simply to his willingness to remain at work long after others had gone to bed. It is thus James Madison who, almost in spite of himself, emerges as the chief architect of the United States Constitution. There is only one aspect of this picture that does not belong. But add a touch or two, and even with all the rest remaining the whole effect is somehow altered. James Madison was not really a compromiser. He was a revolutionary; his ideological presuppositions, down deep, were immovable; despite all appearances to the contrary, he was one of the most stubborn and willful men of his time. In what to him was fundamental, he was quietly, implacably determined to have his way. From the present distance, one penetrates the essential Madison just so far. But watching him always with reference to certain fixed points in his personality and career does help us around some of the paradoxes. Probably the most important of such points is the man's almost paralyzing shyness. All his other attributes—some of them quite incongruous, such as his ambition, his talent, his tenacity, and his intellectual authority—had somehow to be arranged about and adjusted to this, in the course of his development and growth. This process of psychic adjustment had some intriguing by-products. He managed to have his talents recognized at an early age, even though it was not until he was thirty that he could bring himself to take the floor at a public gathering. Personal references in his correspondence are maddeningly few, and when in later life he arranged

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his papers for eventual publication (not to occur until after his death), he appears to have systematically suppressed virtually everything of a "private" nature, though it is not likely that such material had ever really abounded in the first place. For this and other reasons, James Madison's humanity is harder to reconstruct than that of any comparable leader of his time. Ideas were of consuming importance to him, and some of the most striking ones in the history of American constitutional thought are his. But pride of authorship in the ordinary sense was something he learned to renounce very early, if indeed he ever had it. The cause, the idea, was the vital thing, and time after time he would attribute an origin to someone else rather than claim it for himself, which made for a special kind of delicacy in a man not otherwise given to large gestures of open generosity. Anonymity was far more comfortable than the glare of the limelight. "Madison," as one writer has put it, "was made small enough (five foot six) and sufficiently diffident as not to excite the suspicion of men that he would be in competition with them for anything. . . ."2 He could go to some lengths to assist in the saving of face, and he had a well-developed sense of how to achieve the measures he sought without making other men angry. And yet this flexibility, as we shall see, was hardly unlimited. It must in any case be remembered that everything he did was done by a man both timid and stubborn. In addition to his extreme personal diffidence, there is a related element in the modus operandi of James Madison that is important for an understanding of his career as a whole. Unprepared to confront his environment alone, through direct force of personality—as many men of his time, such as Patrick Henry, could and did do—James Madison always functioned, when he did so effectively, under some kind of "cover." As a rule it was only in the setting of the committee, rather than that of the forum, that he could have an operative public self. The rule had few exceptions. Even the Constitutional Convention, which was the peak point of Madison's career, was in many ways a kind of closed committee, whose actual proceedings were not made public for more than fifty years and then only when he himself chpse to do it. Then there was another form of "cover" that Madison maintained in constant repair. He would enter upon no question of policy or law without the most massive prior preparation, which meant that he would almost always know at least twice as much about it as anyone else present. So it is not so much the image of a man, but of the man's knowledge and intelligence with a life of their own, that has left its impress upon history. The "cover" principle even operated, in an odd sort of way, in the sphere of his social relations. Depending on the witness, accounts of Madison's social presence could vary between the most perplexing extremes. One might find him charming; another could think him a "gloomy stiff creature." It was Margaret Bayard Smith who may have hit it closest: "this entertaining, interesting and communicative personage, had a single stranger or indifferent person been present, would have been mute, cold and repulsive."3 James Madison was born in 1751 and grew up at Montpelier, a plantation in the Virginia piedmont near the Rapidan, an upper branch of the Rappahannock. Of his forbears he wrote, "They were planters and among the respectable though ,80.

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not the most opulent class." Nevertheless his father, Colonel James Madison— county lieutenant, justice of the peace, large landowner, and vestryman of St. Thomas Parish—was probably the most important man in Orange County. Colonel Madison, who did not have all the learning he would have liked, was determined that his son should receive the best education available. James junior attended a preparatory school at Dunkirk in King and Queen County conducted by the able Scottish pedagogue Donald Robertson. There, and later through a season of tutoring at home, he studied Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, logic, mathematics, and geography, and developed an interest in political philosophy through the reading of Montesquieu and Locke. He entered the College of New Jersey at Princeton in 1769 and completed the course of four years in a little over two. He received the bachelor's degree in September 1771.4 Princeton, in addition to its high intellectual elan during the years Madison attended, was already penetrated by an all-but-open republicanism, and the college vibrated with revolutionary sentiments as time went on. Such sentiments were shared, and even abetted, by the president. John Witherspoon was a burly, vigorous, and irrepressible Presbyterian cleric recently arrived from Scotland, where the most advanced ideas of the age in moral and political philosophy were being generated. "The Doctor," as Witherspoon was fondly known to his students, would himself be a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Continental Congress. In 1770, when the merchants of New York went back on their agreement to maintain non-importation, a copy of their self-justifying letter to the Philadelphia merchants was burned at Princeton in the college yard by the public hangman, hired for the purpose by the students, "all of them appearing in their black Gowns & the bell Tolling."5 Though both law and theology were among Madison's many intellectual interests, neither the bar nor the ministry seems ever to have been seriously considered by him as a career, in view of his weak voice and personal shyness. Of the latter failing he was apparently quite conscious, judging from the frequent entries in his youthful commonplace book on timid men and their behavior, culled from the maxims of Cardinal de Retz and others. At Princeton he was among the founding members of the American Whig Society. Little is known of the early activities and purposes of American Whig and its rival society, Cliosophic, except for the so-called paper wars between them, but in these James Madison first found a vehicle of public expression which did not constrain him. Members of each society wrote lampooning ditties about those of the other; these satires would then be read in open hall by a designated spokesman before the entire student body, while the actual authors—notable among whom was Madison—remained anonymous. Madison's verses were a bit on the ribald side, which somewhat relieves the picture we have inherited of him as a man of no wit. Among Madison's fellow Whigs were Hugh Henry Brackenridge, William Bradford, and Philip Freneau; Aaron Burr was a Clio.6 At commencement, each graduate was expected to deliver an oration. Madison, though a shining student and well enough at the time, could not do it, and was excused. Upon his return home he suffered a breakdown in the form of epileptoid hysteria, an ailment connected with "overstudy, day dream -

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ing, hypochondria and a sense of physical inferiority," and among whose victims, as Breuer and Freud later wrote, "one may meet persons of the clearest intellects, the strongest wills, greatest principles, and of the subtlest minds." For a time Madison kept his friend Bradford in a state of some alarm with letters gloomily predicting his own early death, but seems to have recovered himself through exercise and by temporarily easing up on his reading. Within a year he was back in health.7 Early in 1774 five or six Baptists were jailed in Culpeper County for preaching without licenses, and this drew from James Madison an exceptional flare-up of feeling, plus his first words and acts of a public nature. "I have neither patience to hear talk or think of any thing relative to this matter," he wrote to Bradford, "for I have squabbled and scolded abused and ridiculed so long about it, to so little purpose that I am without common patience." It is not clear precisely what he did, but he seems to have exerted some influence on behalf of the dissenters, and the Baptists were to support him in his home district from that time on. The approach of the Revolution in effect opened to the twenty-three-year-old Madison his true career. "On the commencement of the dispute with Great Britain," he later wrote in his "Autobiography" (characteristically referring to himself in the third person), "he entered with the prevailing zeal into the American Cause. ..." This seems to have occurred to some extent under his father's aegis. At the meeting of freeholders which chose James junior as a member of the Orange County Committee of Safety in 1774, Colonel Madison was elected chairman. Father and son were likewise elected to the Convention of 1776 which was to devise a new government for Virginia. During the adoption of the Declaration of Rights at that convention, the young man once again put himself on record for religious liberty. In committee, he succeeded in having George Mason's article on that point amended from a guarantee of "toleration" to the more ample "free exercise" of religion. He was defeated for a seat in the newly constituted House of Delegates, presumably because he refused to treat the voters to liquor. But his talents were already sufficiently evident to the members of the House that they elected him to the Council of State, where he served under the first two elected Governors of Virginia, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. Late in 1779 he was chosen to go to the Continental Congress, where he remained until October 1783. By the time he left, his biographer says, he had made himself "the acknowledged leader in every activity that bulwarked independence and pointed toward a strong, firm national union of the states."8 Madison's preeminence in Congress came not primarily from speechmaking but from his tireless committee work and the writing of letters, instructions, and reports. He was directly concerned with a range of business that included defense, military finance, revenue, commerce, diplomacy, and western lands. The very intensity with which he committed himself to this work, rarely missing a day's session, made it virtually inevitable that he should also commit himself in the course of it to a broad continental view of the Revolution which had little room for narrow sectional or local interests. It was during this period that he first met Alexander Hamilton, who entered Congress in 1782. The two saw eye to eye on almost everything, and quickly became friends and allies.

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Side by side with Madison's nationalism grew a bitterness toward England which was greatly intensified by the British campaign in the South. "Negroes, Horses, Tobacco &c," he wrote to Philip Mazzei, "not the standards and arms of their antagonists, are the trophies which display their success/' His reaction to these depredations, says Irving Brant, "deepened an Anglophobia which ruled his mind and emotions for years to come." Madison's mind, whose judicious and rational side may be the more prominent, is nevertheless not at all comprehensible unless this anglophobia is seen as a significant force in its workings.9 Still, it is principally to Madison's nationalism that one looks for the energy which propelled his actions from the end of the Revolution through the framing and ratification of the Federal Constitution—through two more terms in the Virginia Assembly, membership in the abortive Annapolis Convention, a return to Congress, a seat at Philadelphia in 1787, and another in the ratifying convention of Virginia in 1788. Madison's great contribution to the Philadelphia Convention consisted not of compromises—these were for the most part worked out by others—but rather of a master theory and a master plan. The theory—to be known as "Federalism" — was one which rationalized a large republic in the face of the prevailing idea that only small ones could function; it was also one which justified a strong central government in the face of fears in the several states that central power meant tyranny. The plan—to be known as the "Virginia Plan" —specified a series of key arrangements which to Madison were indispensable if Federalism was to work. Most of them were enacted, thanks in great part to the persistence of Madison himself. Two of them, however, were not, despite Madison's every effort to save them. Stubbornly opposed to state encroachments on national power, he resisted state equality in either branch of the national legislature. When the great compromise was reported whereby representation in the lower house was made proportionate to population and that in the Senate made equal, Madison, according to his own words, "was not only fixed in his opposition to the report of the committee but was prepared for any event that might follow a negative of it."10 It was only with deep disgust that he finally gave in. The other provision he had his heart set on but lost was a sweeping veto by the national government on all state laws. The authority of the federal judiciary was not in his view an adequate substitute. Yet most of Madison's views on national supremacy were in fact embodied in the completed Constitution, even though the powers of the national government would have been still greater if he had fully had his way. The following year he and Hamilton, with the assistance of John Jay, defended the work of the Convention and the logic of the Constitution in The Federalist. In Madison's case it was logical that the thoughts that went into these papers, and into the work he had done at Philadelphia, should have received a fair portion of their shape from Madison's prior intellectual experience. The Princeton of Madison's day furnished nine delegates to the Federal Convention—more than any other college, and one more than the combined total of Princeton's two closest competitors.11 For Madison the choice of Princeton, rather than the more convenient William and Mary, was itself that of an at-least-partially

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prepared mind. Madison's initial revolutionary impulses had already taken the form of strong opposition to the Anglican establishment in Virginia and to the movement in England for sending a bishop to America. Though the Madisons themselves were Anglicans, both father and son seem to have been suspicious enough of Church of England influence at William and Mary that they preferred Presbyterian Princeton, already known for libertarian sentiments and already "talking as if she was to be a bulwark against Episcopacy." Religious liberty was insisted upon there, and the subject was frequently debated. A major premise of Madison's Federalist Number 10 —that a multiplicity of interests may function as a guarantee of political stability and against majority despotism—had grown very logically out of Madison's earliest responses to the ecclesiastical situation in Virginia and to his own peculiar determination all through the 17708 and 17805 to pull down the Anglican Church's privileged position there. "If the Church of England had been the established and general Religion in all the Northern Colonies as it has been among us here," he wrote to William Bradford early in 1774, "... it is clear to me that slavery and Subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us." The shape of the thought is that of Voltaire, whom Madison and his fellow-students read at Princeton. He was fond of quoting Voltaire's quip that if only one sect were allowed in England, "despotism might be apprehended; if two only, they would seek to cut each other's throats; but as there are at least thirty, they live together in peace and happiness."12 Enlightenment thought was accessible not only at Princeton but at colleges and academies everywhere in the colonies: the works of Locke and Montesquieu, Vattel and Burlamaqui, even Rousseau and Voltaire, were more or less basic equipment for anyone intellectually concerned with public questions. But the setting at Princeton still seems to have contained a certain extra something, and many writers have tried to account for the special vitality of that setting during the period at which James Madison and his contemporaries studied there. Various elements appear to have intersected in a felicitous way to produce it. The prestige of the college had risen vastly with the trustees' success in persuading the distinguished Witherspoon to take over its leadership, and the excitement generated by Witherspoon's vigorous reorganizing was still new when the young Madison first arrived less than a year later.13 It was of considerable importance, moreover, that Witherspoon was fresh from Scotland and that Edinburgh, where he had been trained, was then the most vital intellectual center of the English-speaking world. The English universities of that same period, placidly mired under Establishment control and whose chief professional product was candidates for the Anglican clergy, were moribund. The Scottish universities, on the other hand, were full of energy. It was energy of a contentious and restless sort, and the restlessness was a feature of Scottish society as a whole, in which there were many strains. For a very poor country, the Union of 1707 had opened the way for an economic development which would at least be complementary to, rather than competitive with, that of England, but the advance of prosperity that resulted from it was by no means quickly or evenly achieved. Meanwhile Scots showed themselves willing to talk, at least, about rem,84.

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edies for almost anything. They both considered and achieved reforms in land tenure and agriculture, developed Scottish commerce, and made scientific advances in industry. They discussed electoral reform endlessly, though with fewer results. Even the frequent spasms of emigration (mostly to America) and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 reflected tensions that were salutary as well as disruptive. There was great popular enthusiasm for education. An act of 1696 had provided for the establishment of a school in every parish, as a result of which the Scots in the eighteenth century developed a better system of education than that of any country in Europe. Scottish boys with talent but no money could find their way into the universities to an extent unthinkable in England. The universities themselves catered to a range of intense professional ambition, in public law, science, and medicine as well as theology, and one of their unique features was unofficial student debating societies to whose meetings professors came only on invitation, and in which contention was heated and vigorous. Moreover, the cultural tension between England and Scotland, replete with both attractions and repulsions, imparted still another special element to Scottish intellectual life. On the one hand, English dissenters and nonconformists were welcome at Glasgow and Edinburgh but not at Oxford and Cambridge; on the other hand, the Scot who ventured into the literary world of London was never allowed to forget his provincialism. In conservative eighteenth-century England, the mentality of the outsider—of opposition, of criticism, of reform, of the "Country party" —had few formal or stable vehicles of expression. In Scotland, all this was more or less institutionalized in the universities.14 Such, in short, was the setting of the "Scottish Renaissance" of the eighteenth century. It produced a formidable group of luminaries: David Hume, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, John Miller, William Robertson, and Lord Kames. They were contemporaries, all knew each other, and all were known to John Witherspoon by the time he left Scotland in 1768 to take up his new station in America. What Witherspoon gave to his students, and what made him the greatest teacher of his day in America, did not primarily consist in creating bonds of discipleship. He did something better; he brought them the news of ideas, a good many of which, as it happened, he had little use for. In their own management of ideas, however, Witherspoon by his personal example encouraged them, almost in spite of himself, to be selective. Intellectually he was pugnacious, dogmatic, and arbitrary. One of his favorite targets was the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, which he saw as deplorably superficial. On the other hand, the political dimension of Hutcheson's moral system included the first specific discussion of the conditions under which colonies and mother country ought to separate— a doctrine which Witherspoon fully endorsed in both thought and deed. In his lectures on moral philosophy he thundered against David Hume as an "infidel"; in his lectures on eloquence Hume became "sagacious" and possessed of "great reach and accuracy of judgment in matters of criticism." It seems to have been a working principle with Witherspoon that if persons suspected a thing of being pernicious, "they ought to acquaint themselves with it; they must know what it

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is, if they mean to shew that it is false/' His list of what the students ought to read embraces the choicest works of the Enlightenment, pernicious or otherwise. The evidence suggests, moreover, that all, or nearly all, were devoured by the young Madison.15 James Madison's theory of the extended republic and of the nature of political man is probably seen in its most compressed form in Federalist Number 10. The assumptions behind it, the particular spirit of inquiry implicit in it, and even certain of its leading ideas —as Douglass Adair has shown16—take on additional meaning when viewed with reference to the special edge given to Enlightenment thought by the Scots. The "utopianism" of Enlightenment thinking amounted to more than mere constructs of reason. It had little room, on the other hand, for assumptions such as those of Burke that governments and constitutions were the product of slow organic growth, and that changes in them could only occur in the same way. Nor, at the same time, did it have much in common with one of the central beliefs of nineteenth-century Romanticism, that all discourse on matters of government and society must take for its starting point the unique character and needs of a given people and a given national state. The political philosophers of the Enlightenment tended to be universal planners; they made endless projections into the future. But they also insisted that such projections be based not simply on reason but on experience and evidence, and herein lay both a certain freedom and a certain psychological protection. Behind an attitude of "realism" — a kind of a priori skepticism toward any proposed system, and a judicious pessimism about most aspects of human nature—they felt free to inquire into the ways whereby people might still predict, plan, and promote their own progress. In Scotland this state of mind was brought to a focus probably sharper than occurred anywhere else. It has been conceded that the Scots—Hume, Smith, and Ferguson in particular—are as entitled as any to be called the founders of empirical social science. A basic premise they all shared was that the behavior of people in society occurs in patterns that are more or less uniform in virtually all times and places, and that human nature itself is not subject to very great change. A dependable science of politics and government, with principles of predictability that are applicable anywhere, is therefore possible if those principles are based on experience and observation. It further follows that the materials of experience are to be found in the study of history—the history both of ancient republics and of modern states. (It was for such reasons that John Witherspoon first introduced history to the curriculum at Princeton.) State-making and the forming of commonwealths must thus be guided by the scientific reading of history's lessons — bearing always in mind, of course, that those lessons might be read in more than one way.17 Douglass Adair has pictured James Madison writing the Tenth Federalist with the Essays of David Hume lying open on his table. There are certainly parallelisms that make this plausible. Hume in 1752 had hoped that an opportunity might some day be afforded for reducing to practice the "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," "either by a dissolution of some old government, or by the combination of men to form a new one, in some distant part of the world."18 Madison in 1788

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was justifying in theory, with Hume's assistance, what he had just helped to bring about in practice. Both assumed that among the worst of all perils in a free government was that of faction. A great inspiration for Madison was Hume's insistence that such perils were more easily controlled in a large republic than in a small one, despite Montesquieu's widely believed doctrine that only small states were governable as republics. Each took for granted that factions and parties— they used the terms more or less interchangeably—were evil. A faction, according to Madison, was any group, a majority or minority in the commonwealth, actuated by some "passion, or ... interest" adverse to the public good or to the rights of the whole. The designs of a minority faction might be thwarted by the republican principle of majority rule. But where was the remedy if the faction should embrace a majority? The causes of faction, Madison asserted, are "sown in the nature of man."19 Like Hume, he allowed that there could be any number of occasions for forming factions and all manner of differences—of class, religion, property, and what not—on which they might be based. There has been some conjecture by modern writers as to just what sorts of divisions Madision thought most susceptible to faction. But whatever the answer may be, of one thing he seems to be certain: if factions are not formed on one pretext they will be formed on some other. Men commit aggressions upon one another because—tautology though it may be—it is in man's nature to be aggressive.20 And yet the remedy for faction is not to remove its causes, because that is impossible; nor is it to take away the liberty without which factions cannot be formed, since to take away liberty is to take away all. Such a cure would be "worse than the disease." The true remedy is not to strike at the causes, but to control the effects. Small republics, said Hume in the "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," are "frail and uncertain," because the close habitation of the people makes them more susceptible to sudden currents of popular passion and facilitates the formation of tyrannical majority factions. Hume then declared that in a large government, which is modelled with masterly skill, there is compass and room enough to refine the democracy, from the lower people . . . to the higher magistrates, who direct all the movements. At the same time, the parts are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest.21

It was just such a government as this, Madison thought, that had in fact been formed in America, and it was under just such a government, he argued, that the rights of all would be most secure. In this large and extended republic, there would be a wider choice of representatives, a "greater variety of parties" which would prevent any one party's "being able to outnumber and oppress the rest"; and although "factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, [they] will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. . . ." And so, he concluded, "in the extent and proper structure of the Union . . . we behold a Republican remedy for the diseases most incident to Republican government."22 .87.

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The Tenth Federalist was the first of the series that Madison wrote, and it represented the compressed essence of several years' reading and thought as developed in more diffuse form through his correspondence, in the two papers he had written prior to the Convention, "Vices of the Political System of the United States" and "On Ancient and Modern Confederacies," and in the speeches he had made in the Convention itself. Among the ways in which the Tenth Federalist has been read in modern times is as an outline for "brokerage politics," the arts of compromise, the "politics of privacy."23 Yet in fact such a realm hardly existed in 1789, certainly not for James Madison. The philosopher, the system-builder, is not the man most likely to be found playing the role of compromise broker for other men's "private opportunities," and even less for other men's systems. The "politics of privacy" had virtually no room for the choices and opportunities of a James Madison, because he could not have them in the sense that ordinary men could. His most valued private choices could not be private at all. They were made in the realm of ideas and systems; his opportunity was the public good. He was, when Fisher Ames first observed him in 1789, wholly a public man: he "was bred to it, and has no other profession."24 He could thus have no clear way of perceiving when those choices might—to use his own definition—become strongly, even dangerously, "factious." Madison and his friend Hamilton might agree on the structure of the republic, on the extent of its powers, on its need for a strong Executive and a generous revenue, and even on its need to coerce the states. And yet on the republic's character, its moral texture, the face it presented to the rest of the world—matters that almost defied thought—the two could never agree, though they did not as yet know it. The moral weather of James Madison's republic must never be tainted by the least shadow of dependence on Great Britain. This was fundamental; he could go no deeper. And though he may have been thinking thoughts of continental breadth, the eyes through which he saw his republic were still, with all said and done, those of a Virginian. The intensity with which Madison promoted his plan of discrimination against British commerce in the spring and summer of 1789 was the product of convictions already formed before the new government was organized, convictions he was determined to put into practice as soon as possible. A uniform tonnage duty on the vessels of countries with whom the United States had commercial treaties (specifically, France), and a higher duty on those of countries with whom we did not (specifically, England) had as its primary object neither increased revenue nor advantages for American shipping. These could be achieved just as well or better by duties that would be the same for all. Nor was the plan simply one whereby a bargaining instrument might be fashioned to extract concessions for American trade with the British West Indies. Madison hardly pictured himself as a spokesman for the interests of American merchants. Indeed, when merchants objected to his plan, he turned his hostility upon them, charging that they were unduly subservient to British influence. His was no less an object than the dignity of his republic, which Great Britain might be expected to debase in any way she could. Her instrument now was commerce, and as long as the mother country held "a

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much greater proportion of our trade than she is naturally entitled to," she retained that instrument. The true remedy would be to alter the channels entirely, if possible, and redirect them toward France. For several years past, Thomas Jefferson had worked toward this aim through diplomacy; Madison now hoped to achieve it through lawmaking.25 James Madison was not normally a man of passion, and Fisher Ames found himself "unable to account for Madison's passionate attachment to the discrimination."26 But if Ames had been a Virginian rather than a New Englander, holding Virginia values and seeing the world as Virginians saw it, it would have been evident to him that Madison was acting not upon "interest" but on principle. He might then have responded as Virginians did to what they saw as the moral hazards of commerce, the moral status of debt, and the moral influence of Great Britain in fashioning these into instruments of corruption. Madison's first election to the Continental Congress was in December 1779, but on account of heavy snows he had been obliged to remain in Virginia until early in March. One of the most critical problems then facing Congress was that of Revolutionary finance, and Madison used the interval to prepare himself for his new duties by writing a treatise on money. Twelve years later, in 1791, he would have the same treatise published in Philip Freneau's newspaper in Philadelphia, on the ground that its argument was as valid then as it had been when he wrote it. Though its economics was debatable, the paper was nonetheless intelligent, reasonably technical, and informed. But it is of special interest for the attitude it reflected on the subject of debt. It was an attitude which had permeated the atmosphere of Madison's boyhood, and would remain with him throughout his life.27 The financial crisis of 1779-80 had been occasioned by excessive issues of Continental paper currency which were now in an alarming process of depreciation. Various remedies were under consideration—devaluation, increased taxes, and redemption for interest-bearing certificates of indebtedness — and, as it turned out, Congress was to try a mixture of them all. But the common-sense assumption behind each was that depreciation had occurred principally because the quantity of currency in circulation had become inordinate, and should therefore be reduced with the object of stabilizing its value. It was this "quantity theory" of money that Madison challenged. He argued that the major variable affecting prices was not the quantity of currency in circulation (in relation to the amount of goods and services available), but rather the confidence of the public in its redeemability, whatever might be the amount of it. As an intellectual exercise the treatise is curious, because on the one hand Madison offers no specific remedies of his own, and on the other he constructs an ingeniously elaborate attack on the one remedy he is against, that of a funded debt. He says nothing about the need for taxation (though he perceived it, as his correspondence certainly shows, and he strongly advocated it in Congress), but he has narrowed the ground upon which taxation or any other expedient may be justified. For example, it would not be to reduce the quantity of currency that taxes should be levied, but rather to assure the public that government revenues were adequate to fulfill its obligations. (This had

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been Virginia's technique for financing its colonial wars: to issue paper money and then to commit a proportion of the taxes toward its redemption.) But the most pernicious remedy for depreciation, the one least rational and most to be avoided, was public loans in any form. By adding the interest charges which these entailed, "we invent new expenditures. In order to raise the value of our money, which depends on the time of its redemption, we have recourse to a measure which removes its redemption to a more distant day. Instead of paying off the capital to the public creditors, we give them an enormous interest to change the name of a bit of paper which expresses the sum due to them. .. ." James Madison was the last man to deny that the public debt was a sacred obligation. Quite the contrary; the government's solvency and credit were among his most intense concerns throughout the period of the Confederation. But he was certainly the last man to think of a public debt as a public blessing. Indeed, a special mentality with regard to debt of any kind was the heritage of almost any Virginian, running in the borderland between thought and feeling.28 The economic life of colonial Virginia had been so organized that most of what Virginians knew about business, credit, finance, and trade had been taught them by the British. These lessons could well have been salutary ones, inasmuch as British experience and techniques in all these realms were probably more sophisticated and advanced than any others in the world. But the Virginians' very location in the network of production and trade of which they were a part necessarily rendered any role they might play in the shaping of it a relatively passive one. It was this psychic immobilization, rather than the question of how well the system did or did not function over the long cycle, that made the main difference in their behavior. To be dependent on it was one thing; to identify themselves in a positive way with the well-being of the system as a whole, and to internalize its values, was quite another. They were bound to see any fluctuations in it, whether to their advantage or not, as the work of outsiders and of forces beyond their reach; a sense of real creativity in molding its standards, processes, and operating norms was by the nature of the case denied them. For its benefits, they need thank only themselves and their own industry. For its shortcomings, they could look to a chain of British middlemen, manipulating invisible values, weaving snares of credit and debt, wielding invisible instruments, and slicing off shares of a Virginian's rightful profits at every step of the way. It was in such a pattern that most Virginians of that day formed their habits of mind.29 Some historians have intimated that a strong motive impelling the planter class of Virginia into the Revolution was a desire to repudiate debts owed to British merchants. Though that case has been shown to be overdrawn, what is obvious beyond much doubt is that the heaviest shadow hanging over Virginia life by the 17608 and 17708 was the shadow of debt. Virginians owed more money to British creditors on the eve of the Revolution than did those of any other colony, and almost as much as all the rest combined. Reluctance to alter a steadily rising style of life in the face of sharp drops in tobacco prices in 1763 and 1773 accounted for deep crises in most of Virginia's leading families.30 A man in such straits, wrote George Washington, ought to retrench, but then "how can I, says he, who have

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lived in such and such a manner change my method? I am ashamed to do it; and besides such an alteration in the system of my living, will create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, and such a thought the World must not harbour. . . . This I am satisfied is the way that many who have set out in the wrong tract, have reasoned, till ruin stares them in the face." When Treasurer and Speaker of the House John Robinson died in 1766, it was discovered that he had lent out over £100,000 in public funds to straitened planters, and the list of debtors to the Robinson estate included the greatest names in Virginia.31 The Robinson affair occasioned much gloom (some of which must have penetrated the Madison household, since Edmund Pendleton, the estate's co-administrator, was a close friend of the family, and Pendleton's ward, the future "John Taylor of Caroline," was a schoolmate of James junior), but the public reaction to it seems to have been rather muted. Robinson's own name escaped the kind of dishonor that might normally have been expected in such circumstances because of his "Compassion for Persons in Distress."32 The fact was that the exigencies behind these desperate transactions were too much a feature of everyone's experience to make of the episode a far-flung scandal. Instead, this and a whole series of less spectacular but equally oppressive stringencies in the economic life of the gentry during this period made for a more diffuse moral crisis. They began accusing themselves of falling prey to the corruptions of sloth and luxury. "Extravagance," lamented William Nelson, "hath been our Ruin," and, according to Nathaniel Savage, the only "Recipe that can be prescribed at this juncture, is Frugality and Industry, which is a potion scarcely to be swallowed by Virginians brought up from their cradles in Idleness Luxury and Extravagance."33 A gentleman, however, paid his debts, or tried to. Of that there was no doubt in the Virginia code, and repudiation was never a threat to the public morality even at the height of the revolutionary crisis. Thomas Nelson, Jefferson's successor as governor, was as heavily entangled as any, but he publicly declared, "By God, I will pay my debts like an honest man."34 Considering the economic arrangements under which the tobacco-planting gentry functioned, debt was a fact of existence and a necessary evil. But that it was anything but an evil, an evil that led to countless other evils, and that this was its overriding feature, few Virginians were capable of imagining. But to suppose that the Virginians would not find a ready scapegoat would be expecting too much of them. The real author of all these evils was the British merchant, whose very profession, Landon Carter declared, "kicks Conscience out of doors like a fawning Puppy," and whose broker "is a villain in the very engagements he enters into." Such villainy was at the heart of Thomas Jefferson's explanation of the disproportionate balances owed by Virginians to Great Britain: The advantages made by the British merchants on the tobaccoes consigned to them were so enormous that they spared no means of increasing those consignments. A powerful engine for this purpose was the giving good prices and credit to the planter, till they got him more immersed in debt than he could pay without selling his lands or slaves. They then reduced the prices given for his tobacco so

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that let his shipments be ever so great, and his demand of necessities ever so economical, they never permitted him to clear off his debt. These debts had become hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.

Jefferson, who was himself never able to live within his means, was in no position to perceive that the merchants were as dependent on the planters—many of whom had in effect been supported by them for ten or fifteen years prior to the Revolution—as the planters were upon them, since a merchant who tried to limit one man's credit risked alienating all his other customers, most of whom were related. But there is no way of settling the final "justice" of a whole society's view of its own experience. What is certain is that for a Virginian, the ideological consequences of this particular experience went very deep. Debt and the very idea of debt, merchants and the very idea of a mercantile way of life, were inseparable from the anglophobia of the Revolution.35 A term of which James Madison made frequent use in his writings was "the national character." And for him, if the lessons of Virginia meant anything, it was that a further dependence, in any form, on the mother country could have no other effect on the purity of the national character than to debase it. With this as a kind of first principle, much in Madison's words and actions throughout the remainder of his public life becomes understandable.

2 Alexander Hamilton and the Mercantile Utopia At some point the careers and outlook of both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton took what might almost be called a reactionary turn, in the sense that in the fluid phases of any revolutionary cycle there is always a certain openness of mind and spirit, and a shared broadness of aim, which cannot be permanent and which is bound to alter with the passing of time and with the consolidation of the revolution's achievements. At the moment of these two men's collaboration in the writing of The Federalist, the phase of openness, of promise and possibility, was evidently at its meridian. The consistency of aim and intention throughout most of those essays is decidedly more impressive than the numerous internal variations, and it is easy to imagine the Publius who put his name to each paper being animated by the same spirit and largely the same thoughts throughout. And yet while Publius remained forever open, it would be no more than two or three years before James Madison and Alexander Hamilton would close, harden, and drift away from the Publius who had represented the union of their energies and talents, and become enemies. One ought to see and know these men as they were before, as well as after, this happened. In certain important ways it changed them both, and in neither case is this drift quite comprehensible without the influence and contribution of the other. This would not be quite the problem that it is, were it not for a certain perennial urge to locate the "blame." Hamilton, for various reasons, seems to

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have absorbed much the greater share of it, and it is easy to see why, if one begins with their respective temperaments and moves outward. Hamilton's vivacity, selfinsistence, and gross visibility wherever he was — contrasted with all the opposite qualities in Madison—would seem to contain in themselves all the makings of a sharp personality clash. But if so, it was certainly delayed for quite a few years, during which time the two were good friends with occasion enough for each to discover what the other was like. Perhaps there was more to it. A variant explanation has had to do with a craving for power on Hamilton's part and a calculated drive to lay his hands on as much of it as he could, to the dismay of his less forward co-worker. Each, however, was fascinated by power and preoccupied with it, as revolutionaries generally are; at the same time, Hamilton, when we look closer at him, turns out to be a good deal less "calculating" than he has often been represented—probably, indeed, less so than Madison. True, a power contest of sorts does seem to have occurred between them. But it takes two to make a contest. It may be imagined that Madison, in the spring and summer of 1789, found his position very satisfying. As the most trusted advisor of Washington, his fellow-Virginian, and having had things so largely his own way in framing the basic legislation, Madison could not have viewed the sudden incursion of Hamilton's influence, and that of Hamilton's Treasury which he, Madison, had created, without some degree of fretfulness. When Hamilton, with his grand system of finance, usurped so large a share of Congress's attention as well as of the President's ear, there were two powers in the field where there had previously been one.36 Still, something more subtle was at stake than simple power. It may have been no less than Hamilton's grand design itself, its very self-contained massiveness, that repelled Madison and caused him to exert all his strength in opposing it. It has been said that Hamilton's determination to enact the whole of his Utopian financial system—the funding plan, assumption of state debts, national bank, and the rest—was the primary cause of the rupture, and that a rigid refusal to compromise, to accept any alterations, was what made wreckage of a former unity. The plan, which had been thought out at great length, was indeed "utopian." But it was hardly less so than those which Madison himself had devised, also at great length, for the political as well as economic arrangements of the republic, and which he had promoted with equal stubbornness, equally reluctant to compromise, both in the Convention and in the legislative session of 1789. It was rather that with Hamilton's plan there were now two Utopias where previously there had been one. It was not primarily men that clashed, or even interests, but visions.37 If his career had somehow ended just before the rupture with Madison, Alexander Hamilton might well have come down to us as one of the most attractive and dashing figures in American history. The stresses that came to fix the picture we do have were for the most part introduced after that time; in any case the perpetual romantic youth, grandly certain of his prowess and forever touchy about his public honor, does not as a rule age gracefully. But the first thirty-four years of Hamilton's life give some proof of the other rule that the youthful prodigy, abounding in charm, good looks, talent, and energy, is not unreasonable in expect-

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ing that the world—that part of it whose approval he values—will lay its heart at his feet. The circumstances of his origin, being cloaked in just enough tropical shadow to arouse the most fanciful reveries, would have done justice to one of the heroes of Stendhal. It is supposed that he was born January n, 1755, illegitimately, on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies; it is known with more certainty that he grew up on the neighboring island of St. Croix. His mother, Rachel Fawcett Lavien, was an unhappy beauty whose distracted ardors eventually led her cuckolded husband to divorce her for adultery. Legally unable to remarry, the girl had meanwhile found refuge with James Hamilton, an agreeable young Scotsman whose family had held lands and a seat in Ayrshire for centuries. But being a fourth son, James had had to strike out for himself and had come to the West Indies at an early age. He was never successful. An agent for various merchant firms, he drifted from place to place and may have abandoned Rachel and their two sons, James junior and Alexander, on St. Croix about 1765. Rachel, maintaining a store at Christiansted, proved a better provider than he, though she died of a fever three years later, leaving the boys for practical purposes orphans. Even so, James Hamilton senior for some reason never forfeited his sons' affection. They got news of his whereabouts some years later, and Alexander would henceforth send him money and remain in touch with him, off and on, until his death at the age of eighty-one.38 How Alexander received his early education is unclear, but of its efficiency there appears little doubt. As a boy he read everything within reach—his favorite authors being Pope and Plutarch—and was bilingual, having learned to speak, read, and write French from his mother. His penmanship, adeptness at arithmetic, and capacity to express himself in writing with both precision and force all combined to make him a wonderful asset to the St. Croix merchant firm of Beekman and Cruger, into whose employ he entered as a clerk at about thirteen. The young Hamilton, despite his lack of fortune, was peculiarly situated to absorb the values, standards, habits of mind, and cosmopolitan outlook of the world of commerce under the most favorable possible circumstances. Though in a nominal sense he had no prospects, his ambitions were in fact warmly encouraged, and he was treated with every consideration both by his employers and by other members of the St. Croix community who knew him. Nicholas Cruger was a kindly and upright man who quickly recognized the youth's exceptional abilities, befriended him, and allowed him a large degree of responsibility and discretion in the affairs of the firm. When Hamilton was seventeen, a substantial fund was raised by the leading men of the island, Cruger probably subscribing the major share of it, to send him to North America for a college education. Cruger, who had good New York connections (his uncle was first president of the Chamber of Commerce), established an account there for the youth's maintenance. Those to whom the newcomer presented himself in New York, and who took responsibility for his welfare, were mercantile men. The world of commerce and mercantile affairs, in short, was one he had known from early boyhood, and he must have seen it very differently from one who—like his future friend James Madi94

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To all intents and purposes the Federalist measures of 1798, foremost among them the odious Alien and Sedition Acts, had furnished all those in any way attached to the Republican cause not only with an "issue" but with a vast release. It was a release from a whole series of inhibitions erected by the values and assumptions under which their entire generation had come to maturity, inhibitions having to do with the "baneful spirit" —as Washington had called it—of party. They could now unite, not as a mere faction in pursuit of office and emolument but as a band of patriots in resistance to encroaching tyranny and arbitrary power. They could join on the ground of principle to do what had to be done in the achievement of what they and everyone else might otherwise see as mere party ends. And the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the first counter-stroke in that effort, had done as much as, and perhaps more than, anything that came after them to set the tone and to point the way. Historians have from time to time puzzled themselves over just what effect they could have had, if any, on the "revolution of 1800," and have rightly concluded that there can be no straightforward answer.92 But it can at least be suspected that the Resolutions performed, at a critical time, a vigorous latent function. Something or other had to be done about them, or so it was thought, and not at some distant center where the national affairs were transacted but much closer to home, in each of ten separate state legislatures. It may actually have been fortunate for the Republicans in those places that they were in every case surrounded by Federalist majorities, because the challenge was not exactly an easy one, requiring as it did some nice discriminations. But what it did do was present them with an occasion for taking a long step in their own awareness of themselves as a party, and for striking a very satisfactory balance between party and principle. Few Republicans appear to have had any doubts about the principles embodied in the Resolutions in general. Yet a good many shied away from the implied remedy—that a state legislature might officially declare an act of Congress unconstitutional—and a number of them said so. Nevertheless when it came down to the question of how the Resolutions were to be disposed of, in each known case where the yeas and nays were recorded, it was settled by a strict party vote.93 Party and principle may not have been entirely merged, and that may have been just as well. The Republicans now knew a little more about where their work lay, where the help might come from, and what the arguments were, than they had beforehand.

6 Federalism and the "Campaign" of 1800 There are turns of luck in all things, and it is conceivable that the Federalists, as late as the opening of the Sixth Congress in December 1799, still possessed the means of effecting repairs of some sort, some purposeful arrest to the course of deterioration their fortunes were now evidently taking. It was still a Federalist Congress; indeed more so than the Fifth Congress that had preceded it. Its mem-

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bers had been elected while the surge of patriotic support for the Administration, reaching its meridian in mid-summer of 1798, was still very much in being, and the result had brought the Federalists even greater majorities than they had had then. True, the Republican victory in Pennsylvania had been a setback, as were Republican gains in southern legislatures. But it could still be supposed that with Federalist control of the House and Senate, and with a Federalist Executive, there ought to have been more than a fair possibility that with exertions in the right direction the Federalists might still face the test that lay before them in the allimportant election of 1800 and emerge from it with success.94 On the face of it, their true strategy could be seen as self-evident—or would have been so seen, say, by a later political generation. The great theme that had brought such a heightened degree of national unity in 1798—the encroaching menace of revolutionary France, the clear need of defense preparations for resisting it, the urgency of means for preventing the spread of subversive Jacobinical principles at home—must now be substantially abandoned, or at least significantly modified. With the Ellsworth mission at last on its way, and with public opinion generally inclined to approve the President's decision to send it, the French threat in the all-or-nothing form which the Federalists had given it could no longer be counted on as a sufficient rallying point for the citizenry. A peaceful settlement was now a possibility that must at least be allowed for, and a place made in their minds for the rewards that might accrue from it. With the likelihood of an actual French invasion having long since faded, and with popular exasperation at high taxes, the Alien and Sedition Laws, and an expensive army becoming every day more manifest, there was little to be gained from a continuing sole preoccupation with the specter of jacobinism. The time had come to turn it around: to exploit the growing popular support for the President's peace initiative, to insist that it was their firm and forthright policy that had made it possible, forcing the French to accept fresh negotiations on American terms, and to close the ranks of Federalism with a new and higher call for national unity in the name of peace and prosperity, to be reaffirmed and ratified by the re-election of the current administration. On the other hand, the liabilities they would have to overcome, residing less in their environment than in themselves, were so gross as to be all but immovable. The jacobin menace, at home and abroad, had become a consuming obsession. The other obsession, vastly more complex, was their self-image as men of "enlightened views and virtuous sentiments." They recoiled from any notion of themselves as agents of a partisan coalition with a diverse constituency, a party whose continuing vitality required a readiness to entice new and disparate aggregations of people to come inside and find a welcome. That was no part of their mission. Theirs was not to accommodate but to stand as examples and to point the way: not to mirror public opinion but to lead and correct it. Adjusting to popular passions was to play the demagogue, pander to the unenlightened, and set another example altogether—one of cowardice, hypocrisy, opportunism. The President's action, then, in dispatching the Ellsworth mission left in them little room for anything but confusion and rage. Adams had deliberately cut away .727.

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the one issue that had enabled them to rise in vindication of the public honor, arm the nation, arouse the people to their danger, and move against the lurking menace at home. In response to what they could only see as this willful folly, a number of leading Federalists were now furtively looking for a way to push Adams aside and replace him with a more suitable candidate in 1800. As it happened, there was at least one Federalist recently come into prominence who saw all these things differently. One of the newly elected members in the Virginia delegation to the Sixth Congress was John Marshall, who would take a highly active hand in the proceedings that opened in December 1799. One way to view these proceedings and their significance would be to do so through Marshall's eyes. When Marshall arrived at Philadelphia for the beginning of the session he was disturbed at much of what he saw and heard. "The eastern people," he wrote to his brother, are very much dissatisfied with the President on account of the late mission to France. They are strongly disposd to desert him & to push some other candidate. King or Ellsworth with one of the Pinckneys—most probably the general [Charles Cotesworth], are thought of. If they are deterd from doing this by the fear that the attempt might elect Jefferson I think it not improbable that they will vote generally for Adams & Pinckney so far as to give the latter gentleman the best chance if he gets the southern vote to be the President. Perhaps this ill humor may evaporate before the election comes on—but at present it wears a very serious aspect.95

In other words, if the "ill humor" should not evaporate, there could be only one outcome: instead of drawing their lines against the opposition, the Federalists would end up drawing them against each other. The southern Federalists were generally of a more moderate temper than those in much of the North, especially New England. On the question of electing a Speaker, Marshall thought that as one step toward a measure of party harmony it would be a good idea to choose a Southerner, two of the three previous Speakers having been from the middle states and the other from New England. A leading candidate, able and respected, was John Rutledge of South Carolina, and Marshall undertook to handle the case for electing him. But the New Englanders insisted on Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, and after three caucuses without any giving of ground it was evident to Rutledge that there was little point in drawing it out any further. He thereupon submitted with grace, and to prevent the Republicans from taking advantage of a Federalist division to elect one of their own, he told his supporters to cast their votes for Sedgwick. Sedgwick was as rigid an ideologue, and as bitter an opponent of Adams's French policy, as any High Federalist around.96 Marshall's talents were certainly well understood by Federalists of all complexions, and a number of them said so. They even recognized, moreover, that Marshall was a presence that could matter if there were to be anything like a .728.

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workable reconciliation within their own ranks. Theodore Sedgwick himself acknowledged as much. "He possesses great powers and has much dexterity in the application of them. He is highly & deservedly respected by the friends of Government from the South. In short, we can do nothing without him."97 Nevertheless there was something about Marshall that made a Federalist of Sedgwick's sort uneasy. For one thing, he paid rather too much attention to public opinion. "He is disposed . . . to express great respect for the sovereign people and to quote their opinions as an evidence of truth."98 And for another, very little that was coming out of the state of Virginia nowadays could be seen as unmixed good news, even such a power as Marshall. "I believe his intentions are perfectly honorable, & yet I do believe he would have been a more decided man had his education been on the other side of the Delaware. . . ." For all Marshall's moral weight ("In Congress, you see Genl. M. is a leader"),99 it would never be quite enough to turn the scales of reason, though certainly not for want of trying, or for Marshall's not fully knowing what he was about. By common consent, the choice of who should prepare the House's customary reply to the President's annual message fell upon Marshall. The resulting address, though suitably elevated in tone, was the product of some sweating. It politely echoed the President's sentiments on all the topics of his speech, on measures taken and others desirable, though there had to be shadings of emphasis here and there to ensure that it would get through the House without an eruption of unseemly debate on the floor. For instance, Adams had been singularly perfunctory about the need for continued measures of defense, with a rather pointed hint about taking thought for "an exact economy." Marshall, aware of what any High Federalist would make of that, put the case for defense on a distinctly more spirited plane, saying nothing about economy (except "commensurate with our resources"), and prudently avoiding any distinction between military and naval appropriations. And of course the touchiest of all the topics was the Ellsworth mission to France, and the obvious freedom from doubt in the President's mind as to his own wisdom in having sent it. Marshall's reply made a great deal of Adams's sincerity of purpose (consistent with "your conduct through a life useful to your fellow-citizens, and honorable to yourself), but qualified with a touch of irony by the hope "that similar dispositions may be displayed on the part of France." That ought to have done it: except that everyone knew, or would soon find out, that Marshall himself had personally approved Adams's decision, and that Adams knew it as well. So the outcome was rather a sullen stand-off. The address passed, according to Oliver Wolcott, "with silent dissent."100 One of Marshall's worst liabilities in the eyes of most northern Federalists (besides generally "thinking too much of Virginia") was his known disapproval of the Sedition Act. This was because they could not face the thought that the Sedition Act had itself become one of their worst liabilities. Marshall in his campaign for Congress in Virginia had made it clear that he was "not an advocate for the alien and sedition bills" and that had he been in Congress at the time he would "certainly have opposed them," thinking them "useless" and "calculated to create, unnecessarily, discontents and jealousies." Sedgwick thought this "a

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mean & paltry electioneering trick," and Fisher Ames declared, "Excuses may palliate,—future zeal in the cause may partially atone,—but his character is done for." Still, this was John Marshall, a man they knew they needed: perhaps he could be redeemed. "Marshall has not yet learned his whole lesson," cautioned George Cabot. But they ought to believe that he would. "Some allowance too should be made for the influence of the Atmosphere of Virginia. . . ,"101 Commendable indulgence, though it might have been more so had "some allowance" been made for Marshall's taking a hand in redeeming them. The Sedition Act did in fact come up for repeal in January 1800. Marshall supported the motion for doing it, which thereby passed by a margin of two votes. But then an adroit Federalist parliamentary maneuver, an amendment replacing the repealed act with the even more obnoxious common law of seditious libel, gave Marshall no choice but to reverse himself and vote against it. The entire Republican contingent did so as well. The Sedition Act thus had to remain where it stood.102 Still another giddy measure came before the House in the course of the session, the Ross Election Bill for a "Grand Committee" of House and Senate to pass upon the validity of electoral votes from the several states in the coming presidential election. Marshall moved against this too, this time with success. But although he thereby helped save his Federalist colleagues from more short-wittedness, they were hardly disposed to thank him for it. The joint committee envisioned by the Ross bill was to have the final determination on any question concerning the election; any "irregularity" would be whatever the committee said it was; and so it would rest with this body of thirteen men, chosen by a Federalistdominated Congress, to decide who should be the next President of the United States. Nor was it any secret that the bill had been especially shaped to deal with what the state of Pennsylvania was likely to do in the election, that state's government having just turned Republican, or that such a committee would be peculiarly receptive to any plausible ground for counting out Thomas Jefferson. Marshall had as little use for Jefferson as any Federalist in the House. But this scheme as he saw it was not only unconstitutional, it was disreputable, and politically demented. What he then did with his influence, on the floor and in committee, was to get the bill altered to a form in which it could no longer carry out the function its originators had designed it for, whereupon the Senate would have no more to do with it.103 One more issue upon which such a temper as Marshall's could have made some difference was the distracted question of what now to do about the army. The army was in deep difficulty, and it was not as though the Federalists were not all too disagreeably aware of it. Sedgwick himself, probably its most passionate supporter in the House, had to admit privately "that the army everywhere to the southward is very unpopular, and is growing, daily, more so."104 Moreover, a shortfall in tax collections, leaving a gap of some $5 million between estimated revenue and what would be needed to support the country's expanded program of armaments, meant that the difference could only be made up by borrowing. The Republicans were making a very big point of this.105 The best thing would

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undoubtedly have been simply to disband the New Army and to let the southern Federalists be given the credit for having done it. But it could not be quite that simple. The Federalist position had become so impacted, and that of the Republicans at such a distance from it, as to tax the mind of the most conciliatory Federalist in sight. What further complicated it was that with the Hamiltonians' grim commitment to a permanent army, and in the absence as yet of any information on how the American mission would be greeted in Paris, such a step as demobilization, however politically effective it might be, was not yet thinkable, even to such as Marshall. Marshall's was nevertheless a vanguard mind, nearly always a step ahead of the others, and probably better able than any to see into what was for most of them a hopelessly opaque political future. Marshall at the beginning of the session resisted a Republican move to disband the army, which if successful would probably have brought even more demoralization to Federalism than if things had been allowed for the time being to go on as they were. He did, however, put his weight behind a compromise whereby the New Army would remain in being but with further recruitments suspended. Yet there was no provision for commencing demobilization should the news from France be favorable, which would have allowed the Federalists some flexibility of movement when reports began trickling in that the American envoys were in fact to be received with due honors by the Bonaparte regime. By then, support for the New Army was crumbling, and even the most warlike Federalists now saw that the only way to keep credit away from the Republicans for what was inevitable would be to do it themselves. Robert G. Harper so moved on May 7, with the provision—proposed by John Marshall— that the demobilization be carried out at the discretion of the President as soon as in his judgment the diplomatic situation warranted it.106 Marshall probably had a fair idea that the President had already so concluded some time before. But it was too little and too late. Had Adams been given such authority three months earlier, the Federalists would have had a stopper to Republican talk of a great military machine to be kept in perpetual being, and they might thus have seized the benefit from the first encouraging news from France. As it was, they managed to kick away even the little good this eleventh-hour gesture might have done them. Three days after Harper's motion passed, Adams dismissed Secretary of State Pickering, and on the same day announced the immediate demobilization of the New Army. The enraged Federalists in the Senate, determined that Adams should not now be allowed the satisfaction of dismantling Hamilton's army, thereupon withdrew such authority from the House motion and voted to exercise it themselves, to take effect on or before June 15, 1800.107 So as Federalist congressmen, full of black thoughts, departed from Philadelphia for the last time, and the brooding Adams was off to inspect the new Federal City of Washington before journeying home to Quincy, the chasm between them had become unbridgeable. But that hardly meant that they had run out of ways to do themselves mischief, or indeed that they were not to find yet new capacities for ensuring that the curtain would be brought down upon Federalism forever. Only one man would be truly spared. John Marshall had left early, to attend

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to his diminishing law practice in Richmond, and meanwhile the President had decided he needed a new Secretary of War. The man he determined to appoint was Marshall, whose loyalty to him throughout had been above question, even while Marshall had been doing all one individual could do to set his tottering party to rights. Marshall politely declined, owing to the demands of his affairs at home. A few days later the President was looking for a Secretary of State as well. Again he wanted Marshall, who this time accepted. He took up his duties on June 8,1800, and would discharge them with due competence until the end of Adams's term.108 Just before that, on January 20, 1801, he would be nominated as Chief Justice. He was thus diverted from a highly promising but probably doomed career as a politician. By May 1800 the covert movement whose beginnings John Marshall had discerned with such foreboding the previous December—the Federalist cabal to prevent John Adams from succeeding himself—had taken on a life of its own. What followed throughout the summer and fall was a sequence of political madness. The madness, to be sure, was not exactly one-sided. There was a distinct aspect of it for which John Adams could have had no other to blame but himself. But in another sense it was all mixed in together. The final stage of self-destruction and demoralization began with the spring elections in New York for seats in the state assembly. It had been evident for some time that this would be a critical test, since the new legislature that resulted from it would be the one to choose New York's twelve electors by a joint vote of both houses. The situation in Pennsylvania made it even more critical, because of the deadlock that had developed in the legislature there as to the manner in which that state's fifteen electors would be chosen—whether by general election, election by districts, or by the legislature itself—and there was a real possibility that it would not be resolved in time for Pennsylvania's electoral votes to be cast at all.109 Thus since Jefferson had received fourteen of those fifteen votes in 1796, and since Adams in 1796 had carried all of New York's twelve, there was now a clear likelihood that the New York vote could decide the election of 1800. Everything thus depended on whether the New York Assembly was to come under Federalist or Republican control. And it was generally recognized that this in turn depended on something else, that with a relatively close balance in the country districts the key to the outcome would be the way things went in New York City. While the city had been safely Federalist from 1789 to 1796, the Republicans had carried the assembly elections there in 1797 and 1798. But the city's Federalists were then able in 1799 to benefit from a strictly municipal issue—public hostility to some sharp dealings over the chartering of a Republican-dominated bank—to elect their entire slate of Assembly candidates by good majorities.110 So for 1800 it was anyone's guess: given candidates of strong caliber, it could go either way. For the Republicans, the work that lay before them had a self-evident clarity of outline. The Federalists, in a congestion of divided purposes, approached theirs with a singular lack of direction.

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One of New York's most decided Federalists was Robert Troup, a longtime friend and close associate of Alexander Hamilton who had regularly taken an active hand in city politics. Troup certainly knew what the Federalists had to do if they expected to win this one, and he said as much in a letter to Rufus King two months beforehand. The coming election, he said, "to choose a Legislature to appoint electors" would be "all important." "We are full of anxiety here. . . . It is next to an impossibility to get men of weight and influence to serve. . . . We must bring into action all our energies; if we do not the election is lost—and if our Legislature should give us anti-federal electors, Jefferson will be in."111 Yet it did not occur to Troup that there was a very good reason why all those energies could not be brought into action, and why it was proving so difficult "to get men of weight and influence to serve." He gave the game away himself when he asserted his conviction, and that of others who saw the case as he did, that "the federal cause essentially depends on removing Mr. Adams and appointing a more discreet man to the Presidency."112 With anything short of an all-out mission, proclaiming the importance above all else of reelecting a Federalist administration, they were without a wholehearted cause with which to rally the voters. And such indeed was the way it worked out. A nominating committee of city Federalists, rent by internal factions, spent the month of March and half of April trying to patch together a slate of Assembly candidates. All New York knew of their differences, which were aired once more at the public meeting of April 15 at which the sum of their efforts was announced. The slate included, according to a jubilant Republican stalwart who was among the first to know of it, "two grocers, a ship chandler, a baker, a potter, a bookseller, a mason, and a shoemaker." The only others with any claim to visibility were Cadwallader Golden and Gabriel Furman, both less than popular with the city's voters. When the ticket was published, "all was Joy & Enthusiasm" among the Republicans.113 They, meanwhile, had seen to every detail. Aaron Burr had been quietly at work for many weeks on the party's Assembly slate and had succeeded in persuading three authentic notables — ex-Governor George Clinton, the distinguished lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Brockholst Livingston, and General Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga—to head the list. Burr and his lieutenants, working in total harmony with the Republican committees, and with a new and lively Republican newspaper, the American Citizen, to aid in preparing public opinion, had one uncomplicated object: to bring down all the works of Federalism in order to bring about the election of Thomas Jefferson. They addressed meetings, distributed literature, and stationed themselves in force at the polls on all three days of the election. The returns, announced on May 3, 1800, showed that the city Republicans had elected all twelve of their Assembly candidates, as well as their nominees for the state senate and the United States Congress. They now had a majority of the legislature, which would meet in November and cast New York's twelve electoral votes for Jefferson.114 The Federalists were of course profoundly shaken. Alexander Hamilton now flailed out in two directions in an effort to shore up the damage. He wrote to

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Governor John Jay imploring him to reconvene the existing legislature and persuade it to enact a new law for choosing electors by district, which he thought might bring a Federalist majority. Jay, aware that such a far-fetched maneuver could well cause a major upheaval in the state, silently chose to do nothing.115 Hamilton's other move was to call for the full activation, through his confidants in Congress, of the undercover plan that had been in ferment for some months to ease Adams out in favor of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The essentials of the plan were in fact adopted by a nominating caucus of congressional Federalists on May 3.116 Whatever appeared to be straightforward in it was counter-balanced by unavowed or disavowed intentions, which required telling some men one thing and assuring others of the opposite, and it was anything but a trumpet call to the people. On the contrary, its success depended in a real sense not on uniting the people but on dividing them. The idea in its simplest form was that Federalist electors North and South were to support Adams and Pinckney for President and Vice-President, and to support them equally. On the face of it this could simply be seen as a precaution against a scattering of wasted second votes which would benefit the opposition, with the expectation that a judicious dropping of one or more Pinckney votes would be enough to permit Adams's re-election and still ensure against an opposition Vice-President. (This was in fact the exact strategy the Republicans would adopt with regard to Jefferson and Burr.) But that was not really what the Hamiltonian plotters had in mind. Their expectations all hinged ultimately on what they hoped would happen in Pinckney's home state of South Carolina. If New England and certain of the middle states were all to cast their votes equally for Adams and Pinckney, Pinckney's popularity in South Carolina would then give him the extra votes needed to make him President, even if the South Carolina electors gave their other votes to Jefferson. Adams had to be the ostensible head of the ticket, much as the insiders might have wished otherwise, because he had more support among the rank and file in the North, and in New England especially, than any other Federalist. So the logic of equal support was not to undermine Adams in those places but rather to take advantage of Adams's strength there by keeping Pinckney's vote abreast of his so that the resulting balance might be tipped in Pinckney's favor elsewhere. "The plot of an old Spanish play," observed Fisher Ames, "is not more complicated with underplot."117 The New Englanders in general, and the unqualified Adams supporters in particular, were uneasy and suspicious from the start. Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts, who was present at the caucus meeting, objected that since "Mr. Adams, as he is viewed by the great majority of Federalists[,] . . . is the most popular man in the U.S. and deemed best qualified to perform the duties of President," such an arrangement would be seen as the "insidious intention . . . to displace him from the office," and that this would "crumble the federal party to atoms." Harrison Gray Otis felt the same way, and his sentiments had been known for some time.118 Hamilton undertook a tour through New England in June, ostensibly for a final inspection of military posts but with a particular view to testing the state of political opinion there. He discovered, as he himself conceded, that

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THE MENTALITY OF FEDERALISM IN l8oO though the greatest number of strong minded men in New England are not only satisfied of the expediency of supporting Pinckney, as giving the best chance against Jefferson, but even prefer him to Adams; yet in the body of that people there is a strong personal attachment to this gentleman, and most of the leaders of the second class are so anxious for his re-election that it will be difficult to convince them that there is as much danger of its failure as there unquestionably is, or to induce them faithfully to cooperate in Mr. Pinckney, notwithstanding their common and strong dread of Jefferson.

He was also said to have been told by Governor Fenner of Rhode Island, "Sir I see what you are after, you mean to bring in Gen'll pinckney. I will not engage in any Such jockeying trick."119 And mixed in with the distrust being spread by those who did not conceal their designs were the falsehoods resorted to by those who did. One of the "jockeys" was Robert Goodloe Harper, who had recently transferred his residence from South Carolina to Maryland and was in close touch with political affairs in both states. Harper tried to soothe Otis's suspicions by telling him that the Adams supporters had nothing to fear in either state so long as New England remained steady in equal support of Pinckney. The South Carolina Federalists, he prevaricated, were actually more solid for Adams than for Pinckney. "There is no doubt that every federal Nerve in the state, will be exerted in support of Mr. Adams and that no people in the Union would more decidedly reject any attempt to supersede him." No one "to the Southward, including South Carolina," saw Pinckney as a competitor to Adams. "They intend him, solely, as a prudent mariner does a spare yard, which he wishes to have on board, lest that on which he places his chief reliance should fail him in a storm." Meanwhile, of course, the New England insiders were insinuating assurances to the South Carolina insiders as to their labors on behalf of Pinckney.120 The least consulted, in any of this, were the interests or self-respect of the candidates themselves. By the end of the summer it had penetrated even the essentially innocent mind of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney that there were disreputable forces afoot from which he really ought to dissociate himself. He therefore gave a promise to the New England Federalists that he would accept no votes for himself that were not also pledged to Adams. This would pull out the props from the Hamilton-Sedgwick-Harper strategy for South Carolina, which counted on Pinckney's popularity extending across party lines and thus enabling him to pick up votes there even if the state went Republican—but not if Pinckney refused to accept the vote of any elector whose other vote would be cast for Jefferson.121 The other candidate, John Adams, had seen through the equal-support scheme the instant he heard what the Federalist caucus of May 3 had done. He thereupon gave himself over to a torrent of rage whose after-effects, by the end of the year 1800, were to leave the ruins of Federalism in even smaller fragments than they were in already. Two days after the caucus meeting, which had occurred on the same day the results from New York were made public, Adams summoned an unsuspecting James McHenry away from a dinner party, ostensibly to settle a

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minor item of department business. His abomination of Hamilton, which now occupied most of his waking hours, was steaming within him. The matter in question was quickly settled; then without warning came the explosion. Hamilton had worked against him in New York and had caused him to lose the election there, and McHenry had been his tool from the beginning, what with having played upon Washington to insist on Hamilton as first in rank of the majorgenerals in 1798, then scheming at Trenton to get the mission to France suspended, and endless other things. Hamilton, he ranted, was an intriguer, "the greatest intrigu[er] in the World—a man devoid of every moral principle—a Bastard, and as much a foreigner as Gallatin. Mr. Jefferson is an infinitely better man. . . . You are subservient to Hamilton, who ruled Washington, and would still rule if he could." When McHenry tried to defend himself, Adams let loose another tirade at the ineptness with which he claimed the Secretary had managed his department. The broken McHenry saw he had no choice but to offer his resignation, which was promptly accepted.122 Whether Adams intended this in advance, or simply lost control of himself, or whether he did indeed intend it but needed to work himself up before he could do it, cannot of course be known. In all likelihood he had been agitating himself with the thought in one form or another for some time. Five days later he sent Pickering a brief note requesting his resignation as well. When Pickering declined to give it Adams dismissed him, effective immediately.123 McHenry drew up a record of his remarkable interchange with the President, and sent the latter a copy of it. He also sent one to Hamilton, who received it a day or two before starting off on his tour of New England.124 The emotions it stirred in him must have been lively indeed, and undoubtedly tinged what Hamilton said to every Federalist he encountered there. They may also have inspired the initial thoughts of what he would eventually do some months later, issue a manifesto under his own name denouncing in every detail the character and conduct of John Adams, and thus commit the most lunatic political act of his life. Not that he lacked provocation. Even among Adams's own supporters, who outnumbered those for any other potential Federalist candidate, few who knew him were now wholly free from misgivings as to his hold on himself and on the responsibilities of his office, while those whom he had alienated believed him quite unhinged. Theodore Sedgwick, who had once sat regularly as an intimate at the Adams family table, had of course long since given him up. "Every tormenting passion rankles in the bosom of that weak and frantic old man. .. ,"125 There were two items in Adams's unguarded talk during this period that gave deep offense to Federalists of whatever complexion. One was the declaration, repeatedly made, that there was a "British faction" entrenched in their midst.126 It would have been as well for the Chief Executive to leave this kind of thing to the "Jacobinical" Republicans, who were making such charges every day anyway. The other, equally serious for the suspicions it raised, was what he had said to McHenry about Jefferson: that he was "an infinitely better man" than Hamilton, that "if President, [he] will act wisely," and that "I ... would rather be Vice President under him . . . than indebted to such a being as Hamilton for the

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Presidency." This and similar sayings gave rise to rumors, untrue but widely believed, that Adams and Jefferson had in fact concluded a secret alliance for sharing power in the forthcoming administration.127 As the summer wore on, the Federalists' movements, in contrast to the elan and single-mindedness of the Republican drive, gave a deepening impression of drift, blurred purpose, divided conviction, and harried furtiveness. For one thing, it was becoming more and more evident that no plan for bringing Pinckney to the presidency had any substantial support outside Hamilton's circle of irreconcilables. Oliver Wolcott even wondered whether it might not be better to put aside all disguise of equal support, to drop Adams and promote Pinckney freely and openly. (Hamilton's own disguise was thin enough already.) But such Massachusetts Federalists as George Cabot and Fisher Ames protested that such a course could only make things worse. Ames, whose super-heated High Federalism did not preclude occasional fits of good sense, declared that unless the party's sole aim were that of keeping the enemy out, it was lost: That, instead of analyzing the measures of the man who has thus brought the cause into jeopardy, you must sound the tocsin about Jefferson; that the hopes and fears of the citizens are the only sources of influence; and surely we have enough to fear from Jefferson; by thus continually sounding our just alarms we remain united with the people, instead of separated from them. . . .128

But Alexander Hamilton was a driven man. John Adams had taken away his army, and now with his ravings about British factions and the intrigues of a bastard foreigner, the President of the United States was striking not only at his patriotism but at his total picture of himself as a leading founder of the republic. He wrote to Adams with a direct request for confirmation of whether he had in fact said what he was reported to have said about "the existence of a British Faction" and whether he had "plainly alluded to me" as a member of it.129 Receiving no reply, Hamilton set to work on the subsequently famous Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. Cabot and Ames knew he was preparing such a document— which Hamilton had said he intended for private circulation only—and both were uneasy, each hoping that if he did anything of the sort he would do it anonymously. Even Wolcott was "clearly of opinion that you ought to publish nothing with your signature at present." What they would all have preferred was that he simply drop it altogether.130 But Hamilton, not to be deterred, had his letter printed in the form of a pamphlet, dated October 24, 1800, which came to fifty-four octavo pages in a limited edition of two hundred copies. Of course it would take no more than one of them, falling into Republican hands, for it to be spread all over the country in no time, which naturally was just what happened.131 There is every likelihood that this was exactly what Hamilton wanted to happen. Why? The best clue may lie in the very structure of the Letter itself. Hamilton began with what he said was his object. Since the President's closest friends were disparaging the motives of all Federalists who advocated equal sup-

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port of the incumbent and General Pinckney, and since this was being accompanied by a growing list of slanders as to the particular part he, Hamilton, was taking in the effort, he felt himself obliged not only to repel such slanders but to acknowledge that there was in fact a difference between his own motives and most of the others with regard to John Adams, and he proceeded to state what it was. It was nothing less than "the conviction that he does not possess the talents adapted to the Administration of Government, and that there are great and intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate." In the early stages of the Revolution, Hamilton said, he had begun with "a high veneration for Mr. ADAMS," but with time and observation he had come to an opinion, which all my subsequent experience has confirmed, that he is a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric; propitious neither to the regular display of sound judgment, nor to steady perseverance in a systematic plan of conduct; and I began to perceive what has since been too manifest, that to this defect are added the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.132

Hamilton's case, had it stopped there, might well have represented the judgment which history itself ought to have settled upon with regard to John Adams. The subsequent judgment has turned out somewhat otherwise, for various reasons, and perhaps the remainder of Hamilton's own pamphlet should be counted as one of them. The greatest portion of it was taken up with a critical commentary on Adams's entire public career, dotted at every point with instances of his fatuities, his inconsistencies, his blunders, and his foolishness, most of them occurring in his presidency. The central charge there was his handling of the Ellsworth mission, and it was based on the premise that the mission ought not to have gone at all. After France's repeated outrages, America's dignity required France not only to make the first overtures for a new negotiation but to send a minister to the United States to carry it out.133 But that premise was by then hopelessly out of date, and for some time had been contrary to the drift of public opinion. And thus the rest of the list—Adams's not consulting his advisors, the irresponsible pardoning of the Fries rebels, the precipitate dismissal of Pickering, the brutal treatment of McHenry, and so on—never quite added up.134 The concluding section of the Letter, which should doubtless be read not as a series of afterthoughts but as Hamilton's true peroration, was a bitterly passionate defense of his own honor. Adams had aimed at the heart of it with his calumny of him as "a man destitute of every moral principle" and with his "British faction" bombast. If, Hamilton protested, he had been a partisan of Great Britain at the expense of his own country's interests, he could hardly have taken the part he did take in the preliminaries to the Jay mission. He had urged a "negotiation, to be followed, if unsuccessful, by a declaration of war," and had called for preparations "by land and sea for the alternative." Moreover, when relations with France had reached a crisis in 1797 he had proposed a commission, with Jefferson or Madison as a member of it, and was "disposed to go greater lengths to avoid

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rupture with France than with Great Britain. ..." Must he not have found it shocking then, he demanded, "to have to combat a slander so vile, after having sacrificed the interests of his family to the service of th[is] country, in counsel and in the field'?135 If there is indeed an afterthought, it would appear to be Hamilton's closing insistence that whatever his opinion of Adams, he was still "finally resolved not to advise the withholding from him a single vote."136 It might well be wondered what anyone who read it was to make of that. All of Hamilton's friends, as well as Federalists everywhere, were appalled. The Letter had both revealed confidential knowledge of a fragmented administration and exposed the distracted state of the party at large for all the world to see; it had created the widespread impression that revenge for Hamilton's own injured vanity had overridden any consideration of the public interest that he professed; and it led to the sad conclusion that Hamilton's once-formidable influence in the councils of Federalism was at an end.137 The Republicans were jubilant. To James Madison the Letter was a "Thunderbolt." "I rejoice with you," he exulted to Jefferson, "that Republicanism is likely to be so completely triumphant. ..." The Aurora announced: The pulsation given to the body politic, by Hamilton's precious letter, is felt from one end of the union to the other. Never was there a publication so strange in its structure, more destructive in its purposed end. It has confirmed facts that were before known, but held in doubt. It has displayed the treachery, not only of the writer, but of his adherents in the public counsels; and while it has thrown much false glare on the character of Mr. Adams, it has given some new and faithful traits also; but it has thrown a blaze of light on the real character and designs of the writer and his partizans.138

The episode revealed in addition to everything else a good many things about the individual character of both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, most of it less than attractive. The two hated each other to a degree exceeded by no comparable enmity in the early life of the republic. But between the lines, as it were, are glimpsed certain affinities which may be taken as a kind of augury for Federalism itself in the hour of its eclipse. The main one was a towering defiance to anything that might be called a morality of partisanship. Here were two men who at their best had lived by the loftiest of civic humanist ideals, the pursuit of the public good as they had perceived and understood it. Now, at their worst, they were perverting the very force—virtue, the "positive passion for the public good," as Adams himself had once phrased it—that was seen to inspire that same pursuit. And in so doing they had exposed the concept of virtue itself for what it was, the most fragile element, the greatest single liability, of the entire civic humanist tradition. They had allowed the public good to become so intertwined with their own sulks, spites, and rages as to blind them to what might have been an intermediary loyalty, a loyalty to the joint venture they had seen into being in 1789. Since that time each had persuaded himself that his own virtue transcended any requirements of a body of like-minded men who, for better

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or worse, had accomplished extraordinary things and might as a body conceivably accomplish still more. Here was John Adams, holding up to contempt any claim that mere party might have on him, and giving it out that any Federalist who had not seen the public good as he did was the servant of a "British faction." And here was Alexander Hamilton, hardly less blind to party claims than Adams, imagining that through the manipulation of two or three electoral votes his version of the public good might somehow be imposed on the entire political nation. Moreover, there was something self-destructive about both of them, as seen in the attitude each had come to take with regard to Jefferson. Hamilton had told Sedgwick, "I will never more be responsible for [Adams] by my direct support— even though the consequence should be the election of Jefferson. If we must have an enemy at the head of the Government, let it be one whom we can oppose & for whom we are not responsible. . . ,"139 In preference to Adams, Hamilton would take even Jefferson; Adams too would take Jefferson, in preference to anyone but himself. Hamilton had now thrown away what pretensions he may once have had as a party influential; Adams had never felt obliged to have such pretensions at all. A Federalist newspaper in Baltimore retrospectively made much the same point nine years later: "Mr. Adams never was a favorite with the leading men of the federal party . .. for they were sensible that he had neither abilities nor discretion to lead a party, much less to govern a nation. . . ."14° The Republican party was by 1800 united in a version of the public good very different from that which had animated Federalism since 1789. And although they too were still dependent on the vocabulary of civic humanism for the words, at least, of most of what they thought and said, somehow for them the concept of "virtue" had slipped a notch or two from the primacy it had once held in the value-system of the founding generation. Their commitment, a collective determination to become the official custodians of the public good as they conceived it, had an integrity of its own that went a step beyond the conflicting claims of individual virtue. They would not yet do the things to each other that the Federalists were doing to themselves in 1800. The support given to the Republicans' nominees must be as unambiguous and straightforward as the still-cumbersome electoral system allowed them to make it. They too had their congressional caucus meeting, held on May n, 1800, at which they unanimously agreed that Aaron Burr, whose work in the New York election had been critical, should be their choice for Vice-President. Burr had been a candidate for that office in 1796, but only the leading one among several, and he still resented having got next to no support from the electors of Virginia. Jefferson himself was determined that this should not happen again, and went out of his way to see that the Virginians stayed in line. And now the "jacobins," as the Boston Federalist Theophilus Parsons sarcastically observed, "appear to be completely organized throughout the United States. The principals have their agents dispersed in every direction; and the whole body act with a union to be expected only from men, in whom no moral principles exist to create a difference of conduct resulting from a difference in sentiment."141

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Their discipline and esprit de corps did, at any rate, hold. When the returns were finally in, they showed Jefferson and Burr tied with 73 votes each, Adams with 65, and Pinckney with 64. These results became known only with maddening gradualness, drawn out over a period of more than seven months beginning in early May, when New York's choice became clear, to well into December; as late as the 2oth of that month there was still no news in Philadelphia from Georgia, Kentucky, or Tennessee.142 This and the ambiguity of the figures themselves were owing, for one thing, to the anomalous provision in the Constitution (shortly to be amended in 1804) f°r presidential elections; for another, to the variations of practice embodied in the electoral laws of the several states; and for still another, to the fact that the states held their elections at widely differing times. Moreover, the final count, for all its apparent closeness, concealed a fact of the most vital historic significance: the political nation had spoken resoundingly for Jefferson, and Adams was actually not entitled to the vote he did get. Thanks primarily to the Constitution itself, and secondarily to state election laws, the popular voice with regard to the choosing of a President could not yet be clearly sounded in the year 1800. In ten of the sixteen states electors were chosen by a majority vote of the legislature; in three, by district elections; in two, by statewide election on a general ticket; and in one, by a curious combination of district and legislative choice. And the laws could be changed at any time as expediency might call for it, and in several cases they were. District elections could produce a split electoral vote, as they did in 1800 in the case of both Maryland and North Carolina. Either this method or that of legislative choice could result in a real perversion of the popular preference. It certainly did so in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Pennsylvania's lower house fell under Republican control in 1799 while the senate retained a narrow Federalist majority, and the two houses came to an impasse over the method to be followed in choosing electors for 1800, broken only by an eleventh-hour compromise whereby the Republican house appointed eight electors and the Federalist senate seven. All fifteen of those votes should have gone to Jefferson. The New Jersey legislature, with a Federalist majority, also chose the state's electors. But all three of New Jersey's most populous counties were overwhelmingly Republican, and a statewide election would have given Jefferson the seven electoral votes that went to Adams instead. In any case the clearest indicator of the popular will in the country at large was the congressional elections of 1800. They brought for the first time a sizable Republican majority of 65-41 in the House of Representatives, more than reversing the Federalist majority of 63-43 m tne previous Congress.143 South Carolina turned out to be the pivotal state in 1800, just as the Hamiltonians guessed that it might. But it was pivotal in an opposite way from what they had hoped. South Carolina, as Charles Cotesworth Pinckney's biographer has aptly put it, "was in a twilight era of mixed political systems."144 The Federalist pre-

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ponderance there had been slipping away, and the recently elected legislature now had a Republican majority. Yet this greatly oversimplifies a political situation in which party divisions had always been vague and had only in the past two or three years taken on much of a discernible outline. These in turn were overlaid by factors—family, wealth, geography, and personal connections—which made for other kinds of divisions and an elusive fluidity of political behavior.145 Such was the setting in which the new legislature met at Columbia in November 1800 to choose the state's presidential electors. On one side was a still-formidable Federalist presence, though there were nine absences—all from the rich Low Country, where Federalist strength had been greatest, one of various indications that the grandees of that region were already beginning to ease themselves out of politics and retreating to other areas of civic life.146 And on the other side was the new Republican majority, though nobody yet knew the exact size of it or could tell how its members would act on the choices that lay before them. This was because in between lay the very broad shadow of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, probably the most popular man in South Carolina, who commanded loyalties, influence, and affections that transcended a wide range of party considerations on either side. In that setting, the choice of electors could very well go in any of several ways. One of them would have made Pinckney President; another, VicePresident under Adams; another, Vice-President under Jefferson. Still another would leave him nothing at all.147 But the other strategic figure in this extraordinary picture was a man who had come to Columbia with the sole purpose of preventing every one of these outcomes except the last, and determined to use every resource of persuasion and intrigue in order to bring that one about in order to elevate Thomas Jefferson to the presidency. This was Charles Pinckney, a second cousin of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who had some years before turned the course of his ambitions into opposition politics after having been passed over by President Washington for the ministerial appointment to London which went instead to his cousin Thomas Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth's brother. He had alienated a sizable portion of that extended family by becoming a prime mover within the growing Republican interest in South Carolina, and was now familiarly known on the Federalist side as "Blackguard Charley."148 He had obtained one of the state's two seats in the United States Senate in 1798, and would have been on hand for the opening of the winter session at Washington on November 17 but for the supreme urgency, for him, of what needed to be done in Columbia. Charles Pinckney thereupon became, as it were, the Aaron Burr of South Carolina. As for all the arts he used and how they were applied, this is still a subject of conjecture. But we do know in more than a general way the results they achieved. The number of Federalist legislators was almost equal to the number of those committed to Jefferson and Burr, though neither side had quite enough for the majority required to carry their ticket. In between were some dozen to sixteen waverers, more or less Republican but whose party attachments were qualified by an equal or greater attachment to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The internal struggle that surged back and forth during the ten days prior to the final balloting .742.

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on December 2 was one in which a variety of cross-pressures were brought to bear upon this knot of irresolutes. The Federalists tried to detach some of them for their ticket, while temporary groupings of Jefferson men, working at odds with Charles Pinckney's aim for a straight Republican ticket, made at least two efforts for a compromise that would result in a divided slate of Jefferson-Pinckney electors, one version of which would have given Pinckney the vice-presidency, and the other the presidency. In the end Charles Pinckney's labors —a mixture of appeals for Republican unity and inducements of influence in a Jefferson administration—prevailed, and the eight electors chosen on the final day were all committed to Jefferson and Burr. Charles Pinckney would subsequently be assiduous in the claims he made to Jefferson as to his own primary role in effecting the outcome, and Jefferson would be gracious in accepting his recommendations for federal offices in South Carolina. Charles Pinckney for his part would be rewarded with appointment as the new United States minister to Spain. And yet it may well be that in the deciding of things at Columbia in those closing days of November 1800, the really critical figure was after all Charles Cotesworth Pinckney himself, and not his renegade cousin. He too had been present, sitting as a state senator from the Charleston district. Temptations, it appears, had twice been dangled before him, and both times he had repelled them. Having already made his promise to the New Englanders, he did not intend to break it now. He would have nothing to do with a ticket that linked his name with Jefferson's, nor would he accept any votes for himself that were not pledged equally to Adams. He certainly knew that the vice-presidency would make him an anomaly in a Republican administration, and that the presidency, should it rest on no wider ground than the favor of a small Federalist faction, would bring him little honor. It was by this conviction, and this promise, that he himself had made possible the final triumph of "Blackguard Charley."

7 Burr and the Revolution of 1800 No public man of less than the first rank in the Republic's founding generation continues to be written about more amply or more often—or with a greater conviction on the part of each author that the job needed to be done all over again—than Aaron Burr. In one sense this would seem superfluous: the record of Burr's comings and goings is actually fairly complete, certainly as much so as that of any representative man of the time. We seem nevertheless not content to leave it at that. Few who have undertaken Burr's case have failed to make the point in some form that his story remains an "enigma."149 There are certainly reasons for this. Much of what we are still curious to know about Burr's after-dark thoughts, movements, and purposes has eluded the record, voluminous though the record may otherwise be. But more pertinently, Aaron Burr was not a representative man of his time. He was clearly a deviant type;

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whether he represented anything or anyone beyond himself is at best debatable. At the same time Burr's undoubted charm, his considerable talents, and the picaresque quality of his life—combined with the all but universal odium that hung over him throughout the latter half of his days—have rightly made him a perennial object of interest. Yet what keeps eluding us is a standard of justice, if indeed there is one, to be applied to this unusual man who so narrowly missed becoming our third President. Aaron Burr was born in 1756 into what might have been a nurturing academic milieu. Both his father, Aaron Burr, Sr., and his grandfather, the great Jonathan Edwards, had briefly held the presidency of the newly established college at Princeton. But he never knew either of them, both having died within months of each other while he was still an infant. His mother died during that same year, leaving him and his sister orphans at the ages of two and four. Aaron and Sarah Burr were thereupon handed about to various family members, and though they appear to have been well enough looked after, they led a somewhat nomadic existence in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Aaron himself was eventually sent to Princeton, and graduated with distinction at sixteen. His commencement oration was on "Building Castles in the Air." He then considered theology, though not for very long; his study of that subject ceased after a few months. At the outbreak of the Revolution he was reading law at Litchfield, Connecticut, with Tapping Reeve, who had recently married Burr's sister Sarah. Burr served with merit as an officer in the Continental line and later built a thriving law practice in New York City. His career as a womanizer, somewhat abnormal for those times, began early. He also loved luxury, abhorred boredom, and was never good at managing money. Much of his ingenuity, to the end of his life, was expended in eluding creditors. He had both a taste and a talent for politics. He was elected to the New York Assembly in 1784, appointed Attorney-General of New York in 1789, and in 1791 chosen by the Assembly as a United States senator. This was an intricate maneuver in which rival factions were persuaded to combine in unseating Philip Schuyler, the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton's untrusting eye thereafter followed Aaron Burr down to the day not of Burr's death but of his own. Burr's fortunes, meanwhile, together with his ambitions and energies, became mingled with those of the Republican interest in both state and national affairs. The election of 1800 may well be thought of as the true turning point in both his career and his reputation, though perhaps only retrospectively so in view of the more dramatic transitions that occurred later on. For his work in the New York City elections he was rewarded, as we have seen, with the Republican party's designation of him as its choice for the vice-presidency, and an unforeseen unity of party discipline, and insufficient attention to the dropping of one or two Burr votes,150 had resulted in the tie vote in the Electoral College between himself and Jefferson. The tie, as will be noted in more detail below, would finally be broken in Jefferson's favor. But meanwhile we may skip ahead somewhat. To Hamilton's distrust would ,744-

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shortly be added Jefferson's as well, and Burr would not again be the Republican vice-presidential candidate when the time came for Jefferson's successful run for re-election in 1804. Thus frozen out of Administration councils and with no future there, Burr let himself be supported for the governorship of New York by Federalists who were contemplating a scheme of disunion, though he gave no promises that he would abet such designs; very probably he would not have. But he was defeated, and it was Hamilton's frantic warnings against Burr during that campaign that brought on Burr's challenge and Hamilton's death on the dueling ground in 1804. When his vice-presidential term ended in 1805, Burr set out for the West, full of plans that were both grand and dim. The uBurr Conspiracy" took on a variety of forms, depending on whom he approached for money and support. The main outline of it appears to have been a projected armed expedition into Spanish Mexico to carve out a vast domain, to be ruled over by himself. A minor variation, probably never very seriously intended, was rumored to involve detaching a portion of the American Southwest to add to it. He was betrayed by a co-conspirator, delivered into federal custody, tried for treason before John Marshall in the circuit court at Richmond, and acquitted for want of evidence. President Jefferson, though once indebted in some degree to Burr for the office he held, had been exceptionally anxious to secure Burr's conviction. After four years in Europe, where he vainly tried to stir up interest in Latin American filibustering schemes, Burr returned to America in 1812 and resumed his old practice of law in New York City, shunned by most of his former friends. His last great exploit, at the age of seventy-seven, was marrying the rich widow Eliza Jumel, who promptly brought suit for divorce when he began running through her property. The decree was awarded on the day of Burr's death in his eighty-first year, 1836. The predominant impulse of all who have written about Burr has been to insist that he was really not that bad. And indeed there is no denying that when today we view the whole span of Burr's story in a mood of detachment, the badness in it takes on a certain mistiness of outline. The story does not repel us; rather it tantalizes, and sets us to musing. Burr's private life was far more interesting than that of any other man of his time of whom much is known, most of them having lived theirs out in settings devoid of decor or scenery. His fascination with women included their minds, another thing that set him off from most of his contemporaries. His devotion to his daughter Theodosia and to his young grandson, both of whom met tragic deaths, appears as a shaft of light from a troubled spirit. True, he cadged thousands of dollars from others, which they never saw again, but he was a soft touch himself. He was a man of genuine culture, and he read everything. Everything he said and wrote—even when lying, which he did often and with great finesse—showed a lively and piquant intelligence. He may have been crafty and designing, but not diabolically so. His judgment of people and circumstances was really not very good, and his schemes for riches and power kept blowing up in his face. He was not vindictive and held few grudges. Even

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the duel with Hamilton may have been less a matter of revenge than of desperation, of turning upon a grim pursuer.151 As for Jefferson's urge to get Burr, his thirst for the man's very life on the flimsiest of grounds: we are naturally disposed to take Burr's side there. But why should the man have been so pursued? "Burr's 'sins,'" writes his most recent biographer, "existed for the most part in the eyes of the beholders."152 But that may be the whole point, unintended though it probably is. We are now a long way off from those beholders, and have in some measure lost touch with them. What exactly did they see, and, more important, what did they make of what they could not see? Aaron Burr lived at a unique time in the Republic's life, and it is not the easiest thing to say why he did not fit into it, or why it chose in the end to set him at a distance. Burr's private life is almost certainly not the key to this question. To be sure, a combined appetite for money, women, and power, at any time, whether exercised in malevolence (of which Burr actually had little) or careless narcissism, carries a heavy potential for damage to others. Of that, Burr in his blithe progress left plenty. But when all was said and done it was the "power" side of that equation, rather than his private morals, that most struck the sensibilities of the age. The private side merely made it look more of a piece. One is brought back once more to the two great contending abstractions in the world-view of an inordinately political-minded age. These were, of course, "liberty" and "power," power in any form being perceived as the crouching menace to liberty, whose vigilance must be its only protector. A trustworthy man was not even supposed to desire power, but when he was seen to reach for it, other men needed at the very least some idea of what he thought about its acceptable uses and limits. Aaron Burr was the only man of prominence in his time who disdained to provide, through either word or example, any such information or even misinformation. Burr's "political correspondence is large," observes his biographer, "but one combs it in vain for so much as a single sentence that can be cited as pointing to a political philosophy." Burr, it seems, preferred a more private code, that of Lord Chesterfield, and he admitted as much. "A gentleman is free to do whatever he pleases so long as he does it with style" — and "so long as no ill-will was intended."153 The matter might be put in a somewhat variant way, in the light of that other great abstraction of the eighteenth century's value-system, "virtue." It bore little resemblance, as we have seen, to the meaning attached to that term today. This "passion for the public good," an idea that went as far back as the Roman Republic, was in some sense a fiction, as enveloping abstractions always must be. But it occupied a disproportionate place in the consciousness of a generation of nation-builders, and the people of that age looked for some approximation of it in the figures they chose to regard as exemplary. It was questions of this sort, involving in some way the uses of power and the clothing of virtue, that they were asking of Aaron Burr in the closing days of 1800. The tie with Jefferson would throw the election into the House of Representatives, each state casting one vote, to be decided by a majority of that state's delegation for one or the other candidate, and the balloting would begin on February n, .MI, 746 **.

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1801. The Federalists now prepared to play their most desperate game yet. (This was still the Federalist-dominated Sixth Congress; the Republican Seventh would not meet for nearly another year.) They had got it into their heads that there was still a way of snatching the Republicans' victory away from them if they could organize enough support to break the tie in Burr's favor rather than Jefferson's. The logic was that Burr, whose Republican principles might be regarded as adjustable, and who would be aware that whatever weight his presidency might have was dependent on the Federalist movement that gave it to him, would therefore see little choice but to put himself in their hands when he took of$ce. Only eight of the sixteen states had delegations with Republican majorities. Jefferson could thus be denied the nine he needed in either of two ways. If the Federalists could bring in the other eight for Burr, and detach a vote or two from Jefferson to Burr so as to reverse the balance in one of the others, Burr would be in. Or, failing a majority for Burr, they might still prevent one for Jefferson if the doubtful states remained deadlocked, which might in turn open the way to deciding the presidency by some other means.154 The one prominent Federalist who viewed this scheme with profound horror when he heard of it was Alexander Hamilton, who had of course known Burr for many years. "For heaven's sake," he implored Theodore Sedgwick, "let not the Foederal party be responsible for the elevation of this Man."155 Letters from Hamilton thereupon went out in all directions. Burr, he told Gouverneur Morris, "in my judgment has no principle public or private—could be bound by no agreement—will listen to no monitor but his ambition. ..." To Otis: "Burr loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement, and will be content with nothing, short of permanent power in his own hands."156 Better, he urged, to seek some assurances from Jefferson: that he would preserve the established system of finance and public credit, maintain the navy, hold to a strict neutrality toward the belligerent powers, and keep in office "all our Foederal friends except in the Great Departments. There and in other matters he ought to be free."157 Whereas should any such promises be extracted from Burr, "he will laugh in his sleeve when he makes them and he will break them the first moment it may serve his purpose." And finally: "As to his theory, no mortal can tell what it is."158 Nor did any mortal have a very clear sense of Burr's thoughts and intentions during the eight-week period between mid-December 1800 and mid-February 1801. The letter he wrote to Congressman Samuel Smith of Maryland on December 16 implies one thing; after that, both his letters and his silences suggest others. He had not at first believed there would be a tie after all, because he had heard there would be an extra Jefferson vote from Vermont, and he said renunciatory things to Smith in that belief. If a tie should happen he would "utterly disclaim all ambition," and he appointed Smith as his proxy "to declare these sentiments if the occasion shall require." A few days later he was assuring Jefferson himself of his "unremitted Zeal" in support of his forthcoming administration and hinting that he would be happy to resign the vice-presidency if he could "be more useful in any Active station."159 Other stirrings, however, appear to have been aroused in him by the end of — 747 ~

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December. By that time the tie had been confirmed, and Jefferson had not got that vote from Vermont after all. Burr had meanwhile been getting letters asking what his intentions were, and he seemed to find them rather irritating. If chosen President, would he engage to resign? To this, he now informed Samuel Smith, he had made no answer; moreover, "if I had made any I should have told that at present advised, I should not." To Smith this was disturbing, as well it might be; he had already given Burr's previous high-minded declaration to the press, a gesture, it was now being rumored, at which Burr had "expressed his displeasure." Rumors of the sort reached Jefferson himself, who professed to take no stock in them.160 At the same time, Burr received a piece of advice from Robert Goodloe Harper, one of those most prepared to do anything to keep Jefferson out. It was being "whispered/' Harper said, that Republican overtures were being made to persuade Burr to yield in favor of Jefferson. However, he counseled, "I advise you to take no step whatever by which the choice of the house of Representatives can be impeded or embarrassed. Keep the game perfectly in your hand; but do not answer this letter, or any other that may be written to you by a federalist; nor write to any of that party."161 Whether or not Burr needed such advice, no further word of his intentions would escape him until the balloting was all but over. He had resolved, for whatever reason, not to do what the virtuous Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had done in South Carolina. Theodore Sedgwick's case for electing Burr shows something of the pass to which the mentality of Federalism had now come. There was "no disagreement," Sedgwick insisted to Hamilton, "as to his character." He is ambitious —selfish—profligate. His ambition is of the worst kind—it is a mere love of power. . . . This is agreed, but then it is known that his manners are plausible, that he is dextrous in the acquisition & use of the means necessary to effect his wishes. . . . He holds to no pernicious theories. . . . His very selfishness prevents his entertaining any mischievous predilections for foreign nations. The situation in which he lives has enabled him to justly appreciate the benefits resulting from our commercial & other national systems; and this same selfishness will afford some security that he will not only patronize their support but their invigoration. . . . Burr must depend on good men for his support & that support he cannot receive but by a conformity to their views.162

Hamilton's supreme effort on behalf of Jefferson was made on January 16 to the Federalist Congressman James A. Bayard of Delaware. For himself, Hamilton said, it was too late to become Jefferson's apologist. "Nor can I have any disposition to do it." I admit that his politics are tinctured with fanaticism, that he is too much in earnest in his democracy, that he has been a mischevous enemy to the principle measures of our past administration, that he is crafty & persevering in his objects, that he is not scrupulous about the means of success, not very mindful of truth, and that he is a contemptible hypocrite.

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"But" (pausing for breath), it is not true as is alleged that he is an enemy to the power of the Executive. . . . I have more than once made the reflection that viewing himself as the reversioner, he was solicitous to come into a Good Estate. Nor is it true that Jefferson is zealot enough to do anything in pursuance of his principles which will contravene his popularity, or his interest. He is as likely as any man I know to temporize—to calculate what will be likely to promote his own reputation and advantage; and the probable result of such a temper is the preservation of systems, though originally opposed, which . . . could not be overturned without danger to the person who did it. ... Add to this that there is no fair reason to suppose him capable of being corrupted, which is a security that he will not go beyond certain limits.163

Bayard never did say what he thought of Hamilton's letter, nor does the letter seem to have been a direct influence on the part Bayard took when he arrived in Washington for the balloting. Bayard had fallen in with the Federalist determination to elect Burr, and was uniquely situated to have a controlling voice in the outcome. This was because he, as Delaware's sole representative, could at any point decide which way the whole vote of one state would go.164 Thirty-six ballots were required through six days of continuous voting. The scene was heavy with portent, or so it would appear: ponderous forces teetering in a fragile balance, all too liable to be tilted either way. The first ballot produced a deadlock which left Jefferson one state short of the nine he needed, and which would not be broken until the final day. Eight were for Jefferson, six for Burr, and two were tied. It would have taken but one man's crossover in each of three states' delegations to make Burr President.165 But this, seen in retrospect, made for something of an illusion. For all the suspense and exhaustion of those six days it can almost certainly be concluded that from the first ballot on, Burr never actually had a chance. At least one Republican state would have had to be turned around (New York or New Jersey were the only ones in which there was any likelihood of doing it), as would both of the two that were tied (Maryland and Vermont), so that what the deadlock really meant was that the Federalists, heave as they might, simply could not bring it off. They could do nothing more without some move from Burr. But Burr was of course immobilized. Meanwhile inauguration day drew closer.166 Circumstances had made James Bayard the key figure, because Bayard controlled not only his own state's vote but in effect those of two others as well. He and the Federalist delegates of the tied states—Maryland and Vermont—had agreed that however they acted they would do so in concert, and the agreement held through thirty-five ballots. But each ballot had made Bayard's nerves another degree less steady, and they frayed out altogether on February 14. ("I was chiefly influenced," he later admitted, "by the current of public sentiment, which I thought it neither safe nor politic to counteract.") On that evening he announced at a hastily called caucus that he would cast Delaware's vote for Jefferson on the following Monday. He was persuaded to delay a day because of expected letters from Burr. The letters came, though they have not survived. Burr resigned his ,749-

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pretensions, and the two tied states went over to Jefferson, giving him one more than he needed. The Federalist holdouts in those states simply refrained from voting, which now gave them Republican majorities, and Bayard cast a blank ballot for Delaware.167 So although they had in effect given in, not one Federalist in the House was obliged in the end to do the graceful thing, and change his vote to Jefferson. As for Aaron Burr, one of two things had happened. It could be that the voice of virtue had belatedly roused him to his duty. Or, he had at last perceived that the game was up.

8 "We are aU Republicans . . ." The first major transfer of power in the life of the Federal Republic, momentous enough to many minds for it to be thought of as a "revolution," was effected peaceably and under the law. The event continues to be marveled at and perennially celebrated. The tone, however, is taken not from the defeated but from the victorious, and in particular from the benign accents of Jefferson's First Inaugural. The other side of the picture is neither benign nor very attractive. The Federalists, from whose hands the power was taken, did not, to be sure, resist the transfer by any resort to force. They nevertheless played a miserable part, and this may justify a final effort to fathom the state of mind that had brought them to it. It is true that the Federalists could not conceive the accession of Thomas Jefferson without sensations of horror. Jefferson might well pull down everything they had built. He might do away with the Bank, dismantle the navy, perhaps even in some way destroy the entire system of public credit. He might commit the American government to the cause of France in Europe, expose the country to a ruinous war with Great Britain, and end by returning its affairs to the anarchy in which they had floundered in the worst days of the Confederation.168 But although the specter of Jefferson may have been the most formidable single item in the Federalists' line of sight as they looked out over the world at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and may have served as their readiest notation for all the ills they perceived there, it cannot account for quite everything. What Jefferson and his followers had already done to that world, and might further do, was fearsome enough. But that was only one side of the Federalists' affliction. What had demoralized and undone them was the cloud that had settled over them—the doubts which that world had cast on the place they themselves held in it, or ought to hold, or indeed ever had held. It was a crisis of soul and spirit of a sort that would never again be undergone by any such group in the subsequent course of the nation's life, over no less a question than that of where exactly they did fit, in space or in time, or in the memory of those that came after them. The Federalists by and large, as we have seen, were men who had ascribed to themselves the status of a social and civic elite, and their political enemies had

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made much of their "aristocratic" pretensions. Nor is it very difficult to see the connection between this and their dread that Jefferson, as one of them put it, "would begin by democratizing the people & end with throwing every thing into their hands."169 Yet there are elites and elites, and this one was of a special sort. For one thing, the term "aristocrat" comes under some strain when applied to the Federalists of the 17905, those in the North at least, insofar as it might denote family connections and the deference accorded to standing acquired over time. A striking number of these men were self-made: one thinks of such as Theodore Sedgwick, Robert Morris, William Cooper, even George Cabot, not to mention Alexander Hamilton and a good many others —"aristocrats," that is, fashioned by no hand but their own.170 And for another, elites that are not quite secure, in either their own eyes or those of the community at large, do not behave in the same way as those that are. An intriguing sidelight of public life after the Revolution is seen in the numbers of men, later counted as Federalists, who as legal counsel or in other ways came to the aid and support of persons known to have been Loyalists in wartime. This could not have been altogether owing to inherent promptings of fair play, or even to commercial interests which might inspire anglophile leanings. Large numbers of Loyalists in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England had been men of prominence and standing in their prewar communities who subsequently found themselves stripped of their property, roughly handled, and in many cases driven out altogether, either by popular hostility or by what amounted to outright mob action. Any man with elite aspirations of his own, however different his political principles may have been, could hardly have observed such action without a shudder. An orderly state, in whose affairs he might picture himself taking part, was not likely to prosper with such forces afoot in it. Indeed the time might even come, and altered circumstances be such, that he could see himself served in the same way. Such disorderly scenes, and the emotions they aroused, appear to have occurred with some regularity throughout the middle and northern states. But they did not occur very often in places like Virginia and South Carolina. There, the ruling elites, overwhelmingly Whig, were entrenched and secure, while the Tory class was both very small and socially marginal.171 But there was still something else, the most important of all, that set the Federalists apart in their own estimation as a chosen few, and such would have been the case quite aside from any claims based on worldly success or social preeminence. This was their picture of themselves as first comers, that select circle who had been present at a unique historical moment, those statesmen who had taken a hand in bringing forth and setting in motion a miraculous prodigy, a new government, a New Republic. According to Douglass Adair, the reward craved above all else by these men of the founding generation, these first makers of law and government, was something that went beyond riches and beyond popularity. It was fame: the kind of honor and glory that is reached by a road other than passing acclaim and popular fancy, and is made finally secure in something akin to immortality. The standards

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were there, in a kind of hierarchy, for those who could recognize and meet them. They had been set in antiquity by the heroes of Plutarch—Lycurgus and Solon, Romulus and Theseus—and reaffirmed in the pages of Montesquieu, Bacon, Rousseau, and Hume.172 "Of all men, that distinguish themselves by memorable atchievements," Hume had written,"the first place of honour seems due to LEGISLATORS and founders of states, who transmit a system of laws and institutions to secure the peace, happiness, and liberty of future generations/'173 And to this standard of fame, Hume added another of ill fame, one that could not have failed to strike the Federalists of 1800 with a special force: the example of other men whose factious movements could undo the Legislator's noblest work. As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested. . . . Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation. . . . And what should render the founders of parties more odious is, the difficulty of extirpating these weeds, when once they have taken root in any state.174

Fame: well and good. Yet there was one element in the legendary examples of Lycurgus and Solon to which the Federalists of 1800 were deaf and blind, as has been many a first comer in other states from antiquity to the present. It was the maxim that he who gave the law should not remain to administer it. For "he who has command over the laws," as Rousseau put it, "ought not any more to have it over men; or else his laws would be ministers of his passions and . . . his private aims would inevitably mar the sanctity of his work." Lycurgus, when he gave laws to his country, "began by resigning the throne." That example, Rousseau might have added, is one that all too few have followed.175 The first comers and insiders in any new or revolutionary state do not let go easily, because their association with the building of it has given them to imagine, perhaps rightly, that it is all theirs: they own it. And so it was with the Federalists of 1800. Worse, they had now corrupted that very principle—the sovereignty of the people—that had enabled them a dozen years before to ride down the opposition to their new Constitution.176 These men had themselves thus imparted to the sovereignty of the people—previously a hackneyed platitude—a vitality and a meaning it had hitherto never possessed.177 What the Federalists of 1800 could not now face, or even admit, was that the sovereign people had spoken for Jefferson, and not for them. Jefferson's inaugural address, pronounced on the fourth of March, 1801, was full of conciliation. The new Chief Magistrate began with becoming modesty, professing his awareness "that the task is above my talents," and that he approached it "with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire." There was no talk of doing away with banks or navies, and he made rather a point of the "honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." Moreover, he intended

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peace with all nations and "entangling alliances with none," and at home, "the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigor."178 But the most extended single passage, coming before any of this, concerned the open expression of political opinion, the topic which may well have stood above all the others in Jefferson's thoughts. This part too was conciliatory and reassuring, though how reassuring might depend somewhat on the way it was read, for it was not without its ambiguities. The recent "contest of opinion," he said, had had an "animation" that might have been perplexing to "strangers unused to think freely and speak and write what they think." But although the issue had been "decided by the voice of the nation . . . according to the rules of the constitution," and although the majority will "is in all cases to prevail, [yet] that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable." That is, the minority too have their equal rights, to be protected by equal laws, and to violate them "would be oppression." Little is gained if after banishing religious intolerance we should countenance a political intolerance equally "despotic" and "wicked." And on the really important things, we mostly think alike anyway: "every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle." Then, in eight words, comes what is probably the most famous single sentence Jefferson ever uttered. "We are all republicans—we are all federalists." One way of reading these mollifying words would be to conclude that Jefferson was here coming as close as he could, short of saying it outright, to pronouncing an official benediction on party politics. He, after all, had just led an opposition party to victory over an incumbent one, and the legitimacy of it had been "decided by the voice of the nation" in full accordance with "the rules of the constitution." He had, moreover, been forthright in his assertion that political intolerance had no place in this free republic, where men must be at liberty "to speak and write what they think." But these were individuals, who in that character could do no harm to the community's health—as individuals. If they wanted to "dissolve this Union" or "change its republican form," they might "stand undisturbed as monuments to the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." This, to be sure, was saying something important and saying it officially, which in view of what some free speakers had recently undergone was saying a very great deal. Nevertheless he did not say it of parties, nor did he intend to; nor, it seems, did he even think it.179 There was still something about parties that fell short of true legitimacy; in particular, he could not imagine "the voice of the nation" calling the Federalists back. Jefferson in his private character was more specific as to what he did mean. His idea had always been "that the mass of our countrymen, even of those who call themselves Federalists, are republicans."180 All would be set right if these persons could simply be made to see where they had gone wrong, and be induced to cross over. "If we can hit on the true line . . . which may conciliate the honest part of those who were called Federalists," he wrote to Horatio Gates, "... I

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shall hope to ... obliterate, or rather [perhaps he should not have said "obliterate"] to unite the names of federalists & republicans."181 The bane of party might then be banished altogether! "The greatest good we can do our country is to heal it's party divisions & make them one people."182 But if this should actually happen, would not new parties eventually arise? Probably so, Jefferson conceded. Yet it would have to be "under another name," because "that of federalism is to become so scouted that no party can rise under it."183 He himself would see to that. "I shall... by the establishment of republican principles . .. sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection for it."184

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A B B R E V I A T I O N S

AC AECPE-U AHA.-AR AHR AP:AFC AP:DAJA APM AQ ASP:CN ASP:F ASP:FR ASP.TA ASP MA ASP:Misc ASP:NA CFM

CPJJ CUL DAB DGW DHFFC FO IBM

Annals of Congress Archives Etrangeres, Correspondance Politique, Etats-Unis American Historical Association Annual Report American Historical Review Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., The Adams Papers: Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass., 1963-). Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., The Adams Papers: Diaries and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 4V. Adams Papers Microfilm American Quarterly American State Papers: Commerce and Navigation American State Papers: Finance American State Papers: Foreign Relations American State Papers: Indian Affairs American State Papers: Military Affairs American State Papers: Miscellaneous American State Papers: Naval Affairs Frederick J. Turner, ed., "Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1791-1797," Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1903, Vol. II (Washington, 1904). Henry P. Johnston, ed., The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay (New York, 1890-93), 4v. Columbia University Library Allen Johnson et al., eds., Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1928-36), 2ov. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington (Charlottesville, Va., 1976-79), 6v. Linda G. DePauw et al., eds., Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America (Baltimore, 1972-). Foreign Office Bernard Mayo, ed., 'Instructions to the British Ministers to the United States, 1791-1812," Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1936, Vol. Ill (Washington, 1941).

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ABBREVIATIONS

JAH L&B LC MHS MVHR NEQ NYUL PAH PCAB PJM PJnMl PMHB PRO PSQ PTJ WFA WGW WJA WJM WJQA WMQ WTJ

Journal of American History Andrew A. Lipscomb and Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, 1903), 2ov. Library of Congress Massachusetts Historical Society Mississippi Valley Historical Review New England Quarterly New York University Library Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1961-81), 2/v. Mary-Jo Kline, ed., The Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr (Princeton, N.J., 1983), 2v. William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison Chicago, 1962-). Herbert A. Johnson et al., eds., The Papers of John Marshall (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1974-). Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Public Record Office Political Science Quarterly Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J., 1950-). Seth Ames, ed., The Works of Fisher Ames (Boston, 1854), 2v. John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Washington, 1931-41), 39v. C. F. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States . . . (Boston, 1850-56), lov. Stanislaus M. Hamilton, ed., The Writings of James Monroe (New York, 1898-1903), /v. W. C. Ford, ed., The Writings of John Quincy Adams (New York, 1913-17), TV. William and Mary Quarterly Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1892-99), lov.

Short Titles Used Brant, Madison Freeman, Washington

Gibbs, Memoirs

King, King Malone, Jefferson Mitchell, Hamilton

Irving Brant, James Madison (Indianapolis, 1941—61), 6v. Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington: A Biography (New York, 1948-57), TV. (Vol. VII by John A. Carroll and Mary W. Ashworth.) George Gibbs, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott (New York, 1846), 2v. Charles R. King, ed., The Life and Correspondence ofRufus King (New York, 1894-1900), 6v. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time (Boston, 1948-80), 6v. Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1957-62), 2v.

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N O T E S

INTRODUCTION

Modes of Thought and Feeling in the Founding Generation 1. E.g., Charles Beard, referring to "the Fathers of the American Constitution" as being "among the great practicing statesmen of all ages," in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913, 1935), p. xvii; or Richard Hofstadter, affirming a "common agreement among modern critics that the debates over the Constitution were carried on at an intellectual level that is rare in politics, and that the Constitution itself is one of the world's masterpieces in practical statecraft," in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it (New York, 1949), p. 15. Most of these "great practicing statesmen" who continued in their practicing through the 17905 were of course Federalists. By the end of that decade, according to John C. Miller, "they had made a parchment into a workable instrument of government; they had proved themselves to be conscientious, honest, and efficient administrators; they had proved that republicanism was compatible with stability," etc. The Federalist Era, 1789-1801 (New York, 1960), p. 277. 2. Marshall Smelser, "The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion," AQ, X (Winter 1958), 391-419; also idem, "The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," Review of Politics, XIII (Oct. 1951), 457-482; and "The Jacobin Phrenzy: The Menace of Monarchy, Plutocracy, and Anglophobia, 1789-1798," ibid., XXI (Jan. 1959), 239-258; John R. Howe, Jr., "Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 17908," AQ, XIX (Summer 1967), 147-165 (passage qu. is on pp. 150-151). 3. Though some features of this literature are examined in the present chapter, for an extensive listing and historiographical discussion of it the reader is referred to two essays by Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXIX (Jan. 1972), 49-80; and "Republicanism and Early American Historiography," ibid., XXXIX (Apr. 1982), 334-356. In an effort to reconcile the diverse points of view represented in this body of writing, Professor Shalhope has offered a synthesis of his own, The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1/60-1800 (Boston, 1990). 4. Most prominently, e.g., in Abraham S. Eisenstadt, ed., Reconsidering Tocquevitte's Democracy in America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1988). 5. Sean Wilentz would make the transition even shorter. "Even if we concede that every historical moment is, in some sense, a moment of transition, there are ample grounds for describing the half-decade from 1828 to 1833 —and even more specifically the period immediately surrounding Tocqueville's brief stay in 1831 — 35 a turning point in American

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NOTES FOR P A G E S 5-14

history. The sheer pace and drama of events, crowding in upon each other, reinforces that impression. . . ." "Many Democracies: On Tocqueville and Jacksonian America," ibid., pp. 213-214. 6. An earlier and somewhat less developed version of this book appeared as the General Introduction to Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), I. Subsequently published in separate form in 1967 as Ideological Origins, it was awarded both the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes. 7. See, of course, James A. Henretta et al., eds., The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (New York, 1991) on the ways in which (as is rightly stated on the cover) "the writings and influence of Bernard Bailyn have changed our understanding of the American past." 8. The term itself had acquired an earlier currency in Renaissance studies with the work of Hans Baron, esp. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955), 2v., to which Pocock gives ample acknowledgment. 9. We take some liberty with chronology in placing The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969) after Pocock's work in our discussion, its actual publication having antedated The Machiavellian Moment by six years. But not, we believe, too grave a liberty. Pocock's main emphasis was on a historical era that came much earlier than that on which Wood centered his attention, while his earlier essays and other writings, which gave a full foretaste of what he would subsequently do, were well known to Wood when the latter began his own work. 10. On this point see Pocock, "States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective," Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock, eds., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence, Kans., 1988), pp. 61-62. 11. Madison's phrase, in Federalist 10, Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Cleveland, 1961), p. 64. 12. J. G. A. Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, III (Summer 1972), 122. A somewhat diffuse statement of this principle is Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (Glencoe, 111., 1964), pp. 47-76; more succinct ones are two essays by Gordon S. Wood, "Intellectual History and the Social Sciences," John Higham and Paul Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979), pp. 2741; and "Ideology and the Origins of Liberal America," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLIV (July 1987), 628-640. 13. An excellent example is Quentin Skinner, "The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole," Neil McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour ofH. J. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 93-128. Skinner's point is that Bolingbroke's ideological weapons were limited to values which the Walpolean Whigs themselves might be expected to accord some sort of recognition, though the cynical Bolingbroke did not really believe them. (We rather suspect he did believe them, at least while voicing them, but that is a point that does not alter the argument either way. A more positive version of Bolingbroke may be found in Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole [Cambridge, Mass., 1968].) A comparable case, if Cecelia Kenyon is correct, is that of the debates over ratification of the United States Constitution in which, as she asserts, "the factors that united the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were stronger than those that divided them." Kenyon, ed., The Antifederalists (Indianapolis, 1966), p. xcvii. 14. One way (among several) to read the symposium on Wood's Creation of the

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NOTES FOR PAGES 14-24 American Republic in WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLIV (July 1987), 549-640, might be as a corroboration of this point. 15. E.g., Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 508-509; H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), p. 95. 16. On the financial revolution see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London, 1967); and John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York, 1990). 17. The Whig ascendancy and the new forms of order it imposed on political and administrative practice are discussed in J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1660-1730 (London, 1967); H. T. Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London, 1973); and idem, Liberty and Property. We have found Chs. 3-5 of the lastnamed especially useful for our own understanding of Court-Country ideological divisions in eighteenth-century England. 18. It is true that the gentry would manage by the late eighteenth century to pass much of the tax burden on to other classes; they nevertheless continued to feel much put upon. See Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 206. 19. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), p. 125. 20. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980). The above paragraphs constitute our reading of McCoy's argument. 21. John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)," J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 36845322. Cooke, ed., Federalist, pp. 384-385. This elitist slant has been noted by John Zvesper, Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 24-25; and by Richard Hofstadter in the essay cited in n. i above, mentioning such men as Edmund Randolph, Elbridge Gerry, William Livingston, and Charles Pinckney (all of whom eventually crossed over to the Country side) as deploring "the turbulence and follies of democracy." American Political Tradition, p. 4. On Publius' rhetorical strategy see Albert Furtwangler's excellent The Authority of Publius: A Reading of the federalist Papers (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984). 23. Cooke, ed., Federalist, passim. The points noted here may be checked through the excellent index to this edition, which lists all the topics in any way touched on by Publius throughout. Also useful for this purpose is Thomas Engeman et al., eds., The Federalist Concordance (Chicago, 1988). 24. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution," PSQ, LXXVI (June 1961), 181-216, discusses this "Continentalist" aspect. But see also E. James Ferguson, "The Nationalists of 1781-1783 and the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution," JAH, LVI (Sept. 1969), 241-261. 25. On the Court defense in England, see again Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 121-162. We know of no comparable movement in America, on this scale of self-assurance, to justify to the public a broad Federalist conception in Hamiltonian terms, or of anything in the modern literature on the divisions of the 17905 that seeks to discern such an effort. Richard Buel, Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789-1815 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972) is very useful on the actual clash of issues at the point, as it were, of contact;

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NOTES FOR PAGES 25-27 Zvesper, Political Philosophy (cited in n. 22 above) is good on the world-view of Federalism prior to its coming under persistent challenge from Jeffersonian Republicanism. Neither, however, considers the question of a systematic Federalist polemical counter-challenge, or whether in fact there was one. 26. This refers of course to the assumption, once given currency principally through the writings of Charles Beard, that the economic basis for the Federalist-Republican division was a kind of fundamental antagonism between commercial and agricultural interests. 27. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the Working Class, 1/88-1850 (New York, 1984), esp. pp. 62-103. 28. See again Elkins and McKitrick, "Young Men of the Revolution," cited in n. 24 above. 29. It might be noted that of the 55 delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, 24 served either in Congress or in high executive or judicial office in the new federal government, and of the 95 men who served in the First Congress, 58 could be described as Federalists, 41 of whom would remain so throughout their careers. See, e.g., Clinton Rossiter, i/8/: The Grand Convention (New York, 1966); Kenneth C. Martis, ed., The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States, 1/89-1989 (New York, 1988); and individual entries in DAB. 30. The three were Madison (initially the Administration's all-but-official spokesman in Congress), Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph. Suggestive clues to what we are calling the "Virginia principle" might also be found in Lance Banning, "James Madison and the Nationalists, 1780—1783," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XL (Apr. 1983), 227-255; and esp. Herbert Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1994). 31. Joyce Appleby has argued that liberal capitalism, in both theory and practice, was a primary goal of Jeffersonian Republicanism. While this is not our reading (the persistent animus in Jefferson's own writings, as well as in his principal public acts, against most aspects of what is commonly understood as entrepreneurship suggests if anything the reverse), we would nevertheless concede that with some rearrangement, aided by certain historical ironies, the argument could have a special kind of validity. As an economic design the free-swinging laissez-faire capitalism of nineteenth-century America was the last thing the Jeffersonians envisioned or would have wanted. But as the product of political exigencies and political choices it could hardly have turned out otherwise. It was of course the centralizing, high-finance, big-mercantile implications of Hamiltonian Federalism, dependent for support on close commercial relations with Great Britain (seen as contaminating to public virtue and a threat to republican liberty) that inspired the formation of the Jeffersonian opposition. The Republicans came to office in 1801 determined to remove the hand of government from all such concerns (and to do away with the taxes required to support them), to steer clear of foreign connections, and to interfere as little as possible in the daily pursuits of the citizenry. In addition, the Jeffersonians in building their own party, starting with an opposition, could afford no constraints against reaching out everywhere for support—the result being a politics of welcome that had room for everyone. A more auspicious setting for the unrestrained individualism that subsequently characterized the great cycles of economic expansion in the nineteenth century could hardly be imagined, no matter what form of economic theory may have been in the minds of those who first opened the door to it. Professor Appleby's ideas have occasioned a fair amount of debate, which has also involved the related issue of how important a place should be accorded the influence of John Locke upon the world-view that accompanied the transition to modernity in both American and British societies. See Joyce Appleby, "Commercial Farming and the 'Agrar-

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NOTES FOR PAGES 28-33

ian Myth' in the Early Republic," JAH, LXVIII (Dec. 1981), 833-849; "What is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?" WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXXIX (Apr. 1982), 287-309; "Republicanism and Ideology," AQ, XXXVII (Fall 1985), 461-473; "Republicanism in Old and New Context," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLIII (Jan. 1986), 20-34 (all reprinted in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination [Cambridge, Mass., 1992]); and Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 17905" (New York, 1984). See also Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), esp. Chs. i and 6; Sloan, Principle and Interest, Introduction; Lance Banning, "Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited; Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLIII (Jan. 1986), 3-19; and James T. Kloppenberg, "The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse," JAH, LXXIV (June 1987), 9-33. 32. Murrin makes a strong point of this in "Great Inversion," p. 429. 33. The evidence as to elite control of local and provincial government in the colonial era is very extensive. Among the studies illustrating this are Richard L. Bushman, Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Edward M. Cook, The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore, 1976); Robert Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods: An Essay on Eighteenth-Century American Politics (Boston, 1971); Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1/26 (Princeton, N.J., 1968); and Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982). 34. The most comprehensive account so far written of the emergence in America of a democratic society "unlike any that had ever existed" is Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991). Wood discusses at length many of the critical challenges to an older civic humanist value-system that occurred in the 17905, recognizing that although the victory of the Jeffersonians in 1800 did not in itself mark the ascendancy of a democratic order—that was still a generation in the future—it did signal the fading of a conviction, shared by most of the Constitution-makers, that the norms of civic life were to be more or less exclusively set by a disinterested elite (as Madison himself had put it in the Tenth Federalist) of "enlightened views and virtuous sentiments."

CHAPTER

I

Legitimacy 1. Journals of the Continental Congress (Washington, 1904-57), XXXIV, 599-601. There was no formal adjournment, but no quorum could be obtained after October 10, 1788. 2. Resolution of Feb. 21, 1787, ibid., XXXII, 74. 3. C. O. Paullin, "The First Elections Under the Constitution," Iowa Journal of History and Politics, II (Jan. 1904), 3-33; for greater detail, see the pertinent volumes of Merrill Jensen et al., eds., The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788-1790 (Madison, Wis., 1976-89), 4V. St. John de Crevecoeur to Jefferson, Oct. 20, Nov. 20, 1788, PIJ, XIV, 29, 274. 4. Edward Stanwood, A History of the Presidency (Boston, 1901), pp. 20-30. In New Hampshire, one of the five states in which popular election of electors was prescribed, no

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NOTES FOR PAGES 34-42 candidate received a majority of votes. The law provided that in such a case a full list be appointed by the legislature, which was duly done. More and more states adopted the mode of popular election as time went on, until by 1832 all but one were using it. The exception was South Carolina, whose electors continued to be appointed by the legislature down to 1860. Also by 1832 all but Maryland and South Carolina were using the general ticket, voted upon throughout the state, as opposed to election by districts. This had not been the case in the first presidential election. At that time, in every state that provided for any form of popular election, the voting was done by districts, which made it possible that the electoral vote of a state could be divided. The first general-ticket election law was that adopted by Virginia in 1800, in order to ensure that that state's entire electoral vote would go to one or the other of the candidates. Ibid., pp. 21, 38, 47, 59, 60, 83, 93, 103, 133, 164. 5. The material in this section is largely drawn from Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington (New York, 1948-57), jv. It also profits from the many insights in Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (Boston, 1958). 6. The fullest study of this subject is Rick W. Sturdevant, "Quest for Eden: George Washington's Frontier Land Interests" (Unpub. diss., U. of Calif., Santa Barbara, 1982). 7. Cf. entries in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1933), II, 280-281; and Bergen and Cornelia Evans, A Dictionary of American Usage (New York, 1957), pp. 90, 366, on "character" and "personality." 8. See Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), pp. 90-115. 9. Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington's Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952), esp. Chs. 7-8; Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1970), p. 77; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1/90 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), esp. Chs. 5-6. 10. Virginia Gazette, Oct. 25, 1765, qu. in Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia (Philadelphia, 1958), p. 228; Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 16891776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), pp. 364ff. 11. Marvin Kitman's (not wholly serious) George Washington's Expense Account (New York, 1970) made something of a splash with the claim, based on a facsimile edition of Washington's wartime accounts published in 1833, that Washington's refusal of a salary was more than counter-balanced by the bill of $449,261 he submitted in 1783 for out-ofpocket headquarters expenses. According to a subsequent estimate, however, allowing for the collapse in value of the Continental currency over the seven-year period of Washington's command, this in hard dollars would have come to less than $20,000. See Marshall Smelser, "A Cool Half Million," Book World, July 19, 1970; and Marcus Cunliffe's review, JAHf LVIII (June 1971), 138. 12. The distinction here between "administrative" and "executive" is important. The executive function in government, according to Edward S. Corwin, is "the power . . . that is the most spontaneously responsive to emergency conditions; conditions, that is, which have not attained enough of stability or recurrency to admit of their being dealt with according to rule." The President: Office and Powers, 1787-1957 (New York, 1957), p. 3. 13. For example, Congress was more willing to use the power of impressing supplies than Washington was. See Journals of the Continental Congress, IX, 1013-1015, Dec. 10, 1777; Brant, Madison, I, 319; II, 114-115. 14. Thomas Balch, ed., Journal of Claude Blanchard, Commissary of the French Aux-

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NOTES FOR PAGES 43-48 iliary Army . . . 1780-1783 (Albany, N.Y., 1876), p. 93, qu. in Freeman, Washington, V, 267; see also Gilbert Chinard, ed., George Washington as the French Knew Him (Princeton, N.J., 1940), passim. 15. Salvador de Madariaga, in his Bolivar (New York, 1952), shrewdly suggests that neither Bolivar nor San Martin would be comprehensible without the example of Napoleon. See p. xviii and passim. 16. WGW, XXVII, 393. 17. Washington to James Warren, Oct. 7, 1785, ibid., XXVIII, 290. 18. PTJ, VII, 592. 19. The "official" source on the proceedings of the Convention is Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention 0/1/87 (New Haven, Conn., 1937), 4v., with Vol. IV (containing additions and corrections to I-III) having been replaced by James Hutson, ed., Supplement to Max Farrand's . . . Records . . . (New Haven, Conn., 1987). Several of the delegates kept notes, the most complete set of which was that of James Madison. These are printed as written in Records, I—II. A somewhat more usable version of Madison's notes—because of corrected spelling and more convenient arrangement—is in Jonathan Elliot, ed., Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1836), Vol. V of Elliot's series on the proceedings of the state ratifying conventions. On Washington at Philadelphia, Arthur N. Holcombe, "The Role of Washington in the Framing of the Constitution," Huntington Library Quarterly, XIX (Aug. 1956), is suggestive, as is Frederick Byrne, "The Model Chief Executive: George Washington and the Establishment of the Executive" (Unpub. M.A. thesis, Columbia U., 1989). 20. Benjamin Rush to Timothy Pickering, Aug. 30, 1787, Lyman Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, N.J., 1951) I, 440; [William Lewis to Thomas Lee Shippen], Oct. n, 1787, PTJ, XII, 230; Pierce Butler to Weedon Butler, May 5, 1788, Farrand, Records, III, 302; Freeman, Washington, VI, ii7n. 21. New-Jersey Journal, Apr. 29, 1789, qu. in ibid., p. 183. 22. Edgar S. Maclay, ed., Journal of William Maclay (New York, 1890), pp. i-io; AC, i Cong., i Sess., 24, 29. A new edition of Maclay's diary appeared in 1988 as Vol. IX of Linda G. DePauw et al., eds., Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, March 4, lySy-March 3, 1791 (Baltimore, 1972-). It is a direct transcription of Maclay's notes exactly as he wrote them, and is accompanied by a highly useful set of editorial annotations. But since the earlier Edgar Maclay edition regularizes the spelling and punctuation of the original, we have found it preferable for purposes of quotation, and the references in these pages will be to that edition. 23. AC, i Cong., i Sess., 24, 29-31, 191, 213; Maclay, Journal, pp. i, 10-12, 14, 1516, 18, 21-22. 24. Ibid., pp. 22-29; 3^4> 391; and William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford, 1961), pp. 74-78. 44. Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 77-105; Washington to Joseph Reed, Jan. 23, 1776, WGW, IV, 269, VII, 218. 45. Hamilton to John Hancock, Sept. 18, 1777, and to Elias Boudinot, Sept. 8, 1775, PAH, I, 326-328, 347-365, 545-547; Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 125-142, 158-173; "Proceedings of a General Court-Martial . . . for the Trial of Major-General Lee, July 4, 1778 .. . ," Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 18/3, Lee Papers, ffl, 201. 46. Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 175-177; Hamilton to Jay, Mar. 14, 1779, PAH, II, 17-19; to New York Committee of Correspondence, Apr. 20, Aug. 18, 1777, ibid., 233-234, 316; to George Clinton, Dec. 22, 1777, Feb. 13, 1778, ibid., 368, 425-428; to Duer, June 18, 1778, ibid., 499-500; to Boudinot, July 26, 1778, ibid., 528-529; to Jay, Mar. 14, 1779, ibid., II, 191. 47. To Duane, Sept. 3, 1780, ibid., 400-418; to R. Morris, Apr. 30, 1781, ibid., pp. 604-635. The Continentalist is repr. in ibid., II, 649-652, 654-657, 660-665, 669-674; III, 75-82, 99-106. 48. It is true that Hamilton would venture an occasional piece of political trickery in the course of his career, most notably his electoral intrigues against John Adams (discussed in Chs. XI and XV below). But these rashly transparent maneuvers were among the clumsiest things he ever did, and all of them backfired. 49. Hamilton to Philip Schuyler, Feb. 18, 1781, PAH, II, 563-568, is the chief source on Hamilton's rupture with Washington. On the romance with Elizabeth Schuyler, Mitchell's discussion in Hamilton, I, 196-208 is both genial and judicious, in contrast to the rather arch treatment in John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (New York, 1959), pp. 62-66. Hamilton to Elizabeth Hamilton, Oct. 16, 1781, PAH, II, 682. 50. Ibid., Ill, 87, 89, 93-94, 98, 117, 122, 189. Hamilton resigned his receivership to Thomas Tillotson on Nov. 10, 1782; ibid., Ill, 195. Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 261-284; Brant, Madison, II, 188. 51. Hamilton to George Clinton, Mar. 12, 1778.; to Duane, Sept. 3, 1780; PAH, I, 439-442; II, 400-418. 52. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance,

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NOTES FOR P A G E S IO2-IO6

1776-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), pp. 146-176; Brant, Madison, II, 209-253; Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 283-326; PAH, III, 420-426. 53. Madison, "Debates in the Congress of the Confederation," PJM, VI, 143-145, 265-266; Hamilton to Washington, Feb. 13, Mar. 17, Mar. 25, 1783, PAH, III, 253-55, 290-293, 305-308; Washington to Hamilton, Mar. 12, Apr. 4, 1783, ibid., 286-288, 315316; Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York, 1975), pp. 17-35. 54. "Address of the Annapolis Convention," Sept. 14, 1786, PAH, III, 686-690. Authorship of certain numbers of The Federalist remained in doubt for many years, and it was not until relatively recent times that the above enumeration was finally established. For an account of this controversy, and the eventual settling of it first by historical analysis and finally by statistical techniques see Douglass Adair, "The Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers," WMQ, 3rd Ser., I (Apr. 1944), 97-122, and (July 1944), 235-264; Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (Reading, Mass., 1964), esp. pp. 1-15, 263-267; and Adair, "The Federalist Papers: A Review Article," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXII (Jan. 1965), 131-139. The question of authorship is also discussed in PAH, IV, 287-301; and PJM, X, 259-263. On Madison in the Virginia ratifying convention see Brant, Madison, III, 185-228. The complexities of the New York situation are still being debated. In addition to Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 426-465, see Linda G. DePauw, The Eleventh Pillar: New York State and the Federal Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), and esp. review of same by Alfred F. Young, WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXV (Apr. 1968), 286-289; Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), pp. 109-128; and Robin Brooks, "Alexander Hamilton, Melancton Smith, and the Ratification of the Constitution in New York," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXIV (July 1967). 55. The principal exponents of this argument are Douglass Adair, "Disputed Authorship"; Alpheus T. Mason, "The Federalist: A Split Personality," AHR, LVII (Apr. 1952), 625-643; and, to a lesser degree, Benjamin F. Wright, "Editor's Introduction," The Federalist (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 1-86. The statement by John Quincy Adams was made in his Eulogy on the Life and Character of James Madison (Boston, 1836), p. 32. 56. PAH, IV, 178-211. These remarks on "corruption" were made in a short speech a few days later. Ibid., 217. 57. Such a case is strongly implied in Rossiter, Hamilton and the Constitution. 58. Hamilton to Duane, Sept. 3, 1780, PAH, II, 400-418; Madison to Jefferson, Apr. 16, 1781, PJM, III, 71-72; VI, 312-313, 493; Brant, Madison, II, 233, 245; PAH, III, 213223; Continentalist (see above, n. 47); I. Brant, ed., "Two Neglected Madison Letters" [North American I and II], WMQ, 3rd Ser., Ill (Oct. 1946), 569-587. Madison's authorship of North American has been questioned by the editors of PJM, who think it more likely that the writer was Richard Peters of Philadelphia, who became a close friend of Madison when they served together in the Continental Congress. In any case Madison's views and those of "North American" were very similar. VII, 319-346. 59. The argument that Hamilton's speech was made for tactical purposes is noted and considered in Rossiter, Hamilton and the Constitution, pp. 46, 277^ 60. Hume's influence on Madison has been discussed by Douglass Adair (see above, p. 86 and n. 16); the same thinker's influence on Hamilton is noted in Rossiter, Hamilton and the Constitution, Chs. 4 and 5, passim, and in Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, Calif., 1970), pp. 77-80. 61. E.g., the bemused remarks of John Mercer: "He who studies it [The Federalist]

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with attention, will perceive that it is not only argumentative, but that it addresses different arguments to different classes of the American public, in the spirit of an able and skillful disputant before a mixed assembly. Thus from different numbers of this work, and sometimes from the same numbers, may be derived authorities for opposite principles and opinions. For example, nothing is easier to demonstrate by the numbers of Publius than that the government, which it was written not to expound merely, but to recommend to the people, is, or is not a National Government; that the State Legislatures may arraign at their respective bars, the conduct of the Federal Government or that no state has any such power." Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention 0/1829-1830 (Richmond, 1830), p. 187. 62. Hume's discussion of "corruption" as a counterweight to Parliament and as a means of maintaining the Executive's independence is in "Of the Independency of Parliament," Essays, 1,120-121; it might also be noted that Hamilton's comments in Federalist 71 on the disparity between the people's intentions and their judgment—usually attributed to Rousseau—were just as likely to have been derived from Hume. See Essays, I, 97, 113, 287-288, 365, 376; also John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York, 1963), p. 199. On Madison and the removal power see above, p. 151 and n. 33. 63. The most useful summing-up on the origins of Hamilton's economic ideas are the editors' introductions to the Report on Public Credit and Report on Manufactures, PAH, VI, 51-65; X, 1-15. 64. Benjamin F. Wright says, "Hamilton was a mercantilist." John C. Miller is more balanced; "he owed more to Colbert, the exponent of mercantilism, than to Adam Smith, the apostle of laissez faire." But Clinton Rossiter protests that "all the mercantilists and neo-mercantilists in England and France could not have spoiled his taste for the commonsense views of Adam Smith." On the other hand, according to Broadus Mitchell, "he refused and refuted laissez-faire teachings . . . and found surer guidance in the maxims that had made strong nations in Europe." For Joseph Dorfman, Hamilton may have been a mercantilist, "but he had his own way of handling the logic." However, after quoting a passage from Hamilton's Continentalist No. V, Russell Kirk exclaims: "This is mercantilism. Hamilton had read Adam Smith with attention, but his heart was in the seventeenth century." But Louis Hacker will have none of this. "His . . . preferences are clear. He follows Adam Smith so plainly and completely that one can only express wonder that the Hamilton text has been misunderstood for so long." Paul Studenski disagrees. "His outlook was . . . mercantilists rather than laissez-faire." Hacker again: "Mercantilism . . . Hamilton rejects again and again in all his famous reports." Mercantilist or advocate of laissez faire? "The answer," suggests Rossiter judiciously, ". . . is that he was both, that his eclectic, undogmatic mind had room for the best teachings of both Colbert and Adam Smith." Wright, Federalist, p. 21; Miller, Hamilton, p. 290; Rossiter, Hamilton and the Constitution, pp. 119, 179; Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 248; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (New York, 1946), I, 410; Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to San fay ana (Chicago, 1953), p. 68; Louis M. Hacker, Alexander Hamilton in the American Tradition (New York, 1957), pp. 12, 166; Paul Studenski and Herman E. Kroos, Financial History of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York, 1963), P- 4565. H. R. Trevor-Roper, in D. F. Pears, ed., David Hume: A Symposium (London, 1963), p. 89. Hume, according to Stuart Hampshire, is "of all philosophers who have written in English, the most admired in British universities at the present time." Ibid., p. 3.

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66. Eugene Rotwein, David Hume: Writings on Economics (Madison, Wis., 1955), pp. cx-cxi. 67. See Peter F. Drucker, "On the 'Economic Basis' of American Politics," The Public Interest, No. 10 (Winter 1968), 30-42. 68. See above, pp. 84-85. 69. David Hume (1711-76) was twelve years the senior of Adam Smith (1723-90), but in a sense it could be said that the two were separated intellectually by nearly a generation. Hume's first book, A Treatise of Human Nature, was published in 1739, whereas Smith's first, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, did not appear until 1759. All of Hume's economic essays except one were brought out in 1752; Smith's Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, twenty-four years later. 70. They are contrasted in Rotwein, Hume, pp. cvi-cx. 71. In 1752 Hume published Political Discourses, a volume of twelve essays, seven of which were on economic subjects (eight if one counts, as Rotwein does, "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations"). They are "Of Commerce," "Of Refinement in the Arts" (entitled, in the first edition and in one subsequent one, "Of Luxury"), "Of Money," "Of Interest," "Of the Balance of Trade," "Of Taxes," and "Of Public Credit." Another, "Of the Jealousy of Trade," was added in 1758. They are all reprinted, with an introductory analysis of Hume's economic thought that constitutes a brief book in itself, in Rotwein, Hume. The edition cited in the present work is that of Green and Grose, 1882, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. 72. "Of Refinement in the Arts," ibid., I, 301-302. 73. See below, p. 201 and n. n. 74. "Of Public Credit," Essays, I, 371. 75. See Donald F. Swanson and Andrew P. Trout, "Alexander Hamilton, 'the Celebrated Mr. Neckar,' and Public Credit," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLVII (July 1990), 422-430. The frequency of references to Hume in Hamilton's writings has certainly been noticed by more than one writer, and such references may be readily checked throughout the indexes of PAH, as well as in the prefatory notes to Hamilton's Treasury reports in that same edition. The present authors have become convinced, however, that with regard to Hume's economic ideas Hamilton did more than simply cite Hume on particular points: at an early stage in his reading he had internalized Hume's entire vision of commercial and industrial development. It is known that he was familiar with the Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (which contained all the essays in question) while still at college, and that he referred to them in his pamphlet controversy with Seabury in 1774-1775. In preparing his letter to Robert Morris, dated Apr. 30, 1781, he asked Timothy Pickering for a copy of the Essays, whose contents he already knew, to use as reference. (The work also appears in a partial list of books in his library given by Allen McLane Hamilton, The Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton [New York, 1910], p. 74.) This letter, which occupies thirty-one printed pages in PAH, II, 604-635, is the best single piece of testimony to how fully Hamilton had absorbed Hume's basic economic assumptions. A careful reading of the essays cited in n. 71 above, followed by a reading of this letter, makes this strikingly evident. On the other hand, the philosophical framework, which is quite prominent in the letter to Morris, is less so in the Report on the Public Credit and Report on a National Bank, in view of the more technical nature of these reports and their concentration on immediate detail. (On the latter report, indeed, Hamilton got little from Hume, who did not favor public banks.) It reappears, however, in the Report on Manufactures, especially in Hamilton's remarks on the relative degree of exertion and enterprise to be observed between artisans and farmers (PAH, X, 241, 255-256), which reflects Hume's "Of Refine-

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NOTES FOR PAGES 114-118 ment in the Arts"; on carelessness in the accumulation of debt (ibid., 282; cf. "Of Public Credit"); and on the perniciousness of poll taxes (PAH, X, 312; cf. "Of Taxes"). Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (Garden City, N.Y., 1981), pp. 66-71, is one of the few modern accounts that make a point of Hume's influence on Hamilton's economic thought. 76. Hamilton to Madison, Oct. 12, 1789, in response to a letter from Madison (subsequently lost); Madison to Hamilton [Nov. 20-28, 1789], PAH, V, 439, 531; John C. Hamilton, History of the Republic of the United States of America, as Traced in the Writings of Alexander Hamilton and of His Contemporaries (New York, 1857-64), IV, 29n. 77. On the general character of New York City in the year 1789, and the daily routine of people at that time and place, see Thomas E. V. Smith, The City of New York in the Year of Washington's Inauguration (New York, 1889), which has an excellent map; Isaac N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York, 1915-28), 6v.; Sidney I. Pomerantz, New York: An American City, 1783-1803: A Study of Urban Life (New York, 1938); Stephen Decatur, Jr., The Private Affairs of George Washington, Prom the Records and Accounts of Tobias Lear, Esquire, His Secretary (Boston, 1933); and Margaret M. Christman, The First Federal Congress, 1789-1791 (Washington, 1989). 78. On the tempo of Hamilton's first days in office—especially that first Sunday—his correspondence speaks for itself: PAH, V, 366ff. 79. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 271-272. 80. The expression "a national blessing" first appears in Hamilton's letter to Robert Morris, Apr. 30, 1781; in his Report on Public Credit of Jan. 9, 1790, it reappears as "the proper funding of the present debt, will render it a national blessing." PAH, II, 635; VI, 106. The best source for the precedents for Hamilton's report is the Introductory Note in ibid., VI, 51-58. See also Donald F. Swanson, The Origins of Hamilton's Fiscal Policies (Gainesville, Fla., 1963). The most lucid account of Hamilton's financial program is Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York, 1979), pp. 117-188. 81. On the argument for discrimination see Introductory Note, PAH, VI, 60-61; and Hamilton's own discussion, 73-78. 82. Ibid., 74, 76. 83. McDonald, Hamilton, pp. 152-160. 84. The principle of concentration, central to the economic thought of David Hume and the guiding concept of present-day growth economics (the mobilization of scarce resources), was understood by Hamilton, Robert Morris, and a number of others as early as the Confederation period. A stable national government could, they believed, through a funded debt and perhaps a national bank, help provide the conditions under which concentration of capital could be achieved and could exert its salutary effect on the community's enterprise. Hamilton touched on the principle in his letter to Morris of Apr. 30, 1781, referring to the need "to erect a mass of credit that will supply the defect of monied capitals and answer all the purposes of cash," which would not only be of advantage to individual investors but would have "the most beneficial influence upon [the country's] future commerce and be a source of national strength and wealth." PAH, II, 617. "Since interest on investing capital in the United States," as E. James Ferguson puts it, "was higher than the interest payments required to support the debt, the new capital created by funding, if properly invested, would bring a net increase in national income. Moreover, since the securities were held by propertied men, the gains from an increase in security values would go to persons in a position to use them not for consumption but for investment." "The Nationalists of 1781-1783 and the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution," ]AH, LVI (Sept. 1969), 248. Robert Morris wrote in 1782 that funding, "by

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distributing property into those hands, which could render it most productive," would increase the national revenues "while the original stock continued the same." Report to the President of Congress, July 29, 1782, E. James Ferguson et al., The Papers of Robert Morris (Pittsburgh, 1973-), VI, 63. The principle of concentration appears discreetly in Hamilton's Report on Public Credit; a funded debt answering "most of the purposes of money" is a stimulus to trade and manufacturing "because there is a larger capital to carry it on," and because the merchant "has greater means for enterprize." PAH, VI, 70-71. He would develop it further in his Report on a National Bank, Dec. 13, 1790, emphasizing "the active capital of the country." "This, it is, which generates employment; which animates and expands labor and industry. Every addition, which is made to it, by contributing to put in motion a greater quantity of both, tends to create a greater quantity of the products of both." Ibid., VII, 317. By the time he wrote his Report on Manufactures the following year, Hamilton would virtually repeat Morris's statement of a decade earlier. Referring to a funded debt as "an engine of business, or as an instrument of industry and Commerce," he declared that "though a funded debt is not in the first instance, an absolute increase of Capital, or an augmentation of real wealth; yet by serving as a New power in the operation of industry, it has within certain bounds a tendency to increase the real wealth of a Community, in like manner as money borrowed by a thrifty farmer, to be laid out in the improvement of his farm may, in the end, add to his Stock of real riches." (For "thrifty farmer" one should probably read "enterprising merchant capitalist.") Ibid., X, 281-282. In his essay "Of Money," Hume spelled out the process whereby an increase of money—or credit—brought about a real increase in the wealth of the community. The key was concentration. "When any quantity of money is imported into a nation, it is not at first dispersed into many hands, but is confined to the coffers of a few persons, who immediately seek to employ it to advantage." It was these men, merchants and manufacturers, who would use such funds to extract more labor, produce more goods, and generally enhance the community's well-being. Essaysf I, 313. Albert Gallatin, on the other hand, who was to serve both Jefferson and Madison as Secretary of the Treasury on fiscal principles very different from Hamilton's, not only recognized the theoretical assumptions behind Hamilton's system but challenged them directly. There was no reason, Gallatin insisted, to assume that the credit resources produced by funding would in fact become investment capital. Rather, he argued, capital "acquired suddenly by individuals . . . has been applied in the same manner as every other sudden acquisition of wealth; it has enabled those individuals to consume, to spend more, and they have consumed and spent extravagantly." "A Sketch of the Finances of the United States" (1796), Henry Adams, ed., The Writings of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia, 1879), III, 147. 85. Report, PAH, VI, 78-81. 86. Ibid., 81-83. The only fully satisfactory discussion of this problem and its bearing on assumption of state debts is Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 203-219 and 3o8f£ 87. Report, PAHf VI, 82. 88. Hamilton calculated about $27 million for the domestic debt, $13 million for accrued interest, $2 million for unliquidated Continental currency still in the hands of the states, and about $12 million for the foreign debt. He estimated that the state debts to be assumed would total about $25 million. As of Sept. 30, 1791, the total debt either funded or registered amounted to about $50.2 million, and it appeared unlikely that it would go much beyond $52 million in the final accounting. Report, PAH VI, 86-119; ASP:F, I, 149150. Of the $21.5 million in state debts that Congress agreed to assume, only $18.2 million was actually subscribed. The additional $4 million paid to the creditor states after the final settlement made a total of about $22 million. The grand total of the federal debt would

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come to about $74 million, not far below Hamilton's original estimate of $79 million. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 330, 332-333; Whitney K. Bates, 'The Assumption of State Debts, 1783-1793" (Unpub. diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1951), pp. 226, 228-229. 89. Higginson to Hamilton, Nov. n, 1789; Bingham to Hamilton, Nov. 25, 1789; PAH, V, 507-511; 538-557; see also James O. Wettereau, "Letters from Two Business Men to Alexander Hamilton on Federal Fiscal Policy, November, 1789," Journal of Economic and Business History, III (Aug. 1931), 667-672. 90. It is true that some of the language as well as certain of the sentiments of the Bingham and Higginson letters are paralleled in passages of Hamilton's report. The same might be said of Madison's suggestion that an excise on domestic spirits be levied according to the size of stills, or the argument of John Witherspoon against discrimination between classes of creditors. Madison to Hamilton, Nov. 19, 1789; Witherspoon to Hamilton, Oct. 26, 1789; PAH, V, 525-527, 464-465. The emphasis in the present account, however, is on the way in which Hamilton had to steer a path between differing conceptions of how interest on the debt ought to be paid, and on the characteristic way in which he made up his own mind on this question. For his discussion of interest see Report, ibid., VI, 85-99; on the sinking fund, 196; for the remark about "probabilities," 88. 91. Report, ibid., 90-97. Hamilton proposed seven separate plans, including partial payment in western lands, or a bonus in land to compensate for a reduction in interest, among which each creditor might take his choice. The immediate interest would have averaged between 4 and 5 percent. Congress in the Funding Act of Aug. 4, 1790, reduced the options to one: 66f percent in 6 percent stock and 335 percent in deferred stock bearing 6 percent after 1800. Accrued interest—or indents—was funded at 3 percent, contrary to Hamilton's recommendation that indents be treated on equal terms with other securities. Other departures from Hamilton's plan included the rating of Continental currency at 100 to i in specie, rather than the recommended 40 to i, and the payment of a slightly lower rate of interest on state than on federal securities. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 296-297; AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 2303-2311; or Statutes at Large, I, 138-144. 92. Report, PAH, VI, 89. 93. Ibid.; Hume, "Of Interest," Essays, I, 323. 94. See above, n. 91. 95. The basic source for this episode is Douglas Brymner, Report on Canadian Archives, 1890 (Ottawa, 1891), in which the documents describing Beckwith's conversations with Hamilton and others were first brought to light and published. The code numbers Beckwith assigned to each of his informants are listed in Brymner's introduction, pp. xlixliii. 96. Beckwith to Dorchester [1788], ibid., p. 101; Samuel F. Bemis, Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1962), pp. 57-59. 97. Beckwith to Henry Dundas, June 20, 1792, qu. in ibid., p. 378; Brymner, Canadian Archives, pp. 121-123. 98. Ibid., pp. 125-129; also PAH, V, 482-490. 99. Ibid., 483, 485, 486. 100. Julian Boyd, Number 7: Alexander Hamilton's Secret Attempts to Control American Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1964), is in the present authors' judgment overwrought, casting an aura of conspiracy and deceit over the Hamilton-Beckwith conversations that is unwarranted by the evidence. A similar conclusion has been reached by two other students of the diplomacy of this period: see Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy Toward the United States, 1783-1795 (Dallas, Tex., 1969), p. 43in., and review of Number 7, Journal of Southern History, XXXI (Feb. 1965), 202-203;

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NOTES FOR PAGES 126-133 and Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Pounding Fathers (Berkeley, Calif., 1970), pp. 52-56. 101. Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 6. 102. Ibid., pp. 1-27, 148-153. Major-General Arthur St. Clair, Governor of the Northwest Territory, spent the entire spring and summer of 1789 in New York promoting various kinds of legislative and executive action on behalf of the Territory, and was on intimate terms with the President during this time. He gave Washington considerable information on the instability of Indian affairs, and the latter fully shared his sense of the problem's gravity. St. Clair had been aware for some time that British retention of the posts, the warlike state of the Indian tribes, and British intrigues among the Kentuckians (stirring up secessionism and encouraging hopes for assistance against the Spanish, who controlled navigation of the Mississippi) were closely related. Washington to Beverley Randolph, July 15, 1789, WGW, XXX, 355-356; St. Clair to Washington, Sept. 14, 1789, William H. Smith, ed., The St. Clair Papers . . . (Cincinnati, 1882), II, 123-124; St. Clair to John Jay, Dec. 13, 1788, ibid., 101-105. Several times during the 1789 session Washington sent Congress messages and documents on the Indian problems of the Northwest: ASP:IA, I, 5-54, 57-58; and at one time during the summer he considered an outright demand for the surrender of the posts. Washington to Madison, [Aug. 1789], WGW, XXX, 394. 103. Ibid., 439-442. 104. DGW, V, 456; Boyd, Number 7, pp. 15-19. 105. See above, n. 102. 106. PAH, IV, 192-193; Rossiter, Hamilton and the Constitution, pp. 153-156; Louise B. Dunbar, A Study of "Monarchical" Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801 (Urbana, 111., 1922), pp. 85-88. 107. Mitchell, Hamilton, I, 74-75, 219, 239-240, 341-345; Brant, Madison, II, 181182; Hamilton to Henry Knox, June 7, 1782, PAH, III, 92; on Hamilton and honor see Combs, Jay Treaty, pp. 55-57. 108. Beckwith, in correspondence with Grenville in January and March 1791, strongly urged the advantages of a trade agreement. See ibid., pp. 52-53, 89; and Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 118-119. Judging from what Beckwith had written to Dorchester on the same subject in 1788, it is probably safe to assume that he had favored such an arrangement all along, and that this must have been apparent to Hamilton. Brymner, Canadian Archives, p. 101. 109. See above, pp. 69-70 no. These estimates are for combined imports and exports. In imports from Britain to America, however, the proportions are much more dramatic: these constitute about 90 percent of America's total imports and about 17 percent of Britain's total exports. See Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 45-49. in. See above, pp. 70-72. 112. See below, pp. 215-222.

CHAPTER III

The Divided Mind of James Madison, 1790 Nationalist Versus Ideologue i. Madison to Jefferson, Oct. 8, Nov. i, 1789; to Washington, Nov. 20, 1789; PJM, XII, 433, 439, 45I~453-

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NOTES FOR PAGES 134-142 2. The fullest account of the "residence question" (as the locating of the capital was called) is Kenneth Bowling, "Politics in the First Congress, 1789-1791" (Unpub. diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1968), pp. 152-199. 3. Madison to Washington, Nov. 20, 1789, PJM, XII, 451-453. 4. Ibid.; same to same, Dec. 20, 1789, ibid., 458-459, Hardin Burnley to Madison, Nov. 28, Dec. 5, 1789, ibid., 455-456, 460. Edmund Randolph to Washington, Nov. 26, Dec. 6,15,1789; Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson to His Excellency the Governor of Virginia, Sept. 28, 1789; the same to The Honorable the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Virginia, Sept. 28, 1789; David Stuart to Washington, Dec. 3, 1789; Edward Carrington to Madison, Dec. 20, 1789; all in Documentary History of the Constitution of the United States of America, 1/86-18/0 (Washington, 1894-1905), V, 214-225, 227-230. Madison to Washington, Jan. 4, 1790; Henry Lee to Madison, Nov. 25, 1789; PJM, XII, 466-467, 454-4555. Robert A. Rutland, The Birth of the Bill of Rights, 1776-1791 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), p. 215. Virginia finally ratified the amendments on Feb. 15, 1791. For the debate over an amendment that would have denied the federal government the power to levy direct taxes see Helen Veit et al., eds., Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 206-213. 6. See above, pp. 127-128. Madison, memorandum dated Oct. 8, 1789; Madison to Jefferson, Oct. 8, 1789; PJM, XII, 433-434. 7. Malone, Jefferson, II, 241-249; Brant, Madison, III, 287-289; Jefferson to Washington, Dec. 15, 1789, PTJ, XVI, 34-35; Madison to Washington, Jan. 4, 1790, PJM, XII, 466-467; Washington to Jefferson, Jan. 21, 1790; Madison to Jefferson, Jan. 24, 1790, PTJ, XVI, 116-118, 125-126, 184. 8. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), pp. 297-299. Hamilton to Edward Carrington, May 26, 1792, PAH, XI, 428. 9. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 251-257, 270; Joseph S. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), I, 339-341. 10. Ibid.; Maclay, Journal, p. 179 (Jan. 18, 1790); Madison to Jefferson, Jan. 24, 1790, PJM, XIII, 4; Whitney K. Bates, "Northern Speculators and Southern State Debts: 1790," WMQ, 3rd Ser, XIX (Jan. 1962), 30-48. 11. Speeches of James Jackson (Ga.), Jan. 28, 1790, AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1095, 1096; Maclay, Journal, pp. 177-178; Hamilton to Henry Lee, Dec. i, 1789, PAH, VI, i; Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 271-272; Davis, American Corporations, I, i74ff. Robert F. Jones, "William Duer and the Business of Government in the Era of the American Revolution," WMQ, 3rd Ser, XXXII (July 1972), 393-416; Cathy Matson, "Public Vices, Private Benefit: William Duer and his Circle, 1776-1792," William Pencak, ed. New York and the Rise of American Capitalism (New York, 1989), pp. 72-123. 12. Brant, Madison, III, 290-305; Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 298, 302. 13. Madison to Jefferson, May 9, 1789; to Henry Lee, Apr. 13, 1790; PJM, XII, 143, XIII, 148. Henry Lee to Hamilton, Nov. 16, 1789; Hamilton to Lee, Dec. i, 1789; PAH, V, 517, VI, i. Lee to Madison, Apr. 3, 1790, PJM, XIII, 137. 14. Madison to Jefferson, Jan. 24, 1790, PJM, XIII, 4. 15. AC, i Cong, 2 Sess, 1094, 1099-1100; 1139-1143. 16. Ibid., 1145-1147; Maclay, Journal, pp. 200-201. 17. AC, i Cong, 2 Sess, 1131-1137, 1143-1144, 1149-1155. 18. Ibid., 1191-1197, 1182, 1191.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 143-156 19. Ibid., 1182-1191, 1197-1205; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery and the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (New York, 1971), pp. 302-304. 20. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1191-1196. 21. Ibid., 1206-1240. 22. Ibid., 1270-1296, 1298; Brant, Madison, III, 298; Maclay, Journal, p. 202. 23. Madison to Hamilton, Nov. 19, 1789, P]M, XII, 449-451. 24. Madison to Jefferson, Feb. 14, 1790; to Edward Carrington, Mar. 14, 1790; PJM, XIII, 41, 104. 25. See above, p. 121. 26. This and the previous paragraph draw on Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 203219. 27. Ibid., p. 304. 28. Albert Gallatin, "A Sketch of the Finances of the United States," Henry Adams, ed., The Writings of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia, 1879), III, 70-203. 29. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1338-1342, 1384. 30. Ibid., 1384-1392. 31. Ibid., 1392-1393, 1403; White's motion had been made on February 25 and was voted down the next day (1345-1377); 1406, 1408. 32. Maclay, Journal, p. 209; AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1478-1480, 1525. 33. Ibid., 1544. 34. The petitions are printed in ibid., 1182-1183, 1197-1198. 35. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1473-1474; see also Robinson, Slavery in Politics, pp. 304306. The significance of the year 1808 in the committee's report derives, of course, from the provision in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution that the importation of slaves might legally continue until that year. 36. Ibid., pp. 306-311; AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1450-1473; Madison to Randolph, Mar. 21, 1790, PJM, XIII, no. 37. Ibid. 38. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1534; Brant, Madison, III, 309. 39. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1513, 1525-1526, 1532-1544; Madison to Monroe, Apr. 17, 1790, PJM, XIII, 151. 40. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1557, 1570-1572; italics added. 41. Ibid., 1572-1581; Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, May 30, 1790, PTJ, XVI, 450; see also Madison to Monroe, June i, 1790, PJM, XIII, 233-234. 42. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 992-993, 997, 1006, 1653-1655, 1656-1657, 2240-2241; Maclay, Journal, p. 310; New York Daily Advertiser, June 29, 1790. Sketchy reporting of this measure in AC makes it extremely difficult to follow. It seems that on July i, 1790, Elbridge Gerry moved that the House agree to the Senate amendments eliminating discrimination, and the House voted 31-19 to accept the motion. See DHFFC, VI, 1951. 43. "Documents on American Commercial Policy", and Washington to Jefferson, June 19, 1790, with enclosures, PTJ, XVI, 513-535. 44. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1656-1657. 45. The above, an undated memorandum written about 1792 and repr. in PTJ, XVII, 205-207, is one of two accounts Jefferson left of the assumption-residence affair; the other is contained in the introduction written in 1818 to the collection of memoranda called "Anas," repr. in WTJ, I, 161-164. He also refers to it briefly in a letter to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, declaring that on that occasion he had been "duped . . . by the Secretary of the Treasury, and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood

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NOTES FOR PAGES 156-160

by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret." PTJ, XXIV, 352. 46. Jacob E. Cooke, 'The Compromise of 1790," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXVII (Oct. 1970), 523-545. 47. The present discussion is indebted to Kenneth Bowling's well-documented "Politics in the First Congress," Ch. 6, and assumes, as Bowling does, that Jefferson's dinner occurred on June 20, 1790. We have somewhat modified Bowling's conception of two voting coalitions and are considering the Pennsylvania delegation separately as constituting in certain respects a third, based on such statements as Thomas FitzSimons's that Pennsylvania "holds the balance." (Cooke, "Compromise," 525, n. 6.) For references to "centrality" and "convenience" see AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1660-1679. "In a representative body on a question arousing the most parochial loyalties, the 'center' of the nation could be agreeably defined only as an abstract theoretical center such as the cartographer, the surveyor, or the demographer would construct." James S. Young, The Washington Community: 1800-1828 (New York, 1966), p. 16. For Bowling's criticism of Cooke, "Compromise," and Cooke's reply, see "Dinner at Jefferson's: A Note on Jacob E. Cooke's 'The Compromise of 1790'", WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXXIII (Apr. 1976), 314. See also Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1/81-1800 (New York, 1978), pp. 363-393; Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York, 1979), pp. 181-188; and Charlene B. Bickford and Kenneth R. Bowling, Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1/89-1/91 (Madison, Wis., 1989), pp. 67-75. 48. See above, pp. 133-134; Maclay, Journal, p. 190; Bowling, "Politics," p. 173. The preference of South Carolina and the other two states of the Lower South for New York was based not only on New York's greater convenience by sea but also on the Southerners' awareness of Philadelphia's hostile climate regarding slavery, as evidenced both in the Quaker petitions and in the Pennsylvania law requiring manumission of any slave remaining within the state after six months. Kenneth R. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital (Fairfax, Va., 1991), pp. 89, 176, 191, 212. 49. Bowling, "Politics," pp. 173-174; Cooke, "Compromise," 528-529; Maclay, Journal, pp. 271-275. 50. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1622, 1625-1626; Madison to Monroe, June i, 1790, PJM, XIII, 233-234; Maclay, Journal, pp. 278-282; Richard Henry Lee to Thomas Lee Shippen, June 5, 1790, James C. Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (New York, 1914), II, 521-522; Bowling, "Politics," p. 174. 51. Maclay, Journal, pp. 284-286; Bowling, "Politics," pp. 175-177; AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1660-1663; Jefferson to George Mason, June 13, 1790, PTJ, XVI, 493. 52. Maclay, Journal, pp. 292-295. 53. Ibid., p. 294; Bowling, "Politics," p. 182; Peter Muhlenberg to Benjamin Rush, June 17, 1790, qu. in ibid., p. 183. 54. Writing to Monroe about assumption on June 17, 1790, Madison said: "I suspect that it will yet be unavoidable to admit the evil in some qualified shape"; Jefferson had written much the same thing to George Mason on June 13, adding, "In general I think it necessary to give as well as take in a government like ours." PJM, XIII, 247; PTJ, XVI, 49355. King, King, I, 384. 56. Cooke refers to the switch of votes in the Senate on June 29 as "inexplicable," inasmuch as the Massachusetts senators switched back against Philadelphia on a later vote.

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But the inexplicability would be largely removed by the simpler explanation that the emergent understandings on residence and assumption were in fact connected after all. The Massachusetts men appear to have been persuaded by Hamilton that they would never get assumption without a Philadelphia-Potomac bargain, which makes their original switch (as well as that of Butler of South Carolina) quite comprehensible. They did it reluctantly, however, being loath to desert New York, and their subsequent reversal is probably to be explained by their belief that the Philadelphia-Potomac arrangement (which on the first June 29 vote had a 16-9 majority) would now be carried without their votes. The bill finally passed the Senate on July i and the House on July 9. Cooke, "Compromise," 537; King, King, I, 384-385; AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 994-1001,1660-1680, 1681-1682; Bowling, "Politics," pp. 190-194. 57. AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1005-1011, 1686-1712; Ferguson, Power of the Purse, pp. 321-322. The settlement of accounts was provided for by a separate act which passed the House June 22 and the Senate on July 9. Ibid., p. 322; AC, i Cong., 2 Sess., 1005, 1646, 2306-2307. 58. Ibid., 1661-1662, 1665-1666. 59. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, p. 385, esp. n. 93. CHAPTER

IV

The Republic's Capital City 1. Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York, 1979), pp. 4, 9. The "profiles" in Ellis's subtitle are of four representative figures—Charles Willson Peale, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, William Dunlap, and Noah Webster—which illustrate the kinds of disillusionment that ensued from such hopes' failure to materialize. This, as Neil Harris has put it, could be called "The Revolution That Never Was" ("The Making of an American Culture: 1750-1800," Charles F. Montgomery and Patricia E. Kane, eds., American Art, 1750-1800, Towards Independence [Boston, 1976], p. 31); and it was this same failed expectation that Emerson referred to in the lecture cited in n. 4 below. 2. Perhaps by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in "A Plea for Culture," Atlantic Monthly, XIX (Jan. 1867), 29~375 see also discussion of this article in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 213-214. Van Wyck Brooks reported in 1915: "I have proposed these terms ['Highbrow' and 'Lowbrow'] to a Russian, an Englishman, and a German, asking each in turn whether in his country there was anything to correspond with the conceptions implied in them. In each case they have been returned to me as quite American, authentically our very own. . . ." America's Coming-of-Age (New York, 1915), p. 6. 3. E.g., Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (New York, 1966), esp. Chs. 2-5. Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1/90-1860 (Chicago, 1966) makes a good case for what vitality there was in this realm, but everywhere in the author's own evidence the wasteland quality of the artistic terrain keeps peeping through. See also David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago, 1968), esp. Ch. 7. 4. Edward Waldo Emerson, ed., The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass., 1903), I, 156-157.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 165-166

5. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 39-40. 6. Coming-of-Age, pp. 7-8. 7. Genteel Tradition, p. 40; Coming-of-Age, p. 4. 8. Genteel Tradition, p. 78. 9. Coming-of-Age, p. 94. This derivativeness had in fact been a recurrent complaint throughout most of the nineteenth century. Orestes Brownson: "We are now the literary vassals of England, and continue to do homage to the mother country. Our literature is tame and servile, wanting in freshness, freedom, and originality. We write as Englishmen, not as Americans." Cornelius Mathews: "Our writers . . . slavishly adhere to old and foreign models . . . ; they are British, or German, or something else than American." Herman Melville: "Let us away with this leaven of literary flunkeyism toward England." Qu. in Richard Ruland, ed., The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature (New York, 1972), I, 272, 301, 324. Santayana: "The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American Woman." Brooks: "In fact we have in America two publics, the cultivated public and the business public[,] . . . the one largely feminine, the other largely masculine." Genteel Tradition, p. 40; Coming-of-Age, p. HI. 10. Ibid., pp. 8-14; Genteel Tradition, pp. 40-44. A subsequent outpouring of such statements, much less temperate than those of either Brooks or Santayana, included H. L. Mencken, "Puritanism as a Literary Force," A Book of Prefaces (Garden City, N.Y., 1917), pp. 197-283; Randolph Bourne, "The Puritan's Will to Power," Seven Arts, I (Apr. 1917), 631-637; Waldo Frank, Our America (New York, 1919), pp. 45-46, 75; James Truslow Adams, The Pounding of New England (Boston, 1921), pp. 64-85; Ernest A. Boyd, "Puritan: Modern Style," Portraits: Real and Imaginary (New York, 1924), pp. 106-117; Harvey O'Higgins and Edward H. Reede, M.D., The American Mind in Action (New York, 1924), pp. 1-25, 132-140; and passim; Langdon Mitchell, Understanding America (New York, 1927), pp. no—HI; and Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (New York, 1927), I, 85. Some of these writings are discussed in Frederick J. Hoffman, "Philistine and Puritan in the 19205: An Example of the Misuse of the American Past," AQ, I (Fall 1949), 247-263. After the work of Perry Miller, of course, references to "Puritan influence" became much more sophisticated; e.g., Robert E. Spiller et al., eds., Literary History of the United States, 3rd ed. (New York, 1963), I, 54-81; Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York, 1948), pp. 5, 10, 27, 360-369, 586; Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York, 1957), p. H; John C. Gerber, ed., TwentiethCentury Interpretations of the Scarlet Letter: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968); and Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn., 1975), pp. 136-186. On the other hand we recall Lionel Trilling's remarking, as a casual aside in one of his lectures on American literature at Columbia in the early 19505: "If you want to 'explain' American culture, don't start with 'Puritanism.' Try everything else first." H. Lewis P. Simpson, ed., The Federalist Literary Mind: Selections from The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (Baton Rouge, La., 1962), p. 68; Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (London, 1922), pp. 94, 212; Emerson, Complete Works, I, 17317412. Ruland, Native Muse, I, 71, 343. 13. Henry James, Hawthorne (New York, 1879), pp. 42-43, 3. James was here elab-

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orating on Hawthorne's own complaint that "no author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case in my dear native land." James Fenimore Cooper had said something strikingly similar thirty years before Hawthorne: "There are no annals for the historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance; no gross and hardy offences against decorum for the moralist; nor any of the rich artificial auxiliaries of poetry." Qu. in Ruland, Native Muse, I, 224-225. 14. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1976; rev. ed., 1988). For a case study of how this new allocation of social roles worked, containing also a concrete instance of the feminine-clerical alliance discussed by Douglas (see below), see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978). See also Jessica S. E. Young, "Rocking the Cradle: The First Generation of Nineteenth-Century American Career Women" (Unpub. diss., Columbia U., 1988); and of course Barbara Welter's now-classic "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," AQ, XVIII (Summer 1966), 151-174. 15. Feminization, pp. 103, 234-235. "It is worth remembering that the sales of all the works by Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman in the 18508 did not equal the sales of one of the more popular domestic novels." Ibid., p. 96. 16. Ibid., p. 44. "I think . . . it is from the clergy only," wrote Frances Trollope, "that the women receive that sort of attention which is so dearly valued by every female heart throughout the world. With the priests of America, the women hold that degree of influential importance which, in the countries of Europe, is allowed them throughout all orders and ranks of society . . . and in return for this they seem to give their hearts and souls into their keeping." Domestic Manners of the Americans [orig. pub. 1832], ed. Donald Smalley (New York, 1949), p. 75. 17. It seems odd that there has been so little critical writing that takes up this question (which neither Brooks nor Santayana so much as mentions) as a possible variable in the evaluation of America's cultural past. But there have been exceptions. Cooper remarked in 1838 that "without a social capital," the American people, "who are really more homogeneous than any other of the same numbers in the world perhaps, possess no standard for opinion, manners, social maxims, or even language." Brownson in the same year wrote: "We have never yet felt that we are a nation, with our own national metropolis. Washington is only a village where are the government offices, and where congress meets; it gives no tone to our literature, and only partially even to our politics." Robert Herrick in 1914 observed that "instead of our having as yet evolved into a fairly homogeneous nation, such as England or France, we inhabit the broad section of a continent with no central metropolis of such indisputable prominence as would serve to unify the social, economic, and political life of the varied peoples that have gathered in it—as London holds together a scattered empire and Paris typifies to every Frenchman the mother land." And because of the "army-like" conditions of urban life, Herrick added, "never has an American city got itself expressed imaginatively as have London and Paris and Rome. For the novelist our cities are like huge hotels where his characters eat and sleep—hotels with meaningless names." Ruland, ed., Native Muse, I, 230, 403-404; idem, ed., A Storied Land: Theories of American Literature, II (New York, 1976), 343, 349. Very suggestive as to the consequences of a separation of a society's political, economic, and cultural pursuits is R. P. Blackmur, "The American Literary Expatriate," David F. Bowers, ed., Foreign Influences in American Life (Princeton, N.J., 1944), pp. 126-145.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 169-1/2

18. Fiske Kimball, Thomas Jefferson, Architect (Boston, 1916), pp. 31-33, 38, 40-43, 142-148; the qu. is from Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970), p. 175. 19. "Documents Concerning the Residence of Congress," PTJ, VI, 361-370. 20. Ibid., 362, 364-365; Jefferson to George Gilmer, June 27, 1790, ibid., XVI, 57457521. A discussion which argues that there was an intended correspondence between the Constitution and the layout of the capital city is in James S. Young, The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (New York, 1966), pp. i-io. 22. Kimball, Jefferson, Architect, p. 51; L'Enfant, "Observations Explanatory of the Plan," Elizabeth S. Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, 1791-1792: Published and Unpublished Documents Now Brought together for the First Time (Baltimore, 1929), Charles Moore, Foreword to ibid., p. vi; F. Kimball, "The Origin of the Plan of Washington," Architectural Review, VII (Sept. 1918), 41-45; Elbert Peets, "The Genealogy of L'Enfant's Washington," Journal of the American Institute of Architects, XV (April, May, June 1927), 115-119, 151-154, 187-191; John W. Reps, Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center (Princeton, N.J., 1967), pp. 1-25; F. Kimball, "L'Enfant, Pierre Charles," DAB, XI, 165-169. "The Capitol corresponds in position to the palace, the President's house to the Grand Trianon, the Mall to the pare, East Capitol Street, Pennsylvania and Maryland Avenues on the east to the Avenue de Paris, de Sceaux, and de St. Cloud. On the west, Pennsylvania Avenue corresponds essentially with the Avenue de Trianon." Ibid., 167. 23. J. McManners, "France," in Albert Goodwin, ed., The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Nobilities of the Major European States in the Pre-Reform Era (New York, 1967), p. 25; Orest Ranum, "The Court and Capital of Louis XIV: Some Definitions and Reflections," in John C. Rule, ed., Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship (Columbus, Ohio, 1969), pp. 265-285; Jacques Chastenet, "Paris, Versailles, and the 'Grand Siecle,'" in Sir Ernest Barker, ed., Golden Ages of the Great Cities (London, 1952), pp. 213-239; Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y., 1952), p. 75. It has been argued that Louis XIV did not, strictly speaking, want a "capital"; he simply wanted a seat of government. He nevertheless wanted to make Versailles France's social, intellectual, and artistic center as well, which proved impossible. In using the term "boggy squalor" we are not unmindful of Kenneth Bowling's effort to dispel the "myth," perpetuated by numerous early visitors, of Washington as a city built on swampland—"swamp," as he correctly points out, being a reference to terrain with trees standing in water most of the time, of which there was very little. There were, on the other hand, tidal marshes, and the low-lying land around the main government buildings in what is now southwest Washington was plagued with problems of drainage that persisted down to the twentieth century. Bowling, Creating the Federal City, 1774-1800: Potomac Fever (Washington, 1988), pp. 94-95; see also Don Alexander Hawkins, "The Landscape of the Federal City: A 1792 Walking Tour," Washington History, III (Spring/ Summer 1991), 10-33. 24. J.-J. Jusserand, Introduction to Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, pp. 1-30 (qu. from Ampere on p. 28); Margaret Truman Daniel, as told to the authors by Clifton Daniel. 25. Wilhelmus B. Bryan, A History of the National Capital; From its Foundation Through the Period of the Adoption of the Organic Act (New York, 1914), I, 108-115; Washington to Jefferson, Jan. 4, 1791, and Proclamation, Jan. 24, 1791, WGW, XXXI, 191, 202-204.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 173-176 26. Draft of Agenda for the Seat of Government, Aug. 29, 1790 (once erroneously assumed to be of date Nov. 29, 1790), PTJ, XVII, 460-461; see also Editorial Note, ibid., 452-460. 27. Washington, Commission Appointing Commissioners, Jan. 22, 1791; to Jefferson, Feb. i, 1791; WGW, XXXI, 200, 206-207; Bryan, National Capital, 1,125-127; Georgetown Weekly Ledger, Mar. 12, 1791; Jefferson to Ellicott, Feb. 2, 1791; to L'Enfant, Mar. 1791, Apr. 10, 1791; to Washington, Apr. 10, 1791; Ellicott to Jefferson, Feb. 14, 1791; L'Enfant to Jefferson, Mar. 10, n, 1791; all in Saul K. Padover, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital: Containing Notes and Correspondence exchanged between Jefferson, Washington, L'Enfant, Ellicott, Hallett, Thornton, Latrobe, the Commissioners, and others, relating to . . . the City of Washington, 1783-1818 (Washington, 1946), pp. 40-47, 58-61. 28. Washington to Jefferson, Mar. 31, 1791, WGW, XXXI, 256-258; Bryan, National Capital, I, 154; Ellicott to L'Enfant, Sept. 12, 1791, Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, P- 7329. Notes on Commissioners' Meeting, Sept. 8, 1791, Padover, ed., Jefferson and National Capital, pp. 70-74. 30. Jefferson described these efforts to Washington in a letter of Apr. 10, 1791, with which he enclosed copies of the Pennsylvania Assembly debates; ibid., pp. 60-61. For Washington's constant agitation on this point see WGW, XXXI, 262-264, 372-374, 376377, 381, 422-423, 495, 504; Bryan, National Capital, I, 139-141; Freeman, Washington, VI, 324n. 31. James S. Young has called attention to this point in Washington Community, pp. 27, 256-257, n. 20. Washington did consider it, though it seems not seriously. Washington to Commissioners, Nov. 17, 1792, WGW, XXXII, 226. 32. L'Enfant to Washington, Aug. 19, 1791, Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, pp. 67-72. 33. David Stuart to Washington, Oct. 19, 1791, ibid., p. 78; Bryan, National Capital, I, 159-160; WGW, XXXI, 400. 34. Washington to Commissioners, Sept. 29, Nov. 17, 1792; Fourth Annual Address to Congress, Nov. 6, 1792; ibid., XXXII, 170-171, 205-212, 225-226. Bryan, National Capital, I, 204 (date of sale incorrectly given), 213-214. There are descriptions of the festivities in Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette, Sept. 25, 1793, and recollections of George Watterston in National Intelligencer, Aug. 26, 1847. Washington, Fifth Annual Address to Congress, Dec. 3, 1793; to Arthur Young, Dec. 12, 1793; WGW, XXXIII, 163169,176. Andrew Ellicott, in running the District line through the area south of Alexandria, was appalled at both the poverty of the inhabitants and the thinness of the soil, but was quite aware of how strong was Washington's will to believe. "As the President is so much attracted to this country," Ellicott wrote to his wife, "I would not be willing that he should know my real sentiments about it." June 26, 1791, qu. in Bryan, National Capital, I, 173. On the three public sales see also Bob Arnebeck, Through A Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790-1800 (Lanham, Md., 1991), pp. 70, 132-137, 174-175. 35. Tobias Lear to L'Enfant, Oct. 6, 1791; L'Enfant to Lear, Oct. 19, 1791; Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, pp. 74-78. Washington would not believe that L'Enfant himself was responsible for the delay, but he did think there had been "something very unaccountable in the conduct of the Engraver." Washington to David Stuart, Nov. 20, 1791, WGW, XXXI, 419-423. 36. The final phase of L'Enfant's association with the Federal City—the demolition of the house of Daniel Carroll of Duddington (a nephew of one of the Commissioners), the discharge and imprisonment of Roberdeau, and the fruitless efforts by Washington,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 176-179 Jefferson, and the Commissioners to have the Major hasten the engraving of the city plan— is described in Bryan, National Capital, 1,165-169,173-176, and more succinctly in Malone, Jefferson, II, 378-382. The pertinent correspondence is in Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, pp. 79-155. 37. L'Enfant to Jefferson, Feb. 26, 1792; Jefferson to L'Enfant, Feb. 27, 1792; ibid., pp. 147, 150, 151-152. L'Enfant promptly declared that "the same Reasons which have driven me from the establishment, will prevent any man of capacity . . . from engaging in a work that must defeat his sanguin hopes and baffle every exertions. . . ." To Jefferson, Feb. 27, 1792, ibid., pp. 152-153. The following year, strained relations between Ellicott and the Commissioners resulted in their discharging him and his entire corps of assistants. Washington restored him on April 9, 1793, but about a week later Ellicott received an appointment to survey a road in Pennsylvania, which he promptly accepted. Samuel Blodgett was appointed as superintendent in charge of construction in January 1793 and dismissed a year later. Bryan, National Capital, I, 193-194, 209-211, 226-227. Washington to Commissioners, Apr. 3,1793, WGW, XXXIII, 404-406. Washington to David Stuart, Apr. 8, Nov. 30, 1792; to Benjamin Stoddert, Nov. 14, 1792; to Thomas Johnson, Jan. 23, 1794; ibid., XXXII, 19, 223-224, 244-245, XXXIII, 250-252. After L'Enfant's dismissal the Commissioners offered to re-employ Roberdeau. "Considering him a misguided young man, we have felt more compassion than resentment towards him." Roberdeau, with broad irony, said he was sensible of having been forgiven "as a misguided young man, but I am fearful that I should not behave as well in future, therefore, as there may be a possibility to exist independent of such honors, I decline." Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, p. i6in. 38. David Stuart to Washington; L'Enfant to Jefferson, Feb. 26, 1792; ibid., pp. 147, 149. Washington to Stuart, Mar. 8, 1792, WGW, XXXI, 504, 506. 39. Washington to William Deakins, Jr., and Benjamin Stoddert (partially drafted by Jefferson), Mar. 2,1791; to Jefferson, Mar. 31,1791; ibid., XXXI, 226-227, 256-258. Bryan, National Capital, I, 128-129, 131-134, 138-147. DGW, VI, 103-106, 164-166 (Mar. 28-30, June 27-30, 1791). 40. Kite, ed., L'Enfant and 'Washington, pp. 167-181; Jefferson to Thomas Johnson, Feb. 29, 1792; to George Walker, Mar. i, 1792, Padover, ed., Jefferson and the National Capital, pp. 100-102; Bryan, National Capital, I, 178-180. 41. Ibid., pp. 189-190, 211, 237, 255 and n. Washington to Thomas Johnson, Jan. 23, Feb. 23, 1794; to Commissioners, Apr. 27, 1794; to Johnson, June 27, 1794; to Tobias Lear, Aug. 28, 1794, WGW, XXXIII, 250-252, 277, 343, 415, 481-482. Washington to Johnson, Mar. 6, 1795, ibid., XXXIV, 134. Ibid., 177, 186, 196-197. 42. Malone, Jefferson, II, 384-385; Bryan, National Capital, I, 195, 376-377, 405, 458460; II, 238. 43. Ibid., I, 195-202; Malone, Jefferson, II, 385-387; Kimball, Jefferson, Architect, pp. 54-56; Jefferson to Daniel Carroll, Feb. i, 1793, Padover, ed., Jefferson and National Capital, p. 171. 44. Bryan, National Capital, I, 202-204, 241-242, 259-260, 314-319, 377-378, 449454, 456, 618, II, 433-434. Washington to Jefferson, June 30, 1793; to Commissioners, July 25, 1793; WGW, XXXII, 510-512, XXXIV, 29-30. 45. Bryan, National Capital, I, 187, 205-208, 214-221, 224-225, 227-231, 233-236, 243-246, 256-259, 281, 283-285, 295-298, 553. 46. Ibid., I, 264-270; WGW, XXXIV, 420; ASPMisc, I, 134. 47. Bryan, National Capital, I, 270-272, 278; Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 377; Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, p. i65n.

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NOTES FOR PAGES

180-183

48. This portion of our discussion draws on Lewis Mumford's formulations of baroque as set forth in The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938), esp. pp. 77-139. 49. Idem, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York, 1961), p. 405. 50. Ibid., pp. 404-405 (Mumford's "sixty thousand" acres was probably intended to read "six thousand"); see also Culture of Cities, pp. 94-98. 51. Kite, ed., L'Enfant and Washington, pp. 55, 65. The Potomac Company, organized under Washington's auspices in 1785, built canals around the falls and tried to improve the river bed by the removal of rocks. Yet after thirty-five years and considerable expense, the Company still had little to show for its efforts, since the only navigation possible despite these improvements was during the time of floods and freshets. According to the report of a commission examining its affairs in 1823, "The whole time when goods and produce could be stream borne on the Potomac in the course of an entire year did not exceed forty-five days." The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the Potomac Company's successor, began work in 1828. By 1850, after an expenditure of nearly $10 million, the canal had reached Cumberland. "But the original purpose of a waterway to the Ohio," according to Carter Goodrich, "had been tacitly abandoned. The canal reached only the foot of the mountains, and that at a time when the railroad had already taken most of its prospective trade." Bryan, National Capital, I, 69-70; Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890 (New York, 1960), pp. 76-81. On the hazards of navigation and loading at Georgetown see Bryan, National Capital, I, 497-498 and n.; Young, Washington Community, p. 22. For a geographer's view of the Potomac as a navigable river see Harry R. Merrens, "The Locating of the Federal Capital of the United States" (Unpub. M.A. thesis, U. of Maryland, 1957), pp. 52-54. 52. Young, Washington Community, p. 24, citing Augustus J. Foster, Thomas Hamilton, Frances Trollope, and E. A. Cooley. 53. Bryan, National Capital, I, 231-232, 323; John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 17891801 (New York, 1960), p. 253; Young, Washington Community, pp. 25-26, 28-31; Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 377-378. 54. John H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg, The Medieval Town (Princeton, N.J., 1958), p. 25. 55. Robert S. Lopez, "The Crossroads Within the Wall," Oscar Handlin and John Burchard, eds., The Historian and the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 27-43; Richard L. Meier, "The Organization of Technological Innovation in Urban Environments," ibid., P-7556. Mundy and Riesenberg, Medieval Town, pp. 36-66; on Genoa see Lopez, "Crossroads," pp. 36-39. 57. Fritz Rorig, The Medieval Town (Berkeley, Calif., 1967), p. 172. See also Mumford, City in History, pp. 299-314; Mundy and Riesenberg, Medieval Town, pp. 40-41 (and ordinance from Costumes et reglemens . . . d'Avignon qu. in ibid., p. 157); and esp. descriptions of such great civic projects in Florence as building the "third circle" (city wall); the campanile of Santa Marie del Fiore—supervised by the artist Giotto and initiated by a grand procession headed by the Bishop; and the rebuilding of the Ponte Vecchio with shops in stone at either end numbering forty-three, "from which the commune drew an annual rental of eighty and more gold florins"; Ferdinand Schevill, History of Florence: From the Founding of the City Through the Renaissance (New York, 1936), pp. 252-256. 58. See Mumford, City in History, pp. 225, 299, 311, 322, and Notes to Plates 21, 25, 26. That the city did see itself as possessing a "soul"—the combined vision of a corporate self in the present, a mythic past, and a civic mission—is made quite evident in Donald

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NOTES FOR PAGES 184-192 Weinstein, "The Myth of Florence," Ch. i of Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J., 1970). 59. Thomas C. Chubb, Dante and His World (Boston, 1966), p. 451. 60. The material for this and the following paragraphs is drawn from Ian Grey, Peter the Great: Emperor of Russia (Philadelphia, 1960), and Christopher Marsden, Palmyra of the North: The First Days of St. Petersburg (London, 1942). 61. Ibid., pp. 51-52. 62. Ibid., p. 56. The figure on population is from William B. Steveni, Petrograd Past and Present (Philadelphia, 1916), p. 39. 63. James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago, 1989); Alan Riding, "Brasilia: A City of the Future Grapples with a Troubled Present," New York Times, Jan. 3, 1988; Kurt F. Fischer, "The Golden Age of Planning and Its End: A Cultural Perspective on Canberra," Ekistics, LII (July/Aug. 1985), 290300; Peter Musson, "Capitalist Utopias," Geographical Magazine, LXIII (Aug. 1991), 2628; Jean Gottmann, ed., "Capital Cities" [a symposium], Ekistics, L (Mar./Apr. 1983), 86-152. 64. Denis Brogan, "Implications of Modern City Growth," Handlin and Burchard, eds., Historian and the City, p. 54; Gwyn A. Williams, Medieval London: Prom Commune to Capital (London, 1963), p. 311 and passim; D. W. Robertson, Chaucer's London (New York, 1968), pp. 313-314. 65. John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1965), pp. 147-154; Fred R. Frank, "The Development of New York City, 1600-1900" (Unpub. M.A. thesis, Cornell U., 1955), pp. 1-24; Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York, 1956), pp. 3-36. 66. Ibid., pp. 37, 54-55, 66-67; Sidney I. Pomerantz, New York: An American City, 1783-1803: A Study of Urban Life (New York, 1938). pp. 21-22, 158-159. 67. Ibid., pp. 233-236. 68. On relative distances and convenience see Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 (New York, 1939), pp. 107, 416. 69. Augustus J. Foster, ]effersonian America (San Marino, Calif., 1954), p. 9. 70. Ellis, After the Revolution, pp. 113-158; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927-49), I, 232ff. 71. Pomerantz, New York, pp. 474-480; Paul L. Ford, Washington and the Theatre (New York, 1899), pp. 35-43 and passim; for more on Dunlap and his activities see Oral S. Coad, William Dunlap: A Study of His Life and Works and of His Place in Contemporary Culture (New York, 1917); and Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, pp. 1-21. 72. Charles F. Montgomery and Patricia E. Kane, eds., American Art, 1750-1800: Toward Independence (New Haven, Conn., 1976), pp. 68-143; Harold Dickson, Arts of the Early Republic: The Age of William Dunlap (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), pp. 24-41; Richard McLanathan, Gilbert Stuart (New York, 1988), pp. 86-87. 73. Still, Mirror for Gotham, p. 147; Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963), p. 145 and ff. 74. On Irving see Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 1935), 2v.; on Cooper, George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott (New York, 1967); on Bryant, Charles H. Brown, William Cullen Bryant (New York, 1971). 75. Arthur Livingston, ed., Memoirs of Lorenzo da Ponte (New York, 1959), pp. 213256; April Fitzlyon, The Libertine Librettist: A Biography of Mozart's Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte (London, 1955), pp. 239-278; Henry E. Krehbiel, Chapters of Opera: Being Historical

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NOTES FOR PAGES 192-196 and Critical Observations and Records Concerning the Lyric Drama in New York from Its Earliest Days down to the Present Time (New York, 1909, 1980), pp. 1-52; Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A History of New York's Orchestra (Garden City, N.Y., 1975), pp. 54-76. 76. Actually the University of Geneva scheme was not as harebrained as it might seem—or rather would not have been, had the geographical context for it not been what it was. A new and hostile political regime in the city of Geneva had placed the entire faculty in jeopardy, and it was one of their own spokesmen, Francois d'lvernois, who in 1794 broached to Jefferson the idea of their migrating to America as a body if they could be assured of the necessary support there. But Jefferson's soundings, both in the Virginia legislature and with Washington himself, made it starkly evident that no such support was conceivable, facilities for accommodating them in the Potomac area being non-existent and the youth of that region being in no way prepared to receive the caliber of instruction offered by that learned company. The case might have turned out quite differently had it been enacted in an urban setting such as New York. D'lvernois to Jefferson, Sept. 5, 23, 1794, Jefferson Papers, LC; Jefferson to Wilson Gary Nicholas, Nov. 22, 1794, WT], VI, 513-515; to John Adams, Feb. 6, 1795, Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1939), I, 256-257; to d'lvernois, Feb. 6, 1795, WTJ, VII, 2-6; to Washington, Feb. 23, 1795, Jared Sparks, ed., Correspondence of the American Revolution: Being Letters of Eminent Men to George Washington (Boston, 1853), IV, 464-469; Washington to Jefferson, Mar. 15, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 146-149. On Columbia College see David C. Humphrey, Prom King's College to Columbia, 1/46-1800 (New York, 1976), esp. pp. 208-228, 269-305; and John S. Whitehead, The Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, 1776-1876 (New Haven, Conn., 1973), pp. 21-31.

CHAPTER

V

Jefferson and the Yeoman Republic 1. Thomas P. Abernethy, ed., Notes on the State of Virginia (New York, 1964), pp. 157-158; see also Roland Van Zandt, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History (The Hague, 1959), pp. 170-180; on the anti-urban Jeffersonian influence among American intellectuals see Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, Mass., 1962, esp. Chs. 3-4. The literature on Jefferson himself is of course enormous, especially that of the "Thomas Jefferson and ..." variety. The less patient reader might thus welcome Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (New York, 1986), a collection of essays by various authorities covering virtually every activity with which Jefferson was associated. And John C. Foley, ed., The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia (New York, 1900), is still a very useful standby. 2. Jefferson to John Banister, Jr., Oct. 15, 1785, PTJ, VIII, 635-637. 3. Jefferson to Washington, Apr. 10, 1791, ibid., XX, 88; to Rush, Sept. 23, 1800, WTJ, VII, 458-459; Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970), p. 268. 4. "There were deep ambiguities in his thinking, which made any effort of consistency impossible." Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948), p. 24. "Ever since Jefferson's death scholars have been trying to discern order in—or to impose it upon—his elusive, unsystematic thought, but without much success. It simply does not lend itself to ordinary standards of consistency." Leo

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NOTES FOR PAGES 197-204

Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), p. 135. 5. Jefferson to the Rev. Charles Clay, Jan. 27, 1790, PTJ, XVI, 129. 6. Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785, ibid., VIII, 633; to DuPont de Nemours, Jan. 18, 1802, WTJ, VIII, 125-127; A. Whitney Griswold, farming and Democracy (New York, 1948), p. 35. 7. A good discussion of Jefferson's reform activities during this period is in Peterson, Jefferson, pp. 97-165. On Jefferson and his gradualist approach to slavery see John C. Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York, 1977), esp. pp. 39-40, 120-121, 206-207; William W. Freehling, "The Founding Fathers and Slavery," AHR, LXXVII (Feb. 1972), 81-93; and David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), pp. 171-175. The sentence quoted is in "Autobiography," WTJ, I, 68. 8. "Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man," he wrote, "and heaven was silent in that awful moment." Jefferson to Jean Nicolas Demeunier, June 22, 1786, PTJf X, 58. "Jefferson's practical activity," comments Richard Hofstadter, "was usually aimed at some kind of minimum program that could be achieved without keen conflict or great expenditure of energy. He hated vigorous controversy, shrank from asserting his principles when they would excite the anger of his colleagues or neighbors." American Political Tradition, p. 25. 9. "The exigencies of Indian warfare, and the excitement of land speculation, with its lure of large and easy profits, were decidedly demoralizing. The absence of any established form of social life, and the recourse to such rough sports as fighting, wrestling, gouging, and running, and to gambling and heavy drinking, further weakened the appeal of the moral and religious life." Niels H. Sonne, Liberal Kentucky, 1/80-1828 (New York, 1939), p. 12. 10. For the material in this and the following paragraph we are indebted to Professor Marx's brilliant study. The Machine in the Garden, pp. 88-105. 11. "But there also was a curious strain of extravagance running through their cult, a seemingly neurotic tendency that these rational theories [of the political economists] cannot explain. After the middle of the century, among the upper classes, the taste for the bucolic rose to an extraordinary pitch of faddish excitement. A passion for gardening and playing farmer cropped up in remote villages of English as well as at the court of Louis XVI." Ibid., p. 98. 12. "Not content to lay down the law in a general way, Jefferson liked to offer practical advice whenever the spirit moved him. He often drew his ideas from the architectural works of his large library." Paul F. Norton, Latrobe, Jefferson, and the National Capitol (New York, 1977), p. 73. 13. Malone, Jefferson, I, 3; Jefferson, "Autobiography," WTJ, I, 2. 14. Ibid., In., 2; Malone, Jefferson, I, 7-33. Inquiry into the family background, according to Professor Malone, shows "that the early Jeffersons were rather more prosperous and prominent than has commonly been supposed." I, 426. 15. Ibid., I, 21-22, 37-48. 16. Ibid., I, 49-74. 17. "Autobiography," WTJ, I, 4; Malone, Jefferson, I, 75-87; Jefferson to L. H. Girardin, Jan. 15, 1815, L&B, XIV, 231-232. 18. Malone, Jefferson, I, 88ff. 19. What we have said about Jefferson's personality in these pages is based, except

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NOTES FOR PAGES 205-215 otherwise noted, on information in ibid., I, which for completeness leaves little to be desired; and an entry in the Index, "Personal Qualities and Characteristics," is very helpful. 20. Peterson, Jefferson, pp. 30-31; to Martha Jefferson, Nov. 28, Dec. 22, 1783, PTJf VI, 360, 417. 21. American Political Tradition, p. 25. The General Court and the Governor's Council actually consisted of the same men, and it was to this group—Jefferson's social familiars, and all insiders—rather than to juries, that Jefferson argued his cases. Frank L. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, Lawyer (Charlottesville, Va., 1986), pp. 18-20. 22. Jefferson to John Banister, Jr., Oct. 15, 1785, PTJ, VIII, 637. 23. A convenient account of Jefferson's war governorship is in Peterson, Jefferson, pp. 166-240; see also, of course, Malone, Jefferson, I, 301-369. 24. Jefferson to Steuben, Mar. 10, 1781, PTJ, V, 120; original italicized. 25. Ibid., VI, 135-136. 26. Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York, 1970), p. 36. 27. Rosemarie Zagarri, "Representation and the Removal of State Capitals, 17761812," JAH, LXXIV (Mar. 1988), 1239-1256.

CHAPTER

VI

Jefferson as Secretary of State 1. "The experiment," according to Merrill Peterson, "would have lasting consequences for Jefferson's career. He became a convert to the principle and the strategy of commercial coercion not only in the Revolutionary struggle against the mother country but in the larger campaign for national independence in the decades ahead." Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970), p. 36. Two other recent works, each seeing Jefferson's preoccupation with commercial coercion as central to his entire perception of America's foreign relations, are Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1990); and Doron BenAtar, The Origins of Jeffersonian Commerical Policy and Diplomacy (London, 1993). 2. See above, p. 70. 3. Aug. 9, 1788, PTJ, XIII, 489. 4. See above, p. 72. 5. John Holland Rose, William Pitt and National Revival and William Pitt and the Great War (London, 1911). The first two volumes of a new biography, John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim and The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition (London, 1969, 1983), carry Pitt's career through 1796. Ehrman has examined American materials which Holland Rose either did not know about or did not regard as pertinent to his subject. 6. Ehrman, Younger Pitt, I, 520—551. 7. The most complete study is William R. Manning, "The Nootka Sound Controversy," AHA:AR 1904, 279-478; see also John M. Norris, "The Policy of the British Cabinet in the Nootka Crisis," English Historical Review, LXX (Oct. 1955), 562-580; and Lennox Mills, "The Real Significance of the Nootka Sound Incident," Canadian Historical Review, VI (March 1925); 110-122. King Ferdinand II persuaded Pope Alexander VI, a Spaniard, to issue a bull in 1493 which proclaimed that all lands west and south of a line

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NOTES FOR PAGES 215-219 drawn at one hundred leagues from the Azores and Cape Verde Islands were to belong to Spain. 8. Ehrman, 'Younger Pitt, I, 554-571. 9. The first move in the Nootka affair had been clumsily handled by Leeds, which was the point at which Pitt decided to take charge himself. But as early as the Holland crisis the French Foreign Minister, Montmorin, had observed, "Lord Carmarthen . . . n'est que le prete-nom de M. Pitt." Ibid., 536, 555. 10. Jerald A. Comb's observation that Pitt "tended to ignore American problems, and British policy toward the United States was left in the hands of subordinate officials" seems indisputable. The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley, Calif., 1970), p. 87. On Hawkesbury's private encouragement of British merchants to express, through memorials to his Committee, their discontent over America's tonnage duties in 1789, see ibid., p. 102. 11. Washington to Morris, Oct. 13, 1789, WGW, XXX, 440-442. 12. Beatrix Cary Davenport, ed., A Diary of the French Revolution, by Gouverneur Morris, 1/52-1816 (Boston, 1939), I, 464-466. 13. Leeds to Morris, Apr. 28, 1790; Morris to Washington, May i, 1790; ibid., 495, 49914. Authorities have differed in their assessments of which was the dominating motive—the fur trade or the protection of their Indian allies—in the retention of the posts of the British. The former is emphasized in Samuel F. Bemis, Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1962), pp. 6-10; whereas Alfred L. Burt, The United States, Great Britain, and British North America: From the Revolution to the Establishment of Peace After the War of 1812 (New Haven, Conn., 1940), pp. 82105, stresses the latter; neither, however, denies that to a significant extent the two were inseparable. For an appraisal of this controversy see Combs, Jay Treaty, pp. 191192. 15. See below, n. 19. 16. See below, n. 28. 17. Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy Toward the United States, 1783-1795 (Dallas, Tex., 1969), pp. 147-150. On the eventual debt settlement see Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795-1805 (Philadelphia, 1955), pp. 138-149. 18. Grenville to Dorchester, Dispatches 22, 23, 24 (Secret), May 6, 1790, Douglas Brymner, ed., Report on Canadian Archives, 1890 (Ottawa, 1891), pp. 131-133. 19. Samuel F. Bemis, "Relations between the Vermont Separatists and Great Britain, 1789-1791," AHR, XXI (Apr. 1916), 547-560; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 152-159; Frederick J. Turner, "English Policy Toward America in 1790-1791," AHR, VII (July 1902), 706-735, VIII (Oct. 1902), 78-86; Douglas Brymner, ed., "Vermont Negotiations," Report on Canadian Archives, 1889 (Ottawa, 1890), pp. 53-58. The Spanish were carrying on their own intrigues with the Westerners; in addition to the documents repr. by Turner in the foregoing, see William R. Shepherd, "Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy," AHR, IX (Apr. 1904), 490-506. 20. Davenport, ed., Morris Diary, I, 520-523; Morris to Washington, May 29, 1790, ASP:FR, I, 123-125. Morris certainly overestimated British concern over the possibility of America's becoming a belligerent. The Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, James Bland Burges, did say that "before we know where we are, we shall have the Americans, and possibly the Russians on our backs, if we lose a week commencing the war with Spain by some vigorous and decisive stroke, which may crush their naval power, and incapacitate

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NOTES FOR PAGES 22O-222

them from standing against us at sea." But America was not Burges's real concern here, being used rather as one item in his case for going to war without further ado. Burges was taking the side of his friend and patron Leeds, who opposed the more deliberate course being conducted by Pitt. Burges to Leeds, June 27, 1790, qu. in Norris, "British Cabinet in Nootka Crisis," p. 575n. 21. Canadian Archives, 1890, pp. 134-143. The part of Beckwith's report relating to conversations with Hamilton is that from pp. 134-136; according to Julian Boyd, the archivist erroneously headed this section with a number i (code for William Samuel Johnson), whereas it should be 7 (Hamilton). Number 7, p. 33n. Beckwith to Grenville, Apr. 7, 1790, qu. in Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 790. 22. Beckwith was given two sets of instructions ("secret" and "less secret") by Dorchester, repr. in Canadian Archives, 1890, pp. 143-144. The only record of his conversation with Hamilton on July 8 is Hamilton's own memorandum of that date to Washington, PAH, VI, 484-485. Boyd tries to show that Beckwith did not say what Hamilton reported him as saying, the argument resting, however, not on a comparison of Beckwith's report and Hamilton's (Beckwith did not make one), but on inferences drawn from Dorchester's instructions as to what Beckwith ought to have said. Actually the instructions and Hamilton's memorandum—except for the prospect of an alliance, which Hamilton, with his will to believe, obviously magnified—tally quite closely. Interested readers may wish to check this for themselves; the documents are also repr. in Boyd, Number 7, pp. 143-149. Dorchester apparently wanted to excuse the British government's not taking Morris as seriously as they might have by mentioning not only the difficulties over the treaty but also Morris's not being a regularly accredited minister. (See also below, n. 27.) This awkward effort seems not to have sat well with Washington. 23. DGW, VI, 94-95; Jefferson's suggestions of July 12 as to what Hamilton should say to Beckwith are in PT], XVII, no. Reports of Hamilton's further conversations with Beckwith are in PAH, VI, 493-498, 546-549, 550-551; VII, 70-74, 111-115, 44°-442; VIII, 41-45, 342-343, 475-477, 544-545; IX, 29-30. See also Canadian Archives, 1890, pp. 145146, 148-151, 158-159, 161-168, 172. 24. Ibid., p. 161. Hamilton to Washington, July 15, 1790, PAH, VI, 495. Jefferson to William Carmichael, Aug. 2, 1790, and "Outline of Policy on the Mississippi Question," same date; to Washington, Aug. 27, 1790; PT], XVII, in-n6, 129-130. Hamilton to Washington, Sept. 15, 1790, PAH, VII, 36-57. 25. Canadian Archives, 1890, pp. 148-149; PAHt VI, 497. 26. Davenport, ed., Morris Diary, I, 597-604. Morris to Leeds, Sept. 10, 1790; Morris to Washington, Sept. 18, 1790, ASP:FR, I, 125-127. 27. The point of whether Morris did or did not end his mission as persona non grata is an intriguing example of how differently the same evidence can be read depending on how the context is perceived. Bemis, assuming that the Morris mission could have made some difference and that American interests might have been better served by someone else, concludes: "Morris's untactful behavior made him persona non grata both to the Government and the Court." Ritcheson, believing there was a real possibility of mutual understanding which Morris bungled, deplores Morris's confidences to La Luzerne, his association with Fox, and his high demeanor with Leeds and Pitt: he was "too stiff and unbending"; he "overplayed his hand and ruined his usefulness in London." (Hamilton's own response was quite similar.) Boyd, with the object of exhibiting everywhere the duplicity and deceit of Hamilton, devotes a chapter to arguing that the story of Morris's behavior was really fabricated by Hamilton and put into Beckwith's mouth in Hamilton's report of conversations in which Morris's mission had been mentioned. Combs, while

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NOTES FOR PAGES 222-22^

open-minded, is skeptical of so elaborate a theory (which seems to assume that Beckwith's reports were complete—whereas they were fragmentary—and which depends on what Beckwith did not say rather than what he did say) and doubts that Hamilton made the story up. It almost certainly came through Beckwith, and Hamilton was only too ready to believe Morris had botched something otherwise promising. Common sense strongly suggests that Combs is right. Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 84; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, p. 102; Boyd, Number 7, pp. 66-72; Combs, Jay Treaty, pp. 52-55. In any case persona non grata is much too strong a term. Morris \ .h his airs was undoubtedly irritating. But whether he was or was not probably made no more than a marginal difference, except to give the British one more reason for temporizing. On this point Morris himself is probably his own best defense. Writing to Robert Morris some time later, he said: "I will suppose it to be a very good Reason to be given to America for not conferring a Favor on her that the Man sent to ask it was disagreeable, no Matter from what Cause, but I trust they will never avow to the british Nation a Disposition to make Sacrifice of their Interests to please a pleasant Fellow." Davenport, ed., Morris Diary, I, 616. 28. Grenville on May 31 consulted Sir Frederick Haldimand, Dorchester's predecessor as Governor of Canada, about surrendering the posts, and was told that it could be done with safety; "if the Americans insisted upon having the posts," Haldimand said, "a merit should be made of giving them up." Canadian Archives, 1889, p. 287; Burt, U.S., Great Britain, British North America, pp. 111-112. Morris himself quickly got wind of these and similar inquiries about the posts. Davenport, ed., Morris Diary, I, 530, 542-543; Morris to Washington, May 29, 1790, ASP:FR, I, 125. Grenville still wanted, however, to provide guarantees for the fur trade and for a peaceful frontier, and it was with reference to these concerns that he devised his Indian barrier state idea. On this project see Bemis, Jay's Treaty, Ch. 6. 29. Morris returned to London in December for another visit, and was unable to see Leeds at all. He did, however, confer with the Undersecretary, James Bland Burges, who told him that it had been decided to send a minister but that this in turn depended on Hawkesbury's forthcoming report. "When received, no time would be lost in setting all the different engines at work. Hoped we would soon have residents with each other, &c. &c. &c." Morris to Jefferson, Dec. 28, 1790, PTJ, XVIII, 367-368. 30. The most extreme statement is Boyd, Number /. 31. This is the argement of Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution. 32. Conversations with Beckwith in which these matters were raised may be found in Canadian Archives, 1890, pp. 126, 127, 150, 161, 163, 164, 171, 172. Hamilton did not directly refer to the separationist movements, but in emphasizing the United States' need for access to the Mississippi, which he did repeatedly, he made it clear that this was important in order to hold the western provinces. He also made it clear on several occasions that the United States would tolerate no outside interference in its efforts to make peace with the Indians. 33. Malone, Jefferson, II, 319, 331-332; Report on Relations with Great Britain, Dec. 15, 1790, PTJ, XVIII, 302. 34. Malone, Jefferson, II, 337. 35. ASP:FRf I, 13-15; AC, i Cong., 3 Sess., 1789, 1791, 1792-1797; Washington to Madison, Dec. n, 1790; PJM, XIII, 311-314, 316-318. 36. PTJ, XVIII, 301-303, 423-436, 565-570; XIX, 206-220.

37. PTJ, XVIII, 232-233; DHFFC, III, 728; PTJ, XVIII, 304-307, 237; ASP.-FR, I, 128; PTJ, XVIII, 237; DHFFC, III, 734.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 226-229 38. PAH, VII, 210-236, 256-342. 39. Cf. Madison to Hamilton, Nov. 9,1789, ibid., V, 525-527; DHFFC, I, 656; Maclay, Journal, pp. 381-383, 385-391, 398-399, 401. The debate is discussed in Kenneth Bowling, "Politics in the First Congress, 1789-1791" (Unpub. diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1968), pp. 237-240. 40. See above, pp. 117-118. As long as securities were significantly below par they remained a speculation, and a holder who sold them gave up the benefits of further appreciation. Once they reached par, however, their speculative value would drop sharply. They might continue to appreciate, but no more than marginally and temporarily, and would now become a good investment paying dependable interest. They could thereupon be readily exchanged in the European money market for specie if one wished to invest one's capital in a mercantile or industrial venture. 41. For details of the bank's charter as Hamilton conceived it see Report, PAH, VII, 334-337. The combined capital of the three state banks then in existence was hardly over $2 million. See Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York, 1979), pp. 189-210. 42. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, eds. (London, 1882), I, 311-312, 339-340; cf. Report, PAH, VII, 306-307, and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York, Modern Library ed., 1937), pp. 304-305; Charles F. Dunbar, Economic Essays (New York, 1904), p. 92; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 128-134. The best and most comprehensive discussion of the influences behind Hamilton's plan is the editors' introductory note in PAH, VII, 236256. The ratio paid by private subscribers was three-fourths federal securities to one-fourth specie, but the government's contribution was to be entirely in specie, which changed the proportion of securities in the total capital from three-fourths to three-fifths. 43. E.g., the tontine and sinking fund proposed in his first Report on the Public Credit of Jan. 9, 1790. See Dunbar, Economic Essays, pp. 77-79, 82-88. 44. However, "in the conduct of the affairs of this country," as Pitt himself once said to Henry Dundas, "there should be an avowed and real minister possessing the chief weight in council and the principal place in the confidence of the King. . . . That power must rest with the person generally called the First Minister; and that Minister ought . . . to be at the head of the finances." Qu. in Ehrman, Pitt, I, 281. "It is worth while to remark," observes Dunbar, " . . . that, under the early practice of our government, the Secretary of the Treasury occupied a position more nearly like that of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer than the present spirit of Congress would allow." Economic Essays, p. 7145. Ehrman, Pitt, I, 157-158. William Bingham to Hamilton, Nov. 25, 1789; Samuel Paterson to Hamilton, Sept. 30, 1790; PAH, V, 547-548, VII, 81-82. 46. Ehrman, Pitt, I, 239-275. 47. PAH, V, 488. "It struck me," wrote a Scottish admirer to Hamilton in sending him some materials on British finance, "that Great Genius, Might like to See the Works of their Cotemporrys. Mr. Pitt many in Britain think, to be too desirous of Ruling among the Nations, to be able to reduce the Nationall Debts, tho the Resources of this Country are very great. I am happy to have the opinions I had of the Resources of your Country Confirmed by the Perusall of your Speech." Samuel Paterson to Hamilton, Sept. 30, 1790, ibid., VII, 82. 48. DHFFC, I, 516, 522, 536; Maclay, Journal, pp. 364, 368-374; AC, i Cong., 3 Sess., 1738, 1739, 1741, 1745, 1746, 1748, 1873, I^75) 1891-1894. There is a convenient reprinting

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NOTES FOR PAGES 229-236 of the congressional proceedings, together with other material, in Matthew St. C. Clarke and D. A. Hall, eds., Legislative and Documentary History of the Bank of the United States, Including the Original Bank of North America (New York, 1967). See also DHFFC, IV, 164-215. 49. AC, i Cong., 3 Sess., 1891, 1936; Maclay, Journal, p. 368. For the debate on the Bank see Benjamin B. Klubes, "The First Federal Congress and the First National Bank: A Case Study in Constitutional Interpretation," Journal of the Early Republic, X (Spring 1990), 19-41. 50. Bowling, "Politics in the First Congress," pp. 233-236; Fisher Ames to George R. Minot, Feb. 17, 1791, WFA, I, 95-96; William L. Smith, The Politicks and Views of a Certain Party, Displayed (Philadelphia, 1792), pp. 16-17. 51. AC, i Cong., 3 Sess., 1894-1902. A supplementary act passed in the closing days of the session delayed the opening of subscriptions until July 4, 1791, and made 3 percent federal securities, as well as 6 percents, receivable for subscriptions. Contrary to Hamilton's own recommendations, the original Senate bill included a provision for branches— though Madison did not regard this as meeting his objections to a single bank. Stuart W. Bruchey, "Alexander Hamilton and the State Banks," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXVII (July 1970), 349378; PAH, IX, 538-539; PJM, XIII, 372-381. Contrary to Madison's prognostications, all federal securities began to rise about June i; their price was sharply stimulated when Bank scrip went on sale July 4; and the 6 percents reached par by the beginning of August and continued upward. "Madison here reveals himself weak," observes Joseph S. Davis, "both as psychologist and as economist." Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), I, 202n. See esp. graphs in ibid., 187, 210. 52. AC, i Cong., 3 Sess., 1903-1909. 53. Sedgwick's speech was made on Feb. 4, Gerry's on Feb. 7. Ibid., 1910, 1914, 1945-

1954.

54. Ibid., 1919-1928. See also Federalist, Cooke ed., pp. 303-305. 55. AC, i Cong., 3 Sess., 1956-1960; Elizabeth Fleet, ed., "Madison's 'Detached Memoranda,'" WMQ, 3rd Ser., Ill (Oct. 1946), 542; PJM, XIII, 383-388. 56. Clarke and Hall, eds., Documentary History, pp. 86-91. 57. Ibid., pp. 91-94; PTJ, XIX, 275-280. 58. Washington had enclosed them both with his letter of request; Washington to Hamilton, Feb. 16, 1791, PAH, VIII, 50. 59. Ibid., 63-134. 60. Neither Jefferson's nor Madison's biographer makes any effort to defend their opinions; see Malone, Jefferson, II, 341-344; Brant, Madison, III, 331-332. But see also Klubes, cited in n. 49 above. 61. Madison to Jefferson, May i, 1791, PJM, XTV, 16. 62. The text of Jefferson's 1784 plan is in PTJ, VII, 194-202. Journals of the Continental Congress, XXXI, 876-878. 63. C. Doris Hellman, "Jefferson's Efforts Toward the Decimalization of U.S. Weights and Measures," Isis, XVI (Nov. 1931), 266—314; Malone, Jefferson, II, 276—281; Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1957, 1962), II, 118-122; PTJ, XVI, 650-655; Jefferson to Hamilton, Dec. 29, 1790, Jan. 24, 1791, PTJ, XVIII, 459-460. 64. Report on the Establishment of a Mint, Jan. 28, 1791, PAH, VII, 570-607. 65. Ibid., 573ff. 66. Jefferson to Hamilton, Jan. 24, 1791, PTJ, XVIII, 460. 67. Hamilton to Edward Carrington, May 26, 1792, PAH, XI, 434-435; WGW, XXXI, 403; Statutes at Large, I, 246-251.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 236-241

68. Cf. PAH, VII, 389-390, 408, 423-424, 425-426, 451-452; VIII, 26, 179-180, 234235, 268, 278-279, 284-286, 289-290, 330, 450, 503-504. 69. Jefferson to Mason, Feb. 4, 1791; to Innes, Mar. 7, 13, 1791; PTJ, XIX, 241-242, 521-522, 542-54370. Malone, Jefferson, II, 354-359. 71. "Colo. Hamilton & Colo. Beckwith are open-mouthed against me, taking it in another view, as likely to give offence to the court of London. H. adds further that it makes my opposition to the government. Thus endeavoring to turn [upon] the government itself those censures I meant for the enemies of the government, to wit those who want to change it into a monarchy." Jefferson to Madison, May 9, 1791, PTJ, XX, 293-294. 72. Jefferson to Washington, May 8, 1791; to Adams, July 17, Aug. 30, 1791; Adams to Jefferson, July 29,1791; ibid., 291-292, 302-303, 310-312, 305-307. Madison had already told Jefferson, having heard it from Beckley, that "Publicola" was John Quincy Adams. Madison to Jefferson, June 23, July 13, 1791, PJM, XIV, 35-36, 46-47; Malone, Jefferson,

n, 363-370.

73. Jefferson to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 356; see also Editorial Note and correspondence, ibid., XX, 718-759. 74. Lewis Leary, That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure (New Brunswick, N.J., 1941), p. 84. 75. Ibid., pp. 113, 115. 76. Ibid., p. 189. 77. Jefferson to Freneau, Feb. 28, 1791; Freneau to Jefferson, Mar. 5, 1791; PTJ, XX, 351, 416-417. Madison to Jefferson, May i, 1791, PJM, XIV, 14-16. Jefferson to Madison, May 9, 1791; to Thomas Mann Randolph, May 15, 1791; PTJ, XX, 293, 414-416. Madison to Jefferson, July 10, 1791, PJM, XIV, 42-44. Jefferson to Madison, July 21, 1791, PTJ, XX, 657. Madison to Jefferson, July 24, 1791; Freneau to Madison, July 25, 1791; Madison to Charles Simons and Mann Page, Aug. i, 1791; PJM, XIV, 52-53, 57, 72-73. Freneau to Jefferson, Aug. 4, 1791, PTJ, 754. Madison to James Madison, Sr., Nov. 13, 1791; to Henry Lee, Dec. 18, 1791; PJM, XIV, 106-107, 154-155. Malone, Jefferson, II, 423-427. Brant, Madison, III, 334-336. 78. Jefferson to Madison, July 10, 1791, PTJ, XX, 616. Madison wrote: "I wish you success with all my heart in your efforts for Payne. Besides the advantage to him which he deserves, an appointment for him, at this moment would do public good in various ways." To Jefferson, July 13, 1791, PJM, XIV, 47. On August 12 Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts was appointed to replace the retiring Samuel Osgood as Postmaster-General. 79. Jefferson to Livingston, Feb. 4, 1791; Livingston to Jefferson, Feb. 20, 1791; PTJ, XIX, 240-241, 295-296. 80. Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton (Boston, 1925), p. 108. Bowers made nothing of this particular trip, but he devoted a whole chapter ("Jefferson Mobilizes," pp. 140-160) to creating an impression of purposeful state-to-state organizing by Jefferson and his "lieutenants" during the early 17905. An example of the results, in a popular textbook: "On a 'botanizing excursion' that led Jefferson and Madison up the Hudson in the summer [sic] of 1791, they undoubtedly found occasion to study Clintonia borealis and other hardy perennials in Ulster County and the neighborhood of Albany." Samuel E. Morison and Henry S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (New York, 1942), I, 343. 81. See discussion in Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), pp. 194-201; see also editorial note, PTJ, XX, 434-445.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 242-246 82. They had in fact discussed such subjects in their epistolary exchange of February. (See n. 79 above.) 83. George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1/46-1813 (New York, 1960), pp. 241-255. 84. Troup to Hamilton, June 15, 1791, PAH, VIII, 478-479; Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 115 and nn. 85. Davis, American Corporations, I, 202-212. Except, that is, for a brief dip in March 1792, which Hamilton remedied with purchases from the sinking fund. 86. Jefferson to Monroe, July 10, 1791; to Pendleton, July 24, 1791; to Madison, July 24, 1791; PTJ, XX, 298, 669-670, 666-667. Jefferson arrived at his figure of "13 per cent" by adding 7 percent (the dividend he assumed the Bank would pay) and 6 percent (the interest on one of the classes of federal securities receivable for Bank stock) and concluding that this combined amount was what the public would be paying for circulation of the Bank's notes. But the 6 percent was an incident not of banking and currency but of the public debt, which was there already and would not have been altered one way or the other by a bank, while the 7 percent represented profits from the Bank's commercial activities. Another way of putting this would be that the convenience of a circulating medium (the Bank's notes) was being paid for not by the public at large but by those specific persons who borrowed money from the Bank. In this connection it might be noted that the Bank itself probably never received anywhere near the amount of actual specie which the embodying act specified for payment of its shares. By the time subsequent installments were due, the Bank had already opened for business, and since the Bank's notes were defined as the equivalent of specie it would be logical that those notes should have constituted the bulk of what was accepted for that portion of the payment (one-fourth) not covered by federal securities (three-fourths) in payment for Bank stock. See Hammond, Banks and Politics, pp. 123-143. 87. Madison to Jefferson, July 10, Aug. 4, 8, 1791, PJM, XIV, 42-43, 65, 69. 88. Jefferson to Rutledge, Aug. 25, 1791, PTJ, XXII, 73-75. 89. There is no biography of George Hammond. See the brief article by Sidney Lee in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee (Oxford, 1885-1901), VIII, 1125-1126; "King George's First Envoy," in Beckles Willson, Friendly Relations: A Narrative of Britain's Ministers and Ambassadors to America (1/91-1930) (Boston, 1934), pp. 3-18; and Leslie Reade, '"George III to the United States Sendeth Greeting . . . ,'" History Today, VIII (Nov. 1958), 770-780. On Thornton, see S. W. Jackman, ed., "A Young Englishman Reports on the New Nation: Edward Thornton to James Bland Burges, 1791-1793," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XVIII (Jan. 1961), 85-121. The "rosey-faced" characterization is that of Williamina Bond Cadwalader (sister of P. Bond) in a letter to her sister, cited in Beckles Willson, p. 6. On Hammond's relations with Bond see Joanne L. Neel, Phineas Bond: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1/86-1812 (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 85ff. 90. Liston to Henry Cunningham, qu. in Willson, Friendly Relations, p. 19. 91. Qu. in ibid., p. 17. 92. See above, pp. 216-217, 221; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 1381!.; and editorial note, PTJ, XVIII, 220-283. 93. There was a limited printing of this report, subsequently recalled; it was, however, later repr. in Collection of Interesting and Important Reports and Papers on the Navigation and Trade of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Colonies in the West Indies and America (London, 1807). An abstract of it found its way into Jefferson's hands and is preserved in his papers. It was this abstract (not the original) that was later repr. by Worthington C.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 247-253

Ford under the title Report of a Committee of the Lords of the Privy Council on the Trade of Great Britain with the United States (Washington, 1888). See also PTJ, XVIII, 267-272. Hawkesbury's draft instructions and Grenville's final ones are printed in IBM, pp. 2-19. 94. On the differences between Hawkesbury's and Grenville's points of view see Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 141-142. 95. See, e.g., Brymner, Report on Canadian Archives, 1890, p. 140; Hammond to Grenville, Apr. 2, 1793, PRO:FO 5/1. 96. Same to same, Oct. 23, Nov. i, 16, 1791 (Dispatches i, 2, 4), PRO:FO 4/11, II; same to same, Nov. i, 1791 (private), Manuscripts of ]. B. Fortescue, Esq., Preserved at Dropmore (London, 1894), II, 223. 97. Jefferson to Hammond, Nov. 29, 1791, PTJ, XXII, 352-353; Thornton to James B. Burges, Dec. 5, 1791, Jackman, ed., "Young Englishman," p. 95. 98. Hammond to Jefferson, Nov. 30, 1791, PTJ, XXII, 356-357. 99. Jefferson to Hammond, Dec. 5, 1791, ibid., 378-379. 100. Hammond to Jefferson, Dec. 6, 1791; Jefferson to Hammond, Dec. 13, 1791; Hammond to Jefferson, Dec. 14, 1791; ibid., 380-381, 399, 402-403. 101. Hammond to Grenville, Dec. 6, 19, 1791 (Dispatches 8, 13), PRO:FO 4/11, III. 102. Benjamin Hawkins to Jefferson, Mar. 26, 1792, PTJ, XXIII, 342-343. 103. Even after it had become evident that a minister would shortly be on his way, Jefferson told Edward Rutledge that the British had "no serious view of treating or fulfilling treaties," and his sayings to this effect reached the ears of Hammond and Thornton soon after they arrived. Meanwhile he continued to hope that a navigation act against British commerce could be passed, and had requested American representatives in Europe to do what they could to persuade the governments of France, Spain, and Portugal to take similar action. Jefferson had his report on commerce with Great Britain (with its recommendations of measures the United States ought to take) largely ready by December 1791, but at a cabinet meeting during that month Hamilton successfully urged that the report be withheld on the ground that it would embarrass the negotiations Jefferson was about to begin with Hammond. Jefferson to Rutledge, Aug. 25, 1791, PTJ, XXII, 73-75; Hammond to Grenville, Nov. 16, 1791 (Private), Dropmore, II, 229; Thornton to Burges, Dec. 5, 1791, Jackson, ed., "Young Englishman," 95-96; Hammond to Grenville, Dec. 6, 19, 1791, Jan. 9, 1792 (Dispatches 8, 13, 3), PRO:FO 4/11, II-III, 4/14, I; Jefferson to David Humphreys, Mar. 15, 1791, and to William Carmichael, Mar. 17, 1791, PTJ, XIX, 572-574, 574-575; Jefferson to Speaker of House of Representatives, Feb. 22, 1792, and Jefferson, Memorandum of Mar. n, 1792, ibid., XXIII, 143, 258-262. On Jefferson's hopes for an arrangement with France, see "Questions to be Considered Of," Nov. 26, 1791, ibid., XXII, 344. 104. Jefferson to Hammond, Dec. 15, 1791; Hammond to Jefferson, Dec. 19, 1791; PTJ, XX, 409-411, 422. 105. ASP:IA, I, 137-138. 106. Hammond to Grenville, Dec. 19, 1791 (Dispatch 13), PRO:FO 4/11, III; also PAH, X, 373-374; "Conversation with George Beckwith, May 15, 1791," ibid., VIII, 342343, and Brymner, Report on Canadian Archives, 1890, p. 388. 107. Hammond to Grenville, Jan. 9, 1792 (Dispatch 3), PRO:FO 4/14, II; also PAH, X, 493-496. 108. Hammond to Jefferson, Mar. 5, 1792, PTJ, XXIII, 196-212. 109. Jefferson to Hammond, May 29, 1792, ibid., 551-601; Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 140, 144; Peterson, Jefferson, p. 453; Malone, Jefferson, II, 412, 414.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 253-262 no. Hamilton to Jefferson, May [20-27], 1792, PAH, XI, 408-414; Madison's Notes on Jefferson's Letter to Hammond [ca. May 16, 1792], PTJ, XXIII, 514-516. in. Hammond to Jefferson, June 2,1792, PTJ, XXIV, 17-18. Hammond to Grenville, June 8, 1792 (Dispatch 22), PRO:FO 4/15; excerpt repr. in PAH, XI, 454-455. 112. No British debts were collected in Virginia until 1793. An arbitration committee was established under the Jay Treaty of 1794, and the United States government would eventually pay £600,000 in 1802 to settle these claims. Ritcheson, Aftermatch of Revolution, pp. 238-241; Charles F. Hobson, "The Recovery of British Debts in the Federal Circuit Court of Virginia, 1790 to 1797," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XCII (Mar. 1984), 176-200. See also PJnMl, V, 259-263. 113. Malone, Jefferson, II, 410; PT], XXIV, 301. 114. Hammond to Grenville, June 8, 1792 (Dispatch 22), PRO:FO 4/15; Jefferson to Madison, June 4, 1792, PJM, XIV, 314-315. 115. Grenville to Hammond, Mar. 17, 1792, IBM, pp. 25-26; Hammond to Grenville, June 8, 1792 (Dispatch 23), PRO:FO 4/15; PAH, XI, 446-447. 116. Grenville, in acknowledging receipt of Jefferson's letter, said he would "defer entering into any particular Consideration of that Paper at present," inasmuch as he was turning it over to Phineas Bond (then in London on leave) for his comments. He assured Hammond meanwhile "of His Majesty's gracious and entire Approbation of the prudent Conduct you have held upon this Occasion. . . . " Bond submitted his report to Grenville in the fall of 1792. War broke out between Great Britain and France on February i, 1793, and the questions under discussion were not resumed until the arrival of John Jay in England in June 1794. Grenville to Hammond, Aug. 4, 1792, IBM, pp. 30-31; Bond to Grenville, Oct. 12,1792, J. Franklin Jameson, ed., "Letters of Phineas Bond to the Foreign Office, 1787-89," AHA.-AR 1896, I, 512. 117. [Oliver Wolcott], British Influence on the Affairs of the United States, Proved and Explained (Boston, 1804), pp. 14-15.

CHAPTER

VII

The Emergence of Partisan Politics 1. Washington, First Annual Message to Congress, Jan. 8, 1790, WGW, XXX, 493; House Journal, I, 141-142. 2. Report on the Subject of Manufactures, PAH, X, 230-231. 3. Ibid., 231-235. 4. Ibid., 236-259. 5. Ibid., 261-263. 6. Ibid., 266-269. 7. Ibid., 274-282. 8. Ibid., 293-296. 9. Ibid., 296-340. 10. See above, pp. 107-108. 11. Peter F. Drucker, "On the 'Economic Basis' of American Politics," The Public Interest, No. 10 (Winter 1968), 35; PAH, X, 260. For a modern formulation in certain ways reminiscent of the report, see the discussion of "backward and forward linkage" in Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 98-119.

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12. On Coxe's role in the preparation both of the Society's prospectus and of the Report on Manufactures see Joseph S. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), I, 349-357; Introductory Note, PAH, X, 10-12; and Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 1978), pp. 182-200. 13. PAH, IX, i44ff.; Davis, Essays, I, 360. 14. Ibid., 372-375. 15. Ibid., 377-3/8. 16. Ibid., 408. 17. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1/80-1840 (Berkeley, Calif., 1970), p. 3. 18. Ibid., pp. 8-ioff. 19. See above, pp. 86-87. 20. "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents" (1770), The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 5th ed. (Boston, 1877), I, 526. 21. For a good discussion of this phase in the the political life of Virginia see Richard P. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1/88-1801 (Lexington, Ky., 1973), esp. pp. 56-118. 22. Mason to Jefferson, Jan. 10, 1791; Jefferson to Mason, Feb. 4, 1791; PTJ, XVIII, 484, XIX, 242. 23. The complete series of eighteen essays, with titles and the dates on which they appeared, are repr. in PJM, XIV, 117-122, 137-139, 170, 178-179, 191-192, 197-198, 201202, 206-208, 217-218, 233-234, 244-246, 257-259, 266-268, 274-275, 370-372, 426-427; I, 302-309; XVII, 559-560; see also Editorial Note, XIV, 110-112. For another discussion of two of these essays, "Parties," and "A Candid State of Parties," see Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 80-86. 24. PJM, XIV, 197-198. 25. Ibid., 274-275. 26. Ibid., 370-372. 27. "Republican Distribution of Citizens," ibid., 244-246. 28. Ibid., 426-427. 29. Ames to George R. Minot, Feb. 16, 1792, WFA, I, 112. 30. Freeman, Washington, VI, 336-341; ASP:FR, I, 137-138; Francis P. Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846 (New York, 1969), pp. 22-27; Henry Lee to Madison, Dec. 8, 1791, Madison to Lee, Dec. 18, 1791, PJMt XIV, 144, 155. 31. National Gazette, Dec. 19, 22, 1791; William H. Smith, ed., The St. Clair Papers: The Life and Public Service of Arthur St. Clair (Cincinnati, 1882), II, 267-269. 32. Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, Newark Gazette, Connecticut Courant, all repr. in National Gazette, Jan. 9, 12, 26, 1792; Boston Gazette, Dec. 26, 1791, qu. in Donald R. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany, N.Y., 1969), pp. 58-59. See also ibid., pp. 65, 359-360; and speeches in Congress, AC, 2 Cong., i Sess., 337-338. Another useful summary of opinion as found in newspapers and other writings is in Freeman, Washington, VI, 340-341, fn. 91. 33. Letter from Albany, repr. in National Gazette, Jan. 9, 1792; AC, 2 Cong., i Sess., 338-342; Stewart, Opposition Press, p. 361. 34. National Gazette, Jan. 9, 19, 23, Feb. 2, 1792; AC, 2 Cong., i Sess., 343-355; Jefferson to Washington, Apr. 17, 1791, PTJ, XX, 145. To Monroe Jefferson wrote, "I hope we shall drub the Indians well this summer & then change our plan from war to bribery." Apr. 17, 1791, PTJt XX, 234. Stewart, Opposition Press, pp. 360-361, appears to

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NOTES FOR PAGES 2/2-2/7

be mistaken in asserting, "Federalists urged a larger regular force for protection, but Eastern Democrats were fiercely opposed." Sentiment on this question did not divide along * "party" lines, as may be seen from the National Gazette and from the congressional debates. Freneau gave space in his paper to all viewpoints on the Indian war, but his own seems to have been similar to those of the Virginians and of his former Princeton classmate, the ultra-hawkish Brackenridge. On the other hand, though Freeman's statement (Washington, VI, 340) that "no sharp political issue developed from this debate" is technically correct, it is being argued here that while the debate itself was not a partisan one, its sideeffects and the climate of recrimination it created did much to prepare the partisan atmosphere that followed, with regard not only to the tariff act of 1792 (raising additional revenue for military purposes) but to a range of other issues as well. 35. To Mrs. Pickering, Jan. 7, 1792, Octavius Pickering and Charles W. Upham, The Life of Timothy Pickering (Boston, 1867-1873), III, 23. ("For my own part," Pickering added, "I, from the beginning, regretted the commencement of the war, as a thing not of inevitable necessity. But perhaps I am mistaken.") "The foes of the Secretary at War," wrote Fisher Ames, "have not been idle." Ames to Thomas Dwight, Jan. 13, 1792, WFA, I, 109. "Poor honest Knox seems to be seriously struck at," Henry Lee observed, though he added that to some extent Knox had it coming: "repeated heavy calamitys demand on the part of govt. minute enquiry into the conduct of those entrusted with the preparation & execution of the measures which have terminated in disaster." Lee to Madison, Jan. 17, 1792, PJM, XIV, 189. Stewart, Opposition Press, pp. 61, 360; Davis, Essays, I, 259-263; House Committee Report, "Causes of the Failure of the Expedition Against the Indians," May 8,1792, and supplementary report, Feb. 15,1793, ASP:MA, I, 36-44. On Washington's handling of St. Clair's resignation and the appointment of Wayne see Freeman, Washington, VI, 341-342; and St. Clair Papers, II, 282-286. 36. Davis, Essays, I, 113-114; Robert F. Jones, "The King of the Alley": William Duer, Politician, Entrepreneur, and Speculator, 1768-1799 (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 1-15. 37. Davis, Essays, I, 114-117. 38. Ibid., 118-123. 39. Miniature by Charles Willson Peale, painted in 1780; reproduced in Clarence Bowen, ed., History of the Centennial Celebration of the Inauguration of George Washington . . . (New York, 1892); a line drawing made from it is in National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, VII, 503. 40. Manasseh Cutler, qu. in Davis, Essays, I, 126. Jones (Duer, pp. 129-134) estimates that Duer realized somewhere between $250,000 and $370,000 in federal dollars from his speculations in government securities while employed in the Treasury. 41. "The Deane Papers," iv, Collections of the New-York Historial Society (New York, 1890), XXII, 168; Davis, Essays, I, 129. 42. Ibid., 124-150, 213-253. 43. Ibid., 259-263. 44. Ibid., 205-207; Hamilton to Duer, Aug. 17, 1791, PAH, IX, 74-75. 45. AC, 2 Cong., i Sess., 51, 362; Henry Cabot Lodge, Life and Letters of George Cabot (Boston, 1877), pp. 38-39, 40-42, 46-54. 46. AC, 2 Cong., i Sess., 363-364. 47. Ibid., 376. 48. Ibid., 381. 49. Ibid., 369. 50. Ibid., 383. 51. Ibid., 385-389-

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52. Ibid., 374, 400-401. From the original language of the bill it would seem that the term "bounty" with respect to the fisheries was not an innovation at all but had been in use, at least informally, since the Revenue Act of 1789. That Act had provided for a unit payment on fish exported from the United States "in lieu of a drawback of the duties imposed on the importation of salt employed and expended therein," and the payment was increased by the Act of Aug. 10, 1790. The intent of the present measure was simply to benefit the fishermen more directly by transferring "the bounty now allowed" (our italics) from the fish exported to the vessels employed. Ibid., 362; William H. Michael and Pitman Pulsifer, eds., Tariff Acts Passed by the Congress of the United States from 1789 to 1895, Including All Acts, Resolutions, and Proclamations Modifying or Changing Those Acts (Washington, 1896), pp. n, 13. Ames to Thomas Dwight, Jan. 30, 1792, WFA, I, 112. 53. AC, 2 Cong., i Sess., 437, 439-440, 442, 452; Hamilton to Edward Carrington, May 26, 1792, PAH, XI, 433. 54. "Report Relative to the Additional Supplies for the Ensuing Year," Mar. 16, 1792, ibid., 139-149; AC, 2 Cong., i Sess., 349-354. This speech is mistakenly reported under the date of Jan. 27; it could only have been delivered sometime between Apr. 17 and 21, 1792. 55. Ibid., 569, 572. 56. Davis, Essays, I, 279-289. 57. Ibid., 290-295. Duer to Hamilton, Mar. 12, 1792; Hamilton to Duer, Mar. 14, 23, 1792; Robert Troup to Hamilton, Mar. 19, 1792, PAH, XI, 126, 131-132, 155-158. Jones, Duer, pp. 176-178. 58. Seth Johnson to Andrew Craigie, Mar. 25, 1792; H. M. Colden to Jeremiah Wadsworth, Apr. 18, 1792; qu. in Davis, Essays, I, 296, 304. "It was reported here last night that there had been a collection of people round the place of Duer's confinement of so threatening an appearance as to call out the Governor and militia. . . . " Jefferson to Henry Remsen, Apr. 14, 1792, PT], XXIII, 426. 59. Davis, Essays, I, 310-315. Actually the program never did have much of a chance. Hamilton's agrarian opponents, in Virginia and in the South generally, were of course solidly against it on grounds of both ideology and interest. Meanwhile there was as yet no "manufacturing interest," in the sense that would come to characterize northern industry in the nineteenth century, though the masters of the numerous artisan establishments in the northern cities certainly favored a protective tariff for their products. Nevertheless the largest entrepreneurs of the day, those in shipping and overseas trade, and in whose business British manufactures played a very large part, tended to be less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic. Jacob E. Cooke, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1982), pp. 101-102. 60. Material in this par. is drawn from Davis, Essays, I, 454-503. 61. Johnson to Craigie, Aug. 20, 1791, qu. in ibid., 208, Oliver Wolcott to Oliver Wolcott, Sr., Jan. 30, 1792, Gibbs. Memoirs, I, 72. 62. Hirschman, Strategy of Economic Development, pp. 20-21. 63. On Holyoke, Lowell, Chicopee, Waltham, and other centers of manufacturing enterprise in early nineteenth-century New England see, e.g., Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings (Boston, 1931); Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Mass. (Northampton, 1935); and esp. Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). 64. National Gazette, Jan. 12, 1792, Dec. i, 1791. 65. Ibid., Nov. 17, 24, 28, Dec. i, 1791. 66. Ibid., Dec. 26, 29, 1791, Jan. 2, 5, 9, 12, 1792.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 283-286 67. See above, n. 23. 68. National Gazette, Mar. 15, 1792. Other "Brutus" papers appeared Mar. 19, 22, 26, Apr. 5, 9, 1792. 69. The "Farmer" appears to have been Dr. George Logan, a Philadelphia Republican and a strong opponent of Hamiltonian policies. His essays appeared intermittently in the National Gazette in March and April 1792 and were published in pamphlet form as Five Letters addressed to the Yeomanry of the United States: Containing some Observations on the Dangerous Scheme of Governor Duer and Mr. Secretary Hamilton, to establish National Manufactories. By a Farmer in August of that year. 70. The "Sidney" pieces appeared in the issues of Apr. 23, 26, 30, May 3, 7, 10, 17, 21, 24, 1792, of the National Gazette. 71. Ibid., June 7, Apr. 26, May 7, 1792. 72. Ibid., June n, 1792. See also the elaborate "Rules for changing a limited Republican Government into an unlimited hereditary one," July 4, 7, 1792. 73. Gazette of the United States, June 9, 1792; National Gazette, June n, 1792. 74. Ibid., July 28, 1792; Gazette of the United States, Aug. 4, 8, 1792. Hamilton's third "T.L." letter appeared in ibid., August n, 1792. 75. There were three "American" letters (Aug. 4, n, 18, 1792), six signed "Catullus" (Sept. 15, 19, 29, Oct. 17, Nov. 24, Dec. 22, 1792), and a single "Metellus" letter (Oct. 24, 1792), all in Gazette of the United States. Other newspaper pieces published during this period have been attributed by Philip Marsh—though it seems mistakenly—to Hamilton: "Original Communications," June 27, 1792; "Detector," July 28, Aug. 23, 1792; "Candor," Aug. 18, 1792; "Scourge," Sept. 22, 1792; "Americanus," Oct. 20, 1792; and "C," Nov. 10, 1792; all in ibid. See Marsh, "Hamilton's Neglected Essays, 1791-1793," New-York Historical Society Quarterly, XXXII (Oct. 1948), 280-300; idem, "Further Attributions to Hamilton's Pen," ibid., XL (Oct. 1956), 351-360; Malone, Jefferson, II, 470-473. The editors of PAH, however, find no evidence that Hamilton wrote any of these, and in the case of "Scourge" they have shown that the author was William Loughton Smith. See XI, 581-582; XII, 123, 225, 266, 411412, 558; XIII, 33. 76. Jefferson to Edmund Randolph, Sept. 17, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 387. Randolph wrote as "Aristides" in Gazette of the United States, Sept. 8, 1792, and perhaps in National Gazette, Sept. 26, 1792 (though the second "Aristides" letter may have been by someone else); Monroe and Madison collaborated on a series entitled "Vindication of Mr. Jefferson," which ran in the Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, Sept. 22, Oct. 10, 13, 20, 30, Nov. 8, Dec. 3, 31, 1792, and which was reprinted in both the National Gazette and Gazette of the United States. The texts have been edited and published as a pamphlet by Philip Marsh, Monroe's Defense of Jefferson and Freneau against Hamilton (Oxford, Ohio, 1948). For the story of the "Vindication," and Jefferson's part in it, see Marsh, "The Vindication of Mr. Jefferson,'" South Atlantic Quarterly, XLV (Jan. 1946), 61-67; idem, "Madison's Defense of Freneau," WMQ, 3rd Ser., Ill (Apr. 1946), 269-280; idem, "Monroe's Draft of the Defense of Freneau," PMHB, LXXI (Jan. 1947), 73-76; Malone, Jefferson, II, 475-476; Brant, Madison, III, 362-363. 77. National Gazette, Sept. 5, 12, Oct. 17, 1792. As "Amicus" Hamilton defended himself against the charge of having advocated monarchy at the Constitutional Convention. Ibid., Sept. 12, 1792. PAH, XII, 320-327, 354-357, 570-571. 78. Jefferson to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 356. 79. Gazette of the United States, Aug. 8, 1792; PAH, XII, 188-189. 80. Jefferson to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 357.

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81. Ibid., 356; see above, n. 79. Over half a century later, Rufus Griswold published a story to the effect that Freneau in his old age had confessed in great remorse to having written articles in the Gazette against Washington which had been "dictated" by Jefferson. The story seems highly questionable, and Philip Marsh has persuasively discredited it. "The Griswold Story of Jefferson and Freneau," AHR, LI (Oct. 1945), 68-73. 82. Elisha Boudinot to Hamilton, Aug. 16, 1792. "This I know," Boudinot quoted his niece's husband, William Bradford, as saying, "that at the time I was in New-York, and was informed of Mr. J.'s writing him [Freneau] a letter, which he took in dudgeon, as striking at his independence, &c., and wrote a very insulting answer, which he showed to Mr. Childs, who prevented his sending it, &c; and in fact related the whole story as I had it." PAH, XII, 210-211. Later on, after the National Gazette had been well launched, Jefferson seems on one occasion to have sent Freneau^a clipping from Fenno's paper, perhaps with a hint that some comment on it might be in order. Freneau condescendingly replied that he might do so later, "when nothing more interesting offers." Lewis Leary, That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure (New Brunswick, N.J., 1941), p. 389^ 83. E.g., Jefferson to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 354. 84. Particulars on Jefferson and the proposal to transfer the French loan are in Malone, Jefferson, II, 188-189, 470-471. 85. Hamilton to Carrington, May 26, 1792, PAH, XI, 426-445. 86. The quotations, in order, are from "Conversations with the President," Feb. 28, 29, July 10, 1792, and Jefferson to Washington, May 23, 1792, WTJ, I, 174, 177, 177-178, 200, XXIII, 537. 87. Washington to Hamilton, July 29, 1792, PAH, XII, 129-134. Hamilton acknowledged receipt of it on Aug. 3, 1792, ibid., 139. 88. Qu. in Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789-1801 (Chapel Hill, 1957), p. 29. 89. Ibid., pp. 33-49; on the Jay-Clinton election see Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), pp. 304-323; and Carol R. Berkin, "The Disputed 1792 Gubernatorial Election in New York" (Unpub. M.A. thesis, Columbia U., 1966); Jefferson to Madison, June 21, 1792, and to Monroe, June 23, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 105, 114-115; Brant, Madison, III, 364. 90. William Page to William Plumer, June 26, 1792, qu. in Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans, p. 34. 91. Ibid., pp. 38ff. 92. Jefferson to Pinckney, Dec. 3, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 696. 93. "Conversations with the President," July 10, 1792, WTJ, I, 199-200. 94. Memoranda of Conversations with the President, May 5, 9, 1792; Madison to Washington, June 20, 1792; PJM, XIV, 299-304, 319-324. 95. Washington to Jefferson, Aug. 23, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 317; Hamilton, Aug. 26, 1792, PAH, XII, 276-277. 96. Hamilton to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, ibid., 347-349. 97. Jefferson to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, PTJ, XXIV, 351-359. 98. Same to same, May 23, 1792, ibid., XXIII, 539; Hamilton to Washington, July 3o-Aug. 3, 1792, PAH, XII, 139. 99. Freeman, Washington, VI, 371, 378-379, 383-384. 100. Every detail presently known about the Reynolds affair is contained in PAH, XXI, 121-144, 215-285 and passim, in the form of (i) the pertinent correspondence of all the parties, with editorial annotation; (2) the original draft of Hamilton's "Reynolds Pamphlet," in which Hamilton offers his own account of the affair, together with the printed

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version issued in 1797 (both also annotated); and (3) most useful of all, an impressive scholarly essay by Barbara Chernow, an Introductory Note of twenty-four closely printed pages, which performs the valuable service of examining all the evidence for every variation of the story that has been advanced from that time to the present. Less successful in this respect is a similar though somewhat curious undertaking by Julian Boyd in PTJ, XVIII, 611-688 (curious, in that Jefferson had nothing directly to do with the episode), whose principal object seems to be that of proving Hamilton guilty of financial misconduct. An earlier discussion is Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: The National Adventure, 17881804 (New York, 1962), II, 399-422, which assumes that the story's main outlines were more or less what Hamilton said they were. Dr. Chernow's scrutiny of the evidence tends to bear out Mitchell's view of the case, that Hamilton's transgressions were limited to frailties of the flesh, a view which the present authors take to be the one most plausible. 101. PAH, XIII, ii6n.; XXI, 278-279. 102. "Reynolds Pamphlet," ibid., XXI, 250-256. 103. Ibid., XIII, n6n.; XXI, 278-279. 104. Ibid., XXI, 128-129; Richard Folwell to Edward Jones, Aug. 12,1797, ibid., XXI, i9on. 105. Ibid., XXI, I2i-i22n. Boyd, cited in n. 100 above, substantially adopts Callender's theory as true. Dr. Chernow's essay (cited in same n.) points out a number of the difficulties raised by the Boyd-Callender version. 106. PAH, XXI, 131-138. The affair nearly brought on a duel between Hamilton and Monroe. 107. Dumas Malone, "William Branch Giles," DAE, VII, 283; idem, Jefferson, III, 15-18. 108. AC, 2 Cong., 2 Sess., 759; PAH, XIII, 451-462, 475-477. 109. AC, 2 Cong., 2 Sess., 835-840; Introductory Note, PAH, XIII, 532-541. no. Report of Feb. 4, 1793, ibid., 548-549; Mitchell, Hamilton, II, 251. in. PAH, XIII, 549-552; Mitchell, Hamilton, II, 251-252. 112. Report of Feb. 13, 1793, PAH, XIV, 26-32. 113. Ibid., 35n., 43-46; Report of Feb. 19, 1793, ibid., 113-114. 114. Ibid., 46-49, 103-110. 115. AC, 2 Cong., 2 Sess., 899-900. 116. PAH, XIII, 539; Mitchell, Hamilton, II, 260-261; Malone, Jefferson, III, 27-28, 30-33. See also Eugene R. Sheridan, "Thomas Jefferson and the Giles Resolutions," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLIX (Oct. 1992), 589-608. 117. AC, 2 Cong., 2 Sess., 900-905, 907-963 (the qu. are from Giles's remarks introducing the Resolutions, and the text of Resolution 8, ibid., 895, 900); Mitchell, Hamilton, II, 261-266. 118. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Mar. 3, 1793, WTJ, VI, 194-195.

CHAPTER

VIII

The French Revolution in America i. Stanley Hoffman, "Old Whine, New Bottles," New York Times, May 19, 1976. A notable exception, however, to the "mutual ignorance" theme on the French side is Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), an elegant and learned study of the profound differences, rooted in

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NOTES FOR PAGES 303-307 the character and prior experience of the two societies, between the American and French Revolutions and their respective consequences. 2. Three random, trifling, but nonetheless interesting symptoms of this situation struck us the day we began investigating it. One was a copy of Elizabeth B. White's excellent American Opinion of France from Lafayette to Poincare, published in 1927, which had sat on the shelves of the Smith College Library for nearly fifty years with its pages uncut; a second was E. Malcolm Carroll's French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870-1914, which contains not a single reference to the United States; and the third was The French American Review, a quarterly which was founded in 1948 with high hopes of furthering mutual understanding, but expired with the completion of the third volume. According to the closing announcement, "While local historical societies are supported by comparatively large memberships, there seems to be no large public for a periodical like ours which aims to be national. It was consequently agreed that the publication of the French American Review be suspenced." 3. Qu. in Frank Monaghan, French Travellers in the United States, 1765-1932: A Bibliography (New York, 1933), ix. 4. The "mirage" motif is a recurrent one in the writings of Gilbert Chinard, especially LExotisme americain dans la litterature frangaise au XVIe siecle (Paris, 1911) and L'Amerique et le reve exotique dans la litterature frangaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1913); and it is fully realized in Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, N.J., 1957), to which we are indebted for some of the formulations that follow. 5. Ibid., pp. 3-14. 6. Ibid., pp. 21-22, 26, 67. 7. "Eripuit fulmen coelo sceptrumque tyrannis." Ibid., p. 50. 8. Ibid., pp. 24-25, 29, 31-34, 48, 75, 152-161. 9. Ibid., p. 183. Except, that is, for the later case of the Statue of Liberty, which coincided in time with an intense need on the part of political leaders of the Third Republic in the i88os to enhance and solidify France's republican character, America once more serving as the model. They gave strong support to the movement to raise money for a monument which would once again symbolically unite the sister republics. See Sanford Elwitt, The Making of the Third Republic: Class and Politics in France, 1868-1884 (Baton Rouge, La., 1975), pp. 136-169. 10. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, pp. 177-178, 180, 183, 188-205, 219-220; Frances S. Childs., French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790-1800: An American Chapter of the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1940), pp. 74-75. 11. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, p. 144. 12. Andre Siegfried, "prance and the United States: What Each Can Learn from the Other," American Society Legion of Honor Magazine, XX (Winter 1949), 297-306; J.-J. Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge (New York, 1968); Georges Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future (Boston, 1931); James F. Marshall, "Stendhal and America," French American Review, II (Oct.-Dec. 1949), 240-267. See also C. E. Andrews, "French Authors Take Revenge," Bookman, LXXIII (Mar. 1931), 15-21; and Grace Flandran, "On What It Is to Be French," AQ, I (Spring 1949), 9-22. 13. Phillips Bradley, Introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1945), I, esp. xl-lii; Elizabeth B. White, American Opinion of France, From Lafayette to Poincare (New York, 1927), pp. 277, 285. It should be noted that Lafayette, at the time of his triumphal visit to the United States in 1824-25, was officially out of favor

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NOTES FOR PAGES 307-309 in France, and news of his successes in America was excluded from French newspapers. Thus he did not really represent France at all, only the Americans' version of France. It might then be added that six years later Tocqueville and Beaumont, both of royalist families, went about in dread that they might have to drink toasts in public to Lafayette, the republican. See ibid., pp. 79-85, and George W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938), pp. 89-90, 146. 14. Howard Mumford Jones, America and Trench Culture, 1750-1848 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1927), esp. pp. 569-572; Lowell qu. in White, American Opinion, p. 211. 15. This was because the French universities would not award higher degrees unless the candidate held a lower one from a French institution; the German universities, on the other hand, put very few restrictions on foreign students wishing to obtain such degrees, and a substantial number of Americans did. Ibid., pp. 235-236. 16. Jones, America and Trench Culture, pp. 300-309; Eliot G. Fay, "Henry James as a Critic of French Literature," Trench American Review, II (July-Sept. 1949), 184-193; Gay Wilson Allen, ed., Walt Whitman Abroad (Syracuse, N.Y., 1955), pp. 56-60; Harry Levin, "Some European Views of Contemporary American Literature," Margaret Denny and William H. Gilman, eds., The American Writer and the European Tradition (Minneapolis, 1950), pp. 177-180. The French were aware that these writers were not to be mistaken for intellectuals, and that their work 'lacked art"; yet they seemed to feel, in their currently exhausted state, that the Americans with their raw virility and their stories full of punch and action, provided something French fiction could do with a dash of. Thus a certain amount of self-flagellation was probably inevitable, amid which the customary note of condescension almost disappeared. Almost, but not quite. "The writers of the New World," announced Henri Peyre in 1947, "have taught the French a refreshing disregard for composition, a total detachment from such rules as unity of plot, a youthful freedom from artistic restraint." "American Literature Through French Eyes," Virginia Quarterly Review, XXIII (Summer 1947), 421-438. Actually it seems that for many decades there was a segment of French youth, fretting under lycee discipline, who sought relief in American penny dreadfuls. Howard C. Rice recalls a lawyer who told him at a Rotary Club meeting in a southern French city about how as a boy he had devoured contraband translations of Nick Carter and Buffalo Bill. "I had been brought up," he confessed, " on the Comtesse de Segur and the Bibliotheque Rose—and here for the first time I had something else, action (though bad literature!) and fresh air!" Howard C. Rice, "Seeing Ourselves as the French See Us," Trench Review, XXI (May 1948), 432-441. 17. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, 1918), p. 96. It was not until more than thirty years after his first visit that Adams came to appreciate the cathedrals of France. Richard L. Shoemaker, "The France of Henry Adams" Trench Review, XXI (Feb. 1948), 292-299. 18. Lafayette to Washington, Mar. 17, 1790, Louis Gottschalk, ed., The Letters of Lafayette to Washington, 1777-1790 (Philadelphia, 1976), p. 348; Paine to Washington, May i, 1790, Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945), II, 1303; Catharine Macaulay Graham to Washington, Oct. 1789, Jared Sparks, ed., Correspondence of the American Revolution; Being Letters of Eminent Men to George Washington from the Time of His Taking Command of the Army to the End of His Presidency (Boston, 1853), IV, 328; Louis M. Sears, George Washington and the Trench Revolution (Detroit, 1960), pp. 76-77. Lafayette sent the key to Paine in London, who transmitted it to Washington with a letter of his own. Catharine Macaulay Graham was the sister of a Lord Mayor of London and had made a name for herself as a historian. Lucy

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NOTES FOR PAGES 309-313

M. Donnelly, 'The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay," WMQ, 3rd Ser., VI (Apr. 1949), 173207. 19. Robert R. Palmer makes a special point of the parallelism with the Virginia Declaration in The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1/60-1800 (Princeton, NJ. 1959-64), I, 487-488, 518-521. 20. This americanisme, however, was hardly as spontaneous and wholehearted as it appeared in America. It happened to serve a clear factional strategy in Assembly politics, and a determination to overpower the anglomane party, who wanted to reproduce in the French constitution certain elements of the English. This posture was not without its embarrassments for the americanistes, inasmuch as one of their principal objectives, a unicameral legislature, had little sanction in American precedents. Joyce Appleby, "America as a Model for the Radical French Reformers of 1789," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXVIII (Apr. 1971), 267-286. 21. AC, i Cong., 3 Sess., 1791-1792, 1798, 1883, 1968-1969, 2116-2118 (Dec. 1790Feb. 1791); ibid., 2 Cong., i Sess., 100, 456-457 (Mar. 1792). R. R. Palmer, conjecturing on why Hamilton should have been given honorary citizenship and not Jefferson, suggests that since Jefferson had been intimate with the by-then-proscribed Lafayette, the Assembly may have imagined Hamilton to be sounder on the Revolution than Jefferson. Age of the Democratic Revolution, II, 55. 22. Gazette of the United States, Oct. 10, 1789; John Jay to M. Grand, Mar. i, 1790, and to Robert G. Harper, Jan. 19, 1796, CPJJ, III, 386, IV, 198-203; John S. Adams, ed., An Autobiographical Sketch by John Marshall. . . (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1937), p. 13; John Marshall, The Life of George Washington (Philadelphia, 1804-07), V, 186, 389-391; Chauncey Goodrich to Oliver Wolcott, Feb. 9, 1793, Gibbs. Memoirs, I, 87; Robert Goodloe Harper, Select Works . . . (Baltimore, 1814), I, 50-51; Gilbert L. Lycan, Alexander Hamilton and American Foreign Policy: A Design for Greatness (Norman, Okla., 1970), pp. 134, 136-137; John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (New York, 1959), pp. 363-364; Harry R. Warfel, Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to America (New York, 1936), p. 226; Gary B. Nash, "The American Clergy and the French Revolution," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXII (July 1965), 392-412. Ruth H. Bloch makes the useful point that most Americans were not deists and freethinkers even though a few of their leaders may have been, that for a great many of them these events had a strong religious significance, and that they saw the Revolution as "moving towards the establishment of the millennial kingdom/' Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1/56-1800 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 156. 23. Charles D. Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1897), PP- 164-171. 24. Appleby, "America as a Model," passim; see also above, n. 20. 25. "LOI. Qui confere le titre de Citoyen Frangois a plusieurs Etrangers. Du 26 Aout 1792, Tan quatrieme de la Liberte," PAH, XII 545-546; Brant, Madison, III, 373. 26. A French edition of Paine's Common Sense—attributed, however, to Samuel Adams—had recently been published in Paris. AP:DA]A, II, 351-352. 27. Edward Handler, America and Europe in the Political Thought of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 40. This study has been of great assistance in shaping the following discussion. 28. Ibid., p. 129. 29. Ibid., pp. 6-7. 30. Ibid., p. 158.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 314-318 31. There is a considerable literature on Adams's views about aristocracy, much of it taking as its starting point Adams's anachronistic application of the English constitution to American conditions, where it could never quite be made to fit. See, e.g., John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, N.J., 1966); and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), esp. pp. 567—592; in addition to the Handler work cited above. It appears to us, however, that the point might equally well be turned around: that Adams's ideas on aristocracy, considering the American setting in which they were formed, were even less applicable to "real" aristocracies as they existed in Europe than to the synthetic ones he postulated for the United States. 32. Jefferson to Adams, Aug. 30, 1787, PT], XII, 68. 33. Robert R. Palmer, "The Dubious Democrat: Thomas Jefferson in Bourbon France," PSQy LXXII (Sept. 1957), 396. 34. Jefferson to Monroe, Aug. 9, 1788, PT], XIII, 489. 35. Jefferson to Thomas Lee Shippen, Sept. 29, 1788, ibid., 642. Malone, Jefferson, II, 217-219. Jefferson to Lafayette, May 6, 1789; to Rabaut de St. Etienne, June 3, 1789, PT], XV, 98, 166-168. 36. "The king is honest and wishes the good of his people, but the expediency of an hereditary aristocracy is too difficult a question for him. On the contrary his prejudices, his habits and his connections decide him in his heart to support it." Jefferson to John Jay, June 17, 1789, ibid., 189. 37. Jefferson to Paine, Sept. 13, 1789, ibid., 424. 38. Jefferson to Madison, Aug. 28, 1789, ibid., 366-367; Adet to Minister of Foreign Relations, Dec. 31, 1796, CFM, 983. 39. To Mason, Feb. 4, 1791; to Lafayette, June 16, 1792; PT], XIX, 241, XXIV, 8586. 40. "Anas," Mar. 12, 1792, WT], I, 187-188. 41. Short to Jefferson, July 20, 31, Aug. 15, 24, 1792, PT], XXIV, 243, 271, 298, 322, 32442. Jefferson to Short, Jan. 3, 1793, WT], VI, 153-156. 43. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jan. 7, 1793, ibid., 157. 44. Works which emphasize the high perspicacity of Morris's observations on the Revolution include Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion, pp. 54-119; Hippolyte Taine, Derniers essais de critique et d'histoire (Paris, 1923), p. 307; Adhemar Esmein, Gouverneur Morris, un temoin americain de la revolution frangaise (Paris, 1906); Daniel Walther, Gouverneur Morris, temoin de deux revolutions (Lausanne, 1932); Sears, George Washington and the French Revolution, esp. pp. 188, 205; and Jean-Jacques Fiechter, Un diplomate americain sous la Terreur: les annees europeennes de Gouverneur Morris, 1789-1798 (Paris, 1983)45. E.g., Alexander DeConde, Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy Under George Washington (Durham, N.C., 1958), pp. 311-341; Albert H. Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: franco-American Diplomacy During the Federalist Era (Knoxville, Tenn., 1974), pp. 99-122. 46. The best single source on Morris for this period is Beatrix C. Davenport, ed., A Diary of the French Revolution by Gouverneur Morris (Boston, 1939), 2V., largely superseding (though not for other periods in Morris's life) Anne C. Morris, ed., The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris (New York, 1888), 2v., and Jared Sparks, ed., The Life of Gouverneur Morris, with Selections from His Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (Boston, 1832), 3v. There is no satisfactory modern biography of Morris. Max M. Mintz,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 318-325 Gouverneur Morris and the American Revolution (Norman, Okla., 1970) is useful but brief. Mary-Jo Kline, "Gouverneur Morris and the New Nation, 1775-1778" (Unpub. diss., Columbia U., 1970) is scholarly and complete, but covers only the period prior to his departure for Europe in 1789. The qu. from Hamilton is in Davenport, ed., Diary, I, xii. 47. This point should be underlined. Morris was certainly not among those who, like Hamilton, were willing to bend over backward to avoid offending England. Quite the contrary; his pro-French attitude and hostility toward England during his mission to London in 1790 gave Hamilton occasion for positive annoyance. Indeed, Morris would have liked to see the French make war on Great Britain, and actually engaged in some undercover efforts to egg them on. See Davenport, ed., Diary, I, 506-509; Mintz, Morris, pp. 211-226. It was not until his alienation from revolutionary France that he concluded that Britain was, after all, America's best friend. 48. Davenport, ed., Diary, I, 137; Morris to Washington, July 31, 1789, Jan. 24, 1790, ibid., 170-172, 379-38749. With perhaps a nudge from Hamilton; Morris to Hamilton, Mar. 21, 1792, PAH, XI, 162. 50. Morris to Short, Apr. 7, 1790, Davenport, ed., Diary, I, 470. 51. Ibid., II, 53. 52. Morris to Montmorin, July 30, 1791, ibid., 230. 53. Ibid., 249-252. 54. Ibid., 264-269. 55. Ibid., 321-323. 56. Washington to Morris, Jan. 28, 1792, WGW, XXXI, 468-470; Morris to Washington, Apr. 6, 1792, Davenport, ed., Diary, II, 403, 429. 57. A good modern biography of Paine is David F. Hawke, Paine (New York, 1974), upon which we have drawn heavily for details, though it does not entirely supersede Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine: With a History of His Literary, Political, and Religious Career in America, France, and England (New York, 1908), 2v. 58. Hawke, Paine, pp. 7-17. 59. Ibid., pp. 17-18. 60. Ibid., pp. 19—25. 61. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), is good on the setting of Philadelphia politics in which Common Sense made its appearance. 62. Hawke, Paine, pp. 57-147. 63. Ibid., p. 168. 64. Ibid., p. 107. 65. Common Sense, Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 32. 66. E. Foner, Tom Paine, pp. 183-209; Hawke, Paine, 149-159, 184. 67. E.g., Paine to Jefferson, Sept. 9, 1788, PTJ, XIII, 587-590; on Paine and the artisans of Philadelphia see E. Foner, Tom Paine, pp. 99-100. 68. Paine had an arch built at his own expense which was exhibited for a time at Paddington and aroused much interest, though not to the point of anyone's offering to buy it. However, the famous Sunderland bridge later erected over the River Wear was built on Paine's basic design, and the work was supervised by the same man whom Paine had in effect trained at the Walker iron works in Yorkshire. Though Paine himself received no financial reward from the Sunderland bridge, his pioneering role in working out the principles upon which it and many other iron bridges were subsequently constructed has been recognized by authorities on the subject. See W. H. G. Armytage, "Thomas Paine and the Walkers: An Early Episode in Anglo-American Cooperation," Pennsylvania His-

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NOTES FOR PAGES 325-330 tory, XVIII (Jan. 1951), 16-30; and references in Audrey Williamson, Thomas Paine: His Life, Work and Times (London, 1973), pp. 105-106; and Hawke, Paine, pp. 212-213. Even in his portentous letter of transmittal to Washington that accompanied Lafayette's gift of the key to the Bastille (see above p. 309), Paine could not resist changing the subject in order to tell Washington about his bridge. Foner, ed., Complete Writings, II, 1303. 69. Hawke, Paine, pp. 175-187. 70. Ibid., pp. 188-202. 71. Paine to Burke, Jan. 17, 1790, and Burke to Paine, n.d., qu. in R. R. Fennessy, Burke, Paine and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Political Opinion (The Hague, 1963), pp. 103-104; Paine to Thomas Walker, Apr. 14,1790, Armytage, "Paine and the Walkers," 2}72. "Preface," Rights of Man, II, Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 349; Fennessy, Burke, Paine, pp. 108-159. 73. Ibid., 160-180. 74. The foregoing paragraph is based on Fennessy's analysis of British public opinion in ibid., Chs. 6 and 7. The qu. is from Rights of Man, II, Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 360. 75. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964), pp. 90-95. 76. Hawke, Paine, pp. 258-264. 77. Ibid., pp. 270-276; the texts of Paine's speeches of Jan. 15 and 19 are in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, II, 551-558. 78. An eleborated version of this argument is presented in Michael Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 1-89. 79. Winthrop D. Jordan, "Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776," JAH, LX (Sept. 1973), 294-308. 80. Samuel Adams to Paine, Nov. 30, 1802, Foner, ed., Complete Writings, II, i433n.; Patrick Henry to his daughter (Mrs. William Aylett), Aug. 20, 1796, William Wirt Henry, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches (New York, 1891), II, 570; George Morgan, The True Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1907), 366n. Benjamin Rush declared that the Age of Reason was "so offensive to me that I did not wish to renew my intercourse with him." Qu. in G. Adolf Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York, 1933), p. 135. The Age of Reason seems to have been widely read in America, but for reasons more of notoriety and a desire to condemn it than from any effectiveness it may have had in turning Christians into deists. See ibid., pp. 134-137; Herbert M. Morais, Deism in Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 1934), pp. 120122, 153, 163, 164, 168. 81. Hawke, Paine, p. 48; see also n. 26 above. 82. The most complete accounts in print of Genet's family and his early career are Jules Jusserand, "La jeunesse du Citoyen Genet, d'apres des documents inedits," Revue d'histoire diplomatique, XLIV (1930), 237-268; and Meade Minnegerode, Jefferson, Friend of France, 1793: The Career of Edmond Charles Genet, Minister Plenipotentiary from the French Republic to the United States, as Revealed by His Private Papers, 1763-1834 (New York, 1928), pp. 3-161. Though the latter's prose and the style of mind it reflects are fatuous in the extreme, and most of the documents used are neither dated nor fully identified, the book is the closest thing to a biography that exists. Extensive materials for a good one, however, are in the Genet Papers, LC. On Genet's mission to America see Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York, 1973); Maude H. Woodfin, "Citizen Genet and His Mission" (Unpub. diss., U. of Chicago, 1928); and William F. Keller, "American

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NOTES FOR PAGES 331-334

Politics and the Genet Mission" (Unpub. diss., U. of Pittsburgh, 1951). One of the bestknown sources on the affairs of the royal household in the closing years of the Old Regime was written by Genet's sister Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan, who was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, but Mme. Campan's memoirs contain only a few passing (though revealing) references to the activities of her brother Edmond. G. F. Fortescue, ed., Memoirs of Madame Campan on Marie Antoinette and her Court (Boston, 1909), II, 123-125. 83. Woodfin, "Citizen Genet," pp. 119-161. There are some useful details on Genet's appointment in Frederick A. Schminke, Genet: The Origins of His Mission to America (Toulouse, 1939). 84. Brissot was the prime example of the Frenchman mesmerized at a distance by the American idea. He had made up his mind about America in advance (he did go there for a few months' visit in 1788-89), and had written a blistering critique of Chastellux's Voyages because he liked Crevecoeur's idealized Lettres much better. On this, as well as Brissot's universalism and optimism, see Eloise Ellery, Brissot de Warville: A Study in the History of the French Revolution (Boston, 1915), esp. pp. 57-60. For a recently uncovered aspect of Brissot's pre-Revolutionary past, see Robert Darnton, "A Spy in Grub Street," The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 41-70. 85. Ellery, Brissot, pp. 226-227. On some of the sources from which Brissot may have picked up these notions, see Felix Gilbert, "The 'New Diplomacy' of the Eighteenth Century," World Politics, IV (Oct. 1951), 1-38. 86. Qu. in Ellery, Brissot, p. 238. 87. Hippolyte Taine, The French Revolution (New York, 1881), II, 99. But Brissot's sympathetic biographer holds much the same view; see Ellery, Brissot, p. 257; also T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), pp. 99-119. There is a discussion of the Girondins' American policy in Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, PP- 39-5588. Louis-Guillaume Otto wrote of Genet in 1797 that "He was charged with drawing up his own instructions." Gilbert Chinard, ed., "Considerations sur la conduite du Gouvernement americain envers la France, depuis le commencement de la Revolution jusqu'en 1797," Bulletin de I'lnstitut Frangais, No. XVI (Dec. 1943), 19. It is to be doubted, however, whether this extended beyond the opening rhetorical declarations. Otto was not employed in the Foreign Office at the time the instructions were prepared. See Frederic Masson, Le department des affaires etrangeres pendant la revolution, 1/87-1804 (Paris, 1877), p. 244. 89. The instructions are printed in CFM, pp. 201-211. But these were not the only instructions Genet received; an additional set dated Jan. 4, 1793, relating to the financing of his mission, are in ASP:FR, I, 142-146. Also serving in some sense as instructions are a series of letters from Lebrun, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Genet numbered i through 10, dated Feb. i, 3, 24, Mar. 10, 31, Apr. 10, n, 23, May 29, and June 19, 1793; two (those of Feb. 24 and Mar. 10) are printed in Cornelis De Witt, Thomas Jefferson: etude historique sur la democratic americaine (Paris, 1861), pp. 516-519. The only part of the instructions made public were the first two paragraphs of the "Memoire pour servir d'instruction," CFM, 202-203, in the form of a speech by Lebrun to the National Convention, Dec. 20, 1792, AECPE-U 36, 470-471, which was reprinted in American newspapers. See Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, May 6, 1793. 90. CFM, p. 204; Lebrun to Genet, Feb. 24, 1793, ibid., 2i5n., and De Witt, Jefferson, p. 516. 91. Lebrun to Genet, Feb. 3, 1793, AECPE-U 37, 100-103. 92. CFM, p. 204. 93. Ibid., p. 210.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 334-338 94. Ibid., p. 209; see also above, p. 124. 95. ASP:FR, I, 142-146. 96. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Apr. 16,1793, CFM, pp. 211-212; "Rapport du citoyen Genet . . . sur son voyage et sa reception populaire dans les Etats-Unis d'Amerique," DeWitt, Jefferson, p. 542. Others have suspected reasons less straightforward than contrary winds; on this question see Charles M. Thomas, American Neutrality in 1793: A Study in Cabinet Government (New York, 1931), pp. 79-80. 97. Minnegerode, Jefferson, pp. 186-189; writings of Genet cited in n. 96 above; Jefferson, "Note given to the President, July 26, 1793," WTJ, I, 248-249. 98. On Mangourit and the Florida project see Richard K. Murdoch, "Citizen Mangourit and the Projected Attack on East Florida in 1794," Journal of Southern History, XTV (Nov. 1948), 522-540; Frederick J. Turner, "The Origin of Genet's Projected Attack upon the Floridas," AHA:AR, 1897, 57^~67999. Minnegerode, Jefferson, pp. 191-197; "Rapport," De Witt, Jefferson, pp. 542547; a good account, based on newspaper reports, of Genet's reception in Charleston and his overland journey to Philadelphia is Keller, "American Politics and the Genet Mission," pp. 114-141. An equally good one is Woodfin, "Citizen Genet," pp. 86-132. 100. Though many authorities on international law (Grotius, Bynkershoek, Vattel, and others) had asserted that nations not involved in war ought to observe a strict impartiality in their relations with the belligerents (and members of Washington's cabinet would naturally ransack their writings to support the position the United States government took in 1793), there was little in the international practice of the eighteenth century to indicate general acceptance of such an assumption. It was not regarded as incompatible with neutral status that a nation might give very material assistance to one or more of the belligerents. On this point see Charles S. Hyneman, The First American Neutrality: A Study of the American Understanding of Neutral Obligations During the Years 1792 to 1815 (Urbana, 111., 1934), pp. 14-19. "Indeed, it has been suggested by careful students that, at a period not long prior to the first American neutrality, a nation would have been hard put to it to show that it had even a legal right to be impartial during a war." Ibid., p. 16. 101. Jefferson to Washington, Apr. 7, 1793; to Madison, Apr. 7, 1793, WTJ, VI, 212213. Jefferson, "Anas," Apr. 18, 1793, ibid., I, 226. Washington to Jefferson, Apr. 12, 1793; "Questions Submitted to the Cabinet," Apr. 18, 1793; Washington to Heads of Departments, Apr. 18, 1793; WGW, XXXII, 415-416, 419-421. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 44. Jefferson was almost certainly right about Hamilton's having been for practical purposes the author of the thirteen questions, though he omits to add that he himself might have prepared such a list had he so wished. In all likelihood he did not so wish, and for reasons similar to those for avoiding authorship of the Neutrality Proclamation. See also Thomas, American Neutrality, pp. 28-30. 102. Jefferson, "Anas," Apr. 18, 1793, WTJ, I, 226-227; "Cabinet Opinion on Proclamation and French Minister," Apr. 19, 1793, ibid., VI, 217; Jefferson to Madison, June 23, 1793, ibid., 315-316; Hamilton, "Pacificus," Nos. I, VII, PAH, XV, 33-43, 130-135. Hamilton, according to Jefferson, repeated the same arguments in his "Pacificus" papers on these points as he had used in the cabinet discussions. Jefferson to Madison, June 29, 1793, WTJ, VI, 327. On the lack of evidence for, or the unlikelihood of, Great Britain's asking the United States for its neutrality at this time, see Malone, Jefferson, III, 70. 103. E.g., DeConde, Entangling Alliance, p. 195; Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York, 1973), p. 51. 104. Apr. 28, 1973, WTJ, VI, 232. 105. "Cabinet Opinion," ibid., 217.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 339-344 106. Jefferson to Madison, May 19, June 29, Aug. 11, 1793; to Monroe, July 14, 1793; ibid., 259, 328, 369, 346. Washington, Proclamation, WGW, XXXII, 430-431. 107. Hamilton and Knox to Washington, May 2, 1793; Hamilton to Washington, May 2, 1793; PAH, XIV, 367-396, 39Mo8. 108. Jefferson to Washington, Apr. 28, 1793, "Opinion on French Treaties," Apr. 28, 1793, WTJ, VI, 218-231. Though Jefferson had not seen Hamilton's written opinion, and probably never would, he explicitly addressed himself in this paper to the same arguments Hamilton had already made verbally. 109. uAnas," Apr. 18, Mar. 30, 1793, ibid., I, 227, 224. The entry of Apr. 18 was written on May 6. no. Letter of Credence, Jan. 13, 1793, F.-Alphonse Aulard, ed., Recueil des actes du Comite de Salut Public; avec la correspondance ojficielle des representants en mission et le registre due Conseil Executif Provisoire (Paris, 1889), I, 478-480; English translation in National Archives Microfilm Publications, M^3 (France), Roll i; Genet's powers to negotiate new treaty, Jan. 4, AECPE-U 37, 22-23; Address of National Convention to United States of America, Dec. 22, 1792, AECPE-U 36, 473~474vo. For Genet's speech to Washington see Jefferson to Madison, May 19, 1793, WTj, VI, 260-261. in. It is not likely that Washington was effusive. But only later, in making up his defense for the failure of his mission, did Genet conclude that he had been coldly received. This was because Washington, as he claimed, was "profoundly wounded" at the contrast in public opinion between the address presented to the President by "300 merchants, mostly English," and the "six thousand citizens who came to felicitate me upon my arrival." Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 7, 1793, CFM, p. 245. See also Genet to Jefferson, July 4, 1797, Minnegerode, Jefferson, p. 417, in which he referred to it as "a perfectly neutral and insignificant reception." 112. Keller, "Genet Mission," pp. 142-148; Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, May 17, 18, 20, 1793; J. S. Biddle, ed., Autobiography of Charles Biddle . . . 1745-1821 (Philadelphia, 1883), pp. 251-253; Hazen, Contemporary Opinion, pp. 176-182; Genet, "Rapport," De Witt, Jefferson, pp. 544-546. 113. "His principles, his experience, his talents, his devotion to the cause we are defending inspire me with the greatest confidence, and give me to hope that we shall arrive at that glorious end which the general interest of mankind should make us desire to attain." Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, May 18, 1793, CFM, p. 215. 114. Genet to Jefferson, May 22, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 142. 115. Ibid., 147. 116. Jefferson to Ternant, May 15, 1793; Genet to Jefferson, May 27, 1793; ibid., 147150. 117. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, May 31, 1793, CFM, p. 216; Keller, "Genet Mission," pp. 215-216; Minnegerode, Jefferson, p. 418; National Gazette, June i, 1793. Jefferson, Genet reported, "has published in the papers under the name of Veritas three letters [there were actually four] against the system of these gentlemen. . . ." He referred in another letter to Jefferson's "anonymous writings." Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 7, Aug. 15, 1793, CFM, pp. 245, 241. 118. Same to same, Oct. 7, 1793, ibid., p. 245; to Jefferson, July 4, 1797, Minnegerode, Jefferson, p. 418. "Thus initiated by you in the foibles and secrets of your Cabinet, in the political divisions of your country, seeing mine in danger . . . I could only give myself up to you who seemed so well disposed, to the people which appeared so warm, and derive every possible advantage from my position. . . . I did so." Ibid. Genet told Jefferson that he, unlike Jefferson, did not have it in his character "to speak . . . in one way, and act in

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another; to have an official language, and a language confidential." Same to same, Sept. 18, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 172-174. 119. The disinclination to enter into new treaty negotiations with France seems to have been generally shared, occasioning no basic disagreements within the cabinet, and here the tone was probably established at the outset by Washington himself. When Jefferson first described to him Genet's offers on this question and on that of the debt, even before the Minister's letters had been translated, Washington's instinct was to avoid doing anything hasty. "In general, I observed to the Secretary," he noted, "that in the present posture of French Affairs, I thought we ought to consider very deliberately on all these measures before we acted—for it was impossible to decide with precision what would be the final issue of the contest—consequently, that the Governmt. ought not to go faster than it was obliged; but to walk on cautious ground." Journal of the Proceedings of the President, May 24, 1793, Washington Papers, LC. See also Woodfin, "Citizen Genet," pp. 406-413. There are two versions of how Jefferson handled this matter with Genet, one his and the other Genet's. Jefferson told the cabinet "that having observed from our conversns that the proposns to treat might not be acceded to immedty. I had endeavored to prepare Mr. Genet for it by taking occasion in conversns to apprize him of the controul over treaties which our consn had given to the Senate, that tho' this was indirectly done (because not having been authorized to say anything official on the subject, I did not venture to commit myself directly) yet on some subsequent conversn, I found it had struck him exactly as I had wished, for speaking on some other matter, he mentd. incidentally his propositions to treat, and said 'however as I know now that you cannot take up that subject till the meeting of the Senate, I shall say no more about it now,' and so proceeded with his other subject, which I do not now recollect." "Anas," Aug. 23, 1793, WT], I, 262. Genet, on the other hand, reported, "Mr. Jefferson seemed convinced of the usefulness of this negotiation and of the need to contract new political and commercial ties with us, but meanwhile he does not conceal from me that he will encounter many obstacles from the partisans of England and of the system introduced into the United States government, after the fashion of England's [celui de cette vieille puissance], a system that is today the principal foundation of its revenues and the sole mortgage of its debt. The enemies of that corrupting system are the philosophers, the friends of unlimited liberty, the farmers whose virtuous industry is the basis of all wealth; its defenders are all the capitalists, all the speculators in the funds, all the creatures of the Federal government in Congress, in the lower legislatures, and in the government, for the art of buying men is already pushed very far among our brothers." Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 5, 1793, CFM, p. 258. For a general survey of the problem see Randolph to Monroe, June i, 1795, ASP:FR, I, 705712, in which Randolph quotes (though inaccurately, 708-709) from Genet's instructions; on background see George F. Zook, "Proposals for New Commercial Treaty Between France and the United States, 1778-1793," South Atlantic Quarterly, VIII (July 1909), 267283. On Jefferson's state of mind during this period see below, pp. 357ff. 120. CFM, pp. 203, 206. 121. Genet to Jefferson, June i, 1793; Jefferson to Genet, June i, 1793; ASP:FR, I, 151. Jefferson's original draft had closed with: "no doubt need be entertained that his case will have the favorable issue you desire. The forms of law involve certain necessary delays; of which however he will assuredly experience none but what are necessary. It will give me great pleasure to be able to communicate to you that the laws (which admit of no controul) on being applied to the actions of Mr. Henfield, shall have found in them no cause for animadversion," WT], VI, 274n.

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NOTES

FOR P A G E S 345-3^0350

122. ASP:FRf I, 150. 123. Ibid., 156. Hamilton's paper would have been even more brusque had not Washington asked him to rewrite it. "This not according altogether with my ideas/' he noted, "as being rather too dry & abrupt an answer—I sent it to the Secretary of State for his remarks thereon." Journal of Proceedings of the President, June 6, 1793, Washington Papers, LC; Jefferson to Washington, June 6,1793, WTJ, VI, 287-289. For a full discussion of the French debt see Robert R. LaFollette, "The American Revolutionary Foreign Debt and Its Liquidation" (Unpub. diss., George Washington U., 1931); Samuel F. Bemis, "Payment of the French Loans to the United States, 1777-1795," Current History, XXIII (Mar. 1926), 824-836; Alphone Aulard, "La dette americaine envers la France," Revue de Paris, III (May 15, June i, 1925), 319-338, 524-550. 124. On benevolent neutrality see Hyneman, first American Neutrality, pp. 15-16, 153-154. Article XXII of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1778 had stated, "It shall not be lawful for any foreign Privateers . . . who have Commissions from any other Prince or State in enmity with either Nation to fit their Ships in the Ports of either the one or the other of the aforesaid Parties," and Jefferson himself (judging from notes he made for a debate in cabinet over what to do about Genet's privateers fitted out at Charleston) seems to have thought there was some implication that it might be lawful for France to do this. "So understood universally, by everyone here—by ourselves at Charleston—by Genet. Still true it is not expressly permitted—may be forbidden. But till forbidden must be slight offense." Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America (Washington, 1931), II, 19-20; "Anas," May 20, 1793, WTJ, I, 229. The first federal statute explicitly forbidding such activity was the Neutrality Act of 1794, though the cabinet meanwhile concluded that it could be forbidden on other grounds. See below, pp. 352-354. 125. On March 5, 1795, Congress passed an act which did in effect liquidate the remaining portion of the French debt. LaFollette, "Foreign Debt," pp. 118-119. 126. "Conversation with George Hammond," [Apr. 2-May 17, 1793], PAH, XIV, 273-274. 127. Genet to Jefferson, June 8, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 151. 128. Same to same, June 14, 1793, ibid., 156-157. 129. Same to same, June 14, 1793, ibid., 152. 130. Jefferson to Genet, June 17, 1793, ibid., 158. 131. Same to same, June 17, 1793, WTJ, VI, 311-312. 132. Same to same, June 19, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 157. 133. "Reasons for the Opinion of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary at War Respecting the Brigantine Little Sarah," July 8, 1793, PAH, XV, 75. 134. Genet to Jefferson, June 22, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 158-159. 135. Ibid. 136. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aug. 15, 1793, CFM. p. 241. 137. "Anas," July 5, 1793, WTJ, I, 235-237. 138. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, July 25, 1793, CFM, p. 221. 139. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, io2n. When Washington on July 25 asked Jefferson to prepare a statement of Genet's verbal communications, this conversation was not mentioned in the resulting paper Jefferson submitted the following day. Ibid., 109-110; "Note Given to the President," July 26, 1793, WTJt I, 248-250. The basic materials on the Louisiana plan are Frederick J. Turner, "The Origins of Genet's Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas," AHR, III (July 1898), 650-671; and "The Policy of France Toward the Mississippi Valley in the Period of Washington and Adams," ibid.,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 350-354 X (Jan. 1905), 249-279; Turner, ed., "Selections [on] . . . the Proposed French Expedition Under General George Rogers Clark against Louisiana, in the Years 1793-94," AHA:AR, 1896, I, 930-1107; and "Documents on the Relations of France to Louisiana, 1792-95," AHR, III (Apr. 1898), 499-516; "Journal of Andre Michaux, 1793-1796," Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1/48-1846 (Cleveland, 1904), III, esp. 27-53; F. R. Hall, "Genet's Western Intrigue, 1793-1794," Illinois State Historical Society Journal, XXI, no. 3, (1928), 359-381; Archibald Henderson, "Isaac Shelby and the Genet Mission,"MVHR, VI (Mar. 1920), 445-469; and Regina K. Crandall, "Genet's Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas, 1793-1794" (Unpub. diss., U of Chicago, 1928). Mildred S. Fletcher, "Louisiana as a Factor in French Diplomacy from 1763 to 1800," MVHR, XVII (Dec. 1930), 367-376, is critical of Turner's assumptions as to the seriousness of France's desire to recover Louisiana. 140. Thomas, American Neutrality, pp. 137-143; Jefferson, "Anas," July 5, 10, 1793, WTJf I, 235, 237-241. 141. Ibid., 237-241; Jefferson to Madison, July 7, 1793, ibid., VI, 338-339. 142. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 100. 143. July 10, 1793, cited in nn. 140, 141 above. 144. "Cabinet Opinion on 'Little Sarah,'" WTJ, VI, 339-340. See also n. 133 above, and "Reasons for his Dissent," ibid., 340-344. 145. Genet to Jefferson, July 9, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 163. 146. WGW, XXXIII, 4; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 102-103; "Anas," July 13, 23, Aug. i, 2, 20, 1793, WTJ, I, 243, 247, 252-254, 259-261. 147. Jefferson to Chief Justice and Judges, July 18, 1793, ibid.f VI, 351-352; Washington to Justices, July 23,1793, WGW, XXXIII, 28; Jay and Justices to Washington, Aug. 8, 1793, CPJ], III, 488-489; the twenty-nine questions are reprinted in WTJ, VI, 352-354. Jefferson to Genet, July 12, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 163 (on detaining Little Democrat in port). The exact date of the ship's departure is unknown (see Thomas, American Neutrality, p. 142); but it is interesting that the British should take it so mildly. Hammond simply observed (after noting that the captain had been ordered to repel by force any effort to detain her), "The privateer then sailed, and the government, from the want of having any cannon or military in readiness, was compelled to submit to the Belligerents." Aug. 3, 1793, WTJ, VI, 358-359148. Ibid.; Thomas, American Neutrality, pp. 152-153. 149. Francis Wharton, State Trials of the United States During the Administrations of Washington and Adams (Philadelphia, 1849), pp. 49-89; Hyneman, first Neutrality, pp. 129-132; Thomas, American Neutrality, pp. 170-176, 185-188; Jefferson to Isaac Shelby, Aug. 29, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 455. See also A. Henderson, cited in n. 139 above; and Samuel L. Wilson, A Review of('Isaac Shelby and the Genet Mission" by Dr. Archibald Henderson (Lexington, Ky., 1920). Sections i and 2 of the Neutrality Act of June 5, 1794, define recruiting and enlistment of American citizens in the service of a foreign belligerent as a "high misdemeanor." Statutes at Large, I, 381-383. 150. Thomas, American Neutrality, pp. 109-112; Jefferson to Genet, Nov. 8, 1793, ASP.-FR, I, 183. 151. Thomas, American Neutrality, pp. 206-220; Hyneman, First Neutrality, pp. 118127. 152. lbid.f pp. 145-150; Thomas, American Neutrality, pp. 247-257; on "free ships, free goods" see ibid.f pp. 257-260. The text of the June 8, 1793, Order in Council is in ASP:FR, I, 240; Jefferson to Genet, July 24, 1793, ibid., 166-167. 153. R. Therry, ed., Speeches of the Right Honorable George Canning, with a Memoir

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NOTES FOR PAGES 356-357 of His Life (London, 1836), V, 50 (in opposition to a motion to repeal the Foreign Enlistments Bill, Apr. 16, 1823). 154. Such is the impression given by Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 88, and there seems in general little reason to doubt it. Yet inasmuch as opposition did arise, some of it very sharp, a careful analysis of public opinion on the Proclamation would be useful. To our knowledge, none has been attempted. 155. Jefferson to Morris, Apr. 20, 1793; to Madison, Apr. 28, 1793; WTj, VI, 217, 232. 156. This point is made in Harry Ammon, "The Genet Mission and the Development of American Political Parties," JAH, LII (Mar. 1966), 725-741, upon which Ch. 10 of Professor Ammon's Genet Mission is based. 157. National Gazette, June i, 5, 8, 12, 1793. No one has yet discovered who "Veritas" really was. John Beckley, for whom a daily ration of gossip seems to have been necessary for health, told Jefferson that it was one William Irvine, "a clerk in the treasury, an Irishman," and that he, Beckley, "had it from Swaine the printer to whom the pieces were delivd.," but "would not permit the name of his informer to be men[tione]d." This was the very kind of thing Jefferson was most ready to believe. "I had long before suspected this excessive foul play in that party, of writing themselves in the character of the most exaggerated democrats, & incorporating with it a great deal of abuse on the President to make him believe it was that party who were his enemies, & so throw him entirely into the scale of the monocrats." But Beckley's stories, as Jefferson had occasion to know, were not always reliable. It seems somewhat far-fetched to imagine Hamilton risking such a thing, or even thinking of it; one wonders, on the other hand, what was to prevent Jefferson—if he was bent on finding out—from simply asking Freneau who "Veritas" was. Carroll and Ashworth mention that Washington received a note dated June 13, 1793 and signed only "G.H." (possibly George Hammond) saying that it was one "Stockdon of Richmond." They conclude, however, that "editor Freneau was directly responsible." It is quite probable that they are right, though they cite as their authority a "thoughtful interpretation," Samuel E. Forman, The Political Activities of Philip Freneau (Baltimore, 1902), which is in fact neither very thoughtful nor very dependable. (For instance, Forman quotes on p. 68 a passage from the Gazette which he attributes to Freneau, and on p. 71 another which he says "was most certainly not written by Freneau," and yet both are from "Veritas.") The mystery, it might be added, is deepened by Hamilton's failure even to mention "Veritas" in any of his public or private writings. Philip Marsh, "The Griswold Story of Freneau and Jefferson," AHR, LI (Oct. 1945), 68-73, nas a theory that "Veritas" may have been Thomas McKean, a leading Republican in Pennsylvania politics. Jefferson, "Anas," June 12, July 18, 1793, WTJ, I, 235, 244-245; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 86n. On Genet's opinion see n. 117 above. 158. Jefferson to Madison, Mar. [n.d.], 1793, WTJ, VI, 192; Hammond to Grenville, No. n, Apr. 2, 1793, PRO:FO 5/1. 159. National Gazette, Apr. 20,1793; on public opinion regarding the King's execution see Hazen, Contemporary Opinion, pp. 253-257. There is a story, since frequently reprinted, that at one of the civic feasts in Philadelphia celebrating the French Revolution in 1793, a pig (representing Louis XVI) was decapitated and the head passed around to the guests, each of whom exclaimed "Tyrant!" as he plunged his knife into it. This hallucinated scene—of which no witnesses have ever come to light—was almost certainly the invention of William Cobbett, a man whose extravagance of mind gave a lively tone to all his writings, and who was at this period of his life a violent francophobe. See William Playfair, The History of Jacobinism . . . With an Appendix by Peter Porcupine, Containing

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NOTES FOR PAGES 357-361 a History of the American Jacobins, Commonly Denominated Democrats (Philadelphia, 1796), II, Appendix, 25-26. See also Hazen, Contemporary Opinion, p. 183 and n.; Kenneth R. Rossman, Thomas Mifflin and the Politics of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952), p. 216. 160. Jefferson to _ , Mar. 18, 1793, L & B, IX, 45; Madison to Jefferson, Apr. 12, 1793, P]M, XV, 7. But in 1821 Jefferson wrote that he would not have voted for execution. "I should have shut up the Queen in a Convent, putting harm out of her power, and placed the king in his station, investing him with limited powers, which I verily believe he would have honestly exercised, according to the measure of his understanding. In this way no void would have been created, courting the usurpation of a military adventurer [Napoleon Bonaparte], nor occasion given for those enormities which demoralized the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy millions and millions of it's inhabitants." WTJf I, 141. A typically balanced Republican reaction was that of Benjamin Rush. "His execution," Rush wrote, "was unjust, unconstitutional, illegal, impolitic, and cruel in the highest degree. . . . Ninety-nine of our citizens out of a hundred have dropped a tear to his memory." As for France herself, however, Rush insisted that "the noble cause in which she is engaged, though much disgraced by her rulers, must finally prevail." Similarly, James Monroe wrote, "In my route I scarcely find a man unfriendly to the French revolution as now modified. Many regret the unhappy fate of the King. But they seem to consider these events as incidents to a much greater one, & which they wish to see accomplished." According to the Republican clergyman William Bentley: "The melancholy news of the beheading of the Roi de France is confirmed in the public opinion, & the event is regretted most sincerely by all thinking people. The french loose much of their influence upon the hearts of the Americans by this event." Rush to John Coakley Lettson, Apr. 26, 1793, Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, N.J., 1951), II, 635; Monroe to Jefferson, May 8, 1793, W]M, I, 252; The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (Salem, 1907), II, 13, Mar. 25,1793. 161. Jefferson to Monroe, May 5, 1793 (he wrote similarly to Thomas Mann Randolph and John Wayles Eppes, May 6, 23); to Madison, Apr. 28, 1793; WT], VI, 232, 238, 241, 264. 162. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, May 6, 1793; to Brissot de Warville, May 8, 1793; to Monroe, June 4, 1793; to same, May 5, 1793; ibid., 241, 249, 281-282, 238. 163. Madison to Jefferson, June 19, 1793, P]M, XV, 33. 164. Jefferson to Madison, May 12, 19, Aug. n; to Monroe, May 5, 1793; "Anas," Apr. 18, 1793. WT], VI, 250-251, 259; ibid., I, 227; PJM, XV, 57-58. 165. Jefferson to Madison, May 19, 27, June 2, 1793, WT], VI, 261, 268-269, 278. 166. Madison to Jefferson, May 27, 1793; Jefferson to Madison, June 9, 1793; PJM, XV, 22, 26-27. 167. "Anas," July 13, 1793, WT], I, 243. 168. PAH, XIV, 475, 193. 169. Hamilton to _ , May 18, 1793; "Defense of the President's Neutrality Proclamation," May 1793, ibid., 473-476, 503. 170. National Gazette, May 15, June i, 8, 1793. "But most," according to Donald H. Stewart, "eschewed any idea of war with Britain at this time. ..." The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany, N.Y., 1969), p. 700. 171. PAH, XV, 33-43 (June 29), 55-63 (July 3), 65-69 (July 6), 82-86 (July 10), 9095 (July 13-17), 100-106 (July 17), 130-133 (July 27).

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NOTES FOR PAGES 361-365 172. Jefferson, "Anas," Aug. 2, 1793, WTJ, I, 254. 173. "No Jacobin," No. I; David Ross to Hamilton, Aug. 30, 1793; PAH, XV, 145, 309-310. 174. Jefferson to Madison, July 7, June 29, 1793, WTJ, VI, 338, 328. Madison to Jefferson, July 18, 30, 1793; "Letters of Helvidius"; PJM, XV, 44, 66-73, 80-87, 95~IO3> 106-110, 113-120. 175. Jefferson, "Anas," Aug. 2, 1793, WT], I, 253; to Madison, Aug. n, 1793, PJM, XV, 57. 176. "Anas," Aug. 6, 1793; to Washington, Aug. n, 1793; WT], I, 256-259, VI, 366-

367. 177. Jefferson to Madison, Aug. 3, 1793, ibid., VI, 361.

178. For circumstances surrounding the preparation of this paper (post-dated Aug. 16, through not finally approved until Aug. 20), memoranda from other cabinet members, and the text itself, see "Anas," Aug. i, 2, 20, 1793; Jefferson to Morris, Aug. 16, 23, 1793; to Madison, Aug. 18, 1793; ibid., I, 252-254, 259-261, VI, 371-397. (Text also in ASP:FR, I, 167-172.) Jefferson transmitted a copy of it to Genet sometime in September, with a covering letter, to which Genet replied heatedly and at length on Sept. 18. WTJ, VI, 429430; ASP:FR, I, 172-174. 179. Jefferson to Madison, Aug. n, 1793, PJM, XV, 56-57. 180. The typical sequence of ideas, together with the quotations, in the above paragraph are drawn from the Caroline County (Virginia) resolutions of Sept. 10, 1793, which are in turn a modified version of Madison's "train of Ideas" sent to Jefferson on Sept. 2. Most of the Virginia meetings followed Madison's and Monroe's model, with many identically worded passages. The "our beloved president" phrase is from the Amelia County (Virginia) resolutions of Oct. 24. Boston Independent Chronicle, Oct. 10, 1793; PJM, XV, 79-80; Baltimore Daily Intelligencer, Nov. n, 1793. For Washington's replies, see WGW, XXXIII, passim. The best published treatment of these meetings is Ammon, "Genet Mission and Political Parties," which contains a very complete set of newspaper references. In one respect our interpretive emphasis differs a little from Professor Ammon's; he stresses the difference between "Republican" and "Federalist" resolutions, whereas we were rather more struck by the similarities. Another very full account of the resolutions campaign is in Woodfin, "Citizen Genet," pp. 323-338, 348-360. 181. Jefferson to Madison, Sept. i, 1793, WTJ, VI, 401-402; ASP:FR, I, 240. 182. Even the doctors had violently differing theories of the cause of the disease, which reflected in an uncanny way their political views. Republican doctors tended to claim that it arose from noxious local origins, whereas Federalist doctors thought it had been brought in from the outside (the thousands of Frenchmen fleeing from St. Domingue). The most notorious Republican cure, that of Benjamin Rush, required drawing extraordinary amounts of blood, more than most patients possessed. (Somewhat reminiscent of the guillotine, the treatment was frequently lethal.) Martin S. Pernick, "Politics, Parties, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXIX (Oct. 1972), 559-586. The two Republican leaders referred to above who died in the epidemic were James Hutchinson and Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant. Jefferson, in the letter referred to in n. 181 above, implied that Freneau, in being among the very last to adhere to Genet (who had "totally overturned the Republican interest in Philadelphia"), had become politically rather isolated. 183. "Anas," Nov. 28, 1793, WTJ, I, 270-272; AC, 3 Cong., i Sess., 14-16, 17-18, 138-139. The message referred to was one on the state of relations with France and Great

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NOTES FOR PAGES 366-372

Britain, transmitted to both houses on Dec. 5, 1793. The papers accompanying it are in ASP:FR, I, 141-246. On Jefferson's report and Madison's proposals for retaliatory legislation, see Ch. IX below. 184. See, e.g., calendar of ministers' correspondence for constant complaints from Ternant, Fauchet, and Adet at having no instructions from home; CFM, pp. 2off. 185. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, May 31, June 19, 1793 (received July 31, 30), CFM, pp. 216-218; Deforgues to Genet, July 30, 1793, ibid., pp. 228-231. 186. Ibid. 187. "Etats-Unis," AECPE-U 39, 466-469VO. Paine to Barere, Sept. 5, 1793; to Monroe, Oct. 20, 1794; Foner, ed., Complete Writings, II, 1332-1333, 1364-1374. De V. PayenPayne, ed., Memoirs of Bertrand Barere, Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety During the Revolution (London, 1896), II, 114. 188. Ibid., 114; Aulard, ed., Actes du Comite de Salut Public, VI, 461. 189. Deforgues to Genet, Sept. 28, 1793, AECPE-U 38, 2jj-2jjvo. 190. Thomas, American Neutrality, Appendix II (''Genet's Financial Difficulties"), pp. 272-274; Genet to Jefferson, Nov. 11, 14, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 185-186. A convenient summary of Genet's activities regarding the St. Domingue fleet is in Ammon, Genet Mission, pp. 111-131. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, July 22, 1793, AECPE-U 38, 62-67; see also Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 91 and n. 191. The Executive Council "shall review \_epurer, a word which literally means "purify" and "purge"] the selection of diplomatic agents already sent to various parts of the globe; such review to be submitted for the approval of the Committee of Public Safety with the instructions to be given." Aulard, ed., Actes du Comite de Salut Public, VI, 461, in connection with the order cited in n. 188 above. 192. "Expose succinct de la conduite du Citoyen Genet dans les Etats Unis de 1'Amerique," CFM, pp. 283-286. The archivist's annotation ("vers Octobre 1793"), however, seems to be mistaken. Paul Mantoux asserts, persuasively it seems to us, that the report was prepared sometime "in the course of September at the latest." "Le Comite de Salut Public et la mission de Genet aux Etats-Unis," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, XIII (Jan.-Feb. 1909), 12-13. 193. Morris to Jefferson, Oct. 10, 1793; to Deforgues, Oct. 8, 1793; Deforgues to Morris, Oct. 10, 1793; ASP:FR, I, 372-373, 375. "Etat des Agens politiques, Etats unis," AECPE-U 39, 193. Order of Oct. n, Aulard, ed., Actes du Comite de Salut Public, VII, 359-360. There is no evidence that this was other than a routine committee decision, or that Robespierre had made it his particular business, as implied in Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 94. Nor are the notations in the margins of Otto's memorandum in Robespierre's handwriting. This paper too ("Etat des Agens politiques") seems to have been misattributed as to date ("Brumaire"); it could not have been prepared after Oct. n, and probably not before Oct. 8. See again Mantoux, "Comite de Salut public," 18 and n. 194. A. G. J. [sic] Ducher, Les deux hemispheres (Paris, Oct. 28, 1793), AECPE-U 39, 20I-204VO. Roland and Condorcet also committed suicide. 195. Rapport. . . sur la situation politique de la Republique, Nov. 17, 1793, AECPE-U 39, 279-293VO.; also in Henri Calvet, ed., Les grands orateurs republicans: Robespierre (Monaco, 1950), pp. 149-168. 196. Instructions to Commissioners, Nov. 15, 1793, CFM, p. 293. On Ducher's economic dogmas see Frederick L. Nussbaum, Commercial Policy in the French Revolution: A Study of the Career of G. ]. A. Ducher (Washington, 1923). 197. Louis Didier, "Le Citoyen Genet," Revue des questions historiques, XCII (July 1912), 73.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 372-382

198. Instructions to Commissioners, Nov. 15, 1793; Fauchet and Commissioners to Minister of Foreign Affairs, May 20, 1794; CFM, pp. 292, 345. Murdoch, "Citizen Mangourit," 537-539199. Fletcher, "Louisiana as a Factor in French Diplomacy," pp. 361, 370-373; E. Wilson Lyon, Louisiana in Trench Diplomacy, 1759-1804 (Norman, Okla., 1934), pp. 61— 65, 69. See also n. 139 above. 200. King, King, I, 478-479; Minnegerode, Jefferson, pp. 36iff. The qu. from Martha Genet is in ibid., p. 403. 201. George Clinton Genet, Washington, Jefferson, and "Citizen" Genet, 1793 (New York, 1899), pp. 50-51.

CHAPTER IX

America and Great Britain 1. Jefferson, "Anas," Nov. 28, 1793, WTJ, I, 271-272; ASP:FR, I, 141-246 (the Order in Council of June 8, 1793, repr. on p. 240); Hammond to Grenville, No. 2, Feb. 22, 1794, FO 5/4; Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy Toward the United States, 1783-1795 (Dallas, Tex., 1969), p. 292. 2. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 144 and n. 3. Jefferson, Report on Privileges and Restrictions, WTJ, VI, 470-484. A useful treatment of the report's background is Merrill D. Peterson, "Thomas Jefferson and Commercial Policy, 1783-1793," WMQ 3rd Ser., XXII (Oct. 1965), 584-610. Peterson (ibid., 609), Vernon G. Setser (Commercial Reciprocity, p. 114), and Dumas Malone (Jefferson, III, 159) are inclined to think that Jefferson intended his report to be simply a kind of valedictory, and that he expected nothing to come of it. But the evidence seems to show otherwise. The timing of the report, the circumstances in which it was issued, and the elaborate use Madison made of it in his resolutions campaign early in 1794 a^ point to the conclusion that both he and Jefferson were in dead earnest. 4. John Lord Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the United States 2nd ed. (London, 1784), p. 87. 5. The report is printed in Collection of Interesting and Important Reports and Papers on the Navigation and Trade of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Colonies in the West Indies and America, with Tables of Tonnage and of Exports and Imports, &c. &c. &c. (London, 1807), PP- 47~I54- The version that Jefferson saw in abstract form and filed with his papers is printed as Report of a Committee of the Lords of the Privy Council on the Trade of Great Britain with the United States, January, 1791, Worthington C. Ford, ed. (Washington, 1888). On the circumstances under which he came by it, see PTJ, XVIII, 267-272. 6. Report, WTJ, VI, 481-484. 7. AC, i Sess., 3 Cong., 157 (Jan. 3, 1794). 8. The great drop in the legal trade between the United States and the British West Indies, emphasized in the Hawkesbury Report, was for the most part offset by smuggling, by trade authorized under temporary proclamations from hard-pressed island governors, and by a very extensive indirect trade conducted through Dutch and French ports in the Caribbean. With the outbreak of war in 1793, British shipowners began shifting their tonnage to the more profitable and less risky European and Far Eastern trade, and the governors opened their ports more and more freely to all manner of American products

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NOTES FOR PAGES 382-383

for extended periods of time. According to U.S. Treasury statistics, in the year ending Sept. 30, 1794 (the very time during which the Madison resolutions were being debated), 58,989 tons of American shipping had made at least one trip to the British West Indies (repeated voyages were not counted), whereas for 1790 the figure had been only 3,620 tons. This meant—since the tonnage in the Dutch and French West Indies trade dropped only slightly—that the Americans had completely absorbed the trade with the West Indies: British, Dutch, and French combined. On this and other matters referred to in the above paragraph see ASP:CN, I, 329-330; Alice B. Keith, "Relaxations in the British Restrictions on the American Trade with the British West Indies, 1783-1802," Journal of Modern History, XX (Mar. 1948), 1-18; and Gordon C. Bjork, "The Weaning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Changes, and Economic Development," Journal of Economic History, XXIV (Dec. 1964), 541-560. 9. This estimate is in John G. B. Hutchins, The American Maritime Industries and Public Policy, 1789-1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), p. 185. Though statistics for this period are erratic, evidence that a tremendous upturn in shipbuilding began in 1793, a point of particular importance for the events being discussed above, is scarcely to be doubted. "It can be demonstrated," according to the Columbian Centinel of Boston on June 21, 1794, "that the quantity of shipping owned in this town has increased more than double within the last eighteen months," and Edmond Genet noted similar activity in Philadelphia. Writing home on May 18, 1793, Genet reported that he had promises of 600,000 barrels of American grain and flour but that ships were scarce; they were, however, "being built everywhere." CFM, p. 215. Robert Goodloe Harper in a circular letter to his constituents (Mar. 22, 1795) stated that in 1789 "the ships built in the United States amounted to between 17,000 and 18,000 tons. In 1790, to 32,000 tons, which was an increase of nearly double in one year. In the year 1793 and in the first six months of 1794, the United States built vessels to the amount of 80,000 tons, without including the ports of Boston, Nantucket, Baltimore, Alexandria, Edenton, and the two Wilmingtons—these are ship-building ports. If the returns from them were completed, it would probably appear that the ship building of the United States in 1793, and the first part of 1794, amounted to at least 100,000 tons. This is at the rate of 70,000 tons which is more than four times what it was in the year 1789." Newport Mercury, qu. in Maude H. Woodfin, "Citizen Genet and his Mission" (Unpub. diss., U. of Chicago, 1928), p. 292n. Alexander Hamilton reported a total of 289,394 tons °f shipping as of Sept. 30, 1792, and 367,734 tons as of Dec. 30, 1793. Subtracting about 15,000 tons for "ghost tonnage" (shipping still registered but having been lost or otherwise destroyed during the previous year), and adding roughly the same amount for ships sold to foreigners (the formula used by Albert Gallatin in his accounting of 1812), Harper's estimate of a 7o,ooo-ton increase in shipbuilding for 1793 would seem about right. ASP:CN, I, 252, 897. On the other hand, Douglass North's table in "U.S. Balance of Payments," p. 595, appears to show a drop in registered tonnage between 1792 and 1793 (and thus by implication a drop in shipbuilding), but this is almost certainly mistaken. For the years 17901792 North seems to have used "entering tonnage" rather than "registered tonnage" ("entering tonnage" is in effect a ship's tonnage multiplied by as many times as that ship entered port during a given year), whereas from 1793 on, he used the official figures for registered tonnage (which is counted only once). This created the anomaly of a higher figure for 1792 than for 1793. 10. On this point see PAH, XIII, 407. 11. AC, 3 Cong., i Sess., 189 (Jan. 13, 1794).

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NOTES FOR PAGES 383-390 12. Ibid., 191. 13. Ibid., 197; see also above, pp. 248-249. 14. /&/ 54933. Hammond to Grenville, No. 4, Mar. 7, 1794, FO 5/4; PAH, XVI, 132 and note. The vote does not appear in AC. 34. E.g., "Probably the outstanding point in connection with the negotiation of the treaty, however, is the extent to which a small group of Federalist Senators, who were also among Washington's most trusted advisers, dominated the entire proceeding. These men suggested the mission; they secured its acceptance by the President, and practically directed the selection of the envoy; they secured his confirmation by the Senate; they sent him out fully cognizant of their views as to what sort of treaty should be striven for and under very flexible instructions from the Department of State." Ralston Hayden, The Senate and Treaties, 1789-1817: The Development of the Treaty-Making Functions of the United States Senate During Their formative Period (New York, 1920), and qu. with approval in Edgar A. Robinson, The Evolution of American Political Parties: A Sketch of Party Development (New York, 1924), pp. 65-66. 35. PAH, XVI, 131; ASP.-FR, I, 430. 36. Hamilton to Washington, Mar. 8, 1794, PAH, XVI, 134-136. 37. King, King, I, 517-518. 38. AC, i Sess., 3 Cong., 485, 500-504. (The debate on the frigates bill is in ibid., 432-441, 444-451, 459, 485-498.) Madison to Jefferson, Mar. 12, 1794, PJM, XV, 279.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 390-393

39. Same to same, Mar. 9, 14, 1794, ibid., 274, 284. Madison's arguments against building warships were made on Feb. 6, 7, and n, 1794, AC, 3 Cong., i Sess., 433, 438, 441, 449-451. 40. Ibid., 521-522 (Mar. 14,1794). Madison's letters of Mar. 9,12, and 14 to Jefferson, and to his father, Mar. 10, 1794, reflect the course of his thinking on both the commercial resolutions and the possibilities of an embargo. PJM, XV, 276-277, and citations in nn. 41-42 above. 41. Pinckney to Randolph, Nov. 25, 1793, qu. in PAH, XVI, 130-131. The Order in Council of Nov. 6 was still a secret, but Pinckney had heard rumors that "they meditate fresh embarrassments to our trade." 42. King, King, I, 518. "The President," according to King, "was at first reserved [one could probably read "glacial"]—finally more communicative and apparently impressed with Ellsworth's representation." 43. Madison to Jefferson, Mar. 24, 1794, PJM, XV, 288. The debate, held behind closed doors, was not reported in AC. 44. "We are continually receiving information of the capture, dentention & condemnation of our vessels," Christopher Gore wrote to Rufus King from Boston on Mar. 15. The merchants there, he said, were for the time being opposed to punitive action against British property. "But such a temper cannot be expected to continue for any length of time, in those, who, from the most exalted state of affluence, are thrown into poverty and bankruptcy. ..." The Salem merchants, he added, "have not that spirit of forbearance which operates on those of this place." King, King, I, 552-553. According to the Federalist Gazette of the United States, "The unparalleled depredations on commerce by the British nation, has provoked universal indignation. . . . Indeed what is their conduct but universal piracy!" Mar. 26, 1794. 45. Skipwith to Randolph, Mar. i, 7, 1794, ASP:PR, I, 428-429. According to the endorsement on the originals in the National Archives, they were received at Baltimore on Mar. 20, though there is no indication of when they reached Philadelphia. 46. Clinton to Washington, Mar. 20, 1794, enclosing copy of Dorchester's speech, Washington Papers, LC. The text of the speech was printed in Gazette of the United States, Mar. 26, 1794, and headed "By this Day's mail NEW-YORK, March 24," which suggests that Washington received his copy no later than that date, and that this and the Skipwith dispatches must have reached him at nearly the same time, certainly no more than a day or two apart. For a discussion of how the speech became public see Samuel F. Bemis, Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1962), p. 267^ The text of it is also printed in Ernest A. Cruikshank, ed., The Correspondence of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe (Toronto, 1923-1931), II, 149-150. 47. ASP:FR, I, 428: AC, 3 Cong., i Sess., 75-76, 529-530; John J. Reardon, Edmund Randolph: A Biography (New York, 1975), p. 444, n. 63. 48. AC, 3 Cong., i Sess., 535-541; Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Pounding Fathers (Berkeley Calif., 1970), pp. 121-122. The point about Washington's conviction that the British intended war assumes that if he had not been so convinced he would not even have considered transmitting the Dorchester speech before making an effort to confirm its authenticity. 49. Gazette of the United States, Mar. 28, 1794; Herman LeRoy to Rufus King, Mar. 30, 1794, King, King, I, 557. 50. Gazette of the United States, Mar. 28, 1794; Washington to Clinton, Mar. 31,1794, WGW, XXXIII, 310-311. (Although Washington's inference that the speech had been made on orders from London proved unfounded, there were good grounds for it in the

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NOTES FOR PAGES 393-399 speech itself and in the references Dorchester made therein to having recently returned from a stay in England.) Pinckney to Randolph, Jan. 9, 1794, ASP:FR, I, 430-431. 51. Ibid., 429. The rumors had been current among Federalists for two or three weeks (see John Alsop to Rufus King, Apr. 4, 1794, King, King, I, 559); the Nicholas and Monroe letters cited below indicate that by now they had reached the Republicans as well. 52. Randolph to Washington, Apr. 6, 1794, Jared Sparks, ed., Correspondence of the American Revolution: Being Letters of Eminent Men to George Washington from the Time of His Taking Command of the Army to the End of His Presidency (Boston, 1853), IV, 448451; Nicholas to Washington, Apr. 6, 1794, qu. in PAH, XVI, 263, and WJM, I, 292n.; Monroe to Washington, Apr. 8, 1794, ibid., I, 291-292; Washington to Monroe, Apr. 9, 1794, WGW, XXXIII, 320-321; Reardon, Randolph, pp. 263-264. 53. Ibid., p. 264; King, King, I, 518-519; Jay to Mrs. Jay, Apr. 9, 10, 1794, CPJJ, IV, 2-354. AC, 3 Cong., i Sess., 561-603. 55. Hamilton to Washington, Apr. 14, 1794, PAH, XVI, 266-279 (see 265^ on date of confirmation). King, King, I, 520-521. Washington to Jay, Apr. 15, 1794; to Randolph, Apr. 15, 1794; to Senate, Apr. 16, 1794; WGW, XXXIII, 329-330, 332-333. AC, 3 Cong., i Sess., 88-90, 675-683, 731-734. Combs, Jay Treaty, pp. 134-135. The Jay appointment, according to Madison, "has had the effect of impeding all legislative measures for extorting redress from G.B." To Jefferson, May u, 1794, PJM, XV, 327. 56. Philadelphia General Advertiser, Apr. 28, 1794; see also Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany, N.Y., 1969), pp. 188-190 for a summary of the various newspaper arguments against the mission. 57. Boston Independent Chronicle, Apr. 28, 1794. 58. Madison to Jefferson, May n, Apr. 28, 1794, PJM, XV, 328, 316. On Jay's views regarding debts and Peace Treaty violations see Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 283-285; and Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, p. 86. 59. Ibid., pp. 310-312; Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 239-241. Hammond on Apr. 7 had told Rufus King "in confidence that Dorchester was not authorized to have made the speech. . . . " King, King, I, 524. 60. Ibid., 523; PAH, XVI, 31911. 61. Ibid., XVI, 319-323; Frank Monaghan, John Jay, Defender of Liberty (Indianapolis, 1935), P- 368. 62. This supposition was based on the British Order in Council of Jan. 8, 1794, which confined seizures to ships sailing directly between European ports and the French West Indies (in addition to those carrying French property or military contraband). The operative word is "directly," the implication being that island cargoes first landed in the United States and then trans-shipped would not be subject to seizure. Hamilton to Washington, Apr. 23,1794; to Jay, May 6,1794; PAH, XVI, 320, 382-383. The Order is repr. in ASP:FR, !> 43163. PAH, XVI, 322-323, 357-358. 64. ASP:FR, I, 472-474. 65. PAH, XVI, 381. 66. Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 297, asserts that this "conflicted with the mandate in Jay's instructions not to let the question of the spoliations be connected in the negotiation with that of the old treaty disputes." Such was not, however, what the instructions said. They specified that "no adjustment of the [inexecution and infraction of the treaty] is to be influenced by the [vexations and spoliations]." ASP:FR, I, 473; italics added. 67. Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 298.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 400-406

68. PAH, XVI, 383. 69. Grenville, according to Bemis, "shrewdly manipulated Jay during the negotiations"; Jay was "outplayed" by a "more able and experienced diplomat." Ritcheson, on the other hand, stoutly insists that whatever advantages Grenville secured, "they outweighed not a whit those won by John Jay." "The wheel had come full circle," he writes of the treaty's completion, "and Pitt, Grenville, and many of their countrymen caught at least a glimpse of Shelburne's vision: a working, harmonious, and mutually beneficial Anglo-American partnership." Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 282, 370, 371; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 351, 352. 70. E.g., according to Bemis "the diplomatic situation, as it would have been viewed by a shrewd diplomatist who knew all the cards, all the players, all the stakes in the great international game, would have been pronounced favorable to the United States." (Except, of course, that "the great international game" did not include the United States.) Jay's Treaty, p. 316. And Ritcheson declares: "The stark truth in 1794 was that Britain simply could ill afford a war with America." (In principle this was probably more or less true, though one might hesitate to say how "stark" it was.) Aftermath of Revolution, p. 350. 71. Hawkesbury to Grenville, June 19, 1794, qu. in ibid., p. 324; Pitt and Grenville, it will be remembered, had been prepared in principle to consider evacuation of the posts since the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790. See also Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 78, 128, 206, 318. 72. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 299-303. 73. On the St. Domingue undertaking see John W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army (London, 1899-1930), IV, 326-349, 457-459, 466-476, 545-566; see also David P. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 17931798 (Oxford, 1982). 74. John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition (London, 1983), II, 327-361; Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 (New York, 1964), pp. 14-15, 19-20, 129. 75. Philip A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History (London, 1965), pp. 75-122; Ehrman, Younger Pitt, pp. 385-402. 76. Francis O'Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, 1967), pp. 139-208; Ehrman, Younger Pitt, pp. 402-419. 77. Combs, Jay Treaty, pp. 143-144; IBM, pp. 57-58. 78. Strictly speaking, two; the bulk of Hammond's dispatches came in on the loth (Nos. 2-15, between Feb. 22 and Apr. 17), with two final ones (Nos. 17 and 18, dated Apr. 28 and May 8) arriving on the i2th. Ibid., p. 58n.; Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 3oon. 79. Hammond to Grenville, Feb. 22, 1794, No. 2, FO 5/4. 80. Same to same, Apr. 17, 1794, No. 15, FO 5/4. A portion of this dispatch is repr. in PAH, XVI, 281-286. 81. Same to same, Apr. 28, 1794, No. 17, FO 5/4. Jay had, according to Hammond, "assured me of his sincere personal disposition to remove by fair and candid explanation every obstacle that may be opposed to the amicable adjustment of the points in discussion between Great Britain and the United States; and added that the hope of effecting so great a benefit to his country was the sole consideration which could have induced him to accept the trust that had been committed to him, in the execution of which he had required that much should be left to his own discretion, and that for this reason he had explicitly expressed to this government his determination of relinquishing his appointment, if any of the measures of hostility against Great Britain which have been so much agitated in the house of representatives, should be passed by the legislature, and finally receive the sanction of the President under the existing circumstances."

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NOTES FOR PAGES 406-410

82. See n. 74 above. 83. Jay to Randolph, June 23, 1794, No. 2, ASP:FRf I, 476, and CPJJ, IV, 28; Jay to Washington, June 23, 1794, ibid., IV, 26; Jay to Randolph, July 6, 1794, No. 4, ASP:FR, I, 476; Dundas to Simcoe, July 4, 1794, and Dundas to Dorchester, July 5, 1794, Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society Historical Collections, XXIV (1895), 678-682; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 319-320. 84. Jay to Randolph, July 6, 9, 1794, Nos. 4 and 5, ASP:FR, I, 477, 479; Jay to Hamilton, July n, 1794, PAH, XVI, 608-609. See also Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 32on. 85. Jay to Randolph, July 12, 1794, No. 6, ASP:FR, I, 479. 86. Same to same, Sept. 13, 1794, No. 15, July 6, 1794, No. 4, ibid., 486, 477; on exclusion of the secretaries, see Combs, Jay Treaty, p. 151. 87. Jay to Randolph, Sept. 13, 1794, No. 15, ASP:FR, I, 485-486. 88. Jay to Grenville, July 30, 1794; Grenville to Jay, Aug. i, 1794, ibid., 481-482. The two Orders are repr. in ibid., 482, and in Josiah T. Newcomb, "New Light on Jay's Treaty," American Journal of International Law, XXVIII (Oct. 1934), 686n., respectively. 89. Jay to Randolph, Aug. 8, 1794, No. n, ASP:FR, I, 483. 90. Jay to Grenville, Aug. 6, 1794, ibid., 486-487. 91. The point was made in Hamilton's memorandum of Apr. 23,1794, to Washington, having been agreed upon in cabinet meetings and conceded by Jefferson in his correspondence with Hammond the year before. PAH, XVI, 320-321. See esp. Jefferson to Hammond, Sept. 5, 1793, ASP:FR, I, 174-175. 92. Grenville to Jay, Aug. 30, 1794, ibid., 487-490. See also "Project of Heads of Proposals to be made to Mr. Jay," undated ms. in Grenville's private papers, pr. as Appendix in Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 381-390. 93. Jay to Grenville, Sept. i and 4, 1794, ASP:FR, I, 490-492. Grenville had actually proposed two possible lines which would rectify this alleged "boundary gap," resulting from a "geographical error" at the time of the Peace Treaty, subsequently discovered by George Hammond, and Jay in his letter of Sept. 4 to Grenville enclosed two maps showing in square miles the territorial losses which the United States would incur from either of the proposed adjustments. They are reproduced in ibid., 492. For a discussion of the boundary gap question see Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 329-332, and "Jay's Treaty and the Northwest Boundary Gap," AHR, XXVII (Apr. 1922), 465-484. 94. Jay to Grenville, Sept. 4, 1794; Grenville to Jay, Sept. 5, 1794; "Notes" on Grenville's projet in preparation for meeting of Sept. 6, enclosed in Jay to Randolph, Sept. 13, No. 15; same to same, Oct. 29, 1794, No. 19; ibid., 490-493, 500. 95. Grenville to Jay (private), Sept. 7, 1794; Jay to Grenville (private), Sept. 7, 1794 (on the indiscretions of Monroe and the two letters from Randolph to the Committee of Public Safety, likewise rather giddy, which Monroe presented at the same time), FO 95/ 512. "I do not believe," Grenville wrote, "that you personally will much envy Mr. Monroe the honour of the fraternal kiss which he has received; and if such an exhibition is thought not to degrade an American Minister I know not why it should become matter of complaint on the part of the British Government." "But," he continued, referring to both Monroe and Randolph, "it is not consistent with neutrality to make Ministerial declarations of favour and preference, nor can it lead to the maintenance of good order in any Country that its Government should give official sanction and adherence to acts at which all Religion and all Humanity revolt." Jay in his reply wrote, "Had I been in Mr. Randolph's place, I should not have written exactly such a Letter." Bemis calls this "a pious exchange of epistles" (Jay's Treaty, p. 333), which it certainly was. Jay to Washington, Sept. 13, 1794; to Randolph, Sept. 13 (private); to Hamilton, Sept. n, 1794; CPJJ, IV, 58-60; National

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NOTES FOR PAGES 410-411

Archives Microfilm, Diplomatic Dispatches, Series M39, Great Britain. Jay was exceedingly blunt with Randolph, telling him of the "uneasy Sensation" the affair had created in London. "It is not pleasant for me to say these Things, but so is the fact, and it is proper that you should know it." The texts of Monroe's speech and Randolph's letters are in ASP.-FR, I, 674-675. 96. Jay to Grenville, Sept. 30, 1794, pr. as Appendix III in Bemis, Jay's Treaty, pp. 391-43397. Bemis calls this a "stupendous retreat" on Jay's part from the positions he had taken in his Sept. 30 draft, with which Ritcheson strongly disagrees. The evidence seems somewhat to favor Ritcheson's view here, though Ritcheson's further argument that Jay's reason for not transmitting the draft home with his other papers was that it consisted merely of "a set of working notes" appears somewhat strained. Ibid., p. 334; Aftermath of Revolution, p. 332 and n.; The text of the treaty is in each of these works, as well as in ASP:FR, I, 520-525; and Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America (Washington, 1931-48), II, 245-267. 98. Jefferson to Genet, July 24, 1793. ASP:FR, I, 166-167; to Robert R. Livingston, Sept. 9, 1801, WTJ, VIII, 92. "And I believe we may safely affirm," Jefferson continued, "that not a single instance can be produced where any nation of Europe, acting professedly under the law of nations alone, unrestrained by treaty, has, either by it's executive or judiciary organs, decided on the principle of 'free bottoms, free goods.'" 99. On the question of free trade across the border, see esp. Grenville to Jay, Aug. 30, 1794, Art. i of treaty projet, ASP:FR, I, 488; Jay to Randolph, Sept. 13, 1794, No. 15 ("Notes," Note 4), and same to same, Oct. 29, 1794, No. 19 ("It was proposed that goods for the Indian trade should pass from Canada to the Indians within the United States, duty free; to this I could not consent"); ibid., 488, 492, 500. On tonnage duties, Art. IV of the treaty reserved to the British government "the right of imposing on American Vessels entering into the British Ports in Europe a Tonnage Duty, equal to that which shall be payable by British Vessels in the Ports of America." This was equalization, in that each would pay the same tonnage duties in the other's ports, but it did not do away with the discrimination in American ports between American and foreign ships as established by the Tonnage Act of 1789; six cents a ton on American-built and American-owned ships, thirty cents on ships built in America but partly or wholly owned by foreigners, and fifty cents on all others. (U.S. Statutes at Large, I, 27). This discrimination, on the other hand, was not the same kind Madison had in mind when he first devised the measure; Madison's original bill would also have discriminated between British and French shipping by requiring the former to pay a higher duty. The treaty prohibited this form of discrimination. Jay wrote Randolph on Oct. 29, 1794, "It has been proposed that alien tonnage and impost should cease; to this there . . . appeared to me to be very strong objections." (ASP:FR, I, 500.) The "strong objections" held, inasmuch as Art. IV of the completed treaty provided that "the United States will not impose any new or additional Tonnage Duties on British Vessels, nor increase the now subsisting difference between the Duties payable on the importation of any articles in British or in American Vessels." (Italics added.) See also Jay to Randolph, Nov. 19, No. 22, ASP:FR, I, 503. It is true, on the other hand (turning again to the "equalization" referred to above), as Combs points out, that "the lighthouse and Trinity fees charged American ships in British ports exceeded the tonnage duties charged British ships in American ports." Jay Treaty, p. 152. 100. Jay to Randolph, Sept. 13, 1794, No. 15; same to same, Feb. 6, 1795, No. 31, ASP:FR, I, 485, 518. Jefferson to Monroe, May 10, 1786, PTJ, IX, 501. On the difficulties of presenting evidence, see Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 70-74.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 411-417

101. Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 339. 102. It speaks for Bemis's scrupulousness as a scholar that his own evidence, from which conclusions very different from his own may be drawn, is so complete. See ibid., pp. 299-315, 337-344; "The United States and the Abortive Armed Neutrality of 1794," AHR, XXIV (Oct. 1918), 26-47; and Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 352-353. 103. On the benefits to the United States of the East India article see Holden Furber, "The Beginnings of American Trade with India, 1784-1812," NEQ, XI (June 1938), 235265; and G. Bhagat, "The Jay Treaty and the Indian Trade," Essex Institute Historical Collections, CVII (Apr. 1972), 153-172. 104. Jay to Washington, Mar. 6, 1795, CP]], IV, 163; Jay to Randolph, June i, 1795, ASP.-FR, I, 520. 105. Ritcheson makes the most of this; see Aftermath of Revolution, pp. 345-350, and "Lord Hawkesbury and Article Twelve of Jay's Treaty," Studies in Burke and his Time, XV (Winter 1973-74), 155-166; see also Perkins, "Lord Hawkesbury and the Jay-Grenville Negotiations," and Combs, Jay Treaty, p. 154. 106. Grenville, "Heads of Proposals," Bemis, Jay's Treaty, p. 389; Buckingham to Grenville, Aug. 6, 1794, Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, Esq., Preserved at Dropmore (London, 1894), H> 611. 107. See above, nn. 11-12. 108. Monroe to Madison (and subsequently to Edmund Randolph), Dec. 18, 1794. Monroe wanted Madison to consider this letter and decide whether it should be passed on to Randolph. PJM, XV, 416-418; WJM, II, 154-161. 109. Jay to Hamilton, July 18, 1794, PAH, XVI, 609. no. Stewart, Opposition Press, pp. 190-191; "Peter Porcupine" [William Cobbett], A Little Plain English, Addressed to the People of the United States, on the Treaty . . . (Philadelphia, 1795), p. 105; John B. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1885), II, 213. in. "An American," Boston Independent Chronicle, Nov. 3, 1794; "A", repr. from ibid., Nov. 10,13,1794, from New York Journal Whereas the Federalist New York Minerva declared that the "spirited and manly, as well as decent tone of Mr. Jay's note to the British minister, does him much honor," the Republican Philadelphia Aurora, discussing the same note, referred to "the servile language of Mr. Jay's humble address to Lord Grenville." Repr. in Aurora, Oct. 25, 1794; ibid., Nov. 19, 1794. Likewise James Madison, who called it a "humiliating memorial." To Jefferson, Nov. 16, 1794, PJM, XV, 381. The Americans' exaggerated defensiveness and touchiness in matters of etiquette and ceremony is interestingly shown by "Philo-Republicanus" in the Aurora, Nov. 18,1794. The "genuine republican," he wrote, "conceives it beneath the dignity of Man, to either give or receive the smallest degree of unmerited respect. His candid soul disdains the mask of hypocritical politeness. ..." (Under this rule, of course, diplomacy as conventionally conducted would be out of the question.) 112. The fourteen essays appeared in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer from March n to June 10, 1795, and were collected in pamphlet form as Letters of Franklin on the Conduct of the Executive, and the Treaty Negociated, by the Late Chief Justice of the United States, with the Court of Great-Britain (Philadelphia, 1795). References here are to the pamphlet, the direct quotations being from pp. n, 20, 51. William Cobbett suspected that "Franklin" was none other than the French minister, Joseph Fauchet. But if he had been, Fauchet would have needed some local assistance, for he wrote no English—though the gallicism "combatting," quoted above, suggests that the Letters could have been a translation from French. When Cobbett's A Little Plain English was republished by his

.833

NOTES FOR PAGES 417-419

children in 1835, they ignored their father's (plausible, we believe) conjectures as to Fauchet, referring now to the Letters as "supposed to be written by Mr. [Alexander J.] Dallas, Secretary of the State of Pennsylvania, but published under the assumed name of franklin." The difficulty here is that in writing Dallas's life, his son, George M. Dallas, while referring freely to his father's activities against the treaty, including the authorship of a very influential pamphlet entitled features of Mr. Jay's Treaty which the junior Dallas reprinted as an appendix, made no reference whatever to "Franklin." In tone and texture the two works do not appear similar. Plain English (1795 ed.), pp. 89-90; John M. Cobbett and James P. Cobbett, eds., Selections from Cobbett's Political Works . . . (London, 1835), I, 53; George M. Dallas, Life and Writings of Alexander James Dallas (Philadelphia, 1871), pp. 50—54, 160-210. But it would be a safe guess that "Franklin," whoever he was, must have had close connections with the Democratic Society of Philadelphia. 113. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 236-239. 114. Stewart, Opposition Press, p. 192. Josiah Parker declared that "if we do not get all we ask it must be the fault of our Negociator at the Court of London." Parker to Thomas Smith, Dec. 28, 1794, qu. in Combs, Jay Treaty, p. 159. 115. WFA, I, 166. Ames seems to have been fairly shrewd on this; he was almost certainly referring to a set of suspiciously honeyed predictions in the Philadelphia Aurora, Feb. 2, 1795, of the wonderful benefits shortly forthcoming with the treaty; only five days later, Feb. 7, 1795, the Aurora was denouncing "so ignoble, so dishonorable a treaty as that said to have been concluded." 116. News that a treaty had actually been signed reached Boston about Jan. 27, and New York about Jan. 31. It was first published in the Philadelphia papers Feb. 2. (See Gazette of the United States of that date, et seq.) Fragmentary details from various sources thereupon began making their appearance. See also Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 233-234 and nn. 117. E.g., to James Madison, Sr., Feb. 8, 1795, PJM, XV, 469. 118. R. R. Livingston to Madison, Jan. 30, 1795; Madison to Livingston, Feb. 8, 1795; Madison to Jefferson, Feb. 15, 1795; ibid., 459-461, 468-469, 473. 119. Ibid., 121. 120. Another was "Sidney" and his series of five essays which appeared in the Aurora June 17, 19, 22, and 26, 1795. The message was very similar to that of "Franklin." 121. Philadelphia Aurora, June 22, 1795. See also Stewart, Opposition Press, pp. 193194; James D. Tagg, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 244-245; Letters of Franklin, pp. 38-41; "Sidney," No. Ill, Aurora, June 22, 1795. The reason for the secrecy (and for flouting the sovereignty of the people) was obviously that the treaty was bad; otherwise "it would not be concealed." New York Journal, May 20, 1795. See also Daniel L. Hoffman, Government Secrecy and the Founding Fathers: A Study in Constitutional Controls (Westport, Conn., 1981), pp. 145-147. 122. King, King, II, 9-10; Hamilton to King, June n, 1795, PAH, XVIII, 370-371; AC, 3 Cong., 3 Sess., 853-868. Strictly speaking, there would have been twenty-one Federalists and nine Republicans, but the defection of Pierce Butler, until then nominally a Federalist, made it twenty and ten. 123. Ibid.; Hayden, Senate and Treaties, p. 78; Eugene F. Kramer, ed., "Senator Pierce Butler's Notes of the Debates on Jay's Treaty," South Carolina Historical Magazine, LXII (Jan. 1961), 1-9. "I understand they have determined not to countenance a publication," wrote Oliver Wolcott to his wife, "though they have reserved the right of conversing generally about it." June 25, 1795, Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 199.

,834.

NOTES FOR PAGES

419-421

124. AC, 3 Cong., 3 Sess., 863. 125. Some of these questions are discussed in Hayden, Senate and Treaties, pp. 7476, though more succinctly in Reardon, Randolph, pp. 294-295. 126. Washington to Hamilton, July 13, 1795, PAH, XVIII, 461-463. 127. Hamilton left office Jan. 31, 1795, and was succeeded by Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Comptroller of the Treasury since 1789. Henry Knox had also resigned as Secretary of War, effective Dec. 31, 1794. Knox's successor was Timothy Pickering, who had ably negotiated several Indian treaties for the federal government and had served as PostmasterGeneral since 1791. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 228-229, 232-233. 128. Randolph to King, July 6, 1795, King, King, II, 15; Hamilton to Wolcott, June 26, 1795. PAH, 388-389; Edmund Randolph, A Vindication of Mr. Randolph's Resignation (Philadelphia, 1795), p. 28. 129. Tagg, Bache, pp. 246-247. Randolph was unable to get the treaty officially into print sooner because he had lent his only copy to Adet. As Tagg points out, however, Adet could not tell Randolph that he already had a copy. Adet's version is in his dispatch to Committee of Public Safety, July 3, 1795, CFM, pp. 741-742. 130. There are many descriptions of these public demonstrations. Documented accounts of those which occurred in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Boston may be found in William S. Wheeler, "Urban Politics in Nature's Republic: The Development of Political Parties in the Seaport Cities in the Federalist Era" (Unpub. diss., U. of Virginia, 1967), pp. 97-99, 173, 268-273, 368-372. See also Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 268-273; McMaster, History, II, 216-229. Broadus Mitchell in his Alexander Hamilton, II, 342-343, has thrown doubt on the story of Hamilton's having been stoned at the July 18 meeting in New York, and these doubts have been picked up by Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), p. 451, and the editors of PAH, XVIII, 485^ Probably Hamilton did not retire "with blood streaming down his face" (McMaster, II, 219), but there is evidence enough that at least one stone made contact with Hamilton's head; the question appears to be not whether he was hit, but simply how hard. The incident was referred to in a number of newspapers at the time, and there is an account of the meeting signed by its chairman, W. S. Smith, which mentions it, in Gazette of the United States, July 21, 1795. On Philadelphia, see also Roland M. Baumann, "The Democratic-Republicans of Philadelphia: The Origins, 17761797" (Unpub. diss., Pennsylvania State U., 1970), pp. 517-522. The originals of the various petitions and addresses, of which there were about fifty, are in the Washington Papers, LC; some half of these were published by Mathew Carey, ed., The American Remembrancer: or an Impartial Collection of Essays, Resolves, Speeches, &c. Relative, or Having Affinity, to the Treaty with Great Britain (Philadelphia, 1795), 3V. 131. That is, nobody in America. The text of the Order remained unpublished until the twentieth century; it was rediscovered in the British Record Office, published, and analyzed by Josiah T. Newcomb in "New Light on Jay's Treaty," cited in n. 88 above. It is not known exactly when the first clear news of the Order and the seizures reached America. An item, somewhat tentative, appeared in the Philadelphia Aurora as early as June 25, but it seems that Washington did not take the reports seriously until they were confirmed by letters from Hamilton and Jay on the 6th and 7th of July, respectively. Randolph, however, tells a slightly different story in his Vindication, pp. 29-30; see also Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 262n. 132. Newcomb, "New Light," 691-692; Earl Spencer to Captain Sidney Smith, June 7, 1795, qu. in Perkins, First Rapprochement, p. 35; J. Stevenson, "Food Riots in England,

.835

NOTES FOR PAGES 421-423

1792-1818," R. Quinault and J. Stevenson, eds., Popular Protest and Public Order: Six Studies in British History, 1790-1920 (London, 1974), pp. 33-74; John Bassett Moore, ed., International Adjudications . . . (New York, 1931), IV, 28-29, 121-123. 133. On Grenville's responses to American complaints, see Newcomb, "New Light," 689-691; IBM, 88, 97-98; J. Q. Adams to Secretary of State, Dec. 5, 1795, WJQA, I, 434449. (Adams wrote this from London, having been detailed there on a temporary mission from his regular post in the Netherlands to clear up unfinished details relating to the treaty.) 134. It is still not known exactly when or in what manner the Order was withdrawn. E.g., on Apr. 22, 1796, Samuel Smith of Maryland said in the House of Representatives that the British "had withdrawn that order since the ratification" (the exchange of ratifications occurred in London Oct. 28,1795), but it had certainly been withdrawn well before then. The American charge d'affaires in London, acting in Pinckney's absence, had written home twice that the Order "had a few days previous" to the i5th of September, 1795, "been rescinded," but adding that "as these Orders have not yet [as of Oct. 13] reached all the Cruizers, American Vessels are still sent in." AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 1155; William A. Deas to Secretary of State, Sept. 15, Oct. 13,1795, Diplomatic Dispatches, Great Britain, Series M3O, National Archives. Adams, in the letter cited in n. 136 above, also refers to the Order as "revoked," sardonically adding that it would "not be revived so long as the costs of their captures will evidently mount higher than their value to the captors." WJQA, I>447135. To these would shortly be added some fresh incidents of impressment, of which the most flagrant involved the activities of Captain Rodham Home, commanding the British cruiser Africa, off the coast of Rhode Island. See Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 301-302. 136. Randolph, Vindication, p. 28. 137. See above, pp. 393~394138. See esp. Randolph to Jay, Dec. 15, 1794 (which if taken at face value would virtually have required Jay to start over), and subsequent correspondence. ASP:FR, I, 509512 et seq. 139. Randolph sent Washington three separate memoranda on this subject in the space of two days, the first two on June 24 and the third on June 25. The first and third are printed in W. C. Ford, ed., "Edmund Randolph on the British Treaty, 1795," AHR, XII (Apr. 1907), 589-590 and 587-588; the second in Jared Sparks, ed., The Writings of George Washington . . . (Boston, 1836), XI, 477-478. On the dating of them (unclear in both Sparks and Ford), see Reardon, Randolph, p. 457, nn. 74-75. 140. Washington to Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War, and Attorney-General, June 29,1795, WGW, XXXIV, 224-225; Reardon, Randolph, pp. 296-297. On the opinion of Bradford, who was ill and may have given it informally, see ibid., p. 458, n. 88. 141. "I do myself the honor of enclosing to you a letter from Colo. H. It proves, what I suspected, that the first opinion was not maturely weighed. But there is something in the business that is a little mysterious to me. . . . " Randolph to Washington, July 20, 1795, Washington Papers, LC. 142. Same to same (private), July 7, 1795, Moncure D. Conway, Omitted Chapters in the History Disclosed in the Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph (New York, 1888), pp. 265-267. See also Reardon, Randolph, pp. 297-299. 143. Sparks, ed., Writings of Washington, XI, 477; Ford, ed., "Randolph on British Treaty," 590-599-

,836,

NOTES FOR PAGES 423-426

144. Ibid., 598. 145. Randolph, Vindication, pp. 31-32. 146. Washington to Hamilton, July 14, 1795, PAH, XVIII, 467; to Randolph, July 18, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 243; Randolph to Washington, July 25, 31, 1795 (enclosing drafts of reply to Boston Selectmen), Washington Papers, LC; "To the Boston Selectmen," July 28, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 252-253. (Replies to the other addresses, except to a few regarded as "too indecent" to merit one, were generally couched in the same language as the preceding.) During the period (July i^-Aug. 10) when Washington was absent from Philadelphia, Randolph wrote him a total of thirteen letters, all of which are in Washington Papers, LC. His own letters for that period are chronologically printed in ibid. The correspondence is discussed in Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 265-278, and Reardon, Randolph, pp. 303-308. 147. Washington to Randolph, July 22, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 244. 148. Randolph to Washington, July 20, 1795, Washington Papers, LC; Washington to Randolph, July 24, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 246-247. 149. Same to same, July 29, 1795, ibid., 254-257. 150. Washington to Hamilton, July 29, 1795, PAH, XVIII, 525. 151. Randolph to Washington, July 29, 1795, Washington Papers, LC. 152. Randolph in his Vindication presents the evidence that he had converted Washington to his point of view and that the President was intending to act on it. To us the evidence is convincing. How firm Washington's intentions were, however (and thus how readily they might have been dislodged), may be another matter, and eminently debatable. There is no question but that while he was at Mount Vernon his apprehensions about France had gained considerable ground against those he already entertained regarding Britain (a point which seems to us insufficiently appreciated in other writings about the case), or that the implications of a delay in ratification were giving him more and more uneasiness. (Note the long "Sylla and charibdas" passage in his letter of July 31 to Randolph.) True, he assures Randolph, or seems to be reassuring him, that he still intends to do things his way—but not without a full, final canvassing of the whole question. The peculiar construction "It is not to be inferred from hence that I am, or shall be disposed to quit the ground I have taken, unless . . . but" occurs twice in his final letters. Washington to Randolph, July 31 and (slightly varied) Aug. 3, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 266, 269. Nor was Randolph correct in claiming that Washington had "approved" his draft of the memorial to Hammond. He may have intended to—again, in principle—but he had not yet done it. Rather, he had cautiously written that it "seems well designed, to answer the end proposed" (without saying what he thought of "the end proposed"), and then referred to its being "revised, and new dressed." Ibid., 267; Vindication, p. 40. (Italics added.) 153. Same to same, July 29, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 255. 154. Randolph to Washington, July 31, 1795, Washington Papers, LC (2nd of 2 of that date); Pickering to Washington, July 31,1795, Charles W. Upham, The Life of Timothy Pickering (Boston, 1873), In> 188-189. 155. Ibid., 217; Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 233, 243. 156. Ibid., 232-233, 243; Grenville to Hammond, May 9, 1795, IBM, 83; Hammond to Grenville, July 27, 1795, PRO:FO 5/9. Fauchet's dispatch in the original French is in CFM, pp. 444-455 (the other two referred to, Nos. 3 and 6, are also in ibid., pp. 372377, 411-418); an English translation is printed in Randolph, Vindication, pp. 41-48. 157. Upham, Pickering, III, 218. 158. Hammond to Grenville, Aug. 14, 1795, No. 33, PRO:FO 5/9. The pertinent

,837.

N O T E S FOR P A G E S 426-429 sections of both draft and final version of the memorial are repr. in Randolph, Vindication, pp. 33-34; and Newcomb, "New Light," 69on., respectively. A copy of the latter, dated Aug. 14, 1795, is in State Department Domestic Letters, National Archives. 159. Randolph, Vindication, pp. 5-9; Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 244-245; Upham, Pickering, III, 218. Bradford, in the last stages of his illness, was not present. He died only a few days later, on Aug. 23. 160. The chief contemporary writings and reminiscences on which our knowledge rests are those of Randolph, Wolcott, and Pickering cited above. Later writings are Conway, Omitted Chapters, pp. 237-357; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 277-336; and Reardon, Randolph, pp. 307-334. Irving Brant's somewhat blustering "Edmund Randolph, Not Guilty!" WMQ 3rd Ser., VII (Apr. 1950), 179-198, made a stir at the time of its appearance but looks rather less impressive now, in view of the flimsiness of two main assumptions on which its argument rests. One of these is that Randolph was deliberately framed by Pickering and Wolcott through their suppression of Dispatches 3 and 6, whereas it is now known that neither Pickering nor Wolcott (nor Hammond nor Grenville) had ever seen those dispatches. The other is the assumption that awkwardness of translation in the version Washington read altered the sense of it in significant ways. This seems greatly overdrawn, inasmuch as Pickering's translation and the one which Randolph (who knew French) thought acceptable enough to print differed very slightly, and in no instance were the words used by Pickering actually wrong. For instance, Brant makes much of the difference between the transliterated "precious confessions" ("precieuses confessions") and "valuable disclosures" (which comes closer to the writer's intentions); yet one cannot imagine Washington's state of mind being in the least altered by either one's having been used rather than the other. Indeed, he might well have seen "valuable disclosures" as the more sinister. For further discussion of these and other aspects of the case see Jerald Combs, Jay Treaty, Appendix II, pp. 193-196; and W. Allen Wilbur, "Oliver Wolcott, Jr., and Edmund Randolph's Resignation, 1795; An Explanatory Note on an Historic Misconception," Connecticut Historical Society bulletin, XXXVIII (Jan. 1973), 12-16. A viewpoint similar to Brant's is Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, "George Washington and the Reputation of Edmund Randolph," JAH, LXXIII (June 1986), 15-34, which argues that Washington "acquiesced in the sacrifice of Randolph's reputation in order to preserve his own." (p. 34). 161. Washington to Hamilton, July 29, 1795; to Randolph, July 31, 1795; WGW, XXXIV, 263, 266. 162. On the various extant translations, see PAH, XVIII, 528-529. 163. As is evident from the undated memorandum he sent to Wolcott and Pickering sometime between his return to Philadelphia and the scene of Aug. 19, 1795 (WGW, XXXIV, 275-276), asking their opinions on how Randolph ought to be confronted and the "measures proper to be taken." No one who reads through all the materials on the case can avoid some distress at the brutality of Washington's proceeding on the i9th. But this memorandum at least shows the nature of the dilemma he knew himself to be in, believing as he evidently did that the question of Randolph's "guilt" (of corruption, or whatever) was actually less important than the likelihood that no "Investigation of this subject" would be "so clear as to restore confidence and a continuance in Office." He had never removed a cabinet officer before, and was painfully embarrassed by the lack of a precedent, but what he did know was that he did not want the man around any longer, whatever extenuating details might eventually turn up. Yet there was no way this could be effected—either through outright dismissal or by a private effort to persuade Randolph to leave quietly—without ugly and mortifying public disclosures, because in either case

.838.

NOTES FOR PAGES 430-432 Randolph was bound to insist on vindicating his conduct, and Washington could not honorably place obstacles in the way of his doing so. Washington was thus forced, at least as he saw it, to cut off his options in advance, to stage it in such a way as to give Randolph no choice, to get it over with, and then to take the consequences, which were bound to be bad no matter what. 164. Randolph to Monroe [circular to all American representatives abroad], July 21, 1795, ASP:FR, I, 719; Randolph to Monroe, July 29, 1795, Monroe Papers, NYPL; also in Conway, Omitted Chapters, pp. 254-255. Carroll and Ashworth (Washington, VII, 289) take for granted that the letter of the 29th was among the papers Randolph showed to Washington, since Conway reported having seen, and in fact quoted from, an abstract in Washington's handwriting, even though the abstract is no longer to be found in the Washington papers. Reardon (Randolph, pp. 461-462) nonetheless argues that Randolph in fact did not show this letter to Washington, otherwise "he would have been obliged to mention it in his Vindication" This reasoning, however, does not seem as plausible as the common-sense supposition that Conway had no reason to "invent" the abstract or to lie about Washington's handwriting, and that Randolph would not have been likely to conceal from the President a communication sent him in his capacity as an officer of the Executive. 165. Washington to Randolph, Oct. 21, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 339-342. 166. Madison to Monroe, Jan. 26, 1796, P]M, XVI, 204; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 329-336; Reardon, Randolph, pp. 332-334; Combs, Jay Treaty, pp. 169-170. 167. Upham, Pickering, III, 226-227. Presumably the account is Pickering's own, though this is not clear from the context. Conway (Omitted Chapters, p. 356) does not believe such an interview ever took place, claiming that the account contained "inaccuracies no Virginian could have uttered" regarding the background of the Randolph-Washington relationship. Conway's suspicions appear justified to the extent that Pickering in all likelihood put into Washington's mouth a whole string of reasons for his disillusionment that were more his own than Washington's. We would guess, however (given this qualification), that a scene in some way resembling the one referred to probably did occur. For comment on the evidence for other such scenes, see Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 332nn. 168. Robert R. Livingston's sixteen "Cato" essays appeared in the New York Argus, or Greenleafs New Daily Advertiser between July 15 and Sept. 30, 1795; Brockholst Livingston wrote five as "Decius" and six as "Cinna" in the same paper, July 10-16 and Aug. 1-18, 1795, respectively; all are reprinted in Carey, American Remembrancer (see n. 130 above). With two or three notable exceptions, almost all the controversial writings on the treaty are collected in this valuable work. Alexander J. Dallas's "Features of Mr. Jay's Treaty" is one of the exceptions; it was published in five parts in Dunlap and Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser of Philadelphia, July i8-Aug. 7, 1795, and reprinted seventysix years later in George M. Dallas, Life and Writings of Alexander James Dallas. Noah Webster published twelve essays signed "Curtius" in the New York American Minerva, July i8-Aug. 5,1795, and reprinted them in N. Webster, A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects (New York, 1843), pp. 179-224; two of them were written by James Kent and the remainder by himself. Hamilton's "The Defence," thirty-eight pieces under the signature "Camillus," ran from July 22, 1795, to Jan. 9, 1796. The first twentyone numbers appeared in the New York Argus, the remainder in the New York Herald, a Gazette for the Country. Hamilton wrote in addition four "Philo-Camillus" papers, July

.839-

NOTES FOR PAGES 432-437 i7~Aug. 19, 1795, also published in the Argus. All are repr. in PAH, XVIII-XIX, except for the ten "Camillus" numbers written by Rufus King (though previously read and occasionally edited by Hamilton), repr. in Henry C. Lodge, ed., The Works of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1885-86), V-VI. 169. Concluding phrase of a harangue delivered by McClenachan at the mass meeting of July 25, 1795, at Philadelphia; on the variant reported versions of the outburst see Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 272 and n. 170. "Observations on Mr. Jay's Treaty," No. I (July 15, 1795), Carey, ed., American Remembrancer, I, 114-119. 171. "Observations," Nos. II, III, IV (July 17, 22, 25, 1795), ibid., 119—122, 147-156. 172. "The Defence," No. I (July 22, 1795), PAH, XVIII, 479-489. 173. No. II (July 25, 1795), ibid., 493-501. 174. Nos. Ill, IV (July 29, Aug. i, 1795), ibid., 513-523; XIX, 77-85. On the various criticisms that had been made of the treaty's preamble see ibid., XVIII, 5i4n. 175. Nos. VII, VIII, IX (Aug. 12, 15, 21, 1795), ibid., XIX, 115-124, 134-145, 163-171. 176. "Observations," No. XV (Sept. 23, 1795), American Remembrancer, II, 13; "Juricola" [Tench Coxe], "An Examination of the Pending Treaty with Great Britain," No. IV (Aug. 12, 1795), ibid., II, 88; "Cinna," No. V (Aug. 15, 1795), ibid., Ill, 226; Dallas, "Features," Life and Writings, p. 196; Jefferson to Madison, Sept. 21, 1795, WTJ, VII, 192-193. "Even his enemies," said Brockholst Livingston (who was one of them), "must allow him to write well." American Remembrancer, III, 102. 177. Nos. I-V defend the treaty in general terms; the first ten articles are taken up in Nos. VI-XXII, five essays being devoted to Article X alone. In these five, Hamilton mounts a comprehensive attack on the entire principle of commercial coercion as debated in Congress in the spring of 1794, especially sequestration of debts, which he argues was contrary to all modern usages of international law. Most of the commercial articles are discussed by Rufus King in Nos. XXIII-XXX; Hamilton resumes with Articles XVII and XVIII in Nos. XXXI-XXXIII; and King concludes the substantive discussion with Nos. XXXIV and XXXV. The last three numbers, XXXVI-XXXVIII, argue the constitutionality of the treaty. In refuting the treaty's critics, Hamilton confined his attention almost entirely to the ablest of them, the two Livingstons and Dallas, though others are occasionally mentioned. The separate "Philo-Camillus" series of four essays is the rebuttal to a specific attack on "Camillus" made by "Cinna" (Brockholst Livingston). For another article-by-article defense of the treaty by Hamilton, see his long memorandum to Washington, "Remarks on the Treaty of Amity Commerce and Navigation lately made between the United States and Great Britain," July 9-11, 1795, PAH, XVIII, 404-454. 178. Ames to Jeremiah Smith, Jan. 18, 1796, WFA, I, 183. 179. See, e.g., below, pp. 446-447. Petition from Western Counties, Mar. 8, 1796 (wrongly dated Mar. 21), Gallatin Papers Microfilm, NYUL (also pr. in Pittsburgh Gazette, Mar. 12, 1796); "From the Western Telegraphe," Gazette of the United States, Apr. 5, 1796. Every expression of western opinion—in newspaper correspondence, petitions, or speeches in Congress—in support of the treaty made the same argument. On the Greenville treaty terms and description of the boundaries see Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (East Lansing, Mich., 1967), pp. 101-102; and Beverley W. Bond, Jr., The Foundations of Ohio (Columbus, Ohio, 1941), pp. 247-248, 321. On the treaties of Ft. Stanwix, Ft. Mclntosh, Ft. Finney, and Ft. Harmar see ibid., pp. 244-247; and Horsman, Expansion, p. 48.

,840-

NOTES FOR PAGES 437-440 180. ASP:IA, I, 12-14; see also Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), I, 61-71; and Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago, 1984), pp. 137-186. 181. Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, 1973), p. 10; Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Beginnings of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York, 1975), pp. 95-96. 182. Ibid., pp. 96-116; Jefferson to Monroe, Apr. 17, 1791, WTJ, V, 319; Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narration of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley Until 1795 (Pittsburgh, 1940), pp. 320-322. 183. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 116-126. 184. Ibid., pp. 148-155. 185. Reginald Horsman, "The British Indian Department and the Resistance to General Anthony Wayne, 1793-1795," MVHR, XLIX (Sept. 1962), 269-290; J. Leitch Wright, Jr., Britain and the American Frontier, 1783-1815 (Athens, Ga., 1975), p. 96. 186. Horsman, "Resistance," 284-289; Wright, Britain and the American Frontier, p. 102. 187. Bond, Foundations of Ohio, pp. 321, 393. 188. The treaty is conveniently printed as Appendix V in Samuel F. Bemis, Pinckney's Treaty: America's Advantage from Europe's Distress, 1783-1800, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1960), pp. 343-362. The background of Spanish policy toward the United States regarding the Mississippi is discussed at length in ibid, and in Arthur P. Whitaker, The Spanish-American Frontier, 1783-1795: The Westward Movement and the Spanish Retreat in the Mississippi Valley (Boston, 1927), two works which complement each other and should be used together. 189. Ibid., pp. i74-I77190. Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), pp. 192-194; Donald B. Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd, Historical Statistics of the South, 1790-1970 (University, Ala., 1973), pp. 22, 50; James G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Kingsport, Tenn., 1853), P- 648. The above figure for Kentucky is an estimate; since a census was taken for Tennessee in 1795 for purposes of admission to statehood, and since the proportion of increase from 1790 to 1800 for both states was almost identical, the estimate could be arrived at by linear interpolation: Tennessee 1790

35,691

1795

77,262

1800

105,602

Kentucky 73,677 [x = 161,252] 220,955

191. Whitaker, Spanish-American Frontier, p. 156. 192. Ibid., pp. 180-222; Bemis, Pinckney's Treaty, pp. 218-284. A gentlemanly debate persisted for many years between Bemis and Whitaker (and was never settled) over the question of whether Godoy had actually seen the text of Jay's treaty before concluding his negotiations with Pinckney. For details, see Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 345-346n. In view of the section which follows, and in conjunction with the point made above,

.841,

NOTES FOR PAGE 441 p. 439, on the abrupt expansion in 1796 of settlements in Ohio, it should be noted that the implications of Pinckney's treaty (in addition to those of Jay's) were immediately grasped by speculators. Navigation of the Mississippi, remarked Robert Morris, "doubles or trebles the value of lands bordering upon the Western Waters of the Ohio." Qu. in ibid., 346n. 193. See pp. 381-382 and n. 9 above. Item from Columbian Centinel qu. in Walter B. Smith and Arthur H. Cole, Fluctuations in American Business, 1790-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 15. 194. From 1790 to 1796, money wages doubled and real wages rose 20 percent for laborers and 30 percent for ship carpenters. Before the rising cost of living began to reduce these gains in 1795, the Philadelphia ship carpenter had seen his real wages increase by over 40 percent, and the laborer's had risen by 58 percent, from 1790 to 1794. Daily Wage and Real Wage Rates in Philadelphia, 1790-1796 Laborers

Ship carpenters Daily wage

Real wage

1790 1791 1792

i. 06

i. 06

1.16

1.204

i. 20

1.217

1793

1.50

J

1.86

1-379 1.470

I.OO

•735 .790

1795 1796

2.00

1.318

1. 00

.659

2.13

1.304

I.OO

.612

794

Daily wage

•jo •53 .66 .80

Real wage

.50 .550 .669

Donald R. Adams, Jr., "Wage Rates in the Early National Period: Philadelphia, 17851830," Journal of Economic History, XXVIII (Dec. 1968), 404-426. Cost of living index for this period is in ibid., 324. 195. The following tables show the movement of export and import values between 1790 and 1796: Exports and Imports, 1790—1796 Value of domestic exports (looos of dollars)

Export price index (Base 1790)

Import price index (Base 1790)

Terms of trade (Base 1790)

1790

19,905

1791

18,512

85.8

109.8

1792

I

9»753 24,360

81.7 97.8

118.8

68.8

108.4

90.2

26,544 39,689

103.6

129.2

80.2

153.6

124.3

123.6

40,764

172.6

132.8

130.0

*793

1794 1795 1796

100

TOO

100

78.1

Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1/90-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961), pp. 221, 229.

.842.

NOTES FOR PAGE 442 Export Commodity Prices, 1790-1796 a

1790 1791 1792 1793

1794 1795

1796

Price of Rice Charleston (per cwt.)

Price of Wheatb Philadelphia (per bu.)

Price of Flourb Philadelphia (per bl. superfine)

Price of Tobacco Philadelphia (per cwt.)

$2.30

$1.34

$6.86

$6.30

2.21

5-24 5.05

4.63

2.68

•99 .96 i. ii

6.16

4.67

2.71

i. 20

3-59 4.16

7.76 11.23

4.83

1.82 1.95°

12.54'

7.26

—

4.67

6.16

a. Arthur H. Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1/00-1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), I, 154. b. Ibid., II, 93-111. Monthly prices have been averaged and reduced to dollars. c. In April, 1796 (in the midst of the House debate over the Jay Treaty) wheat reached $2.25 per bu. and flour $14 per bl., a peak that would not again be reached until 1817.

Value of Imports for Domestic Consumption, 1790-1796 1790

$23,500,000

1791

30,000,000

1792

31,500,000

1793

30,800,000

1794

29,500,000

1795

63,000,000

1796

56,636,164

North, Economic Growth, p. 228. On the grain fleet, see Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, 159.

196. John S. Littell, ed., Memoirs of his Own Times: With Reminiscences of the Men and Events of the Revolution, by Alexander Gray don (Philadelphia, 1846), p. 377. 197. Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of federalism, 1795-1800 (Philadelphia, 1957), p. 20, takes for granted (we believe rightly) a direct connection between the Republicans' attack on the treaty and their hopes of electing Jefferson to the presidency. Dumas Malone, Jefferson, III, 253^, and Thomas J. Farnham, "The Virginia Amendments of 1795: An Episode in the Opposition to Jay's Treaty," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXV (Jan. 1967), 85n., both protest, on the ground that Jefferson himself took no part in these various movements. That much appears to be true, but it hardly invalidates Kurtz's point. John Beckley, indeed, seems to have had little else on his mind. "If the Treaty is rejected," he wrote to DeWitt Clinton in the midst of the House debate, "it will doubtless operate well in those States where the appointment of Electors is given to the people and does not come on speedily. In other cases, the friends of republicanism must redouble their exertions to counteract their opponents. The British Treaty defeated, and a republican president to succeed Mr. Washington, and our country is yet safe, prosperous, and happy" (Apr. n, 1796). And ten days later: "I think . . . that a major vote once obtained & recorded vs the Treaty, it will be extreamly difficult

.843

NOTES FOR PAGES 442-444

to change, and in this view, your elections which I am told come on next Tuesday, will be greatly important, and from the influence it must have as well upon the Treaty, as upon the future choice of a president, it will I hope and trust call forth all the energies of patriotism." Same to same, Apr. 21, 1796, DeWitt Clinton Papers, CUL. That Jefferson would be the Republican candidate was generally understood. "The republicans," wrote Madison to Monroe in cipher, * 'knowing that Jefferson alone can be started with hope of success mean to push him. I fear much that he will mar the project . . . by a peremptory and public protest." Feb. 26,1796, P]M, XVI, 232-233. "Mr. Jefferson's election becomes a matter of extreme importance to republicanism and to the southern states. You ought therefore to begin to look out for an elector in your district. ..." Henry Tazewell to Bishop James Madison, Mar. 6, 1796, qu. in Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, John Beckley: Zealous Partisan in a Nation Divided (Philadelphia, 1973), pp. 135-136. The British charge, Phineas Bond, even assumed (wrongly) that Jefferson himself was directing the campaign against the treaty "for the double purpose of promoting the interests of France and of advancing his candidacy for President." Bond to Grenville, May 4, 1796, qu. in DeConde, Entangling Alliance, p. 458. 198. Draft of Petition, PJM, XVI, 75-76. 199. Jefferson to Monroe, Sept. 6, 1795; to Edward Rutledge, Nov. 30, 1795; WTJ, VIII, 188, 200. 200. Baumann, "Democratic-Republicans of Philadelphia," pp. 523-524; Young, Democratic Republicans of New York, p. 458; Arthur I. Bernstein, "The Rise of the Democratic-Republican Party in New York City, 1789-1800" (Unpub. diss., Columbia U., 1964), p. 168. 201. Farnham, "Virginia Amendments of 1795," pp. 83-85. 202. R. R. Livingston to Edward Livingston, Jan. 5, 1796, qu. in Young, Democratic Republicans, p. 460. 203. Baumann, "Democratic-Republicans," pp. 524-525; Walters, Dallas, p. 73. 204. Farnham, "Virginia Amendments of 1795," 85-88; Jones to Madison, Oct. 20, 1795, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 2nd Ser., XXV (1901-1902), 151. 205. William Constable Letterbook, II, 184, Constable-Pierrepont Collection, NYPL; Fisher Ames to Thomas Dwight, Sept. 13, 1795, WFAf I, 174; Henry Van Schaak to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 14, 1795, qu. in Young, Democratic Republicans, p. 460; WGW, XXXIV, 389. 206. Madison to Monroe, Dec. 20, 1795; to Jefferson, Dec. 13, 1795; PJM, XVI, 170, 163. 207. Rush to John R. Coxe, Jan. 16, 1796, Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, N.J., 1951), II, 769. 208. Madison to Jefferson, Dec. 27, 1795, P]M, XVI, 173. 209. The Treaty of Grenville was agreed to by the Senate Dec. 22, 1795, and sent to the House Feb. 16, 1796; the Pinckney Treaty was agreed to by the Senate Feb. 26 and sent to the House Mar. 3, 1796; and the treaty with Algiers agreed to by the Senate Mar. 2 and sent to the House Mar. 8, 1796. The Jay Treaty was proclaimed Feb. 29 and sent to the House Mar. i. Senate Executive Journal, I, 197, 202, 203; AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 328, 394, 784, 821; WGW, XXXIV, 481. 210. Rush to Griffith Evans, Mar. 4, 1796, Letters, II, 773. 211. AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 400-401. 212. Madison thought Livingston's motion "so questionable that he will probably let it sleep or withdraw it." But Livingston did not withdraw it, and Madison was outvoted when he proposed to tone it down by excepting from the call "so much of said papers as

.844.

NOTES FOR PAGES 444-446

in his [the President's] judgment, it may not be consistent with the interest of the United States, at this time, to disclose." Livingston had meanwhile amended his own resolution with the words, "Excepting such of said papers as any existing negotiation may render improper to be disclosed." Madison twice admitted his misgivings publicly, once when offering his amendment on Mar. 7, and the other time in the course of his speech of Mar. 10 in which he had supported the resolution. Madison to Jefferson, Mar. 6, 1796 (another reference in same to same, Mar. 13, 1796), PJM, XVI, 247, 264; AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 438, 426, 494. 213. Ibid., 438-444 (Mar. 8, 1796). 214. Ibid., 464-474 (Mar. 9, 1796). 215. Ibid., 487-495 (Mar. 10, 1796). 216. Ibid., 495-500 (Mar. 10, 1796). 217. Ibid., 642-650 (Mar. 18, 1794). 218. Ibid., 759-760. 219. Ibid., 760-762; WGW, XXXV, 2-5 (Mar. 30, 1796). 220. AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 782-783. 221. As recollected many years later by Gallatin; see PAH, XX, ii2n. 222. Beckley to DeWitt Clinton, Apr. n (also Apr. 21), 1796, Clinton Papers, NYPL. 223. Madison to Monroe, Apr. 18, 1796; to Jefferson, Apr. 23, 1796; PJM, XVI, 333334, 33i. 224. E.g., Philip Van Cortlandt of New York, one of Beckley's uwaverers" who finally did give way, explained his vote for the treaty in a circular letter to his constituents by saying that "as it appeared during the course of the debates from memorials and other sources of information, to be the general wish of the people of the northern and eastern states, that it ought to be carried into effect; and taking into view all the existing circumstances, I upon the whole conceived it most advisable to give an affirmative vote on the occasion." May 20, 1796, Van Cortlandt-Van Wyck Papers, NYPL. 225. Washington referred to "the torrent of Petitions, and remonstrances which were pouring in from all the Eastern and middle states, and were beginning to come pretty strongly from that of Virginia," in writing to Thomas Pinckney, May 22, 1796, WGW, XXXV, 62; petitions and memorials in favor of the treaty from Norfolk, Portsmouth, King William, Accomack, Northampton, Augusta, Williamsburg, and Alexandria were printed or described in Gazette of the United States, May 6, n, 18, 20, 21, and June 3, 1796, and Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, Apr. 27, 1796. Those from New England in particular are extensively reported in Columbian Centinel, from about Apr. 27 through midMay 1796. According to a grammatically ambiguous item of Apr. 30, "Latter accounts say there are more than one hundred petitions in favour of carrying the treaty into effect, than there are against it." 226. Young, Democratic Republicans, p. 465. 227. Madison to Jefferson, May 9, 1796, PJM, XVI, 352. 228. Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, Apr. 28, 1796; Columbian Centinel, extra, Apr. 28, 1796. 229. Young, Democratic Republicans, p. 465. 230. Petitions from Allegheny, Westmoreland, and Fayette Counties, Mar. 8, 14, and 29, 1796, Pittsburgh Gazette, Mar. 12, 19, 1796; Gazette of the United States, Apr. 9, 1796. One of Gallatin's correspondents warned him that more were on the way; Alexander Addison to Gallatin, Apr. 7, 1796, Gallatin Papers Microfilm, NYUL. David Redick, a Republican leader of Washington County, told Gallatin, "I believe it is the earnest wish of a verry great Majority here that the Treaty should be Executed with all fidelity. . . . It

.845,

N O T E S FOR PAGES 447-452

is believed that this can be done without giving up any true Constitutional ground. I have conversed with divers of the personal as well as the Political Friends of our immediate Representatives in Congress, and with little variation in sentiment all have declared their wish that the Treaty may not be defeated. ..." Redick to Gallatin, Apr. 7, 1796, Gallatin Papers Microfilm, NYUL. The Allegheny petition was originated by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a Republican, and Alexander Addison, a Federalist. On the politics of the Jay Treaty in western Pennsylvania see Russell J. Ferguson, Early Western Pennsylvania Politics (Pittsburgh, 1938), pp. 136-138. 231. Addison to Gallatin, May 4, 1796, Gallatin Papers Microfilm, NYUL; Pittsburgh Gazette, May 7, 1796. 232. AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 941-943, 969. 233. Ibid., 1065-1077 (Apr. 19, 1796); 1095-1097 (Apr. 20, 1795). 234. Ibid., 1153-1157 (Apr. 22, 1796). 235. Ibid., 1183-1202 (Apr. 26, 1796). 236. Ibid., 1239-1263 (Apr. 28, 1796); WFA, II, 37-71. 237. John Adams to Abigail Adams, Apr. 30, 1796, Letters of John Adams Addressed to His Wife (Boston, 1841), II, 225-227; AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 1263-1264. 238. Ibid., 1273-1280; Theodore Sedgwick to Loring Andrews, Apr. 5, 1796, qu. in Combs, Jay Treaty, p. 185. 239. AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 1280. 240. Ibid., 1280-1291. Republican members who had switched their votes are listed in Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 375n. 241. Joshua Coit, Apr. 22, AC, 4 Cong., i Sess., 1151; Madison to Jefferson, Apr. 23, 1796, P]M, XVI, 335. Madison's apparent loss of leadership, and perhaps of nerve, was widely noted at the time. "Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale, withered, haggard." John to Abigail Adams, Apr. 28, 1796, APM, reel 381; Combs, Jay Treaty, p. 178; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 376n. "Every real patriot must be grieved, and filled with resentment, to see such a majority in the House listed under Madison and Gallatin, or rather Gallatin and Madison, for the latter has become so changed, as to be only a second to the former. ..." "From a Federal Republican," Columbian Centinel, Apr. 27, 1796. Madison himself told Jefferson, "The progress of this business throughout has to me been the most worrying & vexatious that I ever encountered. ..." May i, 1796, PJM, XVI, 343. 242. Qu. in Baumann, "Democratic-Republicans," p. 538. 243. Gazette of the United States, May 5, 1796.

CHAPTER

X

The Populist Impulse 1. Oscar and Mary Handlin, "Voluntary Associations," in The Dimensions of Liberty (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 89-112, brief though it is, remains the ablest and most satisfactory effort at a historical synthesis. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 192-229, contains a good discussion of the development of voluntary associations in early nineteenth-century America, but does not deal with the transitional phase that followed the Revolution. Other discussions of various aspects of the subject are cited in the notes that follow, esp. n. 9. 2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, "Biography of a Nation of Joiners, AHR, L (Oct. 1944),

,846,

NOTES FOR PAGES 452-455 1-25; Charles W. Ferguson, fifty Million Brothers: A Panorama of American Lodges and Clubs (New York, 1937); Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, Conn., 1989). 3. Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1970), passim, and esp. pp. 62, 69, 191. 4. Ibid., pp. 47, 70-71, 140. 5. Richard D. Brown, "The Emergence of Voluntary Associations in Massachusetts, 1760-1830," Journal of Voluntary Action Research, II (Apr. 1973), 64-65. 6. Handlin, "Voluntary Associations," pp. 92-94; Schlesinger, "Nation of Joiners," 2-3; Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York, 1963), pp. 103-133. 7. Handlin, "Voluntary Associations," pp. 90-97. 8. Brown, "Voluntary Associations in Massachusetts," p. 71; Robert A. Gross, The Minute-Men and Their World (New York, 1976), pp. 173-175; Anne Farnam, "A Society of Societies: Associations and Voluntarism in Early Nineteenth-Century Salem," Essex Institute Historical Collections, CXIII (July 1977), 181-190. For Salem, the impulse may to a fascinating extent be traced through the entries in The Diary of William Eentley, D.D. (Salem, 1914), 4v., esp. I-II. 9. E.g., Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York, 1976); idem, "Modernization and the Modern Personality in Early America, 1600-1865: A Sketch of a Synthesis," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, II (Winter 1972), 201-228; idem, "The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760-1820," ]AH, LXI (June 1974), 29-51; David H. Smith, "Modernization and the Emergence of Volunteer Organizations," International Journal of Comparative Sociology, XIII (June 1972), 113-134; Stuart M. Blumin, The Urban Threshhold: Growth and Change in a Nineteenth-Century American Community (Chicago, 1976), esp. pp. 150-165; Walter S. Glazer, "Participation and Power: Voluntary Associations and the Functional Organization of Cincinnati in 1840," Historical Methods Newsletter, V (Sept. 1972), 151-168; Gregory H. Singleton, "Protestant Voluntary Organizations and the Shaping of Victorian America," AQ, XXVII (Dec. 1975), 549-560; Don H. Doyle, "The Social Functions of Voluntary Associations in a Nineteenth-Century American Town," Social Science History, I (Spring 1977), 333-355. The most perceptive discussion of modernization and related theories of community transformation currently available is Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978). 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Phillips Bradley, ed. (New York, 1945), II, 115; William E. Channing, "Remarks on Associations" (1829), in Works (Boston, 1875), p. 139. The "main cause" of the associational activity he saw everywhere around him, Channing thought, was "the immense facility given to intercourse by modern improvements, by increased commerce and travelling, by the post-office, by the steamboat, and especially by the press,—by newspapers, periodicals, tracts, and other publications." n. "Associations, A Vital Form of Social Action" (1838), in William H. Channing, ed., The Memoir and Writings of Thomas Handasyd Perkins (Cincinnati, 1851), pp. 170171; Page Smith, As a City Upon a Hill: The Town in American History (New York, 1966), p. 169. 12. Subsequent judicial constructions as to the right of association have been derived not from explicit constitutional guarantees but from the related rights of assembly and petition or remonstrance, together with the right of religious expression. Both Charles E. Rice, Freedom of Association (New York, 1962), and Robert A. Horn, Groups and the

.847.

NOTES FOR PAGE 456 Constitution (Stanford, Calif., 1956), have some difficulty grasping the historical circumstances which prevented this "right" from emerging more clearly or less ambiguously than it did in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Associations, most especially political ones, were not then seen as uniformly innocent or desirable. They were factions, and they could use the strength of their numbers for purposes not in the public interest, representing a kind of private power which might actually inhibit the free expression of public opinion. Madison was not defending such groups in Federalist 10, except negatively; even in objecting to Washington's denunciation of the Democratic Societies in 1794, Madison was not upholding the right of association. He was simply saying that government should not censure opinions that were not in themselves illegal. Even Tocqueville, greatly impressed by the importance of associational life in America, was not quite prepared to hold that the right of association should be unrestricted. Democracy in America, II, 119. Glenn Abernathy, The Right of Assembly and Association, rev. ed. (Columbia, S.C., 1981), recognizes the Founders' concern with factions, but his primary interest for the period from the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth is in the ending of restrictions on religious associations and early trade unions. 13. There were only 28 post offices in 1776; by 1790 these had increased to 75 (about three-fold); in the decade 1790-1800 the number leaped from 75 to 903. John B. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1885), II, _59n.; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), II, 805. The number of newspapers during that decade increased from 92 to 235; meanwhile the speed with which news flowed between the major cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—increased by about 50 percent between 1790 and 1794. During that four-year period the time-lag in the movement of news between Philadelphia and New York dropped from 4 to 1.6 days. Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States' System of Cities, 1790-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 19, 39-42. 14. Eugene P. Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1/90-1800 (New York, 1942), pp. 19-24. Our contention is that such groups as the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence represented a principle quite different from that of the "voluntary association" as we are considering it here. Their participants thought of themselves not as a club, nor as an opposition force, nor as a mere contingent, but as representing the real community—even to the point of exercising certain governmental or quasi-governmental functions in the community's name, and in most places that assumption was more or less ratified by general consent. To put it another way: the key differentiating principle, as seen at the time, between the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary situations was that of the sovereignty of the people. One the one hand, the Sons of Liberty could claim to represent the people's real sentiments—those of the whole community—as against the pretensions of the Crown and its minions, who had obscured and perverted the community's true will. On the other, the Democratic Societies arose in communities where all constituted authority had already been put there by the people, and thus when the societies took it upon themselves to monitor and censor the conduct of those so placed in authority, they themselves were usurping authority to which—according to the logic of popular sovereignty as still construed by the civic values of the late eighteenth century—they were not wholly entitled. Such activity can be acceptable only after the community has conceded the legitimacy of the voluntary association for political as well as other purposes, and with the numbers involved being largely irrelevant. In the mid-i79os that time, we believe, had not yet arrived. 15. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1/90-1800: A Docu-

.848.

NOTES FOR PAGES 456-460 mentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, Conn., 1976), pp. 10, 67, 153. 16. Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, p. 16. 17. Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, p. 180. 18. Ibid., pp. 255, 359. 19. Ibid., pp. 69, 259, 335, 382. 20. Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 13-15. 21. Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 69, 319, 359. 22. 7£/J., pp. 238, 320. 23. Roland M. Baumann, "The Democratic-Republicans of Philadelphia: The Origins, 1776-1797" (Unpub. diss., Pennsylvania State U., 1970), pp. 448-451. The qu. is on p. 450. Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 439-441. 24. Raymond Walters, Jr., Alexander James Dallas: Lawyer—Politician—Financier (Philadelphia, 1943), pp. 14-26; Baumann, "Democratic-Republicans," pp. 222-224; William B. Wheeler, "Urban Politics in Nature's Republic: The Development of Political Parties in the Seaport Cities in the Federalist Era" (Unpub. diss., U. of Virginia, 1967), p. 60 and n. 25. James D. Tagg, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 1-170; J. Philip Gleason, "A Scurrilous Colonial Election and Franklin's Reputation," WMQ 3rd Ser., XVIII (Jan. 1961), 68-84; Wheeler, "Urban Politics," pp. 56-57. A sympathetic account of Bache's relations with his grandfather is Jeffrey A. Smith, Franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic (New York, 1990). 26. David F. Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly (Indianapolis, 1971), pp. 182, 385, 392; George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His ''Travels Through Life" together with his Commonplace Book for 1789-1813 (Princeton, 1948), pp. 78-79; Wheeler, "Urban Politics," pp. 60-61. Rush too, like Bache and Swanwick, had hoped for federal patronage when the government moved to Philadelphia in 1790, but was disappointed. Hawke, Rush, p. 385. 27. Harry E. Wildes, Lonely Midas: The Story of Stephen Girard (New York, 1943), passim. 28. William B. Clark, "That Mischievous Holker: The Story of a Privateer," PMHB, LXXIX (Jan. 1955), 27-62; Margaret B. Tinkcom, "Cliveden: The Building of a Philadelphia Countryseat, 1763-1767," ibid., LXXXVIII (Jan. 1964), 35; Hubertis Cummings, "Items from the Morris Family Collection of Robert Morris Papers," ibid., LXX (Apr. 1946), 187; Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians Now Deceased (Philadelphia, 1859), PP- 73^-737; John H. Campbell, History of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and of the Hibernian Society for the Relief of Emigrants from Ireland (Philadelphia, 1892), p. 126. 29. Roland W. Baumann, "John Swanwick: Spokesman for 'Merchant-Republicanism' in Philadelphia, 1790-1798," PMHB, XCVII (Apr. 1973), 131-182. The qu. is on p. 142. 30. Still other motives have been ascribed to groups and individuals for joining the societies. One conjecture is that such men as Girard, Swanwick, Peter Barriere, and Peter Duponceau were influenced by their French business connections; another is that the Pennsylvania Society was formed expressly to influence state elections. Wheeler, "Urban Politics," p. 86 and n.; Baumann, "Democratic-Republicans," pp. 444-445. 31. "Many important leaders of the period," according to Philip Foner, "belonged to these popular societies." Democratic-Republican Societies, p. 8. Professor Foner does not, however, produce a very long list of them. 32. Qu. in Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, p. i3n.

.849.

NOTES FOR PAGES 460-466 33. Qu. in Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, p. 154. 34. Ibid., p. 162. The delegates at a Federalist state convention at Lancaster, Pa., in 1792 were referred to by A. J. Dallas as "self-created." Walters, Dallas, p. 39. 35. Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 257, 275, 279-281. The Chittenden Society quoted Nathaniel Chipman's Sketches of the Principles of Government in support of its argument, whereupon Judge Chipman published an open letter protesting that his book had been improperly used and that he had never approved of "self created societies and clubs." Ibid., pp. 290-293. 36. E.g., Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1/80-1840 (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), p. 92, characterizes these societies as "lively pressure groups functioning on [the Republican party's] left wing." See also Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789-1801 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), p. 65. 37. Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 66, 69, 75-76,134, 379, 393; Judah Adelson, "The Vermont Democratic-Republican Societies and the French Revolution," Vermont History, XXXII (Jan. 1964), 3-23. 38. Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 75-78, 267, 283, 387, 396. 39. Ibid., pp. 104-105, 134, 246, 353, 400. 40. Ibid., pp. 108, 240, 322, 362. 41. Ibid., pp. 80, 88-91, 106, 146-147, 184, 243. 42. Ibid., pp. 77-78; Harry M. Tinkcom, The Republicans and Federalists in Pennsylvania, 1/90-1801: A Study in National Stimulus and Local Response (Harrisburg, Pa., 1950), pp. 85-86; Baumann, "Democratic-Republicans," pp. 479-480. 43. Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 135-137. 44. E. Merton Coulter, "The Efforts of the Democratic Societies of the West to Open the Navigation of the Mississippi," MVHR, XI (Dec. 1924), 376-389; Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 127, 360, 371, 375. 45. E.g., the organization meeting of the Republican Society of Newark was full of persons who opposed the forming of such a society; the Portland Society could not get the local press to carry notices of its meetings; the Philadelphia Society referred to the "clamour raised against this and similar institutions" as being "proof of the utility of them." Ibid., pp. 85, 143; Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, p. 59. 46. PAH, XVII, 29n. 47. Henry Adams, ed., The Writings of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia, 1879), HI, 7. 48. George Clymer to Alexander Hamilton, Oct. 10, 1792, PAH, XII, 540-542. 49. Hamilton to Washington, Aug. [4], 1794, ibid., XVII, 24-58. 50. Ibid., XVII, 27, 30-31, 40-41, 42. 51. Ibid., XVII, 34, 37, 41-43. 52. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York, 1972), pp. 3-48; the Hutchinson remarks are qu. in John Lax and William Pencak, "The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740'$ in Massachusetts," Perspectives in American History, X (1976), 163. See also Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 17631834 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), pp. vii-viii, 5-35; Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (New York, 1977), pp. 1-15 and passim. 53. William Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Pour Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the year MDCCXCIV. . . (Philadelphia, 1796), pp. vi-viii, 41. Other accounts by contemporaries which touch on the injustice of the excise are Hugh H. Brackenridge, Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794 (Phil-

.850.

NOTES FOR P A G E S 466-470

adelphia, 1795), 3V. in i, III, 6; Henry M. Brackenridge (son of the foregoing), History of the Western Insurrection in Western Pennsylvania, Commonly Called the Whiskey Insurrection, 1794 (Pittsburgh, 1859), pp. 16-18; James Carnahan, "The Pennsylvania Insurrection of 1794, Commonly Called the 'Whiskey Insurrection,'" New Jersey Historical Society Proceedings, VI (1853), 115-152, esp. 117-120. 54. Findley, History, pp. 41-50. 55. Ibid., pp. 56-57; Washington to Burges Ball, Sept. 25, 1794, WGW, XXXIII, 506. 56. Findley, History, pp. 69-71, 77-92. 57. Ibid., pp. 129-139, 309-31358. See, e.g., Charles A. Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1915), pp. 248-267 (esp. p. 250: "This opposition is explicable on purely economic grounds."); Harold U. Faulkner, American Economic History (New York, 1924), pp. 230231, 313 (for acceptance of the argument that reduction of bulk was the main reason for converting grain to whiskey; also for the assumption that whiskey was made from "corn"); William Miller, "The Democratic Societies and the Whiskey Insurrection," PMHB, LXII July 1938), 324-349; Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, p. 80 (for the assertion that "the excise . . . tended to impoverish the West"); and Leland D. Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels: The Story of a Frontier Uprising (Pittsburgh, 1939). 59. Jacob E. Cooke, "The Whiskey Insurrection: A Re-Evaluation," Pennsylvania History, XXX (July 1963), esp. 329-336; David O. Whitten, "An Economic Inquiry into the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794," Agricultural History, XLIX (July 1975), 491-504; William D. Barber, " 'Among the Most Techy Articles of Civil Police': Federal Taxation and the Adoption of the Whiskey Excise," WMQ 3rd Ser., XXV (Jan. 1968), 58-84. 60. Madison to Edmund Pendleton, Jan. 2, 1791, W]M, XIII, 344. Each of the three articles cited above, especially Barber's, deals in some way with this point. 61. Cooke, "Whiskey Insurrection," pp. 327-329. 62. Ibid., 336-345. 63. Edwin G. Burrows, "Albert Gallatin and the Political Economy of Republicanism, 1761-1800" (Unpub. diss., Columbia U., 1974), pp. 335-350. 64. Carnahan, "Pennsylvania Insurrection," pp. 119-120; Brackenridge, Incidents, III, 6; Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels, pp. 23-25, 56-61. 65. Ibid., pp. 107-108, 284-286; Carnahan, "Pennsylvania Insurrection," p. 118. 66. Dorothy Fennell, "From Rebelliousness to Insurrection: A Social History of the Whiskey Insurrection" (Unpub. diss., U. of Pittsburgh, 1981), pp. 98-122. 67. Ibid., pp. 227-258; as opposed to the case made in Whitten, "Economic Inquiry," following Hamilton's argument. 68. Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, "The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky: A Forgotten Episode of Civil Disobedience," Journal of the Early Republic, II (Fall 1982), 239-259; and "A New Look at the Whiskey Rebellion," Steven R. Boyd, ed., The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives (Westport, Conn., 1985), pp. 97-118; Jeffrey J. Crow, "The Whiskey Rebellion in North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, LXVI (Jan. 1989), 1-28; Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York, 1986), pp. 119-120, 256, n. 24. There was arguably, on the other hand, a significant difference between western Pennsylvania and the other frontier areas with regard to resistance to the excise. The law was probably not consistently enforced in any of them. But in such places as Kentucky and North Carolina the resistance tended for the most part to take a passive form—legal maneuvers, unwillingness of local juries to convict, etc. —rather than that of riot, intimidation, and violence.

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69. Ibid., pp. 146-149. 70. Ibid., pp. 152-154; Fennell, "Rebelliousness to Insurrection," p. 124; Russell J. Ferguson, Early Western Pennsylvania Politics (Pittsburgh, 1938), pp. 113-115; Neville B. Craig, The History of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, 1851), pp. 229-230. 71. From late 1791 through June 1794, Neville repeatedly insisted that the excise law could not be enforced in western Pennsylvania unless the government were prepared to take military measures. Neville to George Clymer, Nov. n, Dec. 22, 1791, June 7, 21, 1793, June 13, 20, 1794, Wolcott Papers, XIX, Connecticut Historical Society. 72. The word "rabble" is used in same to same, Sept. 1791, Wolcott Papers, XIX. The first historian to suggest the significance of the "Neville Connection" was Jacob E. Cooke, "Whiskey Insurrection," cited in n. 59 above; see also Fennell, "Rebelliousness to Insurrection," pp. 124-128; and Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, pp. 152-153. For the background of the Neville Connection see Craig, Pittsburgh, pp. 229-230; and Ferguson, Western Pennsylvania, pp. 113-115. 73. Robert E. Harper, "The Class Structure of Western Pennsylvania in the Late Eighteenth Century" (Unpub. diss., U. of Pittsburgh, 1969), pp. 77-79, 125-126, 220; James A. Henretta, "Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston," WMQ, 3rd Ser, XXII (Jan. 1965), 86. 74. Kenneth R. Rossman, Thomas Mifflin and the Politics of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952), pp. 232-248. 75. Harper, "Class Structure," pp. 223-235; Arthur P. Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1/95-1803: A Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (New York, 1934), pp. 8485; Pearl Edna Wagner, "The Economic Conditions in Western Pennsylvania During the Whiskey Insurrection" (Unpub. M.A. thesis, U. of Pittsburgh, 1926); "Judge Addison's Charge to the Grand Jury of Allegheny," Pennsylvania Archives: Second Series, IV (Harrisburg, 1876), 243. 76. ASPMisc, I, 88. 77. The most perceptive discussion of Brackenridge and his career is Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles in Early American Culture (New York, 1981), pp. 73-110. The only full biography is Claude M. Newlin, The Life and Writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Princeton, N.J., 1932); Daniel Marder, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (New York, 1967) is a brief treatment. Professor Marder has also edited a modern printing of Brackenridge's Incidents of the Insurrection (New Haven, 1972). Since it is somewhat abridged, the citations given below will refer to the original edition of 1795. 78. Brackenridge, Incidents, I, 5-70. The letter to Coxe is printed in ibid., Ill, 128131; also in Pennsylvania Archives, IV, 140-144. 79. Brackenridge, Incidents, I, 70-107. 80. Ibid., I, 116. 81. Ibid., I, 31. 82. Ibid., I, 116. When Bradford boasted of defeating "the first army that comes over the mountains," a Colonel Crawford, who was a seasoned Indian fighter and who happened to be sitting in the gallery, remarked, "Not so easy, neither." 83. Ibid., I, 42-43. 84. Ibid., II, ii. 85. Ibid., II, 20. 86. Pennsylvania Archives, IV, 396-397. 87. Brackenridge, Incidents, I, 101-102. 88. Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1/83-1802 (New York, 1975), p. 161; ASP:IA, I, 487-488; Carroll

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NOTES FOR PAGES 4/8-485 and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 199 (Wayne's dispatch of July 7, 1794, describing the Indian attack on Fort Recovery had not yet reached Philadelphia, and Washington would not get the news of Fallen Timbers until Sept. 30); Randolph to Jay, Aug. 18,1794, ASP:FR, I, 483; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 179-180; PAH, XVI, ^88n. 89. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, p. 161; Hamilton to Tench Coxe, Aug. i, 1794, PAH, XVII, i. 90. "Conference Concerning the Insurrection in Western Pennsylvania," Aug. 2, 1794, ibid., XVII, 9-14. 91. James Wilson to Washington, Aug. 4, 1794, ASPMisc, I, 85. 92. "Memorandum of an Executive Conference," Pennsylvania Archives, IV, 82. 93. Hamilton to Washington, Aug. 2, 1794, PAH, XVII, 15-19. 94. Knox to Washington, Aug. 4, 1794, Washington Papers, LC. 95. Bradford to Washington, Aug. [4 or 5], 1794, Washington Papers, LC. 96. Randolph to Washington, Aug. 5, 1794, Washington Papers, LC; also repr. in Randolph, A Vindication of Mr. Randolph's Resignation (Philadelphia, 1795), pp. 100-103, and Francis Wharton, State Trials of the United States During the Administrations of Washington and Adams (Philadelphia, 1849), p. 156. For the date of Randolph's conversation with Fauchet, see Vindication, p. 84. 97. Mifflin to Washington, Aug. 5, 1794, ASPMisc, I, 97-99. 98. WGW, XXXIII, 457-461; ASPMisc, I, 86-87. 99. Randolph to Mifflin, Aug. 7, 1794, ASPMisc, I, 99-101. 100. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, p. 164; Hamilton to Washington, Aug. 5, 6, 1794, PAH, XVII, 24-59, 61; Bradford to Elias Boudinot, Aug. 7, 1794, J. J. Boudinot, ed., The Life, Public Services, Addresses and Letters of Elias Boudinot (Boston, 1896), II, 86-89. 101. Ibid., II, 87. 102. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 165-167; Pennsylvania Archives, IV, 103-106. 103. "Minutes of a Meeting Concerning the Insurrection in Western Pennsylvania," Aug. 24, 1794, PAH, XVII, 135-138. 104. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 167-169; Pennsylvania Archives, IV, 218-219. 105. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, p. 169; Philadelphia General Advertiser, Sept. 10, n, 1794; Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 59, 91-93, 147-148, 183-184, 243, 339> 3/8. 106. Ibid., p. 339. 107. ASPMisc, I, 90. 108. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 169-170; PAH, XVII, 268; Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels, pp. 220-258, 262-264. 109. Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, p. 147. no. Jefferson, "Anas," Aug. 2, 1793, WTJ, I, 254. in. Findley, History, p. 187. 112. Pittsburgh Gazette, Oct. 4, 1794, July 18, Sept. 5, Oct. 3, 1795, Mar. 12, 1796. 113. Pittsburgh Gazette, Nov. 21, 1795. We are indebted to Dorothy Fennell for bringing this choice item to our attention. 114. Washington to Burges Ball, Sept. 25, 1794; to Henry Lee, Aug. 26, 1794; to Daniel Morgan, Oct. 8, 1794; WGW, XXXIII, 506, 476, 523. For other references see ibid., XXXIII, 133, 321-322, 464, XXXIV, 3-4, 17. 115. Moncure D. Conway, Omitted Chapters of History Disclosed in the Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph . . . (New York, 1888), p. 195. 116. WGW, XXXIV, 29. 117. AC, 3 Cong., 2 Sess., 794.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 485-491

118. Findley, History, pp. 56-57; Brackenridge, Incidents, III, 25-27; AC, 3 Cong., 2 Sess., 920. 119. Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 146-147; Foner, ed., DemocraticRepublican Societies, p. 130. William Miller, in "Democratic Societies," p. 325, believes the societies were "only indirectly responsible" for the insurrection. 120. Findley, History, p. 56; Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels, p. 118 and n. 121. Madison to Monroe, Dec. 4, 1794, PJM, XV, 406. 122. AC, 3 Cong., 2 Sess., 899. 123. Ibid., 920-932 (Nov. 26, 1794). 124. Ibid., 934-935 (Nov. 27, 1794). 125. Ibid., 935-947; Madison to Jefferson, Nov, 30, 1794, PJM, XV, 396-398. 126. Dec. 4, 1794, Ibid., 406. 127. For resolutions of protest, see Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 6063, 98-102, 137-139, 148-149, 192-198, 260-264, 304-318, 324-334, 339-343; n the societies' rapid expiration see Miller, "Democratic Societies," pp. 341-342; and Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 200-209. We are contending that despite (or perhaps as a reflection of) their resolutions of self-justification, the societies themselves were far from secure in the sense of their own legitimacy. A letter from David Redick, a leading member of the Washington Democratic Society and a man of some importance in the local politics of western Pennsylvania, to the editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette, Dec. 28, 1794 (printed Jan. 23, 1795), declared that "at a time when it becomes all to give every possible evidence of their attachment to the lately violated laws and government . . . I withdraw myself from the Society; and I do recommend to the Society to dissolve themselves entirely if they think as I do." Qu. in Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 136-137. Brackenridge refers to the "account given me by Mr. M'Donald, the secretary [of the Mingo Creek club], or rather the apology made, for instituting this society. ..." Incidents, III, 26. (Our italics.) 128. E.g., Horn, Groups and the Constitution (cited in n. 12 above), pp. 17-18, 155; Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 92-96. 129. Very suggestive regarding the "wicked councillors" principle, as well as related matters, is Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988), pp. 30-31.

CHAPTER XI

The Retirement of Washington 1. On contemporary opinion see Victor H. Paltsits, Washington's farewell Address . . . (New York, 1935), pp. 55-74, 327-360. A number of later writings are collected in Burton I. Kaufman, ed., Washington's Farewell Address: The View from the 2oth Century (Chicago, 1969). See also Arthur A. Markowitz, "Washington's Farewell and the Historians: A Critical Review," PMHB, XCIV (Apr. 1970), 173-191. 2. Paltsits, Farewell Address, and PAH, XX, 169-183, 237-240, 247, 264-288, 293303, 307-309, 311-314, 316-319, provide between them a complete documentary record— successive drafts, pertinent correspondence, and editorial commentary—of every stage in the Address's evolution. The text of the Address cited in the following paragraphs is that of WGW, XXV, 214-238. 3. Ibid., 214-218.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 491-500

4. Ibid., 218-226. 5. Ibid., 226-227. 6. Ibid., 227-228. 7. I£/J., 228-233. 8. /£&/., 233-235. 9. I£/J., 235-238. 10. Jfe'J., 234. See also n. i above. 11. Samuel F. Bemis, "Washington's Farewell Address: A Foreign Policy of Independence," AHR, XXXIX (Jan. 1934), 250-268. 12. Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1961), esp. pp. 115-136. 13. Burton I. Kaufman, "Washington's Farewell Address: A Statement of Empire," idem, ed., Farewell Address, pp. 169-187. 14. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1/80-1840 (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), pp. 96, 99. 15. Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System: Three Essays (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), p. 44; Alexander DeConde, Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy Under George Washington (Durham, N.C., 1958), p. 469. 16. WGW, XXXV, 224-225. 17. E.g., Fisher Ames's quip about "party racers" (see below, p. 513); [William Duane], Letter to George Washington . . . Concerning Strictures on his Address of the Seventeenth of September, 1796 . . . (Philadelphia, 1796); John B. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States (New York, 1883-1913), II, 290-291. 18. WGW, XXXV, 227. 19. Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. 99. 20. WGW, XXXV, 310-311. 21. See below, pp. 510-511, 520-521. 22. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 320-322. See also above, p. 40 and n. ii. 23. Washington to Jefferson, July 6, 1796, WGW, XXXV, 120. 24. Paltsits, Farewell Address, p. 171; Washington to Hamilton, Aug. 25, 1796, PAH, XX, 307-308. 25. Washington to Jefferson, July 6, 1796, WGW, XXV, 119. 26. Ibid., 119. 27. DeConde, Entangling Alliance, pp. 342-344; Albert H. Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: franco-American Diplomacy During the Federalist Era (Knoxville, Tenn., 1974), pp. 118-119,172-173; Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (New York, 1971), pp. 113-116. These, taken together, largely supersede the older work of Beverly W. Bond, The Monroe Mission to France (Baltimore, 1907). The three others whom Washington had asked prior to nominating Monroe were Thomas Pinckney, Robert R. Livingston, and James Madison. 28. Randolph to Monroe, June 10, 1794, ASP:FR, I, 668-669. 29. Ibid., 672-674; Randolph to Monroe, Dec. 2, 1794, ibid., 689-690; Monroe to Madison, Sept. 2, 1794, WJM, II, 37-41; Washington to Jay, Dec. 18, 1794, WGW, XXXIV, 61. 30. Monroe to Committee of Public Safety, Sept. 3, 1794; Randolph to Monroe, Dec. 2, 1794; ASP:FR, I, 677, 689-690. See also n. 53 below. 31. ASP:FRf II, 685-686. 32. Monroe to Randolph, Nov. 20, Dec. 2, 1794, ibid., 685, 688.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 500-505

33. Ibid., 688. 34. Monroe to Randolph, Dec. 18,1794 (private), W]M, II, 160-161; Ammon, Monroe, p. 142. 35. ASP.-FR, I, 668-669. Monroe to Madison, Nov. 30, 1794; to Randolph, Dec. 8, 1794; Committee of Public Safety to Monroe, Dec. 27, 1794; WJM, II, 136-137, 154-158, i69n., 162-163. Randolph to Monroe, June i, 1795, ASP:FR, I, 711-712. 36. Monroe to Committee of Public Safety, Dec. 27, 1794; Jay to Monroe, Nov. 24, 25, 1794; WJM, II, 163, 169-17011., 180-181. ASP:FRf I, 517. WGW, XXXVI, 203, 221. 37. Monroe to Randolph, Sept. 10, 1795, ASP:FR, I, 721-722. See also Monroe to Madison, Sept. 8, 1795, WJM, II, 357. 38. J. Q. Adams to John Adams, Sept. 12, 1795, WJQA, I, 411. 39. Pickering to Monroe, Sept. 12, Nov. 23, 1795, June 13, Aug. 22, 1796, ASP:FR, I, 596-598, 727, 737-738, 741-742; Monroe to Madison, July 5, 1796, WJM, III, 22-23. Among the first to conclude that Monroe ought to be recalled was Oliver Wolcott, who wrote Hamilton that "we must stop the channels by which foreign poison is introduced into our Country.'' June 17, 1796, PAH, XX, 231. 40. DeConde, Entangling Alliance, pp. 368-369. 41. Monroe to Charles Delacroix, Feb. 17, 1796, AECPE-U 45, i45-i46vo.; Ammon, Monroe, p. 148; M. A. Thiers, Histoire de la revolution fran^aise (Paris, 1842), IX, 41. The nature and date of the document from which Thiers quotes (a portion of which is qu. above) are unknown. 42. Monroe to George Logan, June 24, I79t5]; to Jefferson, June 23, 1795; WJM, III, 6-7; II, 292-304. Ammon, Monroe, p. 152. 43. Secretaries of Departments to Washington, July 2, 1796; Charles Lee to Washington, July 7, 1796; Sparks, ed., Writings of Washington, XI, 483-487. 44. Monroe to Randolph, Mar. 6, 17, 1795, ASP:FR, I, 698, 701; to William Short, May 30,1795, WJM, II, 289-290; DeConde, Entangling Alliance, pp. 366-367. The instructions to Francois Barthelemy, far from saying anything about assisting the United States, included among the arguments for Spain's retroceding Louisiana that it would form a useful barrier between the United States and Spain's other colonies. May 12, 1795, Papiers de Barthelemy, ambassadeur de France en Suisse, 1/92-1/97 (Paris, 1910), VI, 25. The completed treaty, which did not include such retrocession, is in ibid., pp. 81-87. 45. George W. Kyte, "A Spy on the Western Waters: The Military Intelligence Mission of General Collot in 1796," MVHR, XXXIV (Dec. 1947), 427-442; Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 350-35546. Durand Echeverria, ed., "General Collet's Plan for a Reconnaissance of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, 1796," WMQ, 3rd Ser., IX (Oct. 1952), 512-520. The qu. is in Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 354. 47. Monroe to Secretary of State, Aug. 27, 1796, ASP:FR, I, 742. Pickering's letter of recall is dated Aug. 22, 1796, ibid., 741-742. 48. Jefferson to Madison, Jan. 30, 1787, PTJ, XI, 97. 49. Washington, "Remarks on Monroe's 'View of the Conduct of the Executive,'" Mar. 1798, WGW, XXXVI, 194; Randolph to Monroe, Sept. 25, 1794, ASP:FR, I, 678; Monroe, "A View, &c.," WJM, III, 450-451, in which Monroe asserts that he had been given to understand, with regard to Jay's instructions, that "if the existence of a power to form a commercial treaty was not positively denied, yet it was withheld, and the contrary evidently implied." And according to Fauchet, Randolph "positively assured me that there was no question of a treaty, only of simple demands. ..." Randolph to Monroe, June i,

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1795, ASP:FR, I, 711-712; Fauchet to Committee of Public Safety, Feb. 16, 1795, CFM, p. 578; Declaration of Edmund Randolph, July 8, 1795, ASP:FR, I, 711-712. 50. E.g., such characterizations as these in Fauchet's dispatches: "This Mr. Randolph is undoubtedly an excellent man, very much a partisan of our revolution, but I believe him to be of weak character; it is very easy to penetrate his secrets once you get him agitated; besides which I do not give him mine except when I want him to know them." Or: "I have rightly guessed that Mr. Randolph, pressed in cabinet councils between Mr. Hamilton's influence and the force of our rights which are ever heightened in his eyes by his attachment to our Republic, never makes his official communications with sufficient coldness but what at bottom he feels the emptiness of the means of satisfaction he is charged with offering me." To Minister of Foreign Affairs, May 7, Nov. 15, 1794, CFM, pp. 376, 472. 51. As Professor Ammon wryly observes, "Histories of France during this era do not contain any references to the United States or to Monroe. Of all the diplomatic problems facing France, that presented by the United States was one of the least significant." Ammon, Monroe, p. 6oin.; see also 6o4n. (Though an exception, the work of Thiers, is cited in n. 42 above.) 52. Ibid., pp. 118-120. Monroe to Randolph, Aug. 25,1794; to Madison, Sept. 2, 1794; WJM, II, 32-33, 37-40. 53. This was done in two stages, an Order of Nov. 15, 1794 which made some trifling concessions but left the 1793 decree essentially intact, and a subsequent one, Jan. 3, 1795, which restored the "free ships, free goods" principle of the commercial treaty of 1778. ASP:FR, I, 642-643, 689, 752. (Date of Nov. 15 misreported as Nov. 18 on p. 689.) 54. Ammon, Monroe, p. 129; DeConde, Entangling Alliance, pp. 399-404; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 228-231. See also Ch. VIII above, n. 123. 55. W]QA, I, 353-362, 4o8~409n.; CFM, p. 728; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 236-238. 56. Report to Executive Directory, Jan. 16, 1796, AECPE-U 45, 41-53; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 236-238. 57. Jefferson to R. R. Livingston, Apr. 18, 1802, WT], VIII, 145. 58. Frances S. Childs, "French Opinion of Anglo-American Relations 1795-1805," French American Review, I (Jan.-Mar. 1948), 22-23; Adet to Committee of Public Safety, Dec. 2, 1795, CFM, p. 798. 59. "I take i t . . . for granted," Monroe assured the Committee of Public Safety, "that the report [of a treaty "derogatory to the treaties of alliance" between France and the United States] is without foundation; for I cannot believe that an American minister would ever forget the connections between the United States and France, which every day's experience demonstrates to be the interest of both Republics still further to cement." Dec. 27, 1794, WJM, II, 163. Fauchet's dispatches to his government, beginning well before any news from either London or Paris had reached America, were full of information on how the friends of France in America were viewing the Jay mission, starting with Monroe himself. "If Mr. Monroe is vested with the necessary powers," he wrote as early as May 17, 1794, "you will find it more advantageous to treat with him, and he will be the first to so invite you, in order to thwart Jay's mission, upon which he has very real fears, probably only too well founded." And again on Sept. 16, 1794: "Mr. Monroe . . . opened his heart to me on that subject before his departure. His zeal for our interests will probably inspire him to give you his views on how we may ensure an effective reaction against the influence of that mission. ..." Fauchet has an occasional word for Randolph as well, with whom

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NOTES FOR PAGES 510-514

he talked after the news arrived of Monroe's effusive debut in Paris: "He told me (just between ourselves, as he himself put it) that he was delighted with the conduct of his friend Mr. Monroe, but feared that he might have gone beyond his instructions and that this might cause irritation." A private talk with Madison early in February 1795 had elicited that Madison had fears similar to Monroe's as to Jay's doings and, though as yet ignorant of the treaty's actual provisions, believed it would be "altogether disadvantageous to the United States." CFM, pp. 344, 422, 490, 573. See also dispatches of Oct. 22, 31, Nov. 15, 19, Dec. 27, 1794, Feb. 2, 4, 16, Mar. 8, 16, Apr. 3, 9, May 3, 1795, ibid., pp. 440-441, 455> 473~474> 4^2, 520-524, 55*-557> 559-564> 5/8-580, 601-609, 619, 628-634, 674-675, 707-7*0. John Churchman, a scientist from Maryland, was the carrier of Monroe's final dispatches from Bordeaux, delivering them to the State Department on July 29, 1796. In the course of conversation with Secretary Pickering, Churchman was asked about the state of opinion in France as to Jay's treaty. "He answered that. . . very little was said by Frenchmen about the treaty—tho' much was said against it by the American Citizens in Paris." Pickering to Washington, July 29, 1796, W]M, II, 494n. According to Uriah Tracy: "Information from the Hague [J. Q. Adams] . . . is full, that the French Directory were governed entirely by advice of Americans who were in Paris, and by information received there from Americans on this side of the water, in all their movements respecting America." Tracy to Wolcott, Jan. 7,1797, Gibbs, Memoirs, 1,415-416. See also WJQA, 1,481. When Monroe published his defense of his mission in 1797 (View of the Conduct of the Executive, repr. in WJM, III, 383-457), he said that as soon as the American newspapers appeared in Paris in mid-August, 1795, with the text of the treaty, opinion in the French government "openly and severely censure[d] it." On his copy Washington wrote in the margin, "They were predetermined to do so and took the tone from their partisans on this side the water." Ibid., 421; WGW, XXXVI, 205. 60. Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: Founding Father (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), pp. 142-149; ASP:FR, II, 6-7; "Observations on the note of T. Payne relative to the unconstitutionality of the nomination of Mr. Pinckney," Dec. 6, 1796, AECPE-U 46, 427-428. 61. Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 239, 241, 244-245, 250, 253-254; ASP:FRt I, 583. 62. Ibid., I, 579-583; DeConde, Entangling Alliance, pp. 456-458, 471-478; Dec. 31, 1796, CFM, p. 983. 63. Georges Lefebvre, The Directory, tr. Robert Baldick (London, 1965), pp. 1-14, 72-77; Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1/60-1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1958-1964), II, 214-228, 270-275; Louis Madelin, The French Revolution (London, 1933), pp. 478-516. (The qu. is on p. 515.) 64. Monroe to Madison, Sept. i, 1796, WJM, III, 53. 65. Same to same, Jan. i, 1797, Ammon, Monroe, p. 155. 66. Ames to Wolcott, Sept. 26, 1796, Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 384. 67. Calculations on the party composition of the Fourth and Fifth Congresses are in Rudolph M. Bell, Party and Faction in American Politics: The House of Representatives, 1789-1801 (Westport, Conn., 1973), pp. 255-257. The most accurate listing presently available of individual members of the First through Seventh Congresses, with their party identification, is in John F. Hoadley, Origins of American Political Parties, 1/89-1803 (Lexington, Ky., 1986), 192-219. On politics in the states mentioned above see Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (Chapel Hill,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 514-521 N.C., 1967); Harry M. Tinkcom, The Republicans and federalists in Pennsylvania, 17901801: A Study in National Stimulus and Local Response (Harrisburg, Pa., 1950); Bernard Fay, "Early Party Machinery in the United States: Pennsylvania in the Election of 1796," PMHB, LX (Oct. 1936), 375-390; Roland M. Baumann, "Philadelphia's Manufacturers and the Excise Taxes of 1794: The Forging of the Jeffersonian Coalition/' PMHB, CVI (Jan. 1982), 3-39; Paul Goodman, The Democratic-Republicans of Massachusetts: Politics in a New Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); George R. Lamplugh, Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Goergia, 1783-1806 (Newark, Del., 1986); and Lisle A. Rose, Prologue to Democracy: The Federalists in the South, 1789-1800 (Lexington, Ky., 1968). 68. Hofstadter, "A Constitution Against Parties," Idea of a Party System, pp. 40-73. On the methods whereby electors were chosen in the several states in 1796, see table in Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795-1800 (Philadelphia, 1957), 409. 69. Noble E. Cunningham, The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789-1801 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), pp. 91-92, 163-164. 70. Ibid., pp. 107-108; Malone, Jefferson, III, 274-276. 71. Adams to H. Knox, Mar. 30, 1797, WJA, III, 535 (see also 524^). The movement to slip Pinckney in ahead of Adams in 1796 was less concentrated and purposeful than a similar movement under similar auspices on behalf of Pinckney's brother Charles Cotesworth in 1800. But that such a movement existed seems to have been more or less common knowledge. Pierre Adet, for one, knew all about it and so reported to his home government. To Minister of Foreign Relations, Dec. 15, 1796, CFM, p. 978. See also Stephen Higginson to Hamilton, Jan. 12, 1797, PAH, XX, 465; and there are a number of clues and allusions scattered through Hamilton's correspondence during this period: ibid., 158i59> 372, 376> 377-378, 403-404> 406, 418, 437~438> 44572. "One man alone—Benjamin Franklin Bache—either wrote or published the vast majority of the attacks. The more astute Republican leadership . . . shunned any connection with the assault on the President. Almost all notoriety for the defamation of Washington belonged to Bache and the Aurora." James D. Tagg, "Benjamin Franklin Bache's Attack on George Washington," PMHB, C (Apr. 1976), 194. 73. Jefferson to Monroe, June 12, 1796; to Madison, Mar. 27, 1796; WTJ, VII, 80, 69. 74. Evidence for this is quite widespread. E.g., Baumann, "Philadelphia Manufacturers," passim; Young, Democratic Republicans of New York, p. 581; Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York, 1984), pp. 48-49 and n.; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), p. 281. 75. Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, p. 141. 76. Ibid., pp. 412-414. 77. Tinkcom, Republicans and Federalists, pp. 159-162; Richard G. Miller, Philadelphia—The Federalist City: A Study of Urban Politics, 1789-1801 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1976), pp. 22-24, 74-77. 78. Tinkcom, Republicans and Federalists, pp. 163-164. 79. Ibid., pp. 166-168; Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, pp. 177-181. 80. Ibid., pp. 181-186. It is true that Madison, for one, was greatly disturbed by Adet's paper, and he so wrote to Jefferson on Dec. 5, 1796: "Adets Note which you will have seen, is working all the evil with which it is pregnant. Those who rejoice at its indiscretions & are taking advantage of them, have the impudence to pretend that it is an electioneering

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NOTES FOR PAGES 521-528 manoevre, and that the French Govt. have been led to it by the opponents of the British Treaty." PJM, XVI, 422. Professor Cunningham concludes from this that "there seems to be no evidence that Republican leaders were implicated." Jeffersonian Republicans, p. 101. Adet's own correspondence, however, strongly suggests otherwise. Describing a visit to New England in one of his dispatches, Adet mentions having consulted with the "most influential" of "our friends" there, reporting that "they have all told me France must adopt measures that will cause the merchants to fear for their property, and to make them see the need to place at the head of the government a man whose known character would inspire confidence in the [French] Republic and thus put him in a position to play the mediator between it and the United States." To Minister of Foreign Relations, Sept. 24, 1796, CFM, p. 948. From this, and in view of his local connections—and especially of the arrangements he made with Bache for publication—it is hard to imagine Adet's not having had similar conversations in Philadelphia. 81. Delayed returns from one of the counties, had they arrived in time, would have meant the election of all fifteen. Tinkcom, Republicans and Federalists, p. 172. 82. Ibid., pp. 271-272; Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, pp. 186-187; Miller, Philadelphia, pp. 85, 150. On the presumed effect of Adet's activities see ibid., pp. 89-90; Kurtz, pp. 189-190; and Oliver Wolcott to O. Wolcott, Sr., Nov. 27,1796, Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 400-401. 83. The material for this and the two succeeding paragraphs is drawn from Miller, Philadelphia, Chs. 3-5. 84. Qu. in Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans, pp. 100-101. 85. Ibid., p. 98. 86. Idea of a Party System, p. 216. 87. Mark D. Kaplanoff, "Making the South Solid: Parties and the Structure of Society in South Carolina, 1790-1815 (Unpub. diss., Cambridge U., 1979), pp. 6-14. Other works on which we have drawn for the section that follows are George C. Rogers, Jr., Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston, 1/58-1812 (Columbia, S.C., 1962); Zahniser, Pinckney; Rose, Prologue to Democracy; Joseph W. Cox, Champion of Southern Federalism: Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina (Port Washington, N.Y., 1972); and Richard B. Clow, "Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, 1749-1800: Unproclaimed Statesman" (Unpub. diss., U. of Georgia, 1976). 88. Rogers, Smith, p. 290. 89. Hamilton to King, May 4, 1796, PAH, XX, 158. 90. See n. 71 above. 91. Cox, Harper, pp. 73-74; Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., "South Carolina Federalist Correspondence, 1789-1797," AHR, XIV (July 1909), 782. 92. Clow, "Rutledge," pp. 287-288; Rose, Prologue to Democracy, p. 135; Rogers, Smith, p. 291. 93. Kaplanoff, "Making the South Solid," pp. 7-8, 140. 94. Rogers, Smith, pp. 203-207, 226-227; Clow, "Rutledge," pp. 261-264. 95. Rogers, Smith, pp. 264-267, 276-278, 281. 96. Ibid., pp. 279-280; Zahniser, Pinckney, pp. i27-i28n., 129, 133-134; Kaplanoff, "Making the South Solid," p. 156. 97. Smith to Gabriel Manigault, Dec. 22, 1796, Rogers, Smith, p. 294. 98. Clow, "Rutledge," pp. 290-299. 99. To Abigail Adams, Mar. 5, 1797, C. F. Adams, ed., Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife (Boston, 1841), II, 244. 100. Jefferson to Walter Jones, Jan. 2, 1814, WT], IX, 448-449.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 529-530 CHAPTER

XII

John Adams and the Dogma of "Balance" 1. E.g., Gilbert Chinard, Honest John Adams (Boston, 1933); Manning}. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore, 1953); Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795-1800 (Philadelphia, 1957); Page Smith, John Adams (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), 2v.; John M. Allison, Adams and Jefferson: The Story of a Friendship (Norman, Okla., 1966), pp. 193-196; Richard B. Morris, Great Presidential Decisions: State Papers that Changed the Course of History (Philadelphia, 1967), pp. 48-51; Ralph A. Brown, The Presidency of John Adams (Lawrence, Kans., 1975). Here we refer only to a tendency, upon which there are as many variations as authors. (Kurtz and Dauer, for example, do not concede that Adams's policies made his loss of the 1800 election inevitable.) Gerard H. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and American Diplomacy, 1795-1800 (Columbia, Mo., 1969) neither defends Pickering nor challenges the pro-Adams view. Adams's own version is to be found principally in E. M. Cunningham, ed., Correspondence between the Hon. John Adams . . . and the Late Wm. Cunningham, Esq., . . . Beginning in 1803, an& Ending in 1812 (Boston, 1823); and Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Originally Published in the Boston Patriot . . . (Boston, 1809), the latter reprinted in WJA, DC, 241-311. To these might be added the biographical portion of ibid., I, 500-598. 2. Jacob E. Cooke, "Country Above Party: John Adams and the 1799 Mission to France," Edmund Willis, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Papers and Comments Presented at the Nineteenth Conference on Early American History . . . (Bethlehem, Pa., I 9^7), pp. 53-79; Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1976), pp. 250-265; Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York, 1979), pp. 329-352. 3. No major study of Adams has gone so far in associating his thought with reactionary principles as does Correa M. Walsh, The Political Science of John Adams: A Study in the Theory of Mixed Government and the Bicameral System (New York, 1915), a work which had wide influence among historians in the Progressive Era and subsequently; on the other hand Adams was much praised by such "new conservative" writings of the 19508 as Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana (Chicago, 1953); and Peter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill (Princeton, N.J., 1956); whereas Edward Handler, America and Europe in the Political Thought of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), asserts that "what is called American conservatism, when considered within the wider context of European political ideas, is itself a variant of the liberal creed," and that Adams was well within that tradition (p. 191 and passim). Others have come to a similar judgment; e.g., George M. Dutcher, "The Rise of Republican Government in the United States," PSQ LV (June 1940), 199-216; Richard B. Morris, Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers as Revolutionaries (New York, 1973), p. no; Randolph G. Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution: Britannic-American Contributions to the Problem of Imperial Organization, 1765-1775, 3rd ed. (New York, 1958), pp. 107-127. 4. The most explicit argument for a periodization of Adams's thought in distinct phases is John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, N.J., 1966); but there are similar assumptions in other works: Walsh, Political Science of John Adams, pp. 3-4; Dauer, Adams Federalists, pp. 36-37; Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), pp. 55-56; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), pp. 570-572; and Joyce Appleby, "The New Republican Synthesis and the Changing Political Ideas of John

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NOTES FOR PAGES 530-534 Adams," AQ, XXV (Dec. 1973), 578-595. For the contrary argument, that of an essential sameness, or at least consistency, see Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 27; Smith, John Adams, I, 273-274; Richard M. Gummere, "The Classical Politics of John Adams," Boston Public Library Quarterly, IX (Oct. 1957), 167-182; Morris, Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny, p. no; and W]A, IV, 181. 5. On Adams's writing as a reflection in large part of fluctuating moods see WTJ, I, 273 ("he never acted on any system, but was always governed by the feeling of the moment"); Frank W. Grinnell, "The Constitutional History of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from the Revolution to 1813," Massachusetts Law Quarterly, II (19161917), 394-405; Bernard Bailyn, "Butterfield's Adams: Notes for a Sketch," WMQ 3rd Ser., XIX, 253; and Shaw, Character of John Adams, pp. 210-212. On the disorganization of Adams's writing and his extensive copying of other authors, see Haraszti, Prophets of Progress, esp. pp. 46-48, 155-164. A correspondence between theory and behavior is suggested by Stephen G. Kurtz, "The Political Science of John Adams, A Guide to His Statecraft," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XXV (Oct. 1968), 605-613. 6. Page Smith's John Adams is a narrative account of Adams's life and career; Peter Shaw's Character of John Adams is an admirable effort to exhibit what is implied in its title. We have found both helpful, especially the latter, upon whose suggestions we have drawn for some of our own formulations in this and the following paragraphs. 7. Where Adams would have stood by modern academic standards is unclear, though probably not first. He himself evidently regarded Moses Hemmenway and Samuel Locke as the top scholars of the class, though William Browne was chosen as valedictorian, which at that time was an honor given for oratory rather than scholarship. Still, each of the graduates had some forensic part to play at commencement, and Adams's performance seems to have been impressive enough to attract the notice of the Rev. Thaddeus Maccarty of Worcester, who invited him to come there and serve as schoolmaster. Clifford K. Shipton, ed., Sibley's Harvard Graduates, XIII (Boston, 1965), 514, 551, 609, 620. 8. The Dissertation is reprinted in WJA, III, 447-464; the Braintree Instructions in ibid., 465-468. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence S. Mayo (Cambridge, 1936), III, 284. 9. Thoughts on Government, WJA, IV, 189-200; Defence, ibid., IV, 270-588, V, and VI, 3-220. Page Smith doubts that the first volume of the Defence could have had great influence on the deliberations at the Philadelphia Convention (John Adams, II, 701), though there is persuasive evidence that it did: Haraszti, Prophets of Progress, pp. 31, 38; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, pp. 581-582; and esp. Merrill Jensen, ed., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, Wis., 1976), II, 160-161, i67n., 205, 505, 507n., 509, 511, 512-513, 683, 686. 10. AP-.DAJA, II, 362-363; to Abigail Adams, Apr. 7, 1783, APM, reel 360; Shaw, Character of John Adams, p. 12; to Abigail Adams, Dec. 3, 1778, AP:AFC, III, 129-130. 11. AP-.DAJA, I, 6, 7-8, 31; to Abigail Adams, Dec. 7, 1796, APM, reel 382; Shaw, Character of John Adams, pp. 22, 33. 12. To Benjamin Waterhouse, Aug. 19, 1812, Worthington C. Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend: Letters to John Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, 1/84-1822 (Boston, 1927), p. 86; Shaw, Character of John Adams, pp. 97, 117; from Boston Gazette, Aug. 29, 1763, in WJA, III, 432. 13. To James Warren, July 17, 1774, Warren-Adams Letters (Boston, 1917-23), I, 29. "The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences. ..." To Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780, AP:AFC, III, 342. 14. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 568; Charles, Origins, p. 54.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 534-538

15. We here follow the line of analysis advanced in Howe, Changing Political Thought, despite the reservations concerning it in Shaw, Character of John Adams, pp. 210-216. 16. The most perceptive sense of the disjunction between Adams's view of the Federal Constitution and that of most of his countrymen is in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, pp. 567-592. 17. The "balance" theme is present in everything Adams wrote on government. It might be added that Adams invariably filled the margins of his books with notes as he read, but he read Shakespeare through twice in 1805 without making any marginalia at all—except the one comment that in Shakespeare's time a balance of powers was lacking. Shaw, Character of John Adams, p. 313. 18. AP.-DAJA, I, 335; iii, 284; to Mercy Warren, Apr. 16, 1776, Warren-Adams Letters, I, 222; Howe, Changing Political Thought, pp. 28-58. 19. Ibid., pp. 89-101. During this period Adams was entirely concerned with the forming of state constitutions, his principal ideas for which were first embodied in Thoughts on Government. He took little interest and played no part (being out of the country) in the nationalist movement of the 17808 that resulted in the Philadelphia Convention—though as noted above, he became a strong supporter of the new Constitution. 20. Ibid., pp. 102-103 ff., 137-140, 147-155, 164; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, pp. 571-57421. Adams to Jefferson, Nov. 15, 1813, Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (Chapel Hill, 1959), II, 398; to John Taylor, WJA, VI, 456; Howe, Changing Political Thought, pp. 167-176; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, pp. 574-580. A discussion of the immediate stimuli for writing the Defence is Appleby, "New Republican Synthesis" (n. 4 above); on the concept of "ostracism," see Shaw, Character of John Adams, p. 209n. The Discourses on Davila is reprinted in WJA, VI, 223-403. 22. On the titles controversy see Ch. I above. 23. The question of Adams's alleged "monarchism" and of his various denials of it is discussed in Haraszti, Prophets of Progress, pp. 39-42; and Dauer, Adams Federalists, pp. 53-5424. Creation of the American Republic, esp. pp. 580-582. 25. AP.-DAJA, I, 37. 26. Smith, John Adams, I, 121-125; Shaw, Character of John Adams, pp. 58, 77-78. 27. Ibid., pp. 109-111; Smith, John Adams, I, 402-406, 422; Bailyn, "Butterfield's Adams," 246-249. "But what is all this to me? I receive but little Pleasure in beholding all these Things, because I cannot but consider them as Bagatelles, introduced by Time and Luxury in Exchange for the great Qualities and hardy manly Virtues of the human Heart. I cannot help suspecting that the more Elegance, the less Virtue in all Times and Countries." To Abigail Adams, Apr. 12, 1778, AP-.AFC, III, 10. Or: "I could fill volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculpture, Tapestry, Porcelains, &c., &c., &c.—but I could not do this without neglecting my duty." To same, May 12, 1780, ibid., 342. 28. Qu. in Adrienne Koch, Power, Morals, and the Founding Fathers: Essays in the Interpretation of the American Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), p. 82. 29. Adet to Pickering, Oct. 27, 1796, ASP:FR, I, 576-577; Monroe to Pickering, Aug. 4, 15, 1796, ibid., 741. Washington did not arrive in Philadelphia from Mount Vernon until the afternoon of the 3ist, by which time Adet's communication had been made public. Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 412-413.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 538-539

30. J. Q. Adams to John Adams, Aug. 13,1796, WJQA, II, 19, 24; R. King to Monroe, Aug. n, 1796, King, King, II, 78. 31. Samuel F. Bemis, "Washington's Farewell Address: A Foreign Policy of Independence," AHR, XXXIX (Jan. 1934), 252-25511. 32. Albert H. Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy During the Federalist Era (Knoxville, Tenn., 1974), pp. 108-117, 185-186. For a detailed account of how American shipping fared amid these many shifts of French policy, with lists of individual cases (including one story of how a group of influential French privateer owners could effect the repeal of the May 23,1793, decree in order to keep a rich American prize they had captured), see Pickering's report to Congress, Feb. 28, 1797 (misdated 1798), ASP:FR, I, 748-760. Adet's two notes, Oct. 27 and Nov. 15, 1796, are in ibid., 576577, 579-583. See also n. 34 below. 33. ASP.-FR, I, 578. 34. E.g., WJQA, II, 112, 121, 143, 151; Alexander Hamilton, "The Warning," I-VI (series of essays published in Gazette of the United States between Jan. 27 and Mar. 27, 1797)5 PAH, XX, esp. 491-493, 551-556. Most of the supporting documents in the report cited above (n. 32) were prepared by Fulwar Skipwith, American consul-general in Paris during the Monroe mission, whose lists of French spoliations were compiled before the Jay Treaty was negotiated. Aspersions were cast by Frenchmen themselves upon the good faith in which this and other maritime decrees were issued. A long speech to this effect was delivered by Claude E. J. P. Pastoret in the Council of Five Hundred on June 20, 1797, Gazette National, ou le Moniteur Universel, June 25, 26, 1797; also published in Gazette of the United States, Sept. 19, 1797. See also Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797-1801 (New York, 1966), pp. 390-391, n. 4. 35. Pickering to Adet, Nov. i, 1796 (published in Aurora and Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser Nov. 3); the other reply was in the form of an extended letter of instruction to C. C. Pinckney, Jan. 16, 1797 (communicated to Congress Jan. 19 and published in Gazette of the United States, Jan. 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 1797); ASP:FR, I, 578, 559576. Hamilton to Washington, Jan. 19, 1797, PAH, XX, 469; Madison to Jefferson, Jan. 8, 1797, P]M, XVI, 447; "Report of the Secretary of State respecting the depredations committed on the commerce of the United States, since the last of October, 1796," June 21, 1797, ASP:FR, II, 28-65. A definitive report of Pinckney's non-reception did not reach the American government until late in March 1797, but romors and suspicions of it had been current six or seven weeks before. Henry Tazewell mentioned reading one such rumor as early as Feb. i in a letter to Jefferson of that date, Jefferson Papers, LC. See also DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 383-384^ 36. Jefferson, "Anas," WT], I, 272-273. 37. "Pickering and all his colleagues are as much attached to me as I desire. I have no jealousies from that quarter." Adams to Elbridge Gerry, Feb. 13, 1797, WJA, VIII, 523. "When I came into office," Adams later wrote to Benjamin Lincoln, "it was my determination to make as few removals as possible—not one from personal motives, not one from party considerations." Mar. 10, ibid., IX, 47. See also Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, pp. 268-270; and Shaw, Character of John Adams, pp. 254-255. Adams's attitude here need not, of course, be seen as inconsistent with James McHenry's subsequent complaint that the President considered "the heads of departments little more than mere clerks." To Pickering, Feb. 23, 1811, Henry C. Lodge, Life and Letters of George Cabot (Boston, 1877), p. 208.

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N O T E S FOR PAGES 539-544

38. This distinction has been astutely made by Peter Shaw in Character of John Adams, p. 247. 39. WTJ, VII, 91-92. 40. John Adams to Abigail Adams, Jan. 3, 1797; same to same, Jan. i, 1797; APM, reel 383. Rush to Jefferson, Jan. 4, 1797, Jefferson Papers, LC. Adams to Tristram Dalton, Jan. 19, 1797, WTJ, VII, io8n. The entire question of exactly when Adams became aware of Hamilton's election maneuverings is complicated in that his private response did not correspond to the face he put on the matter in his letters to others. Though he certainly knew about these efforts by early December, he continued for the next three months to profess either not to believe the stories, or to believe that such activities were not primarily directed at depriving him of the presidency, or that even if they were, it was for motives of the public good. What he may occasionally have blurted out in private can probably be inferred, e.g., from Rush's remark to Jefferson, qu. above, about Adams's viewing the case "in its proper light," or in his outburst to Abigail, Jan. 9, 1797, that "his [Hamilton's] intrigues in the election I despise." It is of course well known that the net product of his relations with Hamilton—in which this episode certainly constituted a turning point—was a hatred of the man which lasted all his life and which was perpetuated in Adams family tradition. Epistolary evidence bearing on the question includes John Adams to Abigail Adams, Dec. 12, 1796, W]A, I, 496; same to same, Dec. 16, 18, 1796, APM, reel 382; Elbridge Gerry to Abigail Adams, Dec. 28, 1796, Gerry Papers, LC; same to same, Jan. 7, 1797, Dauer, Adams Federalists, pp. 113-114; Abigail Adams to Gerry, Dec. 31, 1796, James T. Austin, The Life of Elbridge Gerry (Boston, 1829), II, 144-145; John Adams to Abigail Adams, Jan. 9, 1797, APM, reel 383; Gerry to Adams, Feb. 3, 1797, WJA, VIE, 524; Adams to Rush, Feb. 13, 1797, APM, reel 117; Adams to Gerry, Feb. 13, 1797, WJA, VIII, 524; Elkanah Watson to Adams, Mar. 5, 1797, APM, reel 383; Adams to Thomas Welsh, Mar. 10, 1797, qu. in Brown, Adams Presidency, p. 20; Adams to Henry Knox, Mar. 30, 1797, WJA, VIII, 535. See also Brown, Adams Presidency, pp. 18-20; Shaw, Character of John Adams, pp. 250-252; and Lynn H. Parsons, "Continuing Crusade: Four Generations of the Adams Family View of Alexander Hamilton," NEQ, XXXVII (Mar. 1964), 43-63. 41. Jefferson to Madison, Jan. i, 1797, WTJf VII, 95-96. 42. Jefferson to Adams, Dec. 28, 1796 (not sent), ibid., 95-96. 43. Madison to Jefferson, Jan. 15, 1797, PJM, XVI, 455-456. 44. Jefferson to Madison, Jan. 30, 1797, ibid., 479. 45. Both Jefferson and Adams left accounts of this episode, Jefferson's in his "Anas," based largely on notes made at the time, WTJ, I, 272-273; and Adams in his Boston Patriot letters written in 1809, a dozen years after the event, WJA, IX, 284-285. 46. WJA, I, 508; WTJ, I, 272-273. 47. WJA, IX, 105-111; Aurora, Mar. 14, 1797; McMaster, History, II, 310-311. 48. WJA, IX, 286. 49. Ibid., 285; WTJ, I, 272-273. 50. This is the tendency in most works primarily sympathetic to Adams (Kurtz, Presidency, p. 238; Dauer, Adams Federalists, p. 124; Smith, Adams, II, 922); though as we argue below, the case has its other side. 51. Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 456, 462, 468. A degree of respect to this view of Adams's character, as mentioned in n. 2 above, has been accorded in the works by Cooke, Shaw, and McDonald therein cited. 52. Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Founding Father (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), pp. 134-135-

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NOTES FOR PAGES 544-546

53. E.g., Washington wrote to Adams on Feb. 20, 1797, of his "strong hope that you will not withhold merited promotion for Mr. John [Quincy] Adams because he is your Son. For without intending to compliment the father or the mother, or to censure any others, I give it as my decided opinion that Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our Diplomatic Corps." Washington added that the country would "sustain a loss" if young Adams's "talents and worth" were "checked by over delicacy on your part." WGW, XXXV, 394. Abigail Adams wrote to her son on Nov. 3, 1797: "That you would not have been sent to Berlin at this time, if Mr. Washington had continued in office, I fully believe. But I can tell you where you would have been employed —as one of the envoys to France. This was the desire and opinion of all the ministers, and nothing but your near connection with the chief Magistrate prevented your being nominated. He had a delicacy upon the subject, and declined it." WJQA, II, 253^ See also Wolcott to Hamilton, Mar. 31, 1797, PAH, XX, 573. 54. Hamilton to Washington, Nov. 4, 5, n, 1796; to Wolcott, Nov. 9, 22, 1796; ibid., XX, 373, 374, 389, 380, 412. 55. Hamilton to Washington, Jan. 19, [25-31], 1797; Washington to Hamilton, Jan. 22, 1797; ibid.f XX, 470, 480-481, 477. 56. Hamilton to W. L. Smith, Jan. 19, Apr. 5, 10, 1797; to T. Sedgwick, Jan. 20, Feb. 26, 1797; to Pickering, Mar. 22, 29, May u, 1797; to McHenry, Mar. [22], Apr. 29, 30, 1797; to Wolcott, Mar. 30, Apr. 5, 1797; ibid., XX, 468, XXI, 20-21, 29-41, XX, 474, 521522, XX, 545, 556-557, XXI, 81-82, XX, 575, XXI, 61-68, 72-75, XX, 567-568, XXI, 2223. For reaction to Hamilton's ideas see Tracy to Hamilton, Mar. 23, Apr. 6, 1797; Pickering to Hamilton, Mar. 26, Apr. 29, 1797; Wolcott to Hamilton, Mar. 31, 1797; McHenry to Hamilton, Apr. 14, 1797; Smith to Hamilton, May i, 1797; McHenry to Pickering, May 28, 1797; ibid., XX, 547, XXI, 24-26, XX, 549, XXI, 68-71, XX, 569, XXI, 48, 75-76; Bernard C. Steiner, The Life and Correspondence of James McHenry (Cleveland, 1907), pp. 224-226; Richard E. Welch, Jr., Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist: A Political Portrait (Middletown, Conn., 1965), pp. 165-166. On Ames, see n. 58 below. 57. Wolcott informed Hamilton that "by means of my most earnest sincere & urgent expostulations nay supplications, it was postponed." Mar. 31, 1797, PAH, XX, 570. According to Jefferson, "Charles Lee [the Attorney-General] consulted a member from Virginia to know whether Marshall would be agreeable. He named you, as more likely to give satisfaction. The answer was, 'Nobody of mr. Madison's way of thinking will be nominated.'" To Madison, June i, 1797, WTJ, VII, 132. 58. Fisher Ames, persuaded that the course Hamilton advocated was the right one, urged it upon Adams on Mar. 3 before departing for Massachusetts; Uriah Tracy, though not agreeing with Hamilton, nonetheless presented the latter's views to Adams a number of weeks later. Instead of welcoming such support for his own plan, Adams was decidedly irritated, and seems to have given them both rather short shrift. Hamilton wrote in 1800 that the expediency of a new mission to France "was suggested to Mr. ADAMS, through a Federal channel, a considerable time before he determined to take it." WJA, IX, 282283, 288-290; Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 483-484; Winfred B. A. Bernhard, Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesman, 1/58-1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), pp. 292-293; Letter . . . Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams . . . , PAH, XXV, 206. See also Adams's exchange in March 1797 with Henry Knox, WJA, VIII, 532-536. 59. Jefferson to Madison, Dec. 17, 1796; to Rutledge, Dec. 27, 1796; to Madison, Jan. 8, 1797; WJT, VII, 91-92, 94, 104. 60. Same to same, Jan. 22, 1797, ibid., VII, 107-108.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 547-550

61. James D. Tagg, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 315-316; circular letters of Samuel Cabell (Va.), Jan. 12, 1797, and John Clopton (Va.), Jan. 24, 1797, Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 1789-1829 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), I, 68-69, 77> Aurora, Jan. 24, 26, Feb. 14, 17, 1797; Washington to Hamilton, Jan. 22, 1797, PAH, XX, 477; Madison to Jefferson, Jan. 22, 1797, P]M, XVI, 471; Abigail Adams to John Adams, Jan. 27, 1797, APM, reel 383. 62. Federalist response is documented in n. 56 above, as is Hamilton's response to Federalist objections. He and they were not, however, in disagreement as to evils that could issue from such negotiations—except that Hamilton believed they could be guarded against through the presence of a Federalist on the commission. 63. Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams, pp. 211-212; Dauer, Adams federalists, pp. 116119. 64. Madison to Jefferson, Dec. 19, 1796, Jan. 29, Feb. 5, 1797, Jan. 15, 1797, PJM, XVI, 433, 476, 484, 456. 65. Same to same, Jan. 22, 1797, ibid., 471. 66. Jefferson to Madison, Jan. 22, 1797, WTJ, VII, 108; Adams to Abigail Adams, Mar. 17, 1797, C. F. Adams, ed., Letters of John Adams Addressed to his Wife (Boston, 1841), II, 252. 67. Madison to Jefferson, Apr. 15, 1798, PJM, XVII, 113; Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, Jan. 29, 1799, WTJ, VII, 336. The chapter in Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, which deals with the episode is entitled "The X.Y.Z. Dish.'" 68. Marshall in particular, it appears, was greatly taken by Paris and quite enjoyed himself there. See esp. Marshall to Pinckney, Apr. 21, 1798, PJnMl, III, 463, 84. One of the sidelights of the XYZ affair concerns "a lady" who, according to one of the dispatches, approached Pinckney in December 1797, perhaps at a party, and tried to wheedle him into a more receptive attitude about an American loan to France—but who, in a subsequent effort by Talleyrand to discredit the story, was referred to by him as "a lady known to be connected with Mr. Pinckney." The story has been spun out into several variations (some of them prurient), and is still a subject of speculation. According to one version the lady was a Madame de Villette, in whose large house Marshall and Gerry had their lodgings. She was an attractive widow of considerable charm who delighted them both, and with whom they spent a great deal of time, including at least one extended weekend at her country residence outside Paris. After the envoys returned home from France, rumors were set afoot in America under Republican auspices which imputed various boudoir exploits to Marshall and Pinckney, but for some reason not to Gerry. See John C. Miller, Crisis in freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston, 1951), pp. 148-149, for a description of the story and details of its provenance. Some of this continues to rub off in modern accounts (E.g., Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 317; DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 51-52; Zahniser, Pinckney, pp. 175-176), though more recently William Stinchcombe has argued that Madame de Villette and the "lady" of the dispatches were probably not the same person. The XYZ Affair (Westport, Conn., 1980), pp. 75-76; PJnMl, III, 3i8n. As for the fascination of Marshall and Gerry with their landlady, about which they themselves were quite open (and aside from the question of whether Madame de Villette was the one who approached Pinckney about the loan, or whether that lady was an agent of Talleyrand), how far it extended has never been settled and probably never will be. Actually there is very little in what evidence does exist to suggest that it was other than innocent. (Had it been otherwise, somebody would almost certainly have told on somebody, or at least dropped innuendoes; somebody in the American colony in Paris would at least have

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NOTES FOR PAGES 550-554 gossiped about Madame's morals. But so far as is known, nobody did.) PJnMl, III, 300 and n.; Marshall to Fulwar Skipwith, Apr. 21, 1798, ibid., 464; George A. Billias, Elbridge Gerry: Pounding father and Republican Statesman (New York, 1976), p. 268. A further item, probably not related to any of the foregoing, is Pinckney's reference, in his letters to Pickering from Amsterdam during the spring and summer of 1797, to "a lady" in Paris with whom he was in correspondence and who was supplying him with information. Zahniser, Pinckney, p. 155^ 69. This is the approach taken in Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, and "A Neglected Memoir by Talleyrand on French-American Relations, 1793-1797," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CXXI (June 1977), 195-208. 70. Pinckney to Pickering, Dec. 20, 1796, ASP:FR, II, 5-10, 18; Zahniser, Pinckney, pp. 141-149. Zahniser reports this news as having officially reached Adams on March 21, 1797, ibid., p. 149. 71. ASP:FR, I, 747; a slightly variant translation of Barras's speech is in ibid., II, 12; Ammon, Monroe, pp. 155-156. 72. King to Hamilton, Feb. 6, 1797, PAH, XX, 507-508; Washington to McHenry, Apr. 3, 1797, WGW, XXXV, 430. 73. The version of the decree which was transmitted among the papers accompanying Adams's message, printed in ASP:FR, II, 12-13, is incomplete; the full text is in ibid., II, 30-31. DeConde, Quasi-War, p. 17; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 275-278; Gardner W. Allen, Our Naval War with France (Boston, 1909), pp. 32-33. 74. WJA, IX, 111-119; Dauer, Adams Federalists, p. 129 and n.; Aurora, May 18,19,1797; Adams to Abigail Adams, Dec. 12, 1796, WJA, I, 495; AC, 5 Cong., i Sess., 364; Jefferson to Peregrine Fitzhugh, June 4, 1797; to Aaron Burr, June 17, 1797, WTJ, VH, 136, 146. 75. Adams submitted two sets of questions to members of the cabinet, dated Apr. 14, and 15,1797, the first ranging over the entire situation and the second applying particularly to what he might say in his special message. They are printed in WJA, VIII, 540-541, and Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 500-502. Wolcott's reply is in ibid., 502-517. Pickering's (dated May i, 1797), McHenry's (one undated, the other Apr. 29), and Lee's (Apr. 30 and May 5) are in APM, reel 384. There is a brief commentary on the replies by Adams's grandson and editor C. F. Adams in WJA, VIII, 541-543. McHenry asked Hamilton for advice on the questions, and Hamilton gave it to him in two papers, one dated Apr. 29 and the other undated, PAH, XXI, 61-68, 72-75. Much of what McHenry then wrote to Adams was simply copied verbatim from what Hamilton had written to him, though not all of it. In each case McHenry did a certain amount of editing and added material of his own. 76. Jefferson to Horatio Gates, May 30, 1797, WTJ, VII, 131. 77. Malone, Jefferson, III, 315-317, 322. 78. May 13, 1797, WTJf VII, 121-122. 79. Since a good many of the Scots who had kept stores in the Chesapeake region returned to do business there with the resumption of peace, a number of them becoming American citizens, Jefferson might be excused for imagining that the tobacco trade was still a British monopoly. But by 1797, with competition from American merchants having steadily increased, particularly since the outbreak of war in Europe, this was no longer the case. See Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674-1791, and of its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), II, 773; idem, "The Last Phase of the Virginia-London Consignment Trade: James Buchanan & Co., 1758-1768," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLIII (Jan. 1986), 64-98; Edward C. Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants in the Era of the American Revolution, 1763-1803 (Baltimore, 1975), pp. 35-75; and Charles G. Steffen,

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NOTES FOR PAGE 555

"The Rise of the Independent Merchant in the Chesapeake: Baltimore County, 16601769," JAH, LXXVT (June 1989), 9-33. It is also true that during this same period federal securities and stock in the Bank of the United States were increasingly attractive to investors both in Great Britain and on the Continent, thanks to the strong credit of the American government. But that is not to say that such investors had any measurable influence on federal financial policy. 80. "As to going to war with France lightly," Adams wrote to Gerry on May 3, "I know of nobody who is willing for it. . . ." APM, reel 117. George Cabot wrote, in a letter to the Columbian Centinel, May 3, 1797: "But it will be asked, must we make war on France? I answer, No. War might be just, but is not expedient: it is a great calamity, and should always be avoided, except when necessary to prevent a greater evil than itself'' Qu. in Henry C. Lodge, Life and Letters of George Cabot (Boston, 1878), p. 583. Robert Goodloe Harper, in a circular letter to his constituents, July 30, 1797, wrote that peace would be "a great happiness to our country." Cunningham, ed., Circular Letters, I, 104. Certainly none of the cabinet desired war at this stage, as is evident in the material cited in n. 75 above, and of course the entire effort of Hamilton with regard to a new mission to France, begun well before Adams took office, was in the hope of avoiding war. On Cobbett ("Peter Porcupine"), Fisher Ames declared that Porcupine "might do more good if directed by men of sense & experience—his ideas of an intimate connection with G Britain justly offend correct thinkers—& still more the multitude." To Hamilton, Jan. 26, 1797, PAH, XX, 488-489 and n. 81. E.g., to Madison, May 18, 1797; to Thomas Pinckney, May 29, 1797; to Peregrine Fitzhugh, June 4, 1797; to French Strother, June 8, 1797; to Madison, June 8, 15, 1797; to Burr, June 17, 1797; to Gerry, June 21, 1797; to Edward Rutledge, June 24, 1797; to Edmund Randolph, June 27, 1797; WTJ, VII, 124-130, 134-140, 142-156. The two principal themes in all these letters are, one the one hand, the warlike intentions of the Administration and, on the other, the desirability of thwarting them by delay and inaction on all defense legislation while awaiting the course of military events in Europe—the outcome of which, Jefferson hoped, would be a great triumph for France. In the letter to Randolph cited above, he referred to "Buonaparte's victories, the victories on the Rhine, the Austrian peace, Irish insurgency, English bankruptcy, insubordination in the fleet, &c." as "miraculous events," and declared that "nothing can establish firmly the republican principles of our government but an establishment of them in England. France will be the apostle for this." On Jefferson's talks with Letombe, see below, pp. 566-

567.

82. Malone, Jefferson, III, 320-322; Adams to Uriah Forrest, June 20, 1797, WJA, VTII, 546-547. This was the second time in less than two months that Jefferson had got into trouble of this sort. Early in May, a letter he had written over a year before to Philip Mazzei, an Italian emigrant who had once lived in Virginia and had since returned to Italy, found its way into the newspapers. There was a heated passage in it about the "Anglican monarchical, & aristocratical party" whose object was to bring the United States over to "the substance, as they have already done to the forms of the British government," followed by one that pointed directly at Washington: "It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England." Apr. 24, 1796, WT], VII, 72-78; for details see Malone, Jefferson, III, 266-268, 302-308. 83. Jefferson's long letter of June 17, 1797 to Burr, with its discussion of all the issues, is rightly seen by Professor Malone as something of a Republican policy paper. At about

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NOTES FOR PAGES 555-559

the same time, Samuel A. Otis wrote: "Our new V. President is very active, and I think his influence visibly increasing." Ibid., 322-324; qu. in Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 463n. On the dinner for Monroe, see Malone, Jefferson, III, 324-325; and Ammon, Monroe, p. 158. 84. Most of Letombe's political dispatches through July 15, 1797 (by which time the special session had adjourned), had been received in Paris by the end of September. CFM, p. io43n. The American commissioners arrived the first week in October. Before setting off for Paris from Holland, Marshall and Pinckney were told about a dinner conversation of an assorted company of bankers in which it was taken for granted that there was "a strong party amongst us, at least equal to counteract the operations of our Government. . . ." Francis Childs to William Vans Murray, Sept. n, 1797, qu. in PJnMl, III, 257^ 85. Clarfield, Pickering and American Diplomacy, pp. 104,109-110; Billias, Gerry, 259260; Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, p. 31, n. 27; W]A, IX, 286-287; Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 467469, 531; McHenry to Pickering, Feb. 23, 1811, Lodge, Cabot, pp. 204-205 (also qu. in Steiner, McHenry, p. 224). 86. The items upon which we have most depended in the paragraphs that follow are Billias, Gerry, which is based on thorough scholarship, and Samuel E. Morison, "Elbridge Gerry, Gentleman-Democrat," NEQ, II (Jan. 1929), 6-33, and repr. in Morison, By Land and by Sea: Essays and Addresses (New York, 1953), and "Elbridge Gerry" in DAB. A discussion of other literature on Gerry is in Billias, Gerry, pp. 342-343. The proposition that Gerry's career and personality be considered within the framework of classical republicanism is in ibid., pp. xiii-xviii and passim. 87. Qu. in ibid., p. 292. The parallel with Randolph is suggested by Robert Dawidoff's brilliant study, The Education of John Randolph (New York, 1979). 88. Billias, Gerry, p. 58. 89. Austin, Life ofElbridge Gerry, II, 307. 90. Qu. in Billias, Gerry, p. 67. 91. Charles Thomson to Richard Peters, Jan. 19, 1784, E. C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress (Washington, 1934), VII, 422. 92. Billias, Gerry, p. 195; to Jefferson, Oct. n, 1787, Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, Conn., 1911), III, 104. 93. Billias, Gerry, p. 262; Jefferson to Gerry, May 13, June 21, 1797, WT], VII, 119124, 149-151. The anglophobic ferocity of both these letters is striking; in the second, Jefferson urges Gerry to accept appointment to the mission, the character of which he felt depended entirely on him, and insists that Gerry's nomination had given "a spring to hope, which was dead before." 94. To J. Q. Adams, Mar. 31, 1797, WjA, VIII, 537. 95. No modern biography of Marshall has as yet superseded Albert J. Beveridge's Life of John Marshall (Boston, 1916-19), 4V.; Leonard Baker, John Marshall: A Life in Law (New York, 1974) falls well short of that object. One reason for the deficiency, aside from the still-daunting durability of Beveridge's work, may be that Marshall's very long and innovative career as Chief Justice has led the best-qualified writers to direct their studies of it to aspects which fall more readily into the realm of legal and constitutional history than biography. Edward S. Corwin's extended article on Marshall in DAB is, however, very good and useful. 96. John Stokes Adams, ed., An Autobiographical Sketch by John Marshall. . . (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1937), p. 4. 97. Ibid., pp. 9-10. 98. Jefferson to Madison, Nov. 26, 1975, WT], VII, 38.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 559-562

99. DAB, XII, 318. 100. King to C. C. Pinckney, Oct. 17, 1797, King, King, II, 235. 101. The best source for Pinckney's life and career is Zahniser, Pinckney, cited in n. 52 above. The qu. is from Eliza Pinckney to C. C. Pinckney [late 1767], ibid., p. 18. 102. Ibid., pp. 13-14, 20, 24-25, 34. 103. Qu. in ibid., p. 98. 104. C. C. Pinckney to Thomas Pinckney, Jan. 7, 1793, qu. in ibid., p. ii7n. 105. The body of Talleyrand scholarship is immense. Those items found to be most useful for our purposes were Georges Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand: 1754-1838 (Paris, 192834), 4v., still the most complete, and full of quotations from letters and other documents; J. F. Bernard, Talleyrand: A Biography (New York, 1973) an ample and intelligently written work, without footnote references but with a very full bibliography; Crane Brinton, The Lives of Talleyrand (New York, 1936), suggestive but superficial and persistently arch in tone; and Louis Madelin, Talleyrand: A Vivid Biography of the Amoral, Unscrupulous, and Fascinating French Statesman, tr. Rosalie Feltenstein (New York, 1948), by a noted French historian, originally published in Paris, 1944, without the above lurid (though not inaccurate) subtitle. Pieter Geyl, "The French Historians and Talleyrand," Debates with Historians (The Hague, 1955) is not, as the title might suggest, a critical essay on the Talleyrand literature but a series of interesting though somewhat disjointed reflections on Talleyrand's statecraft. A new biography is in progress as of the present writing, though the sequence of volumes appearing so far has not accorded with the actual chronology of Talleyrand's career, resulting in some repetition: Michel Poniatowski, Talleyrand aux Etats-Unis, 17941796 (Paris, 1967); Talleyrand et le Directoire (Paris, 1982); Talleyrand et le Consulat (Paris, 1986); and Talleyrand et I'ancienne France, 1754-1789 (Paris, 1988). The story about Adalbert, the tenth-century Count of Perigord, is in all Talleyrand biographies; the qu. about being forced into the priesthood is from Madelin, Tallyerand, p. 16. 106. The story about Hamilton is in Nathan Schachner, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1946), p. 345; for Talleyrand's otherwise high opinion of Hamilton see Due de Broglie, ed., Memoirs of the Prince de Talleyrand, tr. R. Ledos de Beaufort (New York, 1891), I, 181-182. Other material on Talleyrand's sojourn in America includes Hans Huth and Wilma J. Pugh, eds., Talleyrand in America as a Financial Promoter, 1794-1796 (Washington, 1942); John L. Earl III, "Talleyrand in Philadelphia, 1794-1796," PMHB, XCI (July 1967), 282-298; idem, "Talleyrand in America: A Study of His Exile, 1794-1796" (Unpub. diss., Georgetown U., 1964); Richard M. Brace, "Talleyrand in New England: Reality and Legend," NEQ, XVI (Sept. 1943), 397-406; Edwin R. Baldridge, Jr., "Talleyrand in the United States, 1794-1796" (Unpub. diss., Lehigh U., 1963). 107. Madelin, Talleyrand, p. 56. "II faut y faire une fortune immense, une immense fortune, une immense fortune, une fortune immense." Poniatowski, Talleyrand et le Directoire, p. 161. 108. Henry J. Ford, in "Timothy Pickering," S. Bemis, ed., The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy (New York, 1927), II, 217, believes that the principal author of the instructions was Marshall; Beveridge, Marshall, II, 218, does not claim this but does imply that the coincidence of Marshall's and Hamilton's both being in Philadelphia during the early part of July "may or may not have been significant"; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 286, suggests that the two probably collaborated on the instructions. A more common-sense likelihood could be that they were drafted by the Secretary of State himself, who by this time was in more or less full agreement with the principles they embodied, as was taken for granted by Pickering's early biographers in the i86os when they referred to the instructions as one of Pickering's "celebrated State Papers." Pickering and Upham,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 562-565 Pickering, III, 371. Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, pp. 22-23, 31* n- 29> ak° assumes Pickering's authorship, but plausibly suggests that Hamilton's ideas were at the same time influential, and that Adams was aware of where they came from. He cites an undated set of notes in Adams's handwriting headed "H Ideas" (APM, reel 387) which do in fact tally with the suggestions Hamilton made to McHenry (n. 75 above). It should be added, however, that ideas from all the Secretaries, as set forth in the above-cited papers, found their way into the instructions. They are printed in ASP:FR, II, 153-157; and P]nMl, III, 102-119. 109. Ibid., 117. In addition to the subjects summarized above, the envoys were to seek a revision, in the interests of greater clarity, of the Consular Convention concluded between the United States and France in 1788. The main point at issue here was whether judicial decisions of consuls regarding their own nationals should be executed by officials of the host country, as France contended was allowed by the Convention. This did not, however, as DeConde (Quasi-War, p. 45) mistakenly asserts, include prize court jurisdiction by one party in the ports of the other, which no treaty or convention had ever permitted. The text of the Consular Convention is in Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America (Washington, 1931), II, 228-241. no. Gazette National, ou le Moniteur Universe!, June 25, 26, 1797. This version omitted the excerpts from treaties, laws, and decrees cited by Pastoret in his speech; but the complete text in an English translation was published in Gazette of the United States, Sept. 19, 1797. One is struck by the circumstantial detail and evident authenticity of Pastoret's facts, until one discovers how readily accessible such facts were: Pinckney in Amsterdam had had a thousand copies printed of Pickering's powerful report of Jan. 16, 1797 (in the form of a dispatch to himself), on French-American relations (see ASP:FR, I, 559-576) and had sent one to every member of France's legislative body. That body, before being decimated by the coup d'etat of Fructidor (Sept. 4, 1797), was already disaffected from the Directory and thus more than ordinarily disposed to listen to such philippics. Several weeks before Pastoret's speech, Louis-Philippe Segur had made a similar argument in two very strong articles in Nouvelles Politiques, Apr. 25, May 17, 1797. Zahniser, Pinckney, p. 156; Clarfield, Pickering and American Diplomacy, p. 112; Bernard Fay, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America: A Study of Moral and Intellectual Relations Between France and the United States at the End of the Eighteenth Century, tr. Ramon Guthrie (New York, i955)> PP. 392-393in. Gilbert Chinard, ed., "Considerations sur la conduite du Gouvernement americain envers la France, depuis le commencement de la Revolution jusqu'en 1797, par LouisGuillaume Otto," Bulletin de I'lnstitut Frangais, No. XVI (Dec. 1943), 9-37. 112. Joseph Fauchet, A Sketch of the Present State of our Political Relations with the United States of North-America, tr. Benjamin F. Bache (Philadelphia, 1797), pp. 5, 13, 18, 28, 30; first published in Paris in the summer of 1797. 113. Adet to Talleyrand, Sept. 22, 1797, AECPE-U 48, 258-264VO.; sentences qu. are on 263-263VO. 114. Talleyrand to Letombe, Aug. 4, Sept. i, 1797, AECPE-U 48,154-155, 214-2^0. 115. Talleyrand to Bourdieu and others, Jan. 15,1795, Huth and Pugh, eds., Talleyrand in America, p. 92; Georges Pallain, ed., "Les Etats-Unis et 1'Angleterre en 1795: Lettre de M. de Talleyrand [to Lord Lansdowne, Feb. i, 1795]," Revue d'histoire diplomatique, III (1889), 76; Talleyrand, Memoir Concerning the Commercial Relations of the United States with England . . . (Boston, 1809), p. 13, an English translation of a paper read at the National Institute, Apr. 4, 1797. 116. "Objects which should figure in the forthcoming negotiations with the United States," Oct. 2, 1797, AECPE-U 48, 278-286vo. There has been some question concerning

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NOTES FOR PAGES 565-567 this paper. Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 312, assumes it to have been prepared by Talleyrand, as by implication does E. Wilson Lyon, "The Directory and the United States/' AHR, XLIII (Apr. 1938), 520-521— with which, judging from internal evidence, we are inclined to agree. Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, p. 49, however, contends that it must have been written by someone else in the Foreign Office, because (a) "Talleyrand did not accept any of this report's recommendations on indemnities, cessation of hostilities, and the revision of treaties during the next nine months"; and (b) he "specifically rejected a number of the report's suggestions in his margin notes." But it would be more accurate to say he did not act on any of them during that time, not being, for any number of reasons, free to do so. Moreover, this was a preliminary memorandum, as the author makes clear in several places. Nor are the two or three marginal jottings rejections of anything; they are simply additions, in Talleyrand's handwriting, of words that had been inadvertently omitted by the clerk who transcribed the document. On the other hand there is a section of this paper, 284~286vo., headed "Indemnities— Negotiations with the United States," which Lyon and Bowman take to be a separate memorandum; we are treating the entire sequence as a single piece. In all likelihood it was never actually submitted to the Directory as a formal report. 117. Stinchcombe, "Neglected Memoir by Talleyrand," pp. 206-207. This paper seems to have been prepared later in October and did serve, as later evidence corroborates, as a report to the Directory. As we know, the hint contained in it about an "explanation" of President Adams's message, and with the question of money, were then emerging as prerequisites to any kind of negotiation. The tactics on the indemnities question were outlined in "Objects which should figure in the forthcoming negotiations," pp. 284-286^. 118. Frances S. Childs, "A Secret Agent's Advice on America," Edward M. Earle, ed., Nationalism and Internationalism: Essays Inscribed to Carlf on J. H. Hayes (New York, 1950), pp. 18-44, is a good-humored summary, with many excerpts, of this extremely tedious correspondence. The phrases quoted are on pp. 33, 35, 38. 119. Letombe to Minister of Exterior Relations, June 7, 1797, CFM, p. 1030. During the period of the special session when Jefferson was in Philadelphia, Letombe refers in four of his dispatches to having seen him: May 16, 30, June 5, 7, ibid., pp. 1018, 1025, 1027, 1029-1031. In a later one the following winter there is mention of Jefferson's having once more urged that Letombe "not hesitate to drop in on him any time I liked." Jan. 17, 1798, AECPE-U 49, 145. Hauterive in a letter of July 16, 1797, reported that the Republican party in America (the "friends of France and liberty") did not then favor an immediate or final accommodation with France: "wisdom and patriotism seem to unite to counsel the way of a prorogation until a time when the maritime destinies of the European states will be more settled." Qu. in Childs, "Secret Agent," p. 38. 120. To Minister of Exterior Relations, May 30, June 7, 1797, Jan. 17, 1798; CFM, pp. 1024-1025, 1031; AECPE-U 49, 145. 121. See n. 117 above; as for the "hint" there referred to, the entire course of the American commissioners' dealings with Talleyrand's agents, as described below, is evidence of how the hint was developed. 122. "Objects which should figure in the forthcoming negotiations," AECPE-U 48, 284-286vo. 123. The most circumstantial first-hand accounts are George Duruy, ed., Memoirs of Barras: Member of the Directorate (New York, 1895), II, 530-573 (much the fullest); Memoirs of Talleyrand, I, 188-190; Baroness de Stael, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed. Due de Broglie and Baron de Stael (New York, 1818), I, 381382; Robert d' Angers, ed., Memoires de Larevelliere-Lepeaux . . . (Paris, 1895), E, 114-115;

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NOTES FOR PAGES 568-570 a Rashomon-like situation in which each of the parties concerned gives a particular version of the truth. For an appraisal of this problem see Bernard, Talleyrand, pp. 179-186. 124. Hippolyte Carnot, Memoires sur Carnot, par son fils (Paris, 1863), H> II^'-> Talleyrand, Memoirs, I, 191; Paul Bailleu, ed., Preussen und Frankreich von 1795 bis 1807, Diplomatische Correspondenzen (Leipzig, 1880), I (disp. of Oct. 25, 1797), 155. 125. On ReubelTs treatment of Talleyrand, see Barras, Memoirs, III, 218-220, and Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand, I, 288-290, for some entertaining examples. On the state of France's foreign relations after Fructidor, see Raymond Guyot, Le Directoire et la Paix de I'Europe: des traites de Bale a la deuxieme coalition (1795-99) (Paris, 1911), pp. 548-553. 126. Ibid., pp. 553-557; Geyl, "French Historians and Talleyrand," pp. 198-203. The qu. is from an obsequiously laudatory circular Talleyrand addressed to all foreign agents of the Republic, Sept. 6, 1797, Georges Pallain, ed., Le Minis fere de Talleyrand sous le Directoire (Paris, 1891), p. 138. 127. Jean-Baptiste H. R. Capefigue, "Talleyrand," Eiographie universelle, ancienne et moderne . . . , new ed. (Paris, 1870-73), XL, 610. 128. Bailleu, ed., Preussen und Frankreich, I, 168; Capefigue, "Talleyrand," 611. 129. Louis Bastide, Vie politique et religieuse de Talleyrand-Perigord (Paris, 1838), p. 227; Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand, I, 237-238; Whitelaw Reid, "Introduction," Memoirs of Talleyrand, I, xviii. 130. Georges Lefebvre, The Directory, tr. Robert Baldick (New York, 1967), pp. 95119. What the Directors wrote about each other was picturesque to say the least. Carnot said of Larevelliere-lepeaux that "nature, when creating him deformed and stinking," did so to warn others "against the falseness of his character and the profound corruption of his heart," and of Reubell, that he was "the protector of men charged with thefts and peculations." "This Monsieur Reubell," said Sieves, "must needs take something for his health every morning." (He even pocketed wax candles when leaving sessions of the Directory.) Barras, according to Larevelliere, was surrounded at the Luxembourg only by "the most crapulous brawlers, the most corrupted aristocrats, abandoned women, men of ruined reputation, jobbers and fixers, mistresses and lover-boys. . . . A lie costs him nothing; calumny is but a game. He is faithless and without morals. ..." Duruy, "Preface," Memoirs of Barras, III, xiii; Memoires de Larevelliere-Lepeaux, I, 338-339. Barras himself in his Memoirs, esp. Ill, is full of anecdotes involving the "cold, treacherous, narrow, perfidious" Merlin (p. 311), the "hard-hearted" Treilhard, "coarse and insolent" (pp. 323, 417), Neufchateau, "a libertine of old, whom neither infirmities nor years had reformed" (p. 212), and so on. 131. Evidence of any kind of sustained attention to, or concern with, or policy toward the United States on the part of the Directory up to the time of Adams's special mission is so fragmentary as to be all but meaningless. This is not to deny a kind of endemic hostility toward the United States all during this period—the decrees against American shipping and the treatment of Pinckney are sufficient evidence of that—but these actions must be seen as a function of France's very unconcern with American affairs, and have to be explained in a particular context, that of France's military involvements in Europe and the problem, to which all else was subordinate and for which no pretext was too farfetched, of resources with which to sustain them. For example, the Prussian minister Sandoz-Rollin, after listening to a tirade from Carnot against the city of Hamburg ("Those people are too rich, and it's indispensable that they should pay dearly for their neutrality"), noted on May 6, 1796: "You see it and you hear it: the opportunity for extortion and for gathering up a bit of money makes every other consideration give way here, and becomes the mainspring of their enterprises and, I venture to say, of their policy." Bailleu, ed.,

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NOTES FOR PAGE 570

Preussen und Frankreich, I, 67. The pretext in the case of the United States was of course the Jay Treaty, a formula which the individual Directors—when they mentioned it at all, which was seldom—repeated almost mindlessly. But beyond this, the Directors showed virtually no interest in the United States. There is scarcely a reference to America in all of Barras's memoirs (by far the most detailed of any); even with regard to the Jay Treaty, Barras does not get around to mentioning it until March 1796, and then only to note that it had aroused discontent in America (II, 97). Reubell never wrote anything about America until 1799, when he prepared a "memoire justicatif" defending himself from a whole series of charges made against the Directory in the Council of Five Hundred, a minor one of which was breaking off relations with the United States. To this, Reubell devoted three sentences in a paper filling thirty-four printed pages, and managed to get his facts wrong in all three. (He said the Jay Treaty had been made by John Adams, "the President of Congress.") Gerlof D. Homan, Jean-Franqois Reubell: Trench Revolutionary, Patriot, and Director (i/4/-i8o/) (The Hague, 1971), p. 153; Bernard Nabonne, ed., "Le Memoire justicatif de Reubell, chef de la diplomatic du Directoire," Revue d'histoire diplomatique, LXIII (1949), 85-86. Larevelliere too was one of the accused Directors in the denunciation of 1799, without which the United States would probably not have made its way into his memoirs at all. He professes great esteem for Monroe (Monroe was President of the United States by the time he wrote them, and he himself a private citizen), and he too gets his chronology all muddled up. (He has Monroe counseling patience against "the unjust proceedings of John Adams's government," whereas Monroe had been recalled well before Adams took office.) Larevelliere also accuses Carnot (whom he hated) of wanting to declare war against the United States and of taking Monroe for a tiresome bore. The first charge is doubtful; the second is rather more plausible since the only mention of the United States in Carnot's own biography, prepared by his son, is a patronizing reference to Monroe as being more of a French revolutionary than Carnot himself, followed by a footnote which has Monroe, Jefferson, and Adams all dying on the same day to commemorate the Declaration of Independence. Larevelliere-lepeaux, Memoires, II, 257-260; III, 179-189; Memoires sur Carnot, II, 133. Merlin de Douai, one of the two new Directors installed after Fructidor, is briefly associated with America for having written a "treatise" (referred to below, Ch. XIV, n. 21) on the role d'equipage while serving as Minister of Justice. We may well imagine the circumstances. Merlin, according to the ever-malicious Barras, "sought to make war, politics, and revolution subject to all the chicanery of the law," and was once the subject of a "dessert joke" told by Bonaparte. "Whenever I commit any arbitrary act," the latter recounted, "and have been obliged to overstep my functions, I go the next morning to Merlin, and beg him to be good enough to point out to me some ancient or modern law under which I can shelter myself. He reflects awhile, and in a very few minutes he finds the answer in his head, or he puts his hand on the volume and his finger on the page. Never does this good Merlin leave me in the lurch. He is Merlin the Magician." Barras, Memoirs, II, 590, 413-414. Francois Barthelemy, the other Director purged with Carnot after Fructidor, protests that his own feelings toward the United States were entirely peaceable and asserts that it "was not believed that the Americans' treaty with the court of London was a sufficient motive" for the undeclared war set off by the decree of March 2, 1797. Jean L. G. Soulavie, ed., Memoires historique et diplomatique de Barthelemy depuis le 14 juillet jusqu'au ^oprairial An 7 (Paris, 1799), p. 60. This is probably more or less authentic, even though the Memoires themselves are said to be apocryphal. (Guyot, Le Directoire et la paix de I'Europe, p. 27.) The three brief references to the United States in the Directory's minutes from the

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NOTES FOR PAGE 5/0-577 time of the American commissioners' arrival in October 1797 to the end of the year are quite perfunctory. One concerns the Directory's authorizing the Minister of Exterior Relations to demand an "explanation" of President Adams's speech; another mentions the capture of an American merchant ship lacking a role d'equipage; and the third involves a verbal order to the Minister to confer with envoys from the United States and from Hamburg about taking some shares in the Dutch loan ("Batavian rescriptions"). Sittings of Oct. 17, Nov. 17, Dec. 24,1797, AF III, 8, 9, Archives Nationales, Paris. We are indebted to Isser Woloch for this bit of negative evidence. 132. Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, p. 35; Pinckney to Pickering, Dec. 20, 1796, ASP:FR, II, 8. 133. See below, p. 596. 134. Marshall, Paris Journal, Oct. 8, 14, 18-19, 1797; Envoys to Pickering, Oct. 22, 1797, PJnMl, III, 159-165, 255-258. The journal kept by Marshall frequently gives a fuller account of the commission's proceedings than do the dispatches sent home by the envoys, though not invariably so. Parallel references to both sources will be given here wherever possible. When this material was transmitted to Congress and subsequently released for publication the letters "X," "Y," and "Z" were substituted by Secretary Pickering for the names of the individuals given in the dispatches and journal. There was actually a "W" who made a very brief early appearance, Nicholas Hubbard of the Amsterdam firm of Van Staphorst and Hubbard; technically, then, it could be called the "WXYZ" affair, though it seldom is. Ibid., 2$6n. 135. Ibid., 165-168, 258-261. 136. Ibid., 26i-262>^ 137. Ibid., 168. x 138. Ibid., 263-265. 139. Ibid., 265. 140. Ibid., 170-173; Envoys to Pickering, Nov. 8, 1797 (here begins the sequel to events occurring between Oct. 22 and this date), 276-279. The envoys did of course transmit further dispatches after this one. There were eight altogether, through Apr. 3, 1798. Numbers i and 2, those that caused the great upheaval of feeling in America, were transmitted to Congress by President Adams on Apr. 3; he sent the remainder of them May 4, June 5, and June 18, 1798. ASP:FR, II, 157-163, 169-182, 185-188, 188-189. 141. PJnMl HI, 174-178, 280-283. 142. Ibid., 178-180, 283-285. 143. Ibid., 181-182, 286-287. 144. Ibid., 182-184, 287-289. 145. Ibid., 185-194, 293-295, 305-3°7> 33I~3^2146. Ibid., 195-197. 147. Talleyrand in a report to the Directory, probably in late January, wrote: "Messrs. Pinckney and Marshall are devoted to the ideas reigning at Philadelphia, and they have already let them appear more than once. . . . I propose that the Directory authorize me to bypass these two ministers. . . . There remains Mr. Gerry." Marshall and Pinckney, he concluded, should "be invited to withdraw." Pluviose, Year VI [Jan. 2o-Feb. 18, 1798, but probably before Feb. 4], AECPE-U 49, i74-i87vo. 148. PJnMlt III, 197-203. 149. Ibid., 203-205. 150. Ibid., 205-228. 151. ASP-.FR, II, 188-191. 152. "He believes," Marshall wrote in his journal, "that Genl. Pinckney and myself

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NOTES FOR PAGES 578-586 are both determined to remain no longer, unless we can be accredited." Marshall was further persuaded that Talleyrand did not think Gerry shared this determination. Feb. 4, 1798, PJnMl, III, 197. 153. Ibid., 231-232. Envoys to Talleyrand, Apr. 3, 1798, ibid., 428-459, esp. 459. 154. Ibid., 233. 155. Ibid., 232-242, 461-462; Zahniser, Pinckney, pp. 188-190. 156. PJnMl, III, 236-238; Marshall to Pinckney, Apr. 21, 1798, ibid., 464; Billias, Gerry, p. 265. 157. See below, pp. 608-609.

CHAPTER XIII

Adams and Hamilton 1. AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 963-964; Jefferson to Madison, Feb. 8, 1798, WTJ, VII, 196. The dispatch of Letombe to Talleyrand above referred to is in CFM, pp. 1094-1096. 2. On Matthew Lyon and his doings see Ch. XV below. 3. On the debates in the House over the Lyon-Griswold affair, and the efforts to reduce the diplomatic corps and repeal the stamp tax, see AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 955-969, 961-962, 964-1029, 1034, 1036-1043, 1048-1058, 1063-1068 (Lyon-Griswold); 849-945, 1058, 1083-1143, 1145-1200 (Foreign Intercourse); 1069-1083, 1097-1098 (Stamp Duty). 4. Abigail Adams to Eliza Peabody, Feb. 13, 1798, Shaw Family Papers, LC. 5. ASP.-FR, II, 151-152. 6. Adams to Heads of Department, Jan. 24, Mar. 13, 1798, WJA, VIII, 561-562, 568. The replies are summarized in ibid., 562-563^ and 568-569^ See also n. 9 below. 7. Malone, Jefferson, III, 370-371. 8. Gerard H. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and American Diplomacy, 1/95-1800 (Columbia, Mo., 1969), pp. 144-147. 9. McHenry to Adams, Feb. 14, Mar. 14, 1798; Charles Lee to Adams, Mar. 8, 14, 1798; Wolcott to Adams, Mar. 15, 1798 (wrongly dated Mar. 19 in Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 14-15); APM, reel 387. McHenry's letter of Feb 15 closely parallels the ideas and actual wording of Hamilton to McHenry, [Jan. 27-Feb. n, 1798], PAH, XXI, 341-346. 10. See, e.g., Reginald C. Stuart, War and American Thought: Prom the Revolution to the Monroe Doctrine (Kent, Ohio, 1982), a treatment of what the author calls "The LimitedWar Mentality." 11. This was more or less the view of Republicans generally. See John W. Kuehl, "The XYZ Affair and American Nationalism: Republican Victories in the Middle Atlantic States," Maryland Historical Magazine, LXVII (Spring 1972), 2; Jefferson to Burr, June 17, 1797; to Gerry, June 21, 1797; to Edmund Randolph, June 27, 1797; to Arthur Campbell, Sept. i, 1797; all in WTJ, VII, 145-149, 151, 155-156, 169-171, 218-221, 227-230. 12. McHenry to Adams, Feb. 15, 1798, APM, reel 387; Hamilton to McHenry, [Jan. 27-Feb. 11, 1798], PAH, XXI, 341-346. 13. Charles Lee to Adams, Mar. 8,14,1798; McHenry to Adams, Mar. 14,1798; APM, reel 387. 14. Notes for Message to Congress [undated, but probably after Mar. 8 and before Mar. 19, 1798], APM, reel 387. 15. Wolcott to Adams, Mar. 15, 1798, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 14-15; Adams, Message to Congress, Mar. 19, 1798, ASP:FR, II, 152.

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N O T E S FOR PAGES 587-590

16. Ibid. 17. Jefferson to Madison, Mar. 21, 1798, WTJ, VII, 219. 18. AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 1319-1320. 19. Ifo'J., 1349. 20. Ibid., 1357-1358. 21. Ibid., 1359-1371. Abigail Adams to J. Q. Adams, Apr. 4, 1798, APM, reel 388. On Giles and Gallatin, see Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, Apr. 4, 1798, New Letters, p. 151. The resolution was passed 65-27; every Republican voted for it, and all twenty-seven against were Federalists, with the possible exception of Tillinghast of Rhode Island. Rudolph M. Bell, Party and faction in American Politics: The House of Representatives, 1/89-1801 (Westport, Conn., 1973), pp. 166, 256-257. 22. ASP:FR, II, 153; DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 72-73 and nn. 23. Jefferson to Madison, Apr. 6,19, 26,1798; to Peter Carr, Apr. 12,1798; to Monroe, Apr. 19, 1798; to E. Pendleton, Jan. 29, 1799; WTJ, VII, 234-236, 238-246, 337. "The Democrats in neither House of Congress make much opposition; and out of doors the French Devotees are rapidly quitting the worship of their idol." Pickering to Washington, Apr. 14, 1798, Pickering Papers, XXXVII, MHS. On Federalist electoral gains, see John W. Kuehl, "Southern Reaction to the XYZ Affair: An Incident in the Emergence of American Nationalism," Kentucky State Historical Society Register, LXX (Jan. 1972), 214924. Robert Troup to Rufus King, June 3, 1798, King, King, II, 329. 25. "The numerous addresses," Abigail Adams wrote to her sister, " . . . load the President with constant application to his pen, as he answers all of them and by this means has an opportunity of diffusing his own sentiments, more extensively & probably where they will be more read and attended to than they would be through any other channel." The British minister Robert Liston reported, "Mr. Adams spends the whole morning from 6 o'clock till 12 or i, in writing these answers, which are frequently as long as the addresses to which they apply." For more than two months, Abigail told her son in mid-July, "upon an average he has replied to 4 or 5 addresses every day with his own hand." Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, May 18, 1798, New Letters, p. 175; Liston to Grenville, May 20, 1798, qu. in DeConde, Quasi-War, p. 403, n. 15; Abigail Adams to J. Q. Adams, July 14, 1798, APM, reel 390. 26. A generous selection of these replies is reprinted in WJA, IX, 180-231. A great many of the addresses themselves, as well as the replies, were published in the newspapers, and a collection of them was brought out in book form: A Selection of the Patriotic Addresses to the President of the United States. Together with the President's Answers . . . (Boston, 1798). The originals of both the addresses and replies are in APM, reels 388-390 and 119. 27. Abigail Adams to Eliza Peabody, June 22, 1798, Shaw Family Papers, LC; to Mary Cranch, May 21, 1798, New Letters, p. 178. "The numerous addresses which pour in daily in abundance give him much additional writing. They are however a grateful and pleasing testimony of the satisfaction of the publick mind. ..." To Mary Cranch, May 13, 1798, ibid., p. 173. Though the burden was considerable, it was "a gratefull and pleasing employment as it assures him of the approbation confidence and satisfaction of the people in his conduct and administration." To Eliza Peabody, June 22, 1798, Shaw Family Papers, LC. 28. ASP:MA, I, 120; AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 2127, 3717, 3722-3727, 3733, 3747-3755; Smelser, Congress Founds the Navy, pp. 150-159; DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 90-91. 29. WJA, IX, 291. Abigail Adams's letters certainly leave little doubt as to where her own sentiments lay. She declared that "nothing will have an Effect untill congress pass a

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NOTES FOR PAGES 590-597 Sedition Bill, which I presume they will do before they rise," adding that there was not an issue of Bache's paper or of the Boston Chronicle "but what might have been prossecuted as libels upon the President and Congress." To Mary Cranch, Apr. 26, 1798, New Letters, p. 165. "And in any other Country Bache & all his papers would have been seazd and ought to be here, but congress are dilly dallying about passing a Bill enabling the President to seize suspisious persons, and their papers." To same, June 19, 1798, ibid., p. 193. See also ibid., pp. 172, 179, 196. When Congress finally adjourned, she thought "their last deeds may be marked amongst their best, an Alien Bill a Sedition Bill and a Bill declaring void, all our Treaties and conventions with France. . . ." To Thomas Boylston Adams, July 20, 1798, APM, reel 390. 30. AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 1571, 1580, 1778; James Morton Smith, Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), pp. 27-33. 31. Ibid., p. 48. For Gallatin's speeches against the original bill, and his later insistence on bringing the final version to a vote, see AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 1788-1790, 1792-1796, 2034-2035, 2049. 32. Aurora, May 8, 1798; Smith, Freedom's Fetters, pp. 59-93; Hamilton to Pickering, June 7, 1798, PAH, XXI, 495; AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 1973-2029. 33. Ibid., 596; Aurora, June 6, 1798; Smith, Freedom's Fetters, pp. 94-130; Hamilton to Wolcott, June 29, 1798, PAH, XXI, 522. 34. See below, Ch. XV, n. 25; AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 2093-2116, 2133-2171. 35. The roll-call is in ibid., 2171. The texts of the four acts are in ibid., 3739-3742, 3744, 3746, 3753~3754> 3776~3777> and Smith, Freedom's Fetters, pp. 435-442. 36. PAH, III, 378-397; Richard W. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Beginnings of the Military Establishment in America (New York, 1975), pp. 47-48. 37. Ibid., pp. 73-88. 38. Lois G. Schwoerer, "No Standing Armies!" The Antiarmy Ideology in SeventeenthCentury England (Baltimore, 1974), p. 195. 39. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 60-62 (the qu. is on p. 61). 40. Ibid., pp. 73-88. 41. Ibid., pp. 91-127, 139-157, I74~l8942. Madison to Jefferson, June i, 1794, P]M, XV, 340. 43. J. Q. Adams to John Adams, Aug. 3, 1797, WJQA, II, 155-157; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 222-224. 44. "An Act to augment the Army of the United States, and for other purposes," approved July 16, 1798; "An Act authorizing the President of the United States to raise a Provisional Army," approved May 28, 1798; AC, 5 Cong., Appendix, 3785-3787, 3729373345. Adams to Elbridge Gerry, May 3, 1797, APM, reel 117. 46. ASPMA, I, 120-123. 47. WJA, IX, 194, 221. Italics added. 48. PJnMl, III, 470-471; Jefferson to Madison, June 21, 1798, WT], VII, 272. 49. "The Stand," No. VI, Apr. 19, 1798, PAH, XXI, 437-438; Gilbert E. Lycan, Alexander Hamilton and American Foreign Policy: A Design for Greatness (Norman, Okla., 1970), pp. 360-362; John Jay to William North, June 25, 1798, CPJJ, IV, 244-245. 50. DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 103-106, 343, 411, n. 63, 412, n. 67; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 390-39in.; AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 2114, 2120. Nevertheless, Abigail Adams insisted that "the people throughout the United States, with few exceptions, would have heartily joined in the most decided declaration which Congress could have made . . . but

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NOTES FOR PAGES 597-603 the majority in Congress did not possess firmness and decision enough to boldly make it." To J. Q. Adams, July 20, 1798, APM, reel 390. This is undoubtedly an overstatement. 51. Ames to Pickering, July 10, 1798, Ames, Ames, I, 233-234. 52. Abigail Adams to J. Q. Adams, July 14, 1798, APM, reel 390; to Mary Cranch, July 9, 1798, New Letters, p. 201. 53. Gardner W. Allen, Our Naval War with France (Boston, 1909), pp. 64-65. 54. Kuehl, "Southern Reaction to the XYZ Affair," esp. 25-26; AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 1529-1531, 1646-1648, 1691-1692 (Harper's speeches on the danger of a French invasion). 55. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 224-226; AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 542-544, 546, 559561, 1525-1545, 1561, 1594, 1631-1707, 1725-1772. The qu. from Gallatin and Thomas Sumter are in ibid., 1743-1744, 1668. 56. Ibid., 3729-373357. Ibid., 605, 609, 611, 613-614, 2084, 2088-2093, 2114, 2128-2132, 3785-3787; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 227-228. 58. "The Stand," all numbers of which were originally published in the New York Commercial Advertiser, are reprinted in PAH, XXI, 386, 390-396, 402-408, 412-432, 434447. Jay to Hamilton, Apr. 19,1798; Hamilton to Jay, Apr. 24, 1798; ibid., 433, 447. Robert G. Harper had a scheme, to which he had apparently obtained the President's agreement in principle, whereby Hamilton would replace McHenry as Secretary of War, but nothing came of that either. Harper to Hamilton, Apr. 27, 1798, ibid., 449. 59. Hamilton to Washington, May 19, 1798; Washington to Hamilton, May 27, 1798; ibid., 494, 500-506. 60. Hamilton to Washington, June 2, 1798, ibid., 479. Italics in original. 61. Hamilton to Pickering, June 7, 8, 1798; Pickering to Hamilton, June 9, 1798; ibid., 494, 500-506. 62. Adams to Washington, June 22, 1798, WJA, VIII, 572-573; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 517-519. 63. Pickering to Washington, July 6, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 530-53164. Washington to McHenry, July 4, 1798; to Adams, July 4, 1798; to Pickering, July 11, 1798; WGW, XXXVI, 304-315, 323-327. 65. Washington to McHenry, July 5, 1798, ibid., 318; McHenry to Adams, July 12, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 533-534; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 519-524; Steiner, McHenry, pp. 309-312. 66. Hamilton to Pickering, July 17, 1798; Pickering to Hamilton, July 18, 1798; Washington to Hamilton, July 14, 1798; PAH, XXII, 24-25, 17-21. Pickering later admitted to Hamilton that in order to avoid muddying the waters he had "concealed" the letter of July 17 in which Hamilton had said he would serve under Knox if necessary. Pickering to Hamilton, Aug. 21-22, 1798, ibid., 148. 67. Hamilton to Washington, [July 29-Aug i, 1798], ibid., 36-40. Washington to Knox, July 16, 1798; Knox to Washington, July 29, 1798; WGW, XXXVI, 345-349. Pinckney.to McHenry, Oct. 31, 1798, PAH, XXII, 202n. 68. Pickering to Washington, Sept. 13, 1798, Pickering Papers, IX, MHS; McHenry to Washington, Sept. 19, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 542-543. 69. Charles Francis Adams (the able editor of his grandfather's papers) gives the impression that had it not been for cabinet machinations to influence Washington, the latter would really have preferred Knox as second in command. But this appears to be largely wishful thinking. Washington's letter of Aug. 9 to Hamilton indicates that Washington might have been persuaded to have Knox ranked above Pinckney, but not above

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NOTES FOR PAGES 603-609

Hamilton, and he had already told Hamilton on July 9 that he had ranked Knox "below you both." PAH, XXII, 62, 20; WJA, VIII, 59on. Another of Adams's afflictions was the Senate's rejection on July 19, principally through Pickering's influence, of his son-in-law, Col. William S. Smith, as adjutant-general, on the grounds of Smith's reputation for irresponsible business dealings. Adams did not discover Pickering's part in the affair until some time later, though exactly when is unknown. Details are in Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 233-234, and WJA, VIII, 6i8-6i9n. 70. Washington to Knox, Aug. 9, 1798, WGW, XXXVI, 396-401. 71. McHenry to Adams, Aug. 4, 20, 1798, APM, reel 390 (also summarized at length in Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 543—544); Adams to McHenry, Aug. 14, 29, 1798, WJA, VIII, 580, 587-589. 72. McHenry to Adams, Sept. 6, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 546; Adams to McHenry, Sept. 13, 1798, WJA, VIII, 593-594. 73. For these various threats of resignation or refusal of service (veiled or otherwise), see Hamilton to McHenry, Sept. 8, 1798, PAH, XXII, 177; Knox to Washington, July 29, 1798, WGW, XXXVI, 347-349; Knox to McHenry, Aug. 5, 1798, PAH, XXII, 69-71; Knox to Washington, Aug. 26, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 538-540; Washington to Adams, Sept. 25, 1798, and Washington to McHenry, Sept. 26, 1798 (in which he refers to the possible necessity "for me to proceed to the final step"), WGW, XXXVI, 453-463; McHenry to Adams, Sept. 6, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 546; WJA, VIII, 588. 74. Wolcott to Adams, Sept. 17, 1798, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 93-99. 75. Adams to Wolcott, Sept. 24, 1798 (not sent), WJA, 601-604; to McHenry, Sept. 30, 1798, Steiner, McHenry, p. 341. 76. McHenry to Washington, Sept. 19, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 542-547; Washington to Adams, Sept. 25, 1798, WGW, XXXVI, 453-462. 77. Adams to Washington, Oct. 9, 1798, WJA, VIII, 600-601. 78. Adams to McHenry, Oct. 22, 1798, ibid., 612-613. 79. June 21, 1798, ibid., IX, 159. 80. Billias, Gerry, pp. 290, 294-295. 81. The first intimations that Gerry intended to remain came on June i with the arrival of dispatches from Rufus King enclosing a letter from Pinckney, a correct report of which found its way into the newspapers. King to Pickering, Apr., 16, 1798; Pinckney to King, Apr. 4, 1798; King, King, II, 317, 303-304 (the originals are endorsed as having been received June i; Pickering Papers, XXII, MHS); Philadelphia Aurora, June 4, 5, 1798; Abigail Adams to William Smith, June 4, 1798, Smith-Carter Collection, MHS. The quotation from Bache is in Aurora, June 6, 1798. Other letters of Abigail Adams which refer to the President's and her sentiments on Gerry's behavior are to Mary Cranch, June 4, 13, 19, 25, 1798, New Letters, 186, 192, 194, 196; to William Smith, June 9, 1798, SmithCarter Collection, MHS; to Eliza Peabody, June 22, 1798, Shaw Family Papers, LC. 82. Pickering to King, June 12, 1798, King, King, II, 347; Pickering to Commissioners, Mar. 3, 1798, PJnMl, III, 422-424 (also in ASP:FR, II, 200-201); Pickering to Gerry, June 25, 1798, ASP:FR, II, 204; Pickering to Benjamin Goodhue, Sept. n, 1798, Pickering Papers, IX, MHS. 83. Murray to J. Q. Adams, Worthington C. Ford, ed., "Letters of William Vans Murray to John Quincy Adams, 1797-1803," AHA:AR 1912, 393; King to Pickering, June 14, 1798, King, King, II, 349; J. Q. Adams to Murray, Apr. 27, 1798, WJQA, II, 281-282. 84. Gerry to Pickering, Oct. i, 1798; Talleyrand to Gerry, June 27, 1798; ASP:FR, II, 204-206, 215.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 609-613 85. Gerry to Pickering, Oct. i, 1798, ibid., 206-208; see also accompanying correspondence, 208-227. 86. Murray to Adams, July 17, 1798, WJA, VIII, 680-684; Richard Codman to H. G. Otis, Aug. 26, 1798, Samuel E. Morison, Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848 (Boston, 1913), I, 168-170. 87. This correspondence was not officially received in the United States until October, when Gerry transmitted it to Pickering together with his own report of Oct. i, but Talleyrand had already sent copies to Letombe with instructions to have them published. Portions appeared in the Aurora, Aug. 31 and Sept. i, 1798; more appeared Nov. i, the date on which the paper resumed publication after having been suspended from Sept. 10 because of Bache's death, and more still on Nov. 3. The quotation from Murray's letter of July 17 is in WJA, VIII, 682; other private letters of same to same (July 22, Aug. 3), each featured by much skepticism, are in ibid., 685-687. To Pickering, Murray wrote to much the same effect, Aug. 10, 1798, "Letters of Murray," 452. 88. Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair (Ch. 5, "A Member of the American Club"), esp. pp. 81-88. 89. Adams to Members of Cabinet, Oct. 10, 1798; to Pickering, Oct. 20, 1798; WJA, VIII, 602-604, 609-610. 90. Wolcott to Adams, Nov. 26, 1798, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 168-171; McHenry to Adams, Nov. 25, 1798; Lee to Adams, Oct. 27, Nov. i, 1798; Stoddert to Adams, Nov. 23, 25; Pickering to Adams, Nov. 5, 27, 1798; APM, reels 391, 392. Stoddert's letter of Nov. 23 is in Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 115-117. 91. Jefferson to Madison, Jan. 3, 1799, WTJ, VII, 313. It seems obvious, from evidence later exhibited in Adams's "Letters to the Boston Patriot" and C. F. Adams's accompanying notes, that Hamilton, who was in Philadelphia at the time, knew just about everything that went on in cabinet meetings. WJA, IX, 304-308 and nn. But whether the Secretaries needed any specific advice from him about what Adams should say in his message (comparable to what he had given McHenry on previous occasions), or whether he felt any special urgency about giving it here, seems doubtful. On this particular point we have found no evidence. Our inference that the cabinet members showed each other their replies to Adams's letter of Oct. 10 is drawn from Stoddert's note to Wolcott, Nov. 27, 1798, in Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 115, and on the coincidence between Pickering's and McHenry's ideas both on the Gerry question and on that of recommending a declaration of war. 92. Historians have generally assumed, following Charles Francis Adams (WJA, IX, i3in.), that Adams's message as finally delivered was primarily based on Wolcott's letter. Though we are reluctant to assert otherwise, the fact remains that the Pickering draft, which contains a number of alterations from that of Wolcott, was the one Adams actually used—except, of course, for Adams's much-discussed modification regarding assurances that a minister would be received. The draft, in Pickering's handwriting and with some very minimal editing by Adams, is in APM, reel 392. 93. WJA, IX, 128-134. 94. Ibid., 305-309 and nn. The unlikelihood of the French government's being disposed to send a minister to negotiate at Philadelphia had been referred to in the Codman letter mentioned above. Despite efforts to persuade the French to do this, Codman wrote, "there seems to be a fear that from the present temper of the American Govt he would not be received, they are therefore not inclined to risque it." Morison, Otis, I, 169. 95. Gallatin to his wife, Dec. 14, 1798, Adams, Gallatin, p. 223; Pickering to Murray, Dec. n, 1798, Pickering Papers, X, MHS; Pickering to Cabot, Feb. 4, 1799, Lodge, Cabot,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 613-614

p. 216. See also Stephen Higginson to Pickering, Jan. i, 1799 (the President had "committed himself too far"), Pickering Papers, XXIV, MHS; Higginson to Wolcott, Feb. 14, 1799, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 179-180; Pickering to Cabot, Feb. 26, 1799, Lodge, Cabot, pp. 223-224. Jefferson conceded Adams's message to have been "so unlike himself in point of moderation," and even the Aurora offered congratulations on the "brevity and comparative moderation of the speech." Jefferson to Madison, Jan. 3, 1799, WTJ, VII, 313; Philadelphia Aurora, Dec. 10, 1798. "The Jacobins here," wrote William Shaw to his Aunt Abigail, "say that the speech—the answer of the Senate and house are the most moderate they ever remember to have heard—they don't say much against them. I can tell you the reason. Knowing the firm and intrepid policy which the president has always recommended and pursued and moreover convinced of what ought to be done, the jacobins here thought & I believe expected that a declaration of war between America and France would be recommended by the president and echoed back by the two houses—they are very agreeably disappointed and to be sure they have reason to be pleased—they can now still pursue their tampering and lullaby policy." William Shaw to Abigail Adams, Dec. 20, 1798, APM, reel 392. 96. This memorial, dated Aug. 21, 1798, had been addressed to the President. But unlike virtually all the other addresses this one was critical of Administration policy toward France, and Pickering undertook to reply to it himself in Adams's absence, on the ground that he could not forward anything "calculated to insult the chief magistrate of my country." In his reply (published on Sept. 29 and widely reprinted) he denounced both the French government and its American defenders, in the course of which he made some sarcastic references to its recent dealings with Gerry. Upham, Pickering, III, 471-478. The spokesman for the freeholders, understandably goaded, thereupon replied to the reply; Aurora, Nov. 22, 1798. For Gerry's part in the controversy see Gerry to Adams, Oct. 20, 1798; Adams to Pickering, Oct. 26, 1798; Pickering to Adams, Nov. 5, 1798; WJA, VIII, 610-612, 614, 616. The particular points at issue (such as whether the dinner at which Talleyrand's agents repeated their demands for money was a "private" or a "public" one) are too trifling to be recounted here. Suffice it to say that Pickering, for all his vindictiveness, appears at least to have got his facts straight, while Gerry, making mountains out of molehills as he frequently did, does not show up well in the squabble. (Though for a contrary view see Billias, Gerry, pp. 293-294.) Marshall, whose Paris journal had provided the basis for much of Pickering's information, was reluctant to be drawn into the dispute, and he eventually wrote to Gerry himself urging him to drop it. Pickering to Marshall, Nov. 5, 1798; Marshall to Pickering, Nov. 12, 1798; Marshall to Gerry, Nov. 12, 1798; PJnMl, III, ^20-528. 97. Abigail Adams to John Adams, Jan. 25, 1799, APM, reel 393; Billias, Gerry, p. 295; William Shaw to Abigail Adams, Jan. 15, 1799, APM, reel 393; Gerry, Minutes of a Conference with the President, Mar. 26, 1799, Gerry Papers, LC; Adams to William Cunningham, Mar. 20, 1809, APM, reel 118 (partially quoted in Clarfield, Pickering and American Diplomacy, p. 198); Pickering to Adams, Jan. 18, 1799, WJA, VIII, 621-623. The Gerry-Talleyrand correspondence and Pickering's report, transmitted to Congress on Jan. 18 and 21 respectively and immediately published, are in ASP:FR, II, 204-238. The aggrieved Pickering immediately wrote to Washington, Marshall, Jay, Cabot, and Jedidiah Morse about the way Adams had altered his report (Upham, Pickering, III, 386-390, Pickering Papers, X, MHS; Lodge, Cabot, p. 215); see also Pickering, A Review of the Correspondence between the Hon. John Adams . . . and the late William Cunningham, Esq., . . . Beginning in 1803, an& Ending in 1812 (Salem, 1824), pp. 128-132, for the passages deleted.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 614-617

98. E.g., Philadelphia Aurora, Nov. 7, 16, 22, 30, 1798, Jan. 9, Feb. i, 1799; Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Aug. 27, 1798 (received Nov. 22), Jefferson Papers, LC. The published letters are without signatures but are presented as being from "a respectable American in France, to his friend, a merchant in this city," or "an American gentleman in Paris to a merchant of Baltimore," and so on. They are dated Aug. 24, 26, 27, 30, Sept. 10, and Nov. 5, 1798. Judging from these dates (perhaps excepting the last one or two), there must have been quite a bustle among this group during the last week of August, probably inspired by the peace-seeking efforts being made at that time by Dr. Logan (see below). 99. Frederick B. Tolles, George Logan of Philadelphia (New York, 1953), pp. 153204. 100. Samuel F. Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1949), pp. 99-101. William Shaw to Abigail Adams, Jan. 15, 1799; John Adams to Abigail Adams, Jan. 16, 1799; APM, reel 393. 101. Early rumors of Nelson's victory were dismissed by the Aurora as "apocryphal" (Nov. 16); an American brig arriving at Gloucester Nov. 21 brought confirmation of early reports; official news arrived at New York Nov. 30, and a full account was published in Philadelphia Dec. 3. Aurora, Nov. 30, Dec. 3, 1798. Adams to McHenry, Oct. 22, 1798, WJA, VIII, 613; William Shaw to Abigail Adams, Nov. 25, 1798, APM, reel 392. 102. Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788-1801 (Lexington, Ky., 1972), pp. 188-194; Malone, Jefferson, III, 399-407; PAH, XXII, 103. Some of these petitions were printed in Philadelphia Aurora, Jan. 22, 30, Feb. 12, 1799; see also AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 2807, 2817, 2906, 2934, 2955, 2959, 2985. 104. McHenry's Report on Reorganization of the Army, Dec. 24, 1798, ASP:MA, I, 124. 105. Ibid., 124-129. Washington to McHenry, three letters, all dated Dec. 13, 1798, PAH, XXII, 351-366; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, p. 245. 106. Hamilton to Gunn, Dec. 22, 1798; to Otis, Dec. 27, 1798, Jan. 26, 1799; to Sedgwick, Feb. 2, 1799; PAH, XXII, 388-390, 393-394, 440-441, 452-453. 107. Ibid., 440-441, 453. 108. The expression quoted is from a letter written many years later in Adams's old age to Harrison Gray Otis, May 9, 1823, APM, reel 124. He refers to a letter of Hamilton's "to a member of the house containing a dissertation [with] a complete system of administration foreign & domestic." The reference is tantalizing, since the old man is either hazy about some of his facts or else has telescoped two or more of Hamilton's letters into one, or both (his description does not quite fit any one letter of Hamilton's that has survived); yet he obviously remembers something. S. E. Morison's mention of it in Otis, I, 162, is sufficiently oblique that historians continue to be misled as to when the scene actually occurred. 109. Sedgwick to Hamilton, Feb. 7, 1799, PAH, XXII, 469-471. no. Gerry, Minutes of a Conference with the President, Mar. 26, 1799, Gerry Papers, LC. Adams continued to believe this to the end of his life. He wrote three other letters to Otis to the same effect besides the one cited in n. 108 above: Mar. 16, 29, Apr. 4, 1823, APM, reel 124. in. Murray to Adams, Oct. 7, 1798, enclosing Talleyrand to Pichon, Sept. 28, 1798, WJA, VIII, 688-691; translation of Talleyrand's letter in ASP.-FR, II, 239-240. The exact date received is unknown; C. F. Adams, WJA, VIII, 688n., says "it must have been received by the early part of February"; DeConde, Quasi-War, p. 174, says "apparently on February i"; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 366, thinks it "probable" that it arrived "between 884

NOTES FOR P A G E S 617-624

February 15 and 18." The paper was in any case transmitted with Adams's message of Feb. 18, 1799. 112. ASP.-FR, II, 238-239. 113. Barlow to Washington, Oct. 2, 1798, Sparks, ed., Washington's Writings, XI, 561; Washington to Adams, Feb. i, 1799, WGW, XXXVII, 120. 114. Adams to Washington, Feb. 19, 1799, W]A, VIII, 624-626. 115. ASP.-FR, II, 239. 116. Pickering to King, Feb. 19, 1799, Pickering Papers, X, MHS; Pickering to Washington, Feb. 21, 1799, Washington Papers, LC; Liston to Grenville, Feb. 22, 1799, PAH, XXII, 494-495; Abigail Adams to John Adams, Mar. 3, 1799, APM, reel 393; Cabot to King, Mar. 10, 1799, King, King, II, 551 (similar sentiments by Cabot to Pickering, Mar. 7, 1799, Lodge, Cabot, p. 224); Sedgwick to Hamilton, Feb. 22, 1799, PAH, XXII, 494; Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 203. On Adams's private torments in these and similar circumstances see Shaw, Character of John Adams, esp. Ch. 10. 117. Sedgwick to Hamilton, Feb. 25, 1799, PAH, XXII, 503; Sedgwick to John Rutherfurd, Mar. i, 1799, Welch, Sedgwick, pp. i88-i89n.; Upham, Pickering, III, 439-443; ASP:FR, II, 240; DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 184-185, 432, n. n. 118. ASP.-FR, II, 240. 119. Ibid., 244; Patrick Henry to Pickering, Apr. 16,1799, ibid., 241; DeConde, QuasiWar, pp. 187, 432-433nn. 120. Ibid., p. 186; Adams to Pickering, Jan. 15, 1799, W]A, VIII, 621; ibid., IX, 25in.; Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 248; Pickering to King, Mar. 12, 1799, King, King, II, 558. 121. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 246-249; Washington to McHenry, Mar. 25, 1799, WGW, XXXVII, 159. 122. Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 17951805 (Philadelphia, 1955), pp. 95-98; Maitland to Henry Dundas, Apr. 20, 1799, qu. in ibid., p. 109; Hamilton to H. G. Otis, Jan. 26, 1799, PAH, XXII, 440-441. 123. Clarfield, Pickering and the American Republic, pp. 195-196; King to Pickering, Oct. n, 1799, King, King, III, 123-124. 124. Murray to Pickering, Apr. 23, 1799, "Letters of Murray," AHA:AR 1912, p. 543; Pickering to Murray, July 10, 1799, ibid., 574. 125. H. C. Lodge, "Timothy Pickering," Atlantic Monthly, XLI (June 1878), 751. The Peale portrait, better known, is reproduced in many places, among them Alexander DeConde's Quasi-War; the Stuart appears in Gerard Clarfield's Timothy Pickering and American Diplomacy, as well as in the same author's full biography, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic. 126. The best and most convenient works on Pickering are the two volumes by Clarfield cited above, and we have drawn heavily on the second of these for the profile offered here. Others are the 4-volume Life of Timothy Pickering by his son, Octavius Pickering, and Charles W. Upham (Boston, 1867-73), which is long on documentary materials but very short on Pickering's own life and personality (one would hardly guess from it that there was any real friction between him and Adams); the article in DAB by William A. Robinson; and an unpublished doctoral dissertation, Edward H. Phillips, "The Public Career of Timothy Pickering, Federalist, 1745-1802" (Harvard, 1950). The great mass of Pickering papers is at the Massachusetts Historical Society, to which the Society published an excellent 58o-page calendar index, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser., VIII (Boston, 1896). There is also a microfilm edition of these papers, arranged in the same order as the originals are filed at MHS. The qu. about Pickering's father and the clergyman is in T. Pickering to James McHenry, Jan. 5, 1811, Steiner, McHenry, p. 56!.

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N O T E S FOR PAGES 624-630

127. Clarfield, Pickering and the American Republic, pp. 16-74, passim- The following three paragraphs are based on ibid., pp. 85-164. 128. Ibid., p. 154; Hammond to Grenville, Jan. 5, 1795, Bernard Mayo, ed., "Instructions to British Ministers," AHA:AR 1936, III, 83n. 129. E.g., Hamilton to Washington, Mar. 5, 1796, asserting that "Mr. Pickering, who is a very worthy man, has nevertheless something warm and angular in his temper & will require . . . a vigilant moderating eye," and adding in a subsequent letter, "These opinions are not confined to me." Same to same, Nov. n, 1796, PAH, XX, 374, 390. 130. On the young Garrison's devotion to Pickering and his principles see John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison, A Biography (Boston, 1963), pp. 30, 3234> 40, 42. 131. There is no published biography of Oliver Wolcott, though his public life, especially his service to the federal government, is reasonably well documented. Available materials include Gibbs's Memoirs (1846), repeatedly cited here, an immensely useful compilation with intelligent (if understandably biased) commentary by Wolcott's grandson; and three unpublished dissertations: Frederick H. Schmauch, "Oliver Wolcott: His Political Role and Thought Between 1789 and 1800" (St. John's, 1969); James Bland, "The Oliver Wolcotts of Connecticut: The National Experience, 1775-1800" (Harvard, 1970); and William C. Dennis, "A Federalist Persuasion: The American Ideal of the Connecticut Federalists" (Yale, 1971), containing two chapters on Wolcott. 132. Samuel Wolcott, Memorial of Henry Wolcott and Some of His Descendants (New York, 1881), p. 228; Schmauch, "Wolcott," pp. 6-8. 133. Ibid., pp. 10-17, et seq. 134. "In short, what with the non-acceptance of some, the known deriliction of those who are most fit; the exceptionable draw backs from others; and a wish (if it were practicable) to make a geographic distribution of the great offices of the Administration, I find the selection of proper characters an arduous duty." Washington to Hamilton, Oct. 29, 1795, PAH, XIX, 358. Earlier that year William Vans Murray (then a member of the House of Representatives) was writing that "we certainly are retrograding as to characters." To James McHenry, Jan. i, 1795, Steiner, McHenry, p. 158. "The offices are once more filled," John Adams wrote to Abigail, Feb. 6, 1796, "but how differently than when Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, etc., were here!" C. F. Adams, ed., Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife (Boston, 1848), p. 195. 135. To O. Wolcott, Sr., Jan. 6, 1795, Gibbs, Memoirs, I, 178. 136. Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), pp. 300-307. 137. Bernard C. Steiner's Life and Correspondence of James McHenry (1907) is the only biography available. It has many virtues, though a modern scholarly treatment, with an effort to supply some interpretive dimension, would be welcome. McHenry's performance as Secretary of War is discussed with understanding in M. Howard Mattsson-Boze, "James McHenry, Secretary of War, 1796-1800" (Unpub. diss., U. of Minn., 1965); and in the pertinent sections of Richard H. Kohn's Eagle and Sword, esp. Ch. 12. 138. "Dull is Plato, dry his morals,/ To the forest's floating carols," Steiner, McHenry, p. 3. 139. Ibid., pp. 1-18. 140. Frederick J. Brown, A Sketch of the Life of Dr. James McHenry (Baltimore, 1877), p. 12. 141. McHenry to Hamilton, Aug. n, 1782, PAH, III, 129. 142. Steiner, McHenry, pp. 41-60. 143. Hamilton to Washington, Nov. 5, 1795, PAH, XIX, 397; Washington to

886

NOTES FOR PAGES 630-637 McHenry, Jan. 20, 1796, WGW, XXXIV, 423-424; McHenry to Washington, Jan. 21, 24, 1796, Steiner, McHenry, pp. 163-164. 144. Hamilton to Washington, July 29, 1798; Washington to Hamilton, Aug. 9, 1798; PAH, XXII, 35, 62-63. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 395, n. 12, 248. 145. Wolcott to McHenry, Apr. 9, 1804 ("my friends, among whom, I rank you in the first class"), Steiner, McHenry, p. 529; T. Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, Dec. 19, 1815, Upham, Pickering, IV, 269-270; Lafayette to McHenry, Dec. 22, Steiner, McHenry, pp. 573, 615. 146. Pickering to McHenry, Feb. 3, 1811, ibid., p. 568. 147. Wolcott to Ames, Dec. 29, 1799, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 315. 148. What is known of Charles Lee goes little beyond the sketches in Richard A. Harrison, ed., Princetonians, 1769-1775: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 493-499 by Wesley F. Craven, and in DAB by Maude H. Woodfin. Anything else has to be gleaned from writings about the Lee family, which are fairly numerous, the most recent being Paul C. Nagel, The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American family (New York, 1990). The quotation is from Charles Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution (New York, 1981), p. 118. 149. Woodfin, "Charles Lee," 101; Washington to Lee, Nov. 19, 1795, WGW, XXXIV, 365-366. 150. Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781-1800 (New York, 1978), pp. 432, 457-458; R. H. Lee to Richard Bland Lee, Feb. 4, 1794, James C. Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (New York, 1914), II, 564; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 393-394151. Wolcott to Ames, Dec. 29, 1799, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 315; Carroll and Ashworth, Washington, VII, 354. 152. Lee to Adams, Mar. 14, 1799, W]A, VIII, 628. 153. Wolcott to Ames, Dec. 29, 1799, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 315. 154. Harriot S. Turner, "Memoirs of Benjamin Stoddert, First Secretary of the United States Navy," Columbia Historical Society Records, XX (1917), 141-166; Stoddert to John Templeman [c. 1804], Wilhelmus B. Bryan, A History of the National Capital (New York, 1914), I, 98. 155. Stoddert to Francis Lowndes, May 26, 1798, Turner, "Memoirs," 152. 156. Talleyrand to Murray, May 12, 1799, ASP:FR, II, 243-244; Pickering to Adams, July 31, 1799; Adams to Pickering, Aug. 6, 1799, WJA, IX, 10-12. 157. C. F. Adams, ibid., IX, i2n.; Adams to William Cunningham, Nov. 7, 1808, E. M. Cunningham, ed., Correspondence Between the Hon. John Adams . . . and the Late Wm. Cunningham, Esq., Beginning in 1803, and Ending in 1812 (Boston, 1823), p. 46; Jacob E. Cooke, "Country Above Party: John Adams and the 1799 Mission to France," Edmund P. Willis, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers (Bethlehem, Pa., 1967), pp. 66-67. 158. Higginson to Pickering, Aug. 7,1799, "Letters of Stephen Higginson," AHA:AR, 1896, I, 822. See also memorandum of George Cabot, Sept. 22, 1799, Lodge,>Cabot, pp. 238-240. 159. Peter P. Hill, William Vans Murray, Federalist Diplomat: The Shaping of Peace with France, 1797-1801 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1971), p. 155; Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 264-265. News of the Directorial upheaval appeared in the Gazette of the United States on Aug. 26, and in the Philadelphia Aurora Aug. 27, 1799. 160. Pickering to Adams, Sept. n, 1799, WJA, IX, 23-25. 161. Ellsworth's views on the mission, and the manner in which he communicated them to the various persons named, may be traced in the following correspondence: Pickering to Cabot, Feb. 26, Sept. 13, 29, 1799, Lodge, Cabot, pp. 224, 235-237, 243;

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NOTES FOR PAGES 638-645

Cabot to Pickering, Sept. 23, Oct. 16, 1799, ibid., pp. 242, 247; Ellsworth to Pickering, Sept. 19, 20, 26, Oct. i, 5, 1799, Pickering Papers, XXV, MHS; Ellsworth to Wolcott, Sept. 20, Oct. i, 1799, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 265-267; Ellsworth to Adams, Sept. 18, 1799, and Adams to Ellsworth, Sept. 22, 1799, WJA, IX, 31, 34-35. 162. Higginson to Pickering, Aug. 22, 1799, "Letters of Higginson," pp. 823-824. 163. Troup to King, Apr. 19, 1799, King, King, II, 597. Uriah Forrest to Adams, Apr. 28, 1799; Adams to Forrest, May 13, 1799; WJA, VTII, 637-638, 645-646. C. F. Adams in ibid., I, 551, VIII, 638n. 164. Lee to Adams, Oct. 6, 1799; Stoddert to Adams, Aug. 29, 1799; Adams to Stoddert, Sept. 4, 1799; ibid., IX, 38, 18-19. 165. Ibid., IX, 25-29, 33-34. 166. Ibid., IX, 30; Higginson to Wolcott, Sept. 16, 1799, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 262263. See also Higginson to Pickering, Sept. 20, Oct. 3, 1799, "Letters of Higginson," pp. 827-828. 167. Cooke, "Country Above Party," pp. 68-69. 168. The three versions are (i) a paper intended by Adams as a reply to Hamilton's Letter . . . Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams (Oct. 24, 1800) and quoted by C. F. Adams in WJA, IX, 255-256^; (2) Letter VI of "Letters to the Boston Patriot," published in 1809 and reprinted in ibid., IX, 253-255; and (3) Adams to William Cunningham, Jr., Nov. 7, 1808, Cunningham, Correspondence, pp. 47-48. On cabinet reactions to the Patriot letters see McHenry to Pickering, Feb. 23, 1811, Lodge, Cabot, p. 208; Stoddert to Adams, Oct. 12, 1809, ibid., pp. 200-203; Stoddert to McHenry, Apr. 14,1810, Steiner, McHenry, p. 557. That Adams in their meetings never asked their opinions on suspending the mission was amply confirmed at the time, long before the Patriot letters made an issue of it. E.g., Wolcott to Hamilton, Oct. 2, 1800, PAH, XXV, 141; Wolcott, "Notes on the negotiation with France, written January, 1800"; Pickering to Washington, Oct. 24, 1799; Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 279-280. 169. The quotation is from Adams to William Cunningham, Jr., Nov. 7, 1808, Cunningham, Correspondence, p. 48; a similar version is Letter VI of the Patriot series, WJA, IX, 254-255; Abigail Adams mentions the interview in A. Adams to Mary Cranch, Dec. 30, 1799, New Letters, p. 224; and Hamilton himself refers to it in Letter on John Adams, PAH, XXV, 219. The evidence for Hamilton's having gone to Trenton solely on army business, and with no knowledge of the President's intentions, is fairly persuasive: Letter on John Adams, ibid., 221; McHenry to Pickering, Feb. 3, 1811, Lodge, Cabot, pp. 209210; Cooke, "Country Above Party," pp. 69-70^ 170. Stoddert to Adams, Oct 12, 1809, Lodge, Cabot, p. 203. 171. Cf. Gibbs: "Again had HAMILTON risen up like a spectre in his path. To meet him, the intriguer, there . . . had roused the lurking demon of suspicion in his breast, and from that moment he was ungovernable." Memoirs, II, 276. CHAPTER XIV

The Settlement 1. Dudley W. Knox, A History of the United States Navy (New York, 1936), p. 6; Eugene S. Ferguson, Truxtun of the Constellation (Baltimore, 1956), p. 102. 2. Passage of the legislation of 1794 and its subsequent modification are described at length in Marshall Smelser, The Congress Pounds the Navy, 1787-1798 (Notre Dame, Ind., 1959), pp. 48-86; and more briefly in Craig L. Symonds, Navalists and Antinavalists:

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NOTES FOR PAGES 645-648

The Naval Policy Debate in the United States, 1/89-1827 (Newark, Del., 1980). On Humphreys, see Howard I. Chapelle, The History of the American Sailing Navy: The Ships and Their Development (New York, 1949), pp. 119-127 and passim; Michael A. Palmer, Stoddert's War: Naval Operations During the Quasi-War with Prance, 1/98-1801 (Columbia, S.C., 1989), pp. 27-28; Humphreys to Knox, Dec. 23, 1794, ASP:NA, I, 8. The currently prevailing view on Humphreys appears to be that his influence was more important in the realm of naval thought than in that of design; aspersions on Humphreys's draftsmanship and doubts about which ships' plans should or should not be attributed to him, broached by Chapelle and picked up by subsequent authors, have succeeded to some degree in lowering Humphreys's historical reputation. Whatever the merits of this revisionism, we assume here what nobody has denied, that as a force for creative ingenuity at a critical point in the progress of naval shipbuilding, Humphreys's influence was salutary. 3. A chronological listing of these acts is in Robert G. Albion, 'The First Days of the Navy Department," Military Affairs, XII (Spring 1948), 6; texts of them are in Dudley W. Knox, ed., Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War Between the United States and Prance (Washington, 1935), I, 58, 64, 87-88, 127, 135-137, 181-183, 188-189, 211; and their passage is described in Smelser, Congress Pounds the Navy, passim. In Gardner W. Allen, Our Naval War with Prance (Boston, 1909), Appendixes IV-V, pp. 301-305, there are lists of all vessels in naval service between 1798-1801 (totaling fifty-four) with their ratings and commanders, and of all officers of the first three grades appointed in that same period. Additional information about each of these ships may be found in Chapelle, History of the Sailing Navy. 4. Albion, "First Days," 6-9; Palmer, Stoddert's War, pp. 14-17. Charles O. Paullin, "Early Naval Administration Under the Constitution," United States Naval Institute Proceedings, XXXIII (1906), 1008, has a table of the first constructors and agents and the ports of their employment. On Stoddert's plans for the future see Stoddert to Josiah Parker, Dec. 29, 1798, ASP.-NA, I, 65-66; and Robert F. Jones, "The Naval Thought and Policy of Benjamin Stoddert, First Secretary of the Navy, 1798-1801," American Neptune, XXIV (Jan. 1964), 61-69. 5. Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with Prance, 1797-1801 (New York, 1966), pp. 124-125; Robert G. Albion and Jennie M. Pope, Sea Lanes in Wartime: The American Experience, 1775-1942 (New York, 1942), pp. 70, 83; Palmer, Stoddert's War, p. 6. 6. AC, 5 Cong., 2 Sess., 1531; Henry Knox to Adams, June 26, 1798, D. W. Knox, ed., Naval Documents, I, 140. 7. Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1973), p. 103. 8. Palmer, Stoddert's War, pp. 18-19, 30-31, 35-36, 56; Albion, "First Days," 10; Stoddert to Barry, July n, 1798, and to Adams, July 30, 1798, Naval Documents, I, 189191, 256. 9. WJM, III, 53. 10. Albert H. Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy During the Federalist Era (Knoxville, Tenn., 1974), pp. 234, 255; Monroe to Madison, Feb. 25, 1796, WJM, II, 460-461; ASP.-FR, II, 12-13. 11. Carl L. Lokke, ed., "Memoire sur les Etats-Unis d'Amerique," AHA:AR, 1936, I, 85-119; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 234-235, 238. Fauchet's memoire was itself in no small part an extended lament over how little interest officials of the French government had shown in American affairs, their failure to take seriously—or even to read— the voluminous reports sent to them from America by France's agents there, and how he

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NOTES FOR PAGES 648-653 and his predecessors had had to go for months (in his own case a whole year) "without receiving anything that could be called a dispatch" from Paris. On cues from Monroe and others as to how the French ought to respond to the treaty, and Monroe's counsel to be patient and await the election of a Republican President, see Ch. XI, above. 12. Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 243-244. 13. Monroe to Pickering, Aug. 15, 1796; Delacroix to Monroe, Oct. 7, 1796; ASP:FR, I> 74i> 74514. Sonthonax to Minister of Marine, Feb. 24, 1797, Archives de la Marine, Soussection Colonies, Archives Nationales, Paris. 15. Samuel E. Morison, ed., "DuPont, Talleyrand, and the French Spoliations," MHS Proceedings, XLIX (Oct. i9i5~June 1916), 69. 16. Ulane Bonnel, La France, les Etats-Unis, et la guerre de course (1797-1815) (Paris, 1961), p. 96; Morison, ed., "DuPont," p. 68. 17. Ott, Haitian Revolution, p. 8; Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941), pp. 3 and n., 26-30; ASP:CN, I, 134. 18. Ott, Haitian Revolution, pp. 9-13. The succeeding three paragraphs draw heavily on this highly useful work. 19. The British campaign in the West Indies is fully treated in John W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army (London, 1899-1930), IV; and David P. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (Oxford, 1982). 20. Palmer specifically makes this point in an earlier version of Stoddert's War, "The Quasi-War and the Creation of the American Navy, 1798-1801" (Unpub. diss., Temple U., 1981), p. 63. 21. ASP:FR, I, 759. That there was a direct interest in the profits of the privateering traffic within the French government appears to have been a matter of common knowledge. For instance John Marshall noted in his journal (and in the dispatch of Nov. 8, 1797, which was subsequently made public) that according to Conrad Hottinguer, one of the "XYZ" agents currently soliciting a bribe from the American commissioners, not all of the Directors expected to share in the douceur since one of them, Merlin de Douai, "was paid from another quarter." Pinckney thereupon remarked that he understood Merlin's money came from "the owners of the Privateers," and Hottinguer "nodded an assent to that fact." It was Merlin who, as Minister of Justice, had obliged these men by thinking up the role d'equipage pretext and writing a "treatise" on that subject, for which they had rewarded him with a present of four thousand louis. Talleyrand himself profited from the same sources, according to estimates later made of the corrupt revenues received by him during the first three years of his ministry. Moreover, it appears that the Legislative Council of Five Hundred continued to stifle any effort to reform the prize law because, as William Vans Murray put it, the Council was itself "a nest of privateersmen." PJnMl, III, 172, 247, 262, 278; Louis Bastide, Vie politique et religieuse de Talleyrand Perigord (Paris, 1838), p. 227; Due de Broglie, ed., Memoirs of the Prince de Talleyrand, tr. Raphael Ledos de Beaufort and Mrs. Angus Hall (Paris, 1895), I, xviii; Murray to J. Q. Adams, Dec. 10, 1799, Worthington C. Ford, ed., "Letters of William Vans Murray to John Quincy Adams, 1797-1803." AHAiAR, 1912, p. 630; Hill, Murray, pp. 164-165. 22. Stoddert to Barry, Dec. 7, 1798, Naval Documents, II, 70-72. 23. Palmer, Stoddert's War, pp. 84-87, 235-236. 24. Josiah Parker, chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, made these claims in support of Stoddert's proposal for an expanded naval building program, and thus wanted to make the case as strong as he could. Albert Gallatin, who opposed such a program,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 654-659 challenged Parker's figures and argued that the drop in maritime insurance rates, being worldwide and due to a variety of factors including changes in British and French naval policy, could hardly be ascribed simply to the existence of the United States Navy. As to particulars, Gallatin's assertions were not without substance. Nevertheless Parker's basic argument, that the navy had saved American merchants considerable sums in insurance costs, was a sound one, and if its scope is limited to the West Indies, where the navy's role in reducing premiums was obvious, the evidence is clear and convincing. In the summer of 1796 before the French began their attacks on American commerce, the normal rate for a West Indies voyage was 6 percent of the value of ship and cargo; by the end of the year it had doubled, and would rise to between 15 and 25 percent during 1797, reaching a peak of between 30 and 33 percent in the summer of 1798; whereas by 1800 the rate would fall to 10 percent. Thus if one estimated about $100 million in West Indies trade during 1799 and 1800 and calculated an average of 12 percent savings during this period, the total savings on insurance alone would come to some $12 million, almost twice the cost of the navy during the Quasi-War. Of equal significance to both merchants and producers was that American exports of wheat, flour, lumber, salt beef, and fish to the West Indies rose from $19.7 million in 1797 and $19.75 million in 1798 to $27.4 million in 1799 and $23.5 million in 1800. No matter how the calculation is made, there appears little question that the navy paid for itself several times over, nor was there any serious question of it at the time. ASP:NA, I, 69-70; AC, 5 Cong., 3 Sess., 2823-2827; Albion and Pope, Sea Lanes in Wartime, p. 83; Palmer, Stoddert's War, pp. 130-131; ASP:CN, I, 384, 417, 43*> 45325. Ferguson, Truxtun, pp. 160-171; Naval Documents, II, 326-338. 26. Charles C. Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1789-1873: A Chapter in Caribbean Diplomacy (Baltimore, 1938), p. 33; Rufus King to Pickering, July 14, 1798, King, King, II, 368. 27. Tansill, U.S. and Santo Domingo, pp. 38-39. 28. Adams to Pickering, July 2, 1799, WJA, VIII, 661. 29. Tansill, U.S. and Santo Domingo, pp. 23-29; Logan, U.S. and Haiti, pp. 64-66. 30. King to Pickering, Dec. 7, 1798; to Dundas, Dec. 8, 1798; Dundas to King, Dec. 9, 1798; King to Pickering, Dec. n, 1798; King, King, II, 475-477, 483-488. 31. Grenville to King, Jan. 9, 1799; King to Pickering, Jan. 10, 16, 1799; ibid., II, 499505, 511-512. 32. Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 17951805 (Philadelphia, 1955), p. 108; Tansill, U.S. and Santo Domingo, p. 47. 33. Ibid., p. 45; Logan, U.S. and Haiti, pp. 73-74; Toussaint to Adams, Nov. 6, 1798, J. Franklin Jameson, ed., "Letters of Toussaint Louverture and of Edward Stevens, 17961800," AHR, XVI (Oct. 1910), 65-66. 34. Stoddert to Barry, Jan. 16, 1799, Naval Documents, II, 242. 35. Logan, U.S. and Haiti, pp. 75, 179; Pickering to King, Mar. 12, 1799, King, King, II, 557-558; Robert G. Harper to constituents, Mar. 20, 1799, Noble Cunningham, ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to their Constituents, 1789-1829 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978),

i, i7i.

36. Tansill, U.S. and Santo Domingo, pp. 47-57; Maitland to Dundas, Apr. 20, 1799, qu. in ibid., p. 56; Perkins, First Rapprochement, pp. 108-109. 37. Tansill, U.S. and Santo Domingo, pp. 58-64. 38. Palmer, Stoddert's War, pp. 162-164, 217. 39. Ibid., pp. 196-201.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 660-665 40. Ibid., p. 235; see also above, n. 24. 41. Ibid., pp. 34~35> "i. 42. Palmer, "Quasi-War," pp. 356-360; W. D. Puleston, Annapolis: Gangway to the Quarterdeck (New York, 1942), pp. 2-3, 19-22. 43. Logan, U.S. and Haiti, pp. 85-88; Tansill, U.S. and Santo Domingo, pp. 68-69; Adams to Pickering, Apr. 17, 1799, Works, VIII, 634-635. 44. Pickering to King, Feb. 19, 1799, Pickering Papers, MHS, X. "Among ourselves and on our West India prospects the consequences will be pernicious. By West India prospects I mean the opening of the commerce of St. Domingo and its independence of the French Republic, which Toussaint would in all probability have soon declared. He I believe only waited to know what was to be expected from the U.S." 45. Adams to Pickering, July 2,1799, WJA, VIII, 661. It is quite possible that Pickering had this letter before him, having just received it, when he got off his blast of July 10 to Murray (referred to in Ch. XIII above). 46. Louis Pichon to Talleyrand, July 22, 1801, qu. in Tansill, U.S. and Santo Domingo, p. 81. 47. Ott, Haitian Revolution, pp. 171-172. 48. Pickering to Jefferson, Feb. 24, 1806, Jefferson Papers, LC. 49. Wolcott to Pickering, Dec. 28, 1800, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 468; Jefferson to Madison, Dec. 19, 1800, WTJ, VII, 471. 50. Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York, 1979), p. 347. 51. Ibid., pp. 347-348; Jacob E. Cooke, "Country Above Party: John Adams and the 1799 Mission to France," Edmund Willis, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers (Bethlehem, Pa., 1967), pp. 72ff.; Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (New York, 1889-91), I, 370. 52. Cooke, "Country Above Party," p. 7^n. The mission, according to McDonald, "resulted in a brilliant diplomatic triumph for France." Hamilton, p. 347. 53. R. King to Pickering, June 6, 1798, King, King, II, 336; Bernard Fay, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America: A Study of Moral and Intellectual Relations Between France and the United States at the end of the Eighteenth Century, tr. Ramon Guthrie (New York, 1955), pp. 426-427; Georges Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand: 1754-1838 (Paris, 19281934), I, 238-239; Raymond Guyot, Le Directoire et la paix de I'Europe: des traites de Bale a la deuxieme coalition (1/95-1799) (Paris, 1911), pp. 563-564^; Bonnel, Guerre de course, p. 6in. On May 31, 1798, the Prussian minister Sandoz-Rollin reported to his government: "Talleyrand spoke to me of the damaging particulars being spread about in the American newspapers regarding his ministry and published by order of Congress, and presented in such a way as to influence his ministerial fate. The distraught and disconcerted air with which he referred to this latter circumstance led me to guess that there was truth in the account; I told him the thirst for money will have dragged him through a great deal of dirt. . . . I believe him lost for the foreign ministry. Mr. Truguet has arrived from Spain with proofs of his venality in the treaty with Portugal." Paul Bailleu, ed., Preussen und Frankreich von 1795 bis 1807: Diplomatische Correspondenzen (Osnabriick, 1965), I,

2IO.

54. ASP:FR, II, 206, 210-211 (Gerry's account, and his correspondence with Talleyrand on the subject); Talleyrand, Report to Directory, May 31, 1798, AECPE-U 49, 393404; Talleyrand's Defence: Strictures on the American State Papers . . . (London, 1798); the same material in a slightly different translation is reprinted in ASP:FR, II, 224-227. Bellamy's protest, dated June 25, was first published in L'Ami des loix in answer to the story

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NOTES FOR PAGES 666-674 of the dispatches that appeared in that paper on 21 Prairial (June 9, 1798); his letter was translated and republished the following month in the London newspapers, then picked up by the Philadelphia Gazette, Sept. 20; the Boston Columbian Centinel, Sept. 22; Porcupine's Gazette, Oct. 10; and by various other American papers. 55. Guyot, Le Directoire et la paix de I'Europe, pp. 562-563. 56. ASP:FR, II, 209-219; Hill, Murray, pp. 103-115. 57. Morison, "DuPont," pp. 63-66. 58. Ibid., pp. 66-78. 59. Le Directoire et la paix de I'Europe, pp. 564-565. 60. Georges Pallain, ed., Le ministere de Talleyrand sous le Directoire (Paris, 1891), p. 309. 61. E. Wilson Lyon, "The Directory and the United States," AHR, XLIII (Apr. 1938), 527; Talleyrand to Bruix, July 27, 1798; Bruix to Directory, July n, 1798; to Talleyrand, July 31, Aug. 18, 1798, AECPE-U 50, 34, 132, 134, 178-179; ASP:FR, II, 222-223, 242; Hill, Murray, pp. 122-128; WJA, VIII, 688-691. Bruix, according to Sandoz-Rollin, seems to have acted as something of a go-between during this period. Bailleu, ed., Preussen und Frankreich, I, 213. 62. DeConde, Quasi-War, p. 148; the first reference Talleyrand makes to the PichonMurray talks is in that of Feb. 14, 1799, AECPE-U 51, 40-50. 63. Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand, I, 343. A biographical sketch of Reinhard is in Nouvelle Biographic generale, depuis les temps les plus recules jusqu'a 1850-60 (Copenhagen, 1968), XLI, 928. 64. Oct. i, 1799, AECPE-U 51, 240-24 1 vo. Bowman (Struggle for Neutrality, p. 387^) correctly points out that a second paper, mistakenly attributed to Reinhard by other authors because of its having been misfded in the Archives as pp. 244-247 in Vol. 51, was actually not his at all but originated in an earlier ministry, prior even to Talleyrand's. Charles Delacroix, or someone in his bureau, seems to have toyed briefly with similar thoughts, though probably not very seriously. See above, p. 508. 65. These events are described in Alphonse Aulard, The French Revolution: A Political History, 1/89-1804, tr. Bernard Miall (London, 1910), IV, 115-126; and Leo Gershoy, The French Revolution and Napoleon (New York, 1964), pp. 329-331, 340-341. 66. Ibid., pp. 340-347; Aulard, French Revolution, IV, 127-151. 67. Bruix to Talleyrand, Aug. 18, 1798, AECPE-U 50, 178-179; Albert DuCasse, ed., Histoire des negotiations diplomatiques relatives aux traites de Mortfontaine, de Luneville at d'Amiens (Paris, 1855), I, 187; Talleyrand, Report to Directory, Feb. 14, 1799, AECPEU 51, 40-50; Murray to J. Q. Adams, Dec. 10, 1799, "Letters of Murray," p. 630. 68. The principal source for Ellsworth's life and career, old but serviceable, is William G. Brown, The Life of Oliver Ellsworth (New York, 1905), upon which we have largely drawn for the following paragraphs. 69. Ibid., p. 26n.; Journal of William Maclay, p. 133. 70. Brown, Ellsworth, pp. 76-77. 71. Ibid., p. 100; italics in original. 72. Adams to James Lloyd, Jan. 1815, WJA, X, 112-113. 73. James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1861), I, 72. The only full account of Davie's life is Blackwell P. Robinson, William R. Davie (Chapel Hill, N.C.,

1957).

74. Charles Caldwell, Memoirs of the Life and Campaigns of the Hon. Nathaniel Greene (Philadelphia, 1819), p. 113.

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NOTES FOR PAGES 67^-679

75. Robinson, Davie, p. 186. 76. Ibid., pp. 39, 117, 226, 230, 354. 77. Ibid., p. 322. 78. What was left of Federalism in North Carolina had been for practical purposes snuffed out once and for all under the Jeffersonian tide of 1800. None of the state's four Federalist congressmen would be re-elected, and when Davie himself, the party's titular head, ventured to run for Congress in 1802 he was defeated by the crushing margin of two to one. He thereupon moved out of the state altogether and retired to his holdings in South Carolina. Ibid., pp. 359-375. 79. William Vans Murray, who died prematurely at forty-three, has been handsomely served by Peter P. Hill's correspondingly brief but highly intelligent and stylish biography, William Vans Murray, cited above in n. 56. Largely superseded by Hill's work, but still useful, are two articles by Alexander DeConde, "The Role of William Vans Murray in the Peace Negotiations Between France and the United States, 1800," Huntingdon Library Quarterly, XV (Feb. 1952), 185-194; and "William Vans Murrary and the Diplomacy of Peace: 1797-1800," Maryland Historical Magazine, XLVIII (Mar. 1953), 1-26. Also of interest is the same author's "William Vans Murray's Political Sketches: A Defense of the American Experiment," MVHR, XLI (Mar. 1955), 623-640. A show of irritation in one entry of Murray's private diary (qu. in Hill, Murray, p. 170) is the ground for an impression given in some accounts of an endemic state of friction within the American commission throughout the negotiations of 1800. In it, Murray says he did not believe his colleagues had "a good or respectful opinion of me," and indeed that "not one liked the other!" They were "but on terms of decent civility," and the other two were "too conceited, particularly Davie, to borrow any idea w[it]h complacency from me, the third named, & youngest of the mission." Still, it would be misleading, we think, to place too great an emphasis on this passage, written more than a year after the envoys' first meeting, or to read any of it into their working relations. There is no evidence in the day-to-day journal Murray kept during the proceedings to indicate any such "friction," and although their personal terms may well not have exceeded those of "decent civility," and although they did not always agree as to means, there is repeated evidence of a lively esprit de corps in their pursuit of the common end. At one point, for instance, Murray refers to Ellsworth's being "heart and soul occupy'd to make it succeed. So is D. So am I." Immediately after the mission concluded its work, Murray told J. Q. Adams, "My colleagues have acted from the first jump with the clearest and most pressing sincerity." And a few weeks later, with reference to Ellsworth, "I profoundly admired the neatness and accuracy of his mind," and regarding Davie: "General D is a firm, soldierly, and wellinformed man." He added: "We certainly did all in our power, and with one spirit." "Letters of Murray," pp. 654, 658-659. 80. There is, of course, a vast literature on Napoleon Bonaparte. We have drawn our principal impressions from James M. Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte: His Rise and Fall (New York, 1951); and Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon: From 18 Brumaire to Tilsit, 175*91807, tr. Henry F. Stockhold (New York, 1969). 81. Thompson, Bonaparte, pp. 140-141. 82. Aulard, French Revolution, IV, 153. 83. Pertinent details of the envoys' voyage, the various delays that obstructed both their sea passage and their overland journey to Paris, and the courtesies extended to them when they arrived there, are all contained in the dispatches and other papers reprinted in ASP.-FR, II, 307-310. 84. There is a perceptive discussion in Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic

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NOTES FOR PAGES 680-684

Movement under the Directory (Princeton, N.J., 1970), pp. 272-277 et seq., of the precarious state of the party idea with specific reference to the comparative experience of France and America in the late 17905. To our knowledge no other writer has thought to make such a comparison, one which we have found greatly suggestive. Professor Woloch's account also includes an illuminating anecdote (pp. 276-277) that illustrates Bonaparte's attitude on this subject long before Brumaire had even been thought of. 85. The "splendid levee" is described by Murray to J. Q. Adams, Mar. 7, 1800 (evidently misdated: the levee was held on the 8th), "Letters of Murray," p. 644. Ellsworth's biographer cites a "tradition" that Bonaparte, on the occasion of his first meeting with the Chief Justice, had been so struck with his "grave, firm face" that he "said to some one, 'We must make a treaty with this man.'" But according to Davie's secretary, "Bonaparte, in addressing the American legation at his levees, seemed for the time to forget that Governor Davie was second in the commission, his attention being more particularly directed to him." And yet it is probable that Murray, the only one of the three who spoke any French, actually got more of Bonaparte's attention than did either of the other two. Murray's detailed description of the lavish two-day entertainment at Joseph Bonaparte's chateau that marked the final signing of the Convention, and of his extended conversations there with the First Consul (solicited by the latter), certainly gives that impression. Brown, Ellsworth, p. 284; Robinson, Davie, pp. 354-355. George F. Hoar, ed., "A Famous Fete," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, XII (Apr. 1898), 240-259, is a full transcription of Murray's account of the doings at Mortefontaine. 86. Ibid., 253-254. 87. Emile Dard, Napoleon et Talleyrand (Paris, 1935), p. 37; Report to the Consuls of the Republic, Nov. 30, 1799, AECPE-U 51, 26o-262vo. 88. A. Aulard, ed., Paris sous le Consulat: recueil de documents pour I'histoire de I'esprit public a Paris (Paris, 1903), I, 144, 149, 267; Henri Plon, ed., Correspondance de Napoleon Ier, publiee par ordre de I'Empereur Napoleon III (Paris, 1858-1870), VI, 118; Louis A.-P. Bourrienne, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Philadelphia, 1832), pp. 199-200; H. Noel Williams, The Women Eonapartes: The Mother and Three Sisters of Napoleon I (New York, 1909), pp. 268-269; Fay, Revolutionary Spirit, pp. 431-436. The official newspaper, Le Moniteur, announced Washington's death, in two sentences and without comment, in its issue of Feb. 2, 1798, and on Feb. 4 reported the previous day's session of the Corps Legislatif, in which a kind of embarrassed indecision prevented that body from taking any kind of action in response to the news despite some urging by one of the deputies that it do so. But within a few days, as noted above, the climate had dramatically changed in consequence of the First Consul's orders of Feb. 7. Le Moniteur devoted a "Supplement" on Feb. 19 to the full text of Fontanes's oration, which was also circulated in pamphlet form. For a brief account of Fontanes's career, see M. Prevost et al., Dictionnaire de biograph ie franc,aise (Paris, 1979), IV, 325-327. 89. Hill, Murray, p. 174; E. Wilson Lyon, "The Franco-American Convention of 1800," Journal of Modern History, XII (Sept. 1940), 310-311; ASP:FR, II, 310. 90. DuCasse, ed., Histoire des negotiations, I, 224-225, 229-230, 233-243; ASP:FR, II, 314-317. The Americans' instructions are in ibid., 301-306. 91. Ibid., 314-315; DuCasse, Histoire, I, 186-213 (Talleyrand's instructions to the French negotiators), 230-231; "Some remarks on the status of our negotiations at Paris" (Murray's journal, kept throughout the proceedings), LC, entries of Apr. 9, 15, 16, 18, 1800. 92. ASP:FR, II, 319-326; DuCasse, Histoire, I, 247-256 (report from Pichon, May 5, 1800, on the state of the negotiations up to that date), 256-272; DeConde, Quasi-War,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 684-689 pp. 229-237; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 394-400; Murray, "Some remarks," entries of May 15, 23, 25, 1800. 93. ASP:FR, II, 326-328; DuCasse, Histoire, I, 272-277; Bowman, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 402-403; Hill, Murray, pp. 182-183. 94. ASP:FR, II, 328-330; DuCasse, Histoire, I, 277-286; Murray, "Some Remarks," entries of July 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 1800. 95. Ibid., July 25, 1800; Hill, Murray, pp. 183-185; Talleyrand to French commissioners, n.d. (but on or shortly after July 27, 1800), AECPE-U 52, 187. 96. References for the foregoing four paragraphs are ASP:FR, II, 330-339; DuCasse, Histoire, I, 291-308. 97. ASP:FR, II, 339; Murray, "Some remarks," entry of Sept. 20, 1800. 98. Ellsworth to Pickering (date unknown; original not in Pickering Papers), quoted in Pickering to Wolcott, Jan. 3, 1801, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 463. As Murray later observed, "Indemnities it is true sleep. . . . That they ever should have been made a point so important in this negociation, was, because the wisdom of government commanded it, not because we considered them as of first-rate consequence." Murray to J. Q. Adams, Nov. 7, 1800, "Letters of Murray," p. 658. 99. ASP:FR, II, 339-343. The completed Convention is in ibid., 295-301; also in various other works including James B. Scott, ed., The Controversy over Neutral Rights Between the United States and France, 1/97-1800: A Collection of American State Papers and Judicial Decisions (New York, 1917), pp. 487-510; and DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 351372. See also Hill, Murray, pp. 192-197; Hoar, ed., "Famous Fete," 245-259. The reader wishing to consult more fully detailed descriptions of the proceedings which eventuated in the Convention's reaching its final form may find them in the works by Hill, DeConde, Bowman, and Lyon cited in the foregoing notes. In the interest of clarity many such details have been omitted from the present account. 100. Robinson, Davie, pp. 356-357; H. G. Otis to Hamilton, Dec. 17, 1800; James Gunn to Hamilton, Dec. 18, 1800, PAH, XXV, 260, 263; AC, 6 Cong., 2 Sess., 775-776. 101. Hamilton to Sedgwick, Dec. 22, 1800; Marshall to Hamilton, Jan. i, 1801, PAH, 270, 291. King to Secretary of State, Oct. 31, Nov. 22, 1800, ASP:FR, II, 343-344. AC, 6 Cong., 2 Sess., 777-778. 102. Hill, Murray, pp. 210-212; ASP:FR, II, 344. 103. Ibid., 345. 104. DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 290, 292; A. Gallatin to his wife, Jan. 15, 29, 1801, Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia, 1879), pp. 254-255, 258. "As to indemnification for spoliations," according to Hamilton, "that was rather to be wished than expected. . . . The people of this country will not endure that a definitive rupture with France shall be hazarded on this ground." Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, Dec. 24, 1800, PAH, XXV, 272. 105. "The French treaty will be violently opposed by the Feds; the giving up the vessels is the article they cannot swallow." Jefferson to Madison, Dec. 26, 1800, WTJ, VII, 473-474. "We lose our honor by restoring the Ships we have taken. ..." John Rutledge, Jr. to Hamilton, Jan. 10, 1801, PAH, XXV, 309. On the other hand, as William Vans Murray pointed out, "had we been at war they could have had no right to demand a restoration of the public ships, but as it was not war, and as we would not restore their former treaty of commerce and alliance, etc., etc., we had the less ground to resist a proposition for a mutual restoration of public ships." Murray to J. Q. Adams, Mar. 23, 1801, "Letters of Murray," p. 691. 106. Eli F. Heckscher, The Continental System: An Economic Interpretation (Oxford,

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NOTES FOR PAGES 689-696 1922), p. 50. Bonnel, Guerre de course, pp. 141-144. Murray to Pickering, No. HI, Dec. 26, 1799; to Marshall, No. 121, Dec. 28, 1800; No. 126, Jan. 30, 1801, Netherlands Dispatches, I, National Archives. Hill, Murray, pp. 198-199, 213-214. 107. Arthur A. Richmond, "Napoleon and the Armed Neutrality of 1800: A Diplomatic Challenge to British Sea Power," Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, CIV (May 1959), 186-194. 108. The growing discomfiture of Virginia Republicans (including Jefferson) over their pro-French attachments, in the light of Bonaparte's accession to power, is described in Joseph I. Shulim, The Old Dominion and Napoleon Bonaparte: A Study in American Opinion (New York, 1952), Ch. 3. 109. First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1801, James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897 (Washington, 1896-1899), I, 323. CHAPTER

XV

The Mentality of Federalism in 1800 1. For information on how this term came into existence and who used it, see Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York, 1974). 2. Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, Oct. 25, 1802, WT], VIII, 175-176. 3. The line of thought here being referred to was set afoot most notably by Manning Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore, 1953), and Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams (New York, 1957); with a number of others finding a similar approach highly congenial, among them Page Smith, John Adams (Garden City, 1962), 2v.; Clinton Rossiter, "The Legacy of John Adams," Yale Review, XLV (Summer 1957), 528-550; and Ralph A. Brown, The Presidency of John Adams (Lawrence, Kan., 1975). 4. A tempting analogy might be the resource for England that Churchill represented in 1940 (though not, say, in 1945). 5. AC, 5 Cong., i Sess., 429-430 (July i, 1797). 6. Edward C. Carter II, "A 'Wild Irishman' Under Every Federalist's Bed: Naturalization in Philadelphia, 1789-1806," PMHB, XCIV (July 1970), 331-346; James M. Smith, Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), pp. 22-34. Another factor that seems to have contributed substantially to Jeffersonian majorities in 1800 was the considerable number of newspapers established by these onetime immigrants, especially the Irish. See Michael Durey, "Thomas Paine's Apostles: Radical Emigres and the Triumph of Jeffersonian Republicanism," WMQ, 3rd Ser., XLIV (Oct. 1987), 661-688. 7. It is a pity there is no way of measuring the numbers of Irish votes that must have been lost by Otis's "Wild Irishmen" speech alone. For instance, the Republican Boston Chronicle declared that "the 'wild Irish' of that city would choose a new representative and never cast their votes for 'Young Harry' again." Carter, "Wild Irishman," 334. 8. Quoted in Kenneth W. Keller, "Diversity and Democracy: Ethnic Politics in Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1788-1799" (Unpub. diss., Yale U., 1971), p. 47. This and the same author's "Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, LXXII (1982), were indispensable in shaping the thoughts of the above paragraphs. 9. Keller, "Diversity and Democracy," p. 214; idem, "Rural Politics," p. 20. 10. Keller, "Diversity and Democracy," pp. 130-133, 177-178, 185. 11. Ibid., pp. 16-18, 231-233, 235-237; Keller, "Rural Politics," pp. 12-13, 26-28.

.897.

NOTES FOR PAGES 696-702 12. Keller, "Diversity and Democracy," pp. 234-235; AC, 5 Cong., 3 Sess., 29922993. See also 2795, 2807, 2955> 2958~2959> 298513. There is no complete modern scholarly study of the Fries Rebellion. Still serviceable, however, is William W. H. Davis, The Fries Rebellion, 1798-99 (Doylestown, Pa., 1899), the research for which had been done some forty years previously while many of the participants were still living. The principal documentary sources for the rebellion and subsequent legal proceedings are Thomas Carpenter, comp., The Two Trials of John Fries, on an Indictment for Treason; Together with a Brief Report of the Trials of Several Other Persons . . . (Philadelphia, 1800); and Francis Wharton, State Trials of the United States During the Administrations of Washington and Adams; with References, Historical and Professional, and Preliminary Notes on the Politics of the Times (Philadelphia, 1849). Also useful is Russel B. Nye, A Baker's Dozen: Thirteen Unusual Americans (East Lansing, Mich., 1956), pp. 3-26. Peter Levine, "The Fries Rebellion: Social Violence and the Politics of the New Nation," Pennsylvania History, XL (July 1973), 241-258, examines the rebellion from the viewpoint of crowd-behavior theory. The rumor about Washington and his "20,000 men" is noted in Wharton, State Trials, p. 130. 14. Davis, Fries Rebellion, pp. 67-69; Wharton, State Trials, p. 551. 15. See above, n. 6 to Ch. XIII. 16. PAH, XXII, 552-553. 17. Davis, Fries Rebellion, pp. 62-86. 18. Quoted in ibid., pp. 102, in, 139. 19. Nye, Baker's Dozen, p. 18; Carpenter, Two Trials, pp. 209-213, 226; Gazette of the United States, Apr. 26, 1799; Porcupine's Gazette, Mar. 30, 1799. 20. And instead of twelve petit jurors from Northampton, only two from that place were selected. Davis, Fries Rebellion, pp. 118-119; Wharton, State Trials, pp. 487-490. 21. Wharton, State Trials, pp. 539-548, 565-577, 584-598; Porcupine's Gazette, May 10, 1799. 22. Adams, Works, IX, 178-179. 23. Nye, Baker's Dozen, p. 25. 24. John C. Miller, Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston, 1951), p. 83; Smith, Freedom's Fetters, p. 431. 25. Mark DeWolfe Howe, review of Freedom's Fetters, WMQ 3rd Ser., XIII (Oct. Z 956), 573~5?6; Leonard W. Levy, Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 221-225. English practice was itself partially liberalized with Fox's Act (1792), which permitted the jury to decide facts and law in seditious libel cases. On Jefferson, see L. W. Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 46, 56-58. 26. Ibid., pp. 57-61; Jefferson to Thomas McKean, Feb. 19, 1803, WT], VIII, 218. 27. E.g., the speeches of Nicholas and Gallatin against the resolution to prevent Matthew Lyon from resuming his seat after having been convicted of sedition, and that of Nicholas favoring repeal of the Sedition Law, AC, 5 Cong., 3 Sess., 2961-2966, 2969-2974, 3002-3014; Madison's "Report of 1800," P]M, XVII; and Tunis Wortman, A Treatise Concerning Political Enquiry, and the Liberty of the Press (New York, 1800). 28. Gordon S. Wood, "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution," Richard Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), p. 73. 29. Ibid., p. 81. Janet A. Riesman, "The Origins of American Political Economy, 16901781" (Unpub. diss., Brown U., 1983), pp. 302-377, contains a brilliant account of the new entrepreneurial climate created by the Revolution.

,898,

NOTES FOR P A G E S 703-710

30. Federalist, Cooke ed., pp. 56-65. 31. Paul Bourke, "The Pluralist Reading of James Madison's Tenth Federalist," Perspectives in American History, IX (1975), 271-295; and Robert J. Morgan, "Madison's Theory of Representation in the Tenth Federalist," Journal of Politics, XXXVII (Nov. 1974), 852-885; in addition to Wood, "Interests," cited above, strike us as conclusive on this point. Another suggestive statement as to the true status and function of such men is G. S. Wood, "The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution," Library of Congress Symposia on the American Revolution, Leadership in the American Revolution (Washington, 1974), pp. 63-88. 32. Smith, Freedom's Fetters, pp. 277-287; Raymond Walters, Jr., Alexander James Dallas: Lawyer—Politician—Financier, 1759-1817 (Philadelphia, 1943), pp. 78-79; Wharton, State Trials, pp. 345-391. The letter referred to is Adams to Tench Coxe, May 1792, Gibbs, Memoirs, II, 424-425. Duane's editorial concerning it appeared in the Philadelphia Aurora July 24, 1799, unambiguously titled "BRITISH INFLUENCE." 33. Smith, Freedom's Fetters, pp. 288-300; the proceedings against Duane are reported in AC, 6 Cong., i Sess., 68-96, 104-105, 111-124. 34. Smith, Freedom's Fetters, pp. 301-305. 35. Ibid., pp. 390-392; Throop Wilder, "Jedidiah Peck: Statesman, Soldier, Preacher," New York History, XXII (July 1941), 290-300; Alfred F. Young, The Democratic-Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), 508-517. 36. Smith, Freedom's Fetters, pp. 392-398; Jabez D. Hammond, The History of Political Parties in the State of New York (Syracuse, N.Y., 1852), I, 132. 37. Aleine Austin, Matthew Lyon: ( 665 Bemis, Samuel F., 399, 402, 411, 795 n.27 Bill of Rights: absence of, from text of Constitution, 32; Madison and, 60-62, 135; Washington recommends, 59 Bingham, William, 121-22 Blackstone, Sir William, 97, 231, 465 Blodgett, Samuel, 177, 179 Bolivar, Simon: compared with Napoleon, 42; compared with Washington, 42-43 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 6, 9, 264, 758 n.i3 Bonaparte, Joseph, 682, 684, 687 Bonaparte, Napoleon: Campo Formio, makes Treaty of, 570; Italy, exploits in, 511; and Louisiana, 372, 508, 663, 689; and negotiations with U.S. envoys, 684—85, 687; and opposition parties, 679; and popular participation, 679; and St. Domingue, 661-62; sketch of, 677-78; welcomes U.S. envoys, 680 Bond, Phineas, 244-45 Boston Associates, 280, 281 Boudinot, Elias, 51, 95, 99, 142, 230-32, 262 Bowers, Claude, 241 Bowman, Albert H., 648 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry: and Gen. Collot, 504; on Indians, 272; on party and faction, 289; at Princeton, 81, 239, 673; and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 467, 469, 47477, 485 Braddock, Gen. Edward, 35, 271 Bradford, David: and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 467, 475, 476-77, 485

.912.

INDEX Bradford, William: death of, 633; Madison, friend of, 82; at Princeton, 81, 239, 673; and Whiskey Rebellion, 479, 480, 481 Brant, Irving, 139, 838 n.i6o Breckinridge, John, 719, 721 Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre, 49, 331-32, 366, 370 Brogan, Denis, 186 Brooks, Van Wyck, 165, 166 Brown, Capt. Moses, 659 Brown, Richard D., 453 Bryant, William Cullen, 191 Bunel, Joseph, 657 Burgesses, House of, 35, 36, 38-39 Burke, Aedanus, 66, 142, 151 Burke, Edmund: and Thomas Paine, 237, 32526; and parties, 265; Reflections on the Revolution in Prance, 313, 404 Burlamaqui, Jean Jacques, 84, 97 Burr, Aaron: character portrait, 743-46; and Jefferson, tie with, 744, 747-50; and N.Y. election (1800), 692, 733; at Princeton, 81, 474, 673, 744; and vice-presidential nomination: (1792), 298; (1796), 514; (1800), 740 Burr, Sarah, 744 Cabot, George, 276, 389, 395, 396, 619, 634, 737, 75i Callender, James T., 294, 900 n.49 Campo Formio, Treaty of, 570, 573, 574 Canning, George, 245, 354 Carleton, Gen. Sir Guy. See Dorchester, Lord Carmichael, William, 440 Carnot, Lazare, 367, 569 Carondelet, Francisco Louis Hector de, 439 Carrington, Edward, 145 Carroll, Daniel, 177 Channing, William Ellery, 454-55 Chase, Samuel, 699 Chateaubriand, Francois Rene de, 49, 165 Chew, Benjamin, 459, 522 Chipman, Nathaniel, 708-9 Chittenden, Thomas, 708 Civic humanism, 8, 17, 28, 693, 739 Civil War, English, 6, n Clark, George Rogers, 349 Claviere, Etienne, 370 Clingman, Jacob, 293-95 Clinton, DeWitt, 191, 442

Clinton, George, 99, 241; election as governor (1792), 288; and election of 1800, 733; vice-presidential candidacy (1792), 288, 292 Clymer, George: and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 465, 467 Cobbett, William ("Peter Porcupine"), 518, 555, 698-99, 833-34 n.ii2 Codman, Richard, 609, 882 n.94 Coit, Joshua, 597 Coke, Sir Edward, 97 Colbert, Gen. Victor, 504, 566 Combs, Jerald A., 794 n.io, 795-96 n.27 Committee of Public Safety (France), 366-70 passim, 500, 506, 509 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine, marquis de, 72, 210, 310, 312, 328 Consolato del mare, 409, 410, 421 Constable, William, 262, 274, 318 Constitution, English: blessings ascribed to, 7, 10, 16 Constitution, U.S., 10, 31-32, 58; broad construction of, 105-6; strjct construction of, Madison and, 224, 229-32, 276-77 Constitutional Convention, 31, 43-44, 54, 83, 103, 104-5, 557-58, 560 Consular Convention (U.S. and France), 686, 872 n.io9 Continental Congress, 12, 23, 31, 51, 81, 199, 604 "Continentalist" side of Revolutionary war effort, 23-24 Convention of 1800 (also C. of Mortefontaine): advantages of, 688-90; disposition of, by U.S. Senate, 687; negotiations, 682-87; opinion on, 662-63 Conway Cabal, 273 Cooke, Jacob E., 156, 663, 851 n.59 Cooper, James Fenimore, 191 Cooper, Myles, 129 Cooper, Thomas, 705 Cooper, William, 447, 705, 751 Cornwallis, Gen. Charles, Lord, 100 Corwin, Edward, 559, 870 n.95 Coups d'etat (France): of 18 Brumaire, 660, 670, 676, 680; of 22 Floreal, 669; of 18 Fructidor, 569, 570, 609; of 30 Prairial, 636, 670 Coxe, Tench, 262, 475, 628 Craigie, Andrew, 138, 262

.913,

INDEX Crevecoeur, Hector St. John de, 33 Cruger, Nicholas, 94-95, 115 Cruger, Tileman, 95 Cunliffe, Marcus, 37, 762 n.5 Cunningham, Noble E., 288 Cutler, Manasseh, 275

Duane, William, 704-5 Ducher, Gaspard Joseph Armand, 370-71 Duer, William, 99, 129, 262, 263; sketch of, 272-76; ruin of, 278 Dumouriez, Charles Francois, 321, 327, 331 Dundas, Henry, 406, 651, 656 Dunlap, William, 190-91 DuPont de Nemours, Victor Marie: report on French attacks on U.S. shipping, 648-49, 666-68

Dallas, Alexander J.: and Democratic Society of Phila., 458; Duane, William, counsel for, 705; and Fries trial, 699; Jay Treaty, attacks, 432, 834 n.ii2; and Pa. politics in 17905, 519, 521 Dana, Francis, 556 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 191 Dauer, Manning, 692 Davie, William R.: character sketch, 673-75; mission to France, appointed to, 620 Dayton, Jonathan, 262, 448, 449 Deane, Silas, 275 Debt: Jefferson on, 91-92; Madison on, 90, Ch. Ill passim, significance of in Va. life, 90-92 Debts, unpaid pre-Revolutionary, owed to British creditors, 90, 126, 211, 216, 218, 219, 222, 247, 252, 253, 401, 436; provision for settlement of, in Jay Treaty, 408 Decatur, Capt. Stephen, Sr., 646 Declaration of Independence, 81, 197 Deforgues, Francois Louis Michel: and Genet, 367, 368; replaces Lebrun as Foreign Minister, 354, 366 Delacroix, Charles, 508, 551, 562, 647 Democracy: emergence of, as civic and social value, 29, 451 Democratic Societies, 342, 388 French Revolution as stimulus for formation of, 456; Washington denounces, 484-85; in western Pa., 462, 485; Whiskey Rebellion, disapproved of, by Societies, 481, 482 Directory, French Executive: Committee of Public Safety replaced by, 508; fall of, 669-70; members, character of, 568-69, 874 n.i3 Dorchester, Guy Carleton, Lord, 126, 130, 218, 220, 247, 478; and Beckwith, 124, 219; speech to Indians, 392, 395, 405 Douglas, Ann, 167-68 Drucker, Peter, 261 Duane, James, 99, 101

k

Eden, William: free trade treaty with France, 71-72, 211; and Nootka Sound affair, 214 Edwards, Jonathan, 452, 744 Elections: of 1788, 33; of 1792, 282, 288-92; of 1796, 513 ff.; of 1800, 741 ff. Ellicott, Andrew, 173, 176 Ellis, Joseph J., 163 Ellsworth, Oliver: Adams and, 620, 637; character sketch, 671-73; France, appointed as member of mission to, 619; and Jay mission, 389-90, 393, 395, 396; and Judiciary Act (1789), 63-64; reservations as to French mission, 637, 673 and Wolcott, 627 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 164, 166 Enlightenment, iSth-century, 19, 84, 86, 105, 108, in, 305 Excise act of 1791, 226 Fallen Timbers, battle of, 438, 483, 594 Farewell Address (Washington): interpretations of, 492-97; Monroe and, 513; mentioned, 427 Fauchet, Jean Antoine Joseph: Foreign Office pays little attention to, 648; Genet's successor, 369, 372; on Jay Treaty, 647; on peace with U.S., 564; and Randolph affair, 425 ff., 479 Fauquier, Gov. Francis, 203 Federalism: as social and political philosophy, 21-25; disintegration of, 726 ff. The Federalist, 22-23, 102 ff.; No. 9, 103; No. 10, 22, 84, 86-88, 103, 106, 107; No. 44, 105, 232;

914 /

J.

I •

INDEX The Federalist, (continued) No. 57, 22; No. 77, 106 Fennell, Dorothy, 470, 853 n.ii3 Fenner, Gov. Arthur, 735 Fenno, John, and Gazette of the U.S., 240, 282, 284, 449, 518 Fenno, John Ward: on Fries Rebellion, 698 Ferguson, E. James, 139 "Financial Revolution" of 16908 (England), 1415, 116 Findley, William: and Democratic Societies, 485; and election of 1796, 520; and Whiskey Rebellion, 462-69 passim, 474, 483; mentioned, 283 Fishbourn, Benjamin, 54 FitzSimons, Thomas: and Pa. politics, 522; and "self-created societies," 485, 486; on Tariff of 1789, 66 Flahaut, Adelaide Marie Emilie, comtesse de, 318, 321 Fletcher, Mildred, 372 Fleurieu, Charles-Piefre Claret de, 682 Florence, noted citizens of, 183-84 Fontanes, Louis, 681-82, 764 n.3o Forrest, Uriah, 638 Fox, Charles James, 130, 221, 404 France: and America, mutual attitudes, 303 ff.; attacks on American shipping, 537-38; and Eden Treaty with England, 71-72, 211; Revolutionary debt, U.S., to, 334, 342, 34548; trade with U.S., state of, 70-72. See also Treaties of Amity and Commerce Franklin, Benjamin: antislavery petitions (1790), 151; and commission to negotiate trade treaties, 69; death of, 152; and grandson Bache, 458; vogue of, in France, 305 Franklin, Letters of. See Letters of Franklin on the Conduct. . . "Free ships, free goods," 353, 410, 417, 538, 552, 687, 689 Freeman, Douglas S., 37, 50 Freneau, Philip: anglophobia, 239; National Gazette, founds, 240, 264; newspaper war (1792), 282 ff.; at Princeton, 81, 474, 673; Washington denounces, 361 Fries Rebellion, 620-21, 696-700

Gallatin, Albert: on Adams's speech to Congress (Dec. 1798), 612; and Alien and Sedition laws, 591, 701; and election of 1796, 520; and Jay Treaty, 444, 446-47; on Revolutionary accounts, settlement of, 149; and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 467, 468, 469, 474> 475> 477> 483 Garrison, William Lloyd, 626 Gates, Gen. Horatio, 98, 603, 674, 710, 733, 753 Geddes, Capt. Henry, 659 Genet, Edme Jacques, 330 Genet, Edmond Charles: and Canada, plans for, 333, 334, 335, 367, 371-72; and Catherine II, 331; expeditions against Spanish colonies, projected, 333, 334, 335, 349, 353, 367; family background, 330; instructions of, 332-35; Jefferson, blamed for misfortunes in America, 373; Little Democrat, case of, 350-52; marriage to Cornelia Clinton, 372; and privateers, 333, 335, 345 ff.; recall of, 351-52, 359; remarriage to Martha Osgood, 372; Tocqueville and Beaumont, visit of, 373 "Genteel Tradition," 164, 165, 168 George III, 322, 329 Gerry, Elbridge, 19; anti-military views of, 557, 594; Bank of U.S., 231; bounties on fish, 276; character sketch, 556-58; decision to remain in France, 578; reactions to EG's remaining in France, 6079; return to U.S., 607 ff.; and Talleyrand, fiction of supplying XYZ names to, 609, 611, 665; and XYZ mission, 555-56, 569 ff. Giles, William Branch: on Adams, 552; bounties on fish, 276; resolutions on Hamilton and Treasury, 295 ff. Girard, Stephen, 459, 521 Gironde and Girondins: diplomacy of, 331 ff.; fall of, and execution of leaders, 354, 366 Glorious Revolution (1688), 15, 21 Godoy, Manuel de, 440 Goodhue, Benjamin, 276 Goodwin, Albert, 712

.915.

INDEX Gordon, Thomas. See Trenchard, John Graham, Catharine Macaulay, 75, 309 Great Britain: trade with U.S. after Revolution, 69-7i> 73 Greene, Gen. Nathanael, 624, 674 Greenleaf, James, 178-79 Greenville, Treaty of, 436, 439, 483 Grenville, William Wyndham, Lord: and Beckwith, 124; and cabinet crisis (1794), 404; Dorchester, communications to, 216-23 passim; Indian buffer state, 222, 223, 250; instructions to Hammond, 246, 247; Jay, negotiations with, 407 ff.; and St. Domingue, evacuation of, 656-57 Griswold, A. Whitney, 197 Griswold, Roger: scuffle with Lyon, 582, 70910

Grotius, Hugo, 97 Gunn, James, 616 Guyot, Raymond, 667 Hadfield, George, 178 Hallam, Lewis, 189-90 Hallet, Stephen, 178 Hamilton, Alexander: Adams, interview with at Trenton (1799), 640; and Maj. Andre, 129; and Charles Asgill, 129; and assumption of state debts, 118-21, 123; Bank bill, defense of, 232-33; Beckwith, George, talks with, 125-28, 130, 212, 221-23, 228, 400; on Burr and election of 1800, 747, 748-49; character portrait, 93 ff.; at Constitutional Convention, 102, 103-5; on Convention of 1800, 687; on declaration of war (1798), 584, 596; "The Defence" (of Jay Treaty, as "Camillus"), 433-36, 442; early life, 94 ff.; The Farmer Refuted, 97, 109, 232; The Federalist, co-author of, 22-23, 83, 103, 104; Freneau, attack on, 284; and Fries Rebellion, 697; and Giles Resolutions, 295 ff.; hatred of, by Adams, 593, 865 n.4o; and Hume, 107 ff.; and Jay, instructions to, 396 ff.; Jefferson, attack on (1792), 285-88;

and Jefferson on election of 1800, 749; and Jefferson, enmity of, 4, 77, 211, 236, 28788, 290-92, 315-16; Letter on John Adams, 737-39; and Madison, allies in Continental Congress, 82, 100-102; Madison, collaboration with, in constitutional movement and Federalist papers, 102 ff.; and Madison, estrangement of, 77, 79, 88, 92-93, 137; Madison, favored by AH as envoy to France, 544-45; military career, 97-100; military role, resumption of, 600 ff.; Mint, Report on, 235-36; on neutrality, issue of, 337-38; nominated as Secretary of Treasury, 52; "Pacificus" letters, 360-62, 435; Pickering, AH deplores belligerence of, toward France, 544; Pinckney, C.C., plot to elect (1800), 734 ff.; Pinckney, Thomas, plot to elect (1796), 524 ff., 540, 865 n.4o; public credit, theory of, 115 ff.; Report on Manufactures, 123, 258-62; and residence-assumption bargain (1790), 156-61; retirement from Treasury, 420, 835 n.i27; on Revolutionary accounts, settlement of, 119-21, 123; Rutgers v. Waddington case (1784), 129; Secretary of Treasury, takes office, 114-15; Seabury, pamphlet debate with, 96-97; slavery, views on, 99; and Society for Establishment of Useful Manufactures (SUM), 262-63, 27I> 274> 279-80; and tonnage discrimination, Madison's plan for, 113, 125; and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 464-65, 467, 469, 470, 480-81 Hammond, George: Hamilton, conversations with, 250-52, 255, 405; and Jay Treaty, ratification of, 423, 426; Jefferson, correspondence with, published, 377-78, 386-87; on Louis XIV s execution, American reactions to, 356; mission to U.S., failure of, 245 ff., 257; reports on U.S. reaction to British spoliations, 402-3,405; sketch of, 244-46 Handlin, Oscar and Mary, 453

.916.

INDEX Harmar, Gen. Josiah, 250, 438 Harper, Robert Goodloe: and election of 1796, 5*4> W; and election of 1800, 735, 738; and military measures, 598-99, 715; mentioned, 310 Harrington, James, 6, 9 Hauterive, Alexandre Maurice, comte d', 566 Hauteval, Lucien ("Z" of "XYZ"), 573, 665 Hawkesbury, Robert Jenkinson, earl of, 216, 222,

246,

247,

413, 414;

Report on Commerce with U.S.A., 379-82, 400 Hedouville, Gen. Gabriel-Theodore, 646, 657 Henfield, Gideon, 345, 349 Henry, Patrick, 204, 524, 559; and assumption, 265; in First Continental Congress, 39-40; mission to France, appointed to, 619; mission to France, declines appointment, 620, 67* Paine, PH denounces, 329 Higginson, Stephen, 121-22, 636, 638, 639 Hirschman, Albert O., 281, 802 n.n Hoban, James, 177 Hofstadter, Richard, 191, 205, 263, 264, 412, 523, 701 Hottinguer, Conrad ("X" of "XYZ"), 571-73 Howe, John R., Jr., 4 Howe, Richard, Adm. Lord: victory over French fleet (1794), 403 Hugues, Victor, 645, 651, 652 Hume, David: on commerce as civilizing influence, no, 201; as economic thinker, 107 ff.; on funded debts, 112; Hamilton, influence on, 97 and passim; and Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, 25861; Madison, influence on, 86-87, 105, 106; Witherspoon on, 85; on party and faction, 264, 268, 752 Humphreys, Joshua, 644 Hutcheson, Francis, 85 Hutchinson, Lt.-Gov. Thomas, 465, 532

Ideology: importance of, in new nations, 78-79; nature of, 13-14 Indians, 220, 247, 401; buffer state, idea of, 222, 223, 255; and fur trade, 126; Ohio valley, resistance to settlement of, 217; policy of federal government toward, 437-38;

Southern, treaty with, 55 ff. See also Dorchester, Lord; Harmar, Josiah; Pickering, Timothy; St. Clair, Arthur; Wayne, Anthony Ingersoll, Jared, 478 Innes, James, 237 Iredell, James, 699 Irvine, William, 520 Irving, Washington, 191 Israel, Israel, 521 Izard, Ralph, 336, 524, 525, 526

Jackson, James, 141, 143, 155, 229 Jacobins (France): disposition of Genet case, 366 ff.; overthrow of Gironde ministry, 354 James, Henry, 166, 307-8 Jay, John: Chief Justice, 54; and Cooper, James Fenimore, 191; The Federalist, co-author of, 22; and French Revolution, 310; and gubernatorial election (N.Y., 1792), 288; Hamilton, JJ's plan to appoint to Senate, 599-600; instructions to, as special envoy, 396 ff.; Grenville, first meeting with, 406; Grenville, negotiations with, 407 ff.; Monroe's welcome in Paris, reaction to, 40910; and N.Y. constitution, drafting of, 273, 318; and N.Y. election of 1800, 734; nomination of, as special envoy, 394-95; reception of, in England, 406-7, 416; mentioned, 355 Jay Treaty: appropriations for, movement to deny, 441 ff.; as limit on negotiations with France (1800), 684, 685; as pretext for French attacks on U.S. shipping, 546, 647-48; public opinion, reversal of, on, 431 ff.; reception of, in U.S., 415-22; Senate, approval by, 418-19 Jefferson, Martha, 196, 204-5 Jefferson, Peter, 202-3 Jefferson, Thomas: Adams, overtures to (179697), 540-41, 546; anglophobia, 209, 315, 338, 554; on Bill of Rights, 62; "botanizing tour" with Madison (1791), 240-

.917.

42;

and Burr, breaking of tie with, 750; character portrait, 195 ff.;

INDEX Jefferson, Thomas (continued) and cities, 195-96; and coinage, 234-36; commercial coercion, policy of, 209-10, 211, 224; commercial concessions from France, 70, 72, 210; and commission for negotiating trade treaties in 17808, 69, 70, 210, 532; on Convention of 1800, 662, 688, 690; First Inaugural, 690, 750, 752-53; fisheries, report on, 224-25, 276; francophilia, 210-11; French Revolution, as seen by, 314-17; Freneau, overtures to, 239-40, 286, 722; Genet, politics of disengaging from, 357 ff.; Genet, relations with, 343 ff.; and Hamilton, enmity of, 4, 77, 211, 236, 287-88, 290-92, 315-16; Hammond, George, treatment of, 248 ff.; on Indians, 272, 803 n.34; Jay Treaty, opposition to, 442; Letombe, talks with, 555, 566-67; and liberal tradition, 207; on neutrality, issue of, 337, 338; nominated as Secretary of State, 52; Notes on Virginia, 199, 269; and Paine's Rights of Man, 237-38; presidential candidacy (1796), 515, 519, 52223; reluctance to become President (1796-97), 540, 546; Report on Commerce (1793), 378, 380; Republican opposition, assumes charge of (i797)> 553-555 and residence-assumption bargain (1790), 156-61; resignation as Secretary of State, 211; and "revolution of 1800," 691, 693; Richmond, removal of state capital to, 169, 207; and St. Domingue, 661-62; on speculation in Bank stock, 242-44; Statute of Religious Liberty, 197; Virginia Code, revision of, 197, 210; Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 719 ff.; on war crisis with France, 566-67, 583, 584, 587, 588; war governor of Virgina, 205-6 Jervis, Sir John, 651 Jogues, Fr. Isaac, 187 Johnson, Thomas, 177 Johnson, William Samuel, 125, 672 Jones, Howard Mumford, 50

Jones, Joseph, 443 Judiciary Act (1789), 62-64 Kent, James, 432 Kimball, Fiske, 171 King, Rufus: and Genet affair, 355, 372; on Gerry in Paris, 608; and Jay mission, 389, 392-94, 395, 396; and Jay Treaty, ratification of, 419, 432, 435; minister to Great Britain, 551; and residence debate (1790), 158, 159; and St. Domingue, negotiations on, 656-57 Knox, Henry: criticism of, 272; and French invasion, fears of, 645-46; and frigates, construction of, 644; and ranking in New Army, 602-4; report on Indian affairs (1789), 437; Secretary of War under Confederation, 51; Secretary of War, renominated as (1789), 52; and treaty with Southern Indians, 55—57 Kohn, Richard, 630 Lafayette, Marie Joseph du Motier, marquis de, 72, 100, 210, 303, 307, 309, 310, 629, 631 Lansing, John, Jr., 102, 105 Larevelliere-Lepeaux, Louis Marie de, 569, 670 La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Francois Alexandre Frederic, due de, 187, 210, 310 Latrobe, Benjamin, 201 Laurance, John, 73-74, 142, 388 Laurens, John, 99, 100, 323 Lebrun-Tondu, Pierre-Henri, 331, 366, 370 Lee, Charles: appointed Attorney-General, 633; on declaration of war (1798), 583, 584-85; Monroe, urges recall of, 503, 633; sketch of, 632-34 Lee, Henry, 135, 141, 271, 632 Lee, Richard Bland, 156, 160, 385, 632 Lee, Richard Henry, 39, 47, 632, 633 Leeds, Francis Osborne, duke of, 215, 216, 217, 219, 221 Leib, Michael, 442, 520, 521 L'Enfant, Pierre Charles: and Federal City, 170-72, 173, 175-77, 180-81; and Federal Hall (N.Y.), 188; and Society for Useful Manufactures, 279 Lenox, David, 463, 471 Letombe, Philippe Joseph, 565, 575, 582; Jefferson, talks with, 555, 566-67 Letters of Franklin on the Conduct. . . , 416—17, 418, 833 n.ii2 Lewis, William: and Fries trial, 699 Liberty and power, antithesis of, 6, 7, 28-29, 746

,918.

INDEX Lincoln, Benjamin, 438, 603 Link, Eugene P., 457 Listen, Robert, 245, 618, 654, 658 Livermore, Samuel, 141-42 Livingston, Brockholst, 262, 432, 733 Livingston, Edward, 443, 444 Livington, Robert R., 46, 241-42; on Jay Treaty, 418, 432-33> 435> 437, 443 Livingston, William, 95 Lloyd, James, 592, 715 Locke, John, 6, 81, 84, 97, 557, 760 n.3i Logan, George, 503, 614 Lopez, Robert S., 182 Louis XIV, 14, 174 Louis XVI, 215, 307, 311, 319, 320, 331, 332; reaction in U.S. to execution of, 356-57 Louis XVIII, 637, 680 Loyalists, 126, 173, 217, 247, 251, 252, 253, 401 Lycurgus, 752 Lyon, Matthew: character sketch, 706-11; and Democratic Societies, 709; Griswold, scuffle with, 582, 709—10; "martyrdom" of, 710—11 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 8, 9, 183 Maclay, William, 19; debt, plan for scaling down, 142; and election of 1796, 520; and funding, debates on, 144; and removal power, debates on, 51; and residence debate, 158; on speculation in state debts, 138; and titles, issue of, 46-48; on tonnage discrimination proposals (Madison), 73; and treaty with Southern Indians, 55-58 Macomb, Alexander, 262, 276, 278 Madelin, Louis, 511 Madison, James: anglophobia, 83, 269; and antislavery petitions (1790), 143, 151-52; Bank, opposes, 229-32; and Bill of Rights, 60-62, 135; "botanizing tour" with Jefferson (1791), 24042; on bounties, 276-77; on broad construction, Federalist, 44, 105-6, 231; and capital, location of, 133-34, 156-61; character profile, 79 ff.; and commercial coercion, 130-31, 224, 376, 381 ff.; and compensation to original holders of public debt, 143-45;

at Constitutional Convention, 80, 83; in Continental Congress, 82, 89; and debt, idea of, 90; essays in National Gazette, 266 ff.; The Federalist, co-author of, 22, 23, 83; Federalist No. 10, 84, 86-88, 106, 107, 702; Federalist opposition to JM as envoy to France, 542-45; France, JM's determination not to accept appointment as envoy to, 542-45; and Hamilton, allies in Continental Congress, 82, 100-102; and Hamilton, collaboration in constitutional movement and Federalist, 102 ff.; and Hamilton, estrangement of, 77, 79, 88, 92-93, 137; "Helvidius" letters, 362, 435; and Jay Treaty, 417-18, 443 ff:; Jefferson, cautions on overtures to Adams, 541, 547-48; and Jefferson's presidential candidacy (1796), 515; on luxuries, 20; money, treatise on (1779), 89-90; Morris mission, opposition to, 127-28, 135; motives for opposing funding plan, 137-41, 145, 146; Neutrality Proclamation, opposition to, 358; on parties, 266-69; at Princeton, 81-82, 83-84, 239, 673; on religious liberty, 82, 84; and removal power, 51-52; and residence-assumption bargain (1790), 156-61; retirement from Congress, 549; and "self-created societies," debate on, 48588; on speculation in Bank stock, 242-44; on state legislatures, irresponsibility of in 17805, n, 702; strict construction, adopts doctrine of, 224, 229-32, 276-77; and Tariff of 1789, 65-67; and tonnage discrimination against British shipping, 65, 67-68, 69, 73-74, 88-89, 123, 153-55; and Treasury Department, establishment of, 52; and Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 719 ff. Madison, Col. James, Sr., 81, 82 Maitland, Thomas, 655-56, 657, 658 Malone, Dumas, 202, 295 Malthus, Thomas, 19

.919.

INDEX Mangourit, Michel-Ange de, 335, 510 Manigault, Gabriel, 527 Manufactures, Report on, 258-62, 271 Marat, Jean Paul, 328 Marshall, James: and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 463, 485 Marshall, John: character sketch, 558-59; Chief Justice, appointed, 732; Federalist opinions of, 728-30; and French Revolution, 310; and New Army, 730-31; on Pinckney, plot to elect, 728; return home (1798), 596; Secretary of State, 687, 732; Sedition Act, disapproval of, 728-30; XYZ dispatches, author of, 550, 570; XYZ mission, leadership of, 570 ff.; mentioned, 26 Marx, Leo, 200 Mason, George, 59, 82, 237, 266 Mason, Stevens T., 420, 443, 633, 711 Maury, Rev. James, 202 McClenachan, Blair, 432, 459 McCoy, Drew R., 19 McDonald, Forrest, 663 McDougall, Alexander, 98 McHenry, James: character sketch, 628-31; and commissions in New Army, 603-4; on declaration of war (1798), 583, 584; dismissal of, 735-36; Madison, opposition to, as envoy to France, 543> 545; and New Army, 718 McKean, Thomas, 478, 520 McPherson, William, 698 Meares, John: and Nootka Sound, 214 Meier, Richard L., 182-83 Mercantilism, 20, 23, 261 Mercer, John, 278, 283 Merlin de Douai, Philippe Antoine, 499, 568, 569, 667, 670; and role d'equipage, 572, 875 n.i3i Michaux, Andre, 349-50 Mifflin, Thomas, 351, 458, 519; and Whiskey Rebellion, 477-82 passim Military measures (1798-99), 395, 598-99, 61516 Military policy: under Confederation and in early 17905, 593~95 Miller, John C, 181 Milton, John, 6, 486 Mint, Hamilton's Report on, 235-36 Mirabeau, Honore Gabriel Raquetti, 562 Miranda, Francisco de, 43, 215

Minuit, Peter, 186 Missisippi, free navigation of: and Pinckney Treaty, 439-40, 500; urgency of, 126, 217, 220, 254-55, 461; and whiskey, transportation of, 468, 471, 472 "Modernization," 454, 455 Monroe, James: France, mission to, 498 ff.; and Jay negotiations, 415-16, 500-503, 509, 512-13, 647; and Jefferson, defense of (1792), 285, 295, 806 n.76; recall of, 503, 504, 551; reception of, in Paris, 409-10, 429, 499, 506, 512; and Reynolds affair, 294-95 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 6, 81, 84, 87, 97, 557 Montmorin, Armand Marc St. Hereme, comte de, 319, 320 Morris, Gouverneur: constitution, N.Y. state, drafting of, 273, 318; England, special mission to (1790), 127-28, 131, 154, 212 ff., 225; on federal judiciary, 64, 766 n.58; France, minister to, 316, 321-22, 369, 512; and French Revolution, 317-22 Morris, Robert, 53, 318, 522, 624, 751; debtors' prison, 179, 459; and residence question, 133-34, 156, 158-59; syndicate for financing Federal City, 178-79; tobacco monopoly, 70, 99, 100 Mortefontaine, fete at, to celebrate Convention of 1800, 683, 689 Moultrie, Gov. William, 335, 336 Moustier, Eleanor-Franc.ois-Elie, comte de, 114, 372 Muhlenberg, Frederick A., 293, 294, 449 Muhlenberg, Peter, 520 Mumford, Lewis, 180 Mundy, John, 182 Murray, William Vans: on Bonaparte, 680; character sketch, 675-76; France, nominated as minister to, 618-19; on Gerry's remaining in Paris, 607; on Legislative Councils (French), fall of, 671; and Pichon, 609, 615, 617, 666, 668 Murrin, John M., 21 Naval defense measures (1798), 589-90 Necker, Jacques, 107, 113 Nelson, Adm. Horatio Lord: Battle of Nile (Aboukir), 615, 636, 646, 669 Nelson, Thomas, 91, 206 Nelson, William, 91

.920.

INDEX Neufchateau, Nicolas Louis Francois de, 569 Neville, Gen. John: and Whiskey Rebellion, 463, 467, 468, 470, 471, 474, 485 Neutrality, U.S. policy of, 352-54 Neutrality Proclamation (1793), 338-39; public opinion on, 356 New Army: demobilization of, 731; difficulty in raising and supplying, 621, 71819; Federalist intentions for, 714-16; ideological resistance to, 594, 716-17. See also Military measures New York City: elections of 1800, 732-34; as imaginary national capital, 186 ff. Nicholas, John, 394, 582, 701 Nicholson, John, 178-79 Northwest posts, British occupation of: as grievance, 126, 127, 154, 211, 216-22 passim, 271, 377, 383, 401, 402; Hammond and, 247, 251, 252; Jay Treaty, issue resolved by, 408-12 passim, 483 Orders in Council, British: July 2, 1783 (reaffirmation of Navigation Act), 70; June 8, 1793 ("provision order"), 353, 365, 367, 377> 389; Nov. 6, 1793 (blockade of French West Indies), 389, 392, 393, 398, 402-4; Jan. 8, 1794 (revocation of Nov. 6 Order), 391, 393, 402-4; Aug. 6, 1794 (permitting appeals), 408; Apr. 25, 1795 (secret, preemption of grain cargoes), 421, 423, 425, 426, 835 n.i3i Ordinances of 1784 and 1785, 199 Otis, Harrison Gray, 587, 616; and Naturalization Act, 694; on plot to elect Pinckney (1800), 734; "wild Irish" speech, 694, 710 Otis, James, 531 Otto, Louis-Guillaume, 368, 369, 371, 564, 566 Page, John, 277 Paine, Thomas: Age of Reason, 324, 329; Bastille, transmits key of, to Washington, 309, 814 n.68; and Burke, 325-36; and Franklin, 323; and French Revolution, 322-29; Louis XVI, plea for reprieve of, 328-29; memorandum on American affairs, 367-68;

on Pinckney, appointment of, as minister to France, 510; Rights of Man, 237-38, 324, 325-27, 404 Panic, financial (1792), 270, 278-79, 283 Parkinson, Benjamin: and Whiskey Rebellion, 467 Parsons, Theophilus, 740 "Party" and "Faction," 18, 263 ff., 286, 702 Pastoret, Claude-Emmanuel Joseph Pierre, 56364, 566 Paterson, William, 262 Peace Treaty of 1783. See Northwest posts; Debts, unpaid; Loyalists; Slaves, carried off Peale, Charles Willson, 37, 623, 783 n.i Peck, Jedidiah: sketch of, 705-6 Pelham, Henry, 14 Pendleton, Edmund, 39, 91, 204, 243 Pennsylvania politics in 17905, 519-23 Perry, Capt. Raymond, 659 Peter the Great, 97, 174; builds St. Petersburg, 184-86 Peters, Richard, 699 Peterson, Merrill, 204, 721 Physiocrats, 199, 200, 211 Pichon, Louis, 685, 689; approaches to Murray, 609, 615, 666, 667, 668 Pickering, Timothy: and Adet, 538; character sketch, 623-26; on declaration of war (1798), 583; and French Revolution, 310, 625; and Gerry, 607-8, 613-14; on Hamilton, ranking of, in New Army, 601; Indian diplomacy, 438; on Indian War, 272; Madison, opposition to, as envoy to France, 343, 545; Postmaster-General, 625; and Randolph affair, 425, 431; Secretary of State, 625 Secretary of War, 625 West Indies, diplomacy of, 654-55, 657-58, 660-61 Pinckney, Charles, 742-43 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth: character sketch,

.921,

559-61

Hamiltonian plot to elect CCP as President, 692, 735> 742i minister to France, appointed as, 510; non-reception of, in Paris, 538, 551; "not a sixpence," 573; ranking in New Army, 602-4;

INDEX Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth (continued) and South Carolina politics, 523; and XYZ mission, 549, 555, 569 ff. Pinckney, Thomas, 393, 704; candidacy for Vice-President (1796), 515, 523, 527; plot to make TP President (1796), 515, 525, 528; Treaty of San Lorenzo, 439-40, 483 Pitt, William, 130; career of, as example to Hamilton, 227-28; and French West Indies, invasion of, 393, 403, 651, 656, 657; and Jay mission, 401-2, 407, 413; and Morris mission, 219; and Nootka Sound affair, 213 ff.; and Portland Whigs, 404, 406; subversion, campaign against, 404, 598, 711— *3 Plutarch, 6, 94, 752 Pocock, J.G.A., 8-9, 10, 12, 13 Pope, Alexander, 94, 558 Postlethwayt, Malachi, 97, 107, 227 Potomac, navigation of, 43, 44, 170, 181 Princeton (College of N.J.), 81, 83-86 "Publius," pseud, of Federalist authors, 22, 92; as "split personality," 103-6 Pufendorf, Samuel, baron von, 97 Randolph, Beverley, 438 Randolph, Edmund: Bank, opinion on, 232; disgrace of, 424-31; and Jay mission, 393, 398; and Jay Treaty, ratification of, 422 ff.; Jefferson's exasperation with, 358-59; and Monroe mission to France, 498, 505-6; and Whiskey Rebellion, 428-29, 479-81, 484 Randolph, Jane, 202 Randolph, Peyton, 39 Randolph, William, 202 Reeve, Tapping, 627, 744 Reinhard, Charles-Frederic, 668-69, 680 Reubell, Jean Francois, 568, 569, 570, 667 "Revolution of 1800": Jefferson's view of, 691 Revolutionary accounts, final settlement of, 11921, 147-51, 160 Reynolds, James, 293-94 Reynolds, Maria, 293-94 Rigaud, Andre, 655, 658-59 Ritcheson, Charles R., 402, 795 n.27 Roberdeau, Isaac, 176, 788 n.37 Robespierre, Maximilien, 332, 354, 366, 475, 506 Robinson affair (1766), 91

Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 682, 685 Roland, Jean Marie, 327, 331 Role d'equipage, 552, 563, 564, 648 Roman republic, 6; imagery of, in early America, 48, 55, 193 Ross Election Bill, 704, 730 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 6, 200, 304 Royster, Charles, 632 "Rule of 1756," 397, 398, 399, 400 Rush, Benjamin, 443, 444, 459, 521, 540, 629, 823 n.i82 Rutledge, Edward, 244; and election of 1796, 525 ff. Rutledge, John, 526, 527 Rutledge, John, Jr., 728 St. Clair, Gen. Arthur, 47, 250, 255, 270-72, 4/1 St. Domingue: British invasion, 403, 651-52, 655-56; Jefferson and, 661-62; relief of, 334, 368; revolution and civil war, 650 ff.; society of, 649-50. See also West Indies, French Sandoz-Rollin, David Alfons von, 568 San Martin, Jose de, 43 Santayana, George, 164-65, 167 Santo Domingo. See St. Domingue Saratoga, battle of (1777), 98 Schlesinger, Daniel, 192 Schuyler, Philip, 100, 125, 242, 273 Schwoerer, Lois, 594 Scioto Company, 275 Scott, Thomas, 142, 485 "Scottish Renaissance," 84-85, 86, 107-8. See also Enlightenment Seabury, Samuel: pamphlet debate with Hamilton, 96-97 Sedgwick, Theodore: on Adams, 736; on assumption, 152; on Bank, 230; and Burr, effort to elect, 748; and Jay Treaty, 447; and military preparations, 595, 616, 715; and speakership election (1799), 728; on tonnage discrimination, 154; mentioned, 751 Sedition Act: prosecutions under, 703-6, 710-11 Sewall, Samuel, 597 Shays's Rebellion, 25, 43 Sheffield, John Baker Holroyd, earl of: Observations on the Commerce of the American States, 69-70, 130, 378-79

* 922 / £.£*,

INDEX Shelburne, William Petty Fitzmaurice, earl of: liberal trade policy of, 69, 125, 130, 378, 402 Shelby, Isaac, 349, 353 Sherman, Roger, 152, 532, 672 Shipbuilding boom, 382, 413, 826 n.9 Short, William, 316-17, 321, 440 Sieves, Emmanuel Joseph, 670, 677-78 Simcoe, John Graves, 392, 395, 405 Sinking fund, 123, 279, 296, 301 Skelton, Martha Wayles (Jefferson), 203 Skipwith, Fulwar, 391, 392, 393 Slavery: Hamilton and, 99; and Ordinance of 1784, 199; petitions on, 142-43, 150-51 Slaves, carried off by British, 216, 250, 251, 401, 434-35 Small, William, 203 Smelser, Marshall, 3 Smilie, John: and election of 1796, 520; and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 469, 474 Smith, Adam, 67, 260, 384, 385; and agriculture, 200, 258; Hamilton's use of, 259, 261; and Hume, 107-8; mercantilism, indictment of, 20; and "Scottish Renaissance," 85 Smith, Page, 455 Smith, Samuel, 385, 447, 599, 747-48 Smith, William Loughton: and antislavery petitions, 151-52; and assumption, debate on, 150; on commercial coercion, 383-84; and election of 1796, 523 ff.; on funding, 142; and Jay Treaty, 444-45; and military measures (1798), 595 Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures. See Hamilton, Alexander Solon, 752 Sons of Liberty, 96, 456 Sonthonax, Leger-Felicite, 648, 650, 652 South Carolina: politics in 17908, 523 ff., 74243 Sovereignty, problem of, 11-13 Speculation: in Bank stock, 242-44, 275, 278; in public debt, 137 ff., 275, 278 Sprigg, Richard: resolutions on war crisis (1798), 587-88 Stael, Anne Louise Germaine, 562, 567 Stamp Act (1765), 39, 531, 560 Standing armies: ideological resistance to, 9, 17, 20, 594 Statue of Liberty, 303, 809 n.9

Stendhal (pseud, of Marie Henri Beyle), 94, 166, 306 Steuben, Frederick William, baron von, 206 Stevens, Edward, 657-58 Stiles, Ezra, 163 Stoddert, Benjamin: Adams, BS urges return to seat of government (1799), 638-39; on Adams's recollections of meetings at Trenton, 640; innovations of, 660; and organization of navy, 643 ff.; Secretary of Navy, takes office, 589; sketch of, 634-35; strategy of, in West Indies, 653 Strong, Caleb, 389, 394 Stuart, David, 177 Stuart, Gilbert, 190, 623 Sullivan, Gen. John, 98 Swanwick, John, 459, 521, 522 Taine, Hippolyte, 332 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de: and Bonaparte, 568, 680-81; and Brumaire, 670; character sketch, 561-62; Foreign Minister, appointment as, 562, 567; and Gerry, 608-9, 666-67; impotence of, under Directory, 567-68, 66768; Jay Treaty, private attitude on, 565; and Morris, Gouverneur, 318; overtures to U.S., 609, 615, 617, 666; U.S. envoys, treatment of (1797-98), 571 ff.; visit to America, 187 Tarleton, Banastre, 206, 674 Taylor, John, of Caroline, 91, 719 Tazewell, Henry, 443, 633 Temple, Sir John, 242 Ternant, Jean-Baptiste, 331, 334, 343, 368 Thomson, James, 18, 200 Thornton, Edward, 244-45, 248 Thornton, Dr. William, 178 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5, 108, 303, 307, 373, 455 Tonnage discrimination against British shipping, 65, 67-68, 69, 153-55, 223, 225 Toussaint Louverture, Francois Dominique: betrayal and death, 661; initial emergence, 650; invasion of U.S., rumors of, 598; intrigue against, 646, 655; St. Domingue, efforts to consolidate control of, 651, 654 ff.

.923

INDEX Tracy, Uriah, 715, 866 11.58 Treaties of Amity and Commerce (U.S. and France, 1778), 308, 334, 339-40* 34^-53 passim;

terminated, 686 Treaty of Paris (U.S. and Gt. Britain, 1783). See Peace Treaty of 1783 Treaty of San Lorenzo. See Pinckney, Thomas Treilhard, Jean Baptiste, 667, 669 Trenchard, John, 6, 9, 264, 717 Troup, Robert, 242, 588, 733 Truman, Margaret, 172, 786 n.24 Trumbull, John, 163, 190, 240 Truxtun, Thomas, 644, 654, 688 Tucker, Thomas Tudor: and Tariff of 1789, 66 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 305, 312 Turner, Frederick Jackson: on Louisiana, 372 Van Buren, Martin, 191 Vattel, Emmerich de, 84, 348, 585 Venable, Abraham, 294 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, comte de, 70 "Veritas" letters (1793), 343, 344, 348, 356, 360, 821 n.i57 Virginia: as cradle of revolutionary republicanism, 38 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 615, 700; non-violent character of, 723; and nullification movement in S.C., 720-21; as party propaganda, 721-26 "Virginia principle," 26-27 Virtue, 8, n, 15, 17, 22, 28, 739-40 Voltaire, Jean Francois Marie Arouet de, 84, 304 Voluntary associations in American life, 451-55 Wadsworth, Jeremiah, 152, 627 Walpole, Sir Robert, 6, 14, 15, 19, 52-53, 55, 264

Washington, Bushrod, 55 Washington, George: bill of rights, recommends, 59; Bolivar, compared with, 42-43 capital, desire for Potomac location of, 161, 169; character/personality, problem of, 37, 44; Cincinnati, Order of, 43; death of, 681; and election of 1792, 289 ff.; eulogy on, in Paris, 681; executive functions in Revolution, 41; expectation that GW would be first president, 33-34, 35, 45;

farewell to officers (1783), 42; and Federal City (Washington), building of, 169 ff.; on gentry's style of life, 90-91; inaugural journey, 45, 74; and Jay Treaty, ratification of, 417, 419 ff.; Jefferson and Hamilton, GW's desire for reconciliation of, 290-91; land hunger, 35-36; military aspirations, 34-35; as military commander, 40-41; Morris's report from London, reaction to, 220;

and neutrality (1793), 336 ff.; New England, visit to (1789), 74-75; as "Patriot King," 266, 292, 483, 488, 517; and patronage, 52-55; and petitions on Jay Treaty, 420, 424, 432; preparation for presidency, 44-45; and Randolph affair, 425-31; and ranking of generals in New Army, 60151 recall to military duty (1798), 601; reelection of (1792) desired by Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, 290, 292; revolutionary movement in Va., support of, 39-40; Roman symbolism ascribed to, 48-49; satisfaction over first year of federal government, 75; style of entertainment, 49-50; theater, love of, 49, 190; and titles, 46-48, 763-64 n.25; and treaty-making procedure, 55-58; and Whiskey Rebellion, 462, 463, 474, 475, 478 ff. Wayles, John, 203 Wayne, Gen. Anthony, 272, 391, 395, 432, 436, 438-39, 478, 483, 594 Webster, Daniel, 191 Webster, Noah, 310; defends Jay Treaty, 432; on O. Wolcott, 627; and New Army, 718 West Indies, British: admission, formal, of U.S. ships, 401, 41314; U.S. trade with, 73, 125, 130, 131, 211, 216, 247, 251, 252, 379-80, 382 West Indies, French: British invasion of, 393, 402-3, 649, 651—52,

654 ff.;

Quasi-War, as key to, 643 ff.;

.924.

INDEX U.S. trade with, 73, 649, 650, 652, 661. See also St. Domingue White, Alexander: and assumption debate, 150; and residence-assumption bargain (1790), 156 Wilentz, Sean, 25, 757 n.5 William III, 14 Williams, John, 445, 447 Williamson, Hugh, 150, 276 Willis, Nathaniel, 167 Wills, Garry, 764 n.27, 776 n.jj Wilson, James, 12, 478, 479, 480 Witherspoon, John, 81, 84, 85-86, 96, 673 Wolcott, Oliver, 182, 256, 278, 281; character sketch, 626-28; and commissioning of generals in New Army (1798), 604; on declaration of war (1798), 583; and election of 1800, 737; on Madison as envoy to France, 542-43, 545;

and New Army, 718; and Randolph affair, 425 Secretary of Treasury, appointment as, 627 Wood, Gordon S., 10-12, 536, 702, 761 n.34 Wythe, George, 203 XYZ mission (Marshall-Pinckney-Gerry, 1797r\»V 9» ).

dispatches, arrival of, in U.S., 582; dispatches, release of, 588; instructions to envoys, 562-63; sensation caused, 579, 665, 669, 723, 724 Yates, Robert, 102, 105 Yellow fever, Phila., 365, 636 Yorktown, battle of, 41, 100, 624 Zuckerman, Michael, 452

.925.