American Experiment (36 page)

Yet, the very success of the Jeffersonian leadership carried the seeds of new crisis. Great leadership is forged in the crucible of conflict, as the careers of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams had so amply demonstrated. What happens, then, when leadership succeeds so well, by mobilizing the support of so many of the people, that conflict either dwindles or is displaced into extra-constitutional, even violent arenas? What happens, in the Jeffersonians’ case, when leadership draws such wide support across the party spectrum that opposition shrinks and threatens to crumble, and conflict exists only between the great mass of moderates and the extreme or the desperate?

Jefferson’s answer to this question was that once the moderate Federalists were won over and the high Federalists crushed, the ballooning Republican party would split into two moderate, responsible, competitive parties. “We shall now be so strong,” the President wrote a friend in May 1802, “that we shall certainly split again; for freemen thinking differently and speaking and acting as they think, will form into classes of sentiment, but it must be under another name, that of federalism is to become so scouted that no party can rise under it.…the division will substantially be into whig and tory, as in England, formerly.…” But Jefferson had to admit that no “symptoms” of a new party split had shown themselves, nor would they until after the midterm election. And the President developed a disturbing tendency to equate the Republican party with the whole nation.

As Federalist strength declined at midterm and still more in the 1804 presidential election, no significant division developed in the Republican party. Perhaps Jefferson was too skillful a conciliator. Was the new young republic becoming a one-party state?

A startling event made this question more urgent. One man Jefferson
had not conciliated—and intensely distrusted—was Vice-President Aaron Burr. Rumors abounded among the Jeffersonians about Burr’s striving for the presidency during the crisis of February 1801, just as Burr and his friends suspected that Jefferson had finally won out through a secret deal. The President had virtually ignored Burr on patronage matters and instead dealt with the latter’s adversaries in New York, the Livingston and Clinton factions. Although Jeffersonians suspected that Burr would work out a coalition with the Federalists, the Vice-President was still a mortal enemy of the titular leader of that party, Alexander Hamilton. When Burr, weary of his frustrating job as Vice-President, decided to run for governor of New York, Hamilton was furious at the notion that some of his more opportunistic fellow Federalists would support this ambitious little man. He so attacked Burr’s character that the duelists’ code required a confrontation. It occurred on July 11, 1804, at a secluded spot across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Hamilton, it is thought, intended to miss in the hope that Burr intended likewise. Burr sought to kill. Hamilton died of a bullet in his vertebrae, after hours of intense suffering. The remaining great hope of the Federalist party was gone, along with any hope that Burr could draw the Federalists into a new alliance.

Thus Jefferson was left as head of a burgeoning party, confronting an opposition dwindling both in Congress and in elections. He was the leader of an organized majority. He was a firm believer in majority rule as the practical expression of government by the people, but he also recognized that majority rule must not mean extremist rule. “All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle,” he had said in his Inaugural Address, “that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable: that the Minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, & to violate would be oppression.” Implicit in this doctrine of majority rule were certain assumptions. One was that the majority would necessarily embrace so many diverse interests, sections, and attitudes, in a pluralistic nation, that the majority would pursue a moderate and balanced program; a second was that the majority would represent the great mass of people. Both these assumptions could be questioned: under certain conditions a majority could become as oppressive and fanatical as a minority; and Jefferson’s majority even at best encompassed only free, male, and largely property-owning Americans. Crucial to Jefferson’s belief in majority rule was his belief in the minority’s “equal rights,” but what politically would guarantee those rights? A strong opposition party, but Jefferson lacked a firm understanding of the role of party opposition.

It was precisely here that Jeffersonian theory left an intellectual
gap—a gap that Marshall’s judicial theory brilliantly filled. For if there was inadequate political check on the majority—that is, on the government—there must be an adequate constitutional check institutionalized within the governmental structure. And clearly that vital check on the popular majority must be the judiciary, itself protected against the immediate power of the electorate.

Aaron Burr’s bullet, it was said, had blown the brains out of the Federalist party. This was a half-truth at best; Federalist brains remained very much intact in the heads of John Marshall and his brethren entrenched in the federal judiciary. Marshall, in particular, had a better grasp than Jefferson of the constitutional scope and political implications of various kinds of judicial review. The most minimal kind of judicial review—and one that Jefferson respected because he believed that each branch of government should be independent—was the power of the courts to protect their own existence and manage their own internal affairs. A somewhat higher form of judicial review was that of state legislation, and most Americans at the turn of the century agreed that the federal courts must exercise this power in order that there be an “umpire of federalism.” A still broader form of judicial review was that of presidential action; for centuries Englishmen and Americans oppressed by kings or royal governors had been turning to the courts for relief. The fullest form of judicial review was that of congressional action—the awesome authority to invalidate laws passed by the elected representatives of the people. This was an enormous power, and an anomalous one in a “government by the people.”

Seizing on Marbury’s complaint, Marshall had used that most minimal form of judicial review in order to create the vital precedent for the largest form. Practically, there was nothing Jefferson could do about this, but it is doubtful that intellectually he grasped the enormous implications of what Marshall was about. Ostensibly the Chief Justice was simply protecting the independence of the federal judiciary, at the same time that he was refraining from interfering in the executive’s domain; in fact, he was actually denying a power granted to the Supreme Court by the Congress. Rarely has such potentially vast power been so nicely disguised.

If Marshall had placed a check on the Republican President and Congress, he had established a potential checkmate on popular majorities for years to come. But would that checkmate, in a nation destined to pass through ceaseless social change and violent political conflict, in a nation still encircled north and south and on the oceans by foreign powers, turn out to be that most dangerous condition for a democracy: stalemate?

T
HE CATHEDRAL OF
N
OTRE
Dame, Paris, December 2, 1804.
Before a dazzling array of marshals, ecclesiastics, and
nouveaux princesses
, Napoleon Bonaparte places a fake Carolingian crown on his head and proclaims himself Emperor of France. Behind him sits a glum Pius VII, who has joined Napoleon and Josephine in wedlock only the night before—the couple had neglected to be married in church—in order to legitimate the coronation. At the ceremony Napoleon does not prostrate himself before the Pope, nor will he take communion. The Corsican will bow to no authority, except that of the people, who in a plebiscite hardly a week before have “elected” him emperor by a vote of 3,500,000 to 2,500. He is the new Caesar, the new Charlemagne.…

Three days later the Emperor presented his colonels with their new battle standards: imperial eagles that would symbolize his leadership in creating a new Roman Empire, though hardly a Holy one. By spring his Grand Army was pressing east, while England desperately organized a defensive alliance of Russians, Prussians, and Austrians. In October 1805 Napoleon’s spirited troops routed the Austrians at Ulm and the Emperor was soon sleeping in the palace of Schönbrunn in Vienna. Six weeks later, at Austerlitz, in a classic maneuvering of massed but mobile troops, Napoleon outgeneraled the combined forces of Alexander of Russia and Francis of Austria, cut the enemy in two, killed or wounded 26,000 men, and sent the rival emperors into headlong retreat. It was at this battle that Andrei Bolkonsky, in Tolstoi’s
War and Peace
, lying wounded on his back, reflected on the nature of war, leadership, and history.

In London, an aging monarch contrasted drably with the military hero of France. “Mad” George III reigned in the forty-fifth year of his kingship. Not insane but afflicted with porphyria, he was at times so wild and delirious that his doctors, applying the standard treatment of the day, tied His Majesty to his bed or even strapped him into a “waistjacket.” For months his subjects had stood on the alert while Napoleon built flotillas of flat-bottomed boats big enough to carry infantry, field pieces, and horses into the coves and beaches of southern England. But the Royal Navy stood in the way, and Napoleon turned back to his land conquests.

Londoners had hardly received the bleak news from Ulm when an electrifying report arrived from the Navy. Admiral Horatio Nelson, victor over Napoleon’s fleet in the Battle of the Nile some years earlier, had decoyed the combined French and Spanish armada out into Atlantic waters off the Cape of Trafalgar, broken the heavily gunned allied line, and routed the enemy. Englishmen thrilled to the news that Nelson had signaled from his flagship, “England expects every man to do his duty,” then grieved over the report that Nelson had fallen before a musket ball. When Napoleon triumphed at Austerlitz a few weeks later, the shape of the military chessboard in the West was set for almost a decade: France was master of the Continent, England mistress of the seas.

In Washington, Jefferson and Madison followed these events with a sense of both involvement and detachment. They suspected the intentions of both the major powers and saw no need to take sides; the revolutionary France that Jefferson had welcomed had now been compromised and betrayed by a man whose militaristic flamboyance and Machiavellian statecraft he detested. But the President knew too that, however much he and the other Republican leaders wished to maintain strict neutrality, decisions in London and Paris, and at other points in the swaying mobiles of global politics, would closely touch Americans on the high seas and indeed in their ports and farms and factories. The Jeffersonians had reason to fear involvement: a republican disdain for the machinations of the courts of Europe; the vulnerability of a secondary power to the fleets and armies of a major, coupled with the military unpreparedness of the young nation. The President also feared involvements that would allow events to be controlled more by accident than by leaders, more “by chance than by design.”

Jefferson also had some sense of insecurity about dealing with the veteran diplomats of Paris and London. “An American contending by stratagem against those exercised in it from their cradle would undoubtedly be outwitted by them,” he observed to Madison; the President was referring to Minister Robert Livingston but knew that he himself was widely charged with gullibility in diplomacy. Jefferson had had extensive diplomatic experience, of course; his main handicap was his hope to apply morality to foreign relations. Talleyrand suffered no such encumbrance.

The President had learned early in his first term that, no matter how eager he might be to follow an independent course, the affairs of the New World would be entangled with the Old as long as American ships sailed the seas. That reminder had come from the rulers of Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli, the “Barbary pirates” who had been seizing American ships and their “infidel” crews. American rulers had preferred to pay
tribute rather than build a navy big enough for a transatlantic expeditionary force against the pashas’ ships and moated fortresses. When Barbary avarice and truculence seemed to mount at the turn of the century, Jefferson dispatched the
Constitution
and a few other vessels to bring the pirates to book.

The results were a comic-opera combination of disaster—the
Philadelphia
ran aground chasing pirates and was taken by the buccaneers—and some heroic actions, exemplified by young Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, who boldly piloted a captured ship into Tripoli harbor and put the torch to the
Philadelphia.
Unable to take Tripoli by sea, the Americans now attacked by land. A small band of Arabs, Greek soldiers, and seven Marines marched for an arduous month from Alexandria through the desert, stormed Derna in a brief action, and jolted Pasha Yusuf into making peace, at the additional cost of a $60,000 sweetener for his court. The whole Barbary adventure ended with a few gains: at least temporary peace with Yusuf and the other pashas; training in seamanship, especially with the cheap, shallow gunboats that parsimonious Republicans preferred; and a fine line in a grand Marine song.

If this was a lesson in Old World involvement from the east, events to the west showed that the most sensitive domestic rivalries could become entangled with foreign relations.

The event makers were two remarkable men who had lived half inside, half outside, the young nation’s political and military leadership. One was Aaron Burr, who at the conclusion of his vice-presidency in 1805 was still an object of excitement, distrust, and mystery. A descendant of rigorous Presbyterians, including the great scholar-moralist Jonathan Edwards, he had come to reject the moral and political codes of his day. Short, balding, “persuasive” of eye and tongue, he pursued women so indefatigably and successfully as to qualify him for the title of an American Casanova. An able officer in the Revolution and a brilliant political organizer, he seemed to discipline all except himself. Yet if Burr was prepared in 1805 to betray his nation, he felt betrayed by the established leaders—by the Republicans, who had failed to re-elect him as governor of New York in 1799 and closed ranks against him in the presidential competition of 1801, and by the Federalists, who would never forgive him for killing Hamilton on that dubious field of honor, the dueling ground. Even before he left the vice-presidency Burr was conspiring to undertake his fantastic venture: to invade Mexico, a colony of Spain, seize western territories of the United States, and create a new nation headed, presumably, by himself.