American Sphinx (27 page)

The decisive event in that process was much more explicit and readily identifiable—namely, the passage of the Jay Treaty, which was simultaneously a landmark in the shaping of American foreign policy, a decisive influence on the constitutional question of executive power in foreign affairs and the occasion for Jefferson’s resumption of leadership in the Republican party. If Jefferson was already leaning toward returning to the political wars in Philadelphia, claiming all the while that his retirement was forever and meaning every word, the battle over the Jay Treaty pulled him all the way over and ended all pretenses of remaining a Ciceronian presence in American politics. The passage of the Jay Treaty was a great victory for the Federalists, but it was Jefferson who understood, more than anyone else, that it was a victory from which his enemies would never fully recover. It turned out to be the launching site of his eventually successful campaign for the presidency.
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The story had its origins in the early months of 1795. Madison sent reports to Monticello that the terms of the treaty that John Jay had negotiated with England were still secret but that Federalists with inside information “do not assume an air of triumph,” from which “it is inferred that the bargain is much less in our favor than ought be expected. . . .” It would be wrong to prejudge, he cautioned, “but I suspect that Jay has been betrayed by his anxiety to couple us with England, and to avoid returning with his finger in his mouth.” At this early stage of the story Jefferson refused to rise to the bait. His letters back to Madison did not mention the ominous implications of the Jay Treaty at all, preferring instead to discuss a somewhat bizarre proposal to transfer the University of Geneva to Virginia, request delivery of a letter to a prospective fresco painter for Monticello’s new walls and wax eloquent on vetch as the ideal rotation crop.
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Madison’s fears about the terms of the treaty seemed more than justified, as knowledge of its contents leaked out from the special session of the Senate called to vote on it in the summer of 1795; it then spread, as Madison put it, “with an electric velocity to every part of the Union.” The initial public reaction was almost wholly negative. John Jay later claimed the entire eastern seaboard of the United States was illuminated each evening by the fires from burning effigies of his likeness. Popular opinion rallied around the Republican charge that Jay had betrayed American honor as well as American interests in return for a few scraps of English patronage. In New York Alexander Hamilton was struck in the head by a rock and forced to withdraw while attempting to address a rally against the treaty, and the local militia proposed a mock toast to Jay and Federalist Senator Rufus King: “May the cage constructed to coop up the American eagle prove a trap for none but Jays and Kingbirds.”
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Jefferson’s initial response combined outrage with exhortation. He began giving orders again. Madison must take on Hamilton, who was already heating up the public presses with editorials in behalf of the treaty. “Hamilton is really a collossus to the antirepublican party. Without numbers, he is a host within himself. They have got themselves in a defile, where they might be finished, but too much security on the Republican part, will give time to his talents. . . . We have had only midling performances to oppose him. In truth, when he comes forward, there is nobody but yourself who can meet him.” Monticello soon began to function as headquarters for the Republican campaign against the treaty. Madison paid an extended visit to the mountaintop in October 1795 in order to plan strategy for opposing the treaty in the Virginia legislature, a kind of dress rehearsal for the projected debate in the federal Congress later that year. He left with Jefferson the only copy of his “Notes on the Debates at the Constitutional Convention,” a clear signal that Jefferson needed to bone up on the constitutional questions at issue, which would form the centerpiece of the Republican position in the congressional debate over ratification. What has come to be called “the great collaboration” was now back in operation and functioning in its familiar fashion. A steady stream of correspondence began to flow from Monticello throughout the fall, rallying Republican support around the position that the Jay Treaty was “really nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislature and people of the United States.”
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Indeed, if the gods had seen fit to conjure up a single statement about American foreign policy that was designed to inflame all of Jefferson’s deepest fears and most abiding hatreds, they could not have done better than the Jay Treaty. It accepted the fact of English commercial and naval supremacy and thereby endorsed a pro-English version of American neutrality, just the opposite of Jefferson’s pro-French version of “fair neutrality.” It repudiated Jefferson’s efforts as secretary of state to place duties on English imports while accepting England’s right to retain tariffs on American imports. Finally it committed the United States to compensate British creditors on outstanding prerevolutionary debts, most of which were owed by Virginia’s planters. Its sole positive feature from the Jeffersonian perspective was the agreement to abide by the promise made in 1783 to evacuate British troops from their posts on the western frontier, but even that concession merely reflected a willingness to implement what the Treaty of Paris had long ago required. What’s more, the chief supporters of the treaty were the merchants and bankers of America’s port cities. And, a clinching condemnation, its major advocate was Alexander Hamilton. In effect, as Jefferson saw it, the Jay Treaty was a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence, the Franco-American alliance, the revolu-tionary movement sweeping through Europe and all the political principles on which he had staked his public career as an American statesman.

Subsequent generations of historians, with all the advantages of hindsight, have not seen the same picture that Jefferson saw. The more balanced consensus of posterity is that the Jay Treaty was a realistic bargain that avoided a war with England at a time when the United States was ill prepared to fight one. It effectively postponed the Anglo-American conflict that Jefferson felt in his bones to be inevitable until 1812, when America was economically stronger and politically more stable. In the even longer view it linked American security and economic development to the British fleet, which provided a protective shield of incalculable value throughout the nineteenth century. It bet, in effect, on England rather than France as the hegemonic European power of the future. It therefore repudiated the Jeffersonian presumption that England was an inherently counterrevolutionary force on the downward slope of history.
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None of these historical insights of course was available to Jefferson, who was caught up in an ongoing controversy that put his most cherished political convictions at risk and made all the promises of pastoral seclusion he had made to himself seem like quaint vestiges of a bygone era. Madison had already tried to warn him of what destiny was arranging for him: “You ought to be preparing yourself to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand.” Loosely translated, this meant that Jefferson, not Madison, was the consensus choice of the Republican party to succeed Washington in the presidency. Now that the Jay Treaty had given the Republicans a popular issue on which to discredit the Federalists, and now that Washington’s retirement after two terms was a virtual certainty, Jefferson’s reentry into the political arena had massive implications. Writing in coded language to Monroe in France, Madison explained that “the
republicans
knowing that
Jefferson alone
can be
started with hope of success mean to push him.”
By the early spring of 1796, whether he knew it or not, he had become the standard-bearer for the Republican party.
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This did not mean that Jefferson formally declared his candidacy for the presidency; no self-respecting statesman of the day did that. It meant that he merely neglected to make a public statement declaring his withdrawal. But since Jefferson did not permit the perception of his candidacy to gain access to his conscious mind, even though it was being bandied about throughout the Republican network and in several newspapers, he really had no reason to declare his withdrawal. Madison understood the elaborate system of internal valves that Jefferson could turn off and on so deftly. He therefore understood—it was a critical dimension of their remarkable collaboration—that Jefferson’s willingness to reenter the political arena depended upon sustaining the fiction that it would never happen. Although Madison spent the entire summer and early fall of 1796 at Montpelier only a few miles from Jefferson, he chose not to visit his mentor at Monticello for fear of being drawn into conversations that upset Jefferson’s denial mechanisms. “I have not seen Jefferson,” he wrote Monroe in coded language, “and have
thought it best
to present
him no opportunity of protesting
to his
friend against
being
embarked on this contest.”
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This psychological minuet enjoyed the advantage of allowing Jefferson to dance back into public life without quite knowing it was happening. On the downside, since he did not yet acknowledge to himself that his remarks were anything but those of a private citizen, he did not feel accountable to anyone but himself or internalize any need to be guarded in his correspondence. His most damaging statement came in a letter to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei, in April 1796, that effectively ended his cordial relationship with Washington when it was picked up in the American press the following year: “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 and Solomons in the council, but who have had their head shaved by the harlot England. . . . We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords which they have been entangling us during the first sleep which succeeded our labors.”
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If, as everyone at the time assumed, Samson was George Washington and the reference to shaved heads was a comment on his support for the Jay Treaty, Jefferson’s letter was both grossly unfair and extremely impolitic. Characteristically, he claimed that the version printed in American newspapers was a distortion of his meaning produced by a bad translation from the Italian papers, where it originally appeared. But the simple truth was that his sentiments had not been garbled in translation, nor were they a temporary aberration, as some latter-day biographers have claimed. This was how he genuinely saw his political opponents at the time, as apostates and heretics and traitors to the cause of American independence. The moral dichotomies were clear and pure. The colors were black and white. There was no room in his mental universe for the notion that honest and principled men could disagree on a landmark issue like the Jay Treaty and make mutually compelling claims to the truth.

He also made some loose comments on the constitutional issues posed in the debate on the Jay Treaty that he would almost certainly have avoided if his guard had been up. Madison had lent him his personal copy of “Notes on the Debates at the Constitutional Convention” in the fall of 1795 because it was clear by then that the Republican strategy to block passage of the Jay Treaty depended upon throwing the question into the House of Representatives, where the Republicans enjoyed a majority; this required a good deal of constitutional ingenuity because the power to make treaties rested with the president and the Senate. (Indeed, a review of Madison’s “Notes on the Debates” revealed that Madison himself had been one of the staunchest opponents of infringements on executive power over foreign policy at the Constitutional Convention.) Jefferson’s bold and bald solution to this dilemma was to declare that “the true theory of our constitution” allowed the elected representatives in the House an equal share of power over treaties with the president and the Senate. Because he regarded the House of Representatives as the most democratic branch of the government with the closest ties to popular opinion, “the representatives are as free as the President and the Senate were to consider whether the national interest requires or forbids their giving the forms and force of law to the articles over which they have a power.” Indeed, Jefferson claimed that to deny the House a role was to transfer control from the American people to “any other Indian, Algerine or other chief.” He even went so far as to tell Monroe that he had no problem in shifting the main responsibility for approving all the treaties to the House and “in annihilating the whole treaty making power [of the executive branch], except as to making peace.”
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These were radical prescriptions that, if taken seriously, would have thrown American foreign policy into the cauldron of domestic politics on every controversial occasion. They contrast with Madison’s more narrow and careful constitutional argument, which became the official Republican position, that the House could block passage of the Jay Treaty because certain provisions required funding for their implementation and the House was the proper branch to decide all money bills. Madison’s more careful argument made no frontal assault on executive power but still achieved the desired goal of allowing the Republican majority in the House to hold the Jay Treaty hostage. Jefferson’s more extreme position reflected his more cavalier attitude toward constitutional questions in general. Unlike Madison, who had a deep appreciation for the Constitution as an artful arrangement of juxtaposed principles and powers with abiding influence over future generations, Jefferson tended to view it as a merely convenient agreement about political institutions that ought not to bind future generations or prevent the seminal source of all political power—popular opinion—from dictating government policy. His casual remarks in the spring of 1796 during the height of the debate over the Jay Treaty were uncharacteristic only in the sense that Jefferson customarily left constitutional questions in Madison’s capable hands. But precisely because he did not feel the obligation to filter his opinions through Madison, his statements more accurately reflected his greater willingness to bend constitutional arguments to serve what he saw as a higher purpose, which in this case was defeat of the counterrevolutionary alliance with England. Upsetting delicate constitutional balances or setting dangerous precedents did not trouble him in such moments.
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