Madison and Jefferson (54 page)

That was not the only curious element in Dolley’s genealogy. Her great-grandfather, a Virginia Quaker, was also the grandfather of Patrick Henry. Among the Virginians, such ties were to be expected. Recall that a similar connection existed between the Madison and Pendleton clans, and between the Jeffersons and the Randolphs. Jefferson had knowledge of the Madisons’ courtship in advance, though any written mention of it has been lost. Two weeks after the ceremony, when Madison next wrote to Jefferson, he denoted September 15, 1794, his wedding date, as “the epoch at which I had the happiness to accomplish the alliance which I intimated to you I had been some time soliciting.” Dolley was less circuitous. Without waiting, she wrote to a close friend on the fifteenth: “In the course of this day I give my hand to the man of all others I most admire.” Before sealing the letter that evening, having taken his name, she added an emphatic postscript: “Dolley Madison! Alass! Alass!”
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Politics did not take a honeymoon, because America’s relationships with the warring European powers remained unresolved. The two main branches of government were still trying to establish credit abroad and grow maritime commerce. President Washington counted on his London-bound envoy to make things right. He had been personally comfortable
with John Jay ever since the late 1770s, when the Revolution was in trouble and Jay, then president of Congress, staunchly supported the commanding general against those who wanted him replaced. To some, Jay was vain, condescending, and aristocratic in manner, but Washington had known him only as a well-trained, right-thinking public servant. During the Confederation period, Jay served as U.S. secretary of foreign affairs and, since 1789, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. The Court was not nearly as active as it would later be, and Washington thought that Jay could be spared from judicial duties long enough to travel to London to negotiate a commercial treaty and avert war.

The appointment would prove to be a bad choice for a president who was pushing against the increasing pressure of faction. But this did not matter to Washington. A letter he wrote to Hamilton toward the end of his presidency, marked “Private,” summed up his turn of mind: “I have a very high opinion of Mr. Jay’s judgment, candour, honor and discretion (tho’ I am not in the habit of writing so freely to him as to you).” In or out of office, Hamilton was the president’s chief aide. It was Hamilton, in fact, who first proposed Jay’s name to Washington when his own selection became unlikely. The consequence of the Virginian Washington having thrown in with New Yorkers Hamilton and Jay would prove far-reaching.
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James Monroe, soon to be dispatched to Paris to placate the French, stood in opposition to Jay’s confirmation. As a U.S. senator, he had also voted against Morris’s appointment as minister to France. His reasons for opposing Jay now were no different from Madison’s and Jefferson’s: Jay’s weakness in dealing with the Spanish in the past made it doubtful that he could be a tough negotiator with the British. If less obnoxious than Hamilton, Jay was nonetheless one of those “Anglomen” whom Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all distrusted. The ostensibly objective Edmund Randolph advised Washington not to send Jay because it would be a “bad precedent that a chief justice should be taught to look for
executive
honors … while he retained his judicial seat.” Good reasoning, perhaps, but it went unheeded. Republicans in the Senate would make sure this violation of the separation of powers remained an issue.

Aware that the United States was divided into two rival camps, the British were in no hurry to allay its concerns. Washington hoped that Jay, accommodating by nature, would convince the British to abandon the western forts, as they had consented to do a decade before. He hoped too that both sides would reach an agreement to grant American vessels
easier access to the British West Indies. He could not ignore the growing number of incidents in which British warships had captured American merchant ships.

The chief justice sailed to London in mid-May 1794 and followed his instructions closely. But as the British would not bend much, Jay fell short of everyone’s expectations. Rather than express outrage over British depredations, as Madison would have preferred, he remained circumspect, attuned to British sensibilities and driven by a concern that a commercially isolated United States would be at a disadvantage.
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Meanwhile, Monroe left for Paris, accompanied by his wife and young daughter. He knew why he had been chosen for the assignment. The president, he told Jefferson, wanted “a republican character” to serve as his special envoy in order to repress whispers about his own political drift. Not surprisingly, Hamilton proposed Edmund Randolph for the assignment. Randolph, in turn, proposed Monroe. Monroe had offered Burr’s name, which would have made Madison perfectly happy. But Burr was a New Yorker, as Jay was, and Robert Livingston, another New Yorker, had already refused the assignment. So after consultation with Madison and others, Monroe had accepted the appointment “upon the necessity of cultivating France,” as he put it, “and the incertainty of the person upon whom it might otherwise fall.”
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Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of the late Dr. Franklin, was the editor of the pro-French Philadelphia
General Advertiser
. On learning of Monroe’s mission, he gloated in his paper that a “DEMOCRAT” was going to France who would “supersede” the authority of Gouverneur Morris, Federalist. This was a rare, early evocation of the word
democrat
in a prideful light. The Federalists were using it as a defamatory term, equating the mobs of Revolutionary France with the “mad democrats” in America. It was the beginning of Bache’s short but colorful reign as the one editor who could intimidate the president of the United States.
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At the end of 1794 Bache’s
General Advertiser
became known as the
Aurora
, projecting the dawn of a new age as its anti-administration bent became more purposeful. The editor proved so infatuated with the Revolution in France that he became a complete apologist. He failed even to pick up on Jefferson’s abandonment of Genet. Imbued with an excess of optimism, Bache fed the once popular sentiment that time was accelerating and world historical events multiplying because of the French Revolution. Politicized readers nervously awaited each new piece of intelligence—
rumors first, and then corroborations from abroad—which Bache added to an already impassioned American stew.

In 1795, as he began personalizing his attacks, Bache went right after the greatly admired president. Stoking the fires of partisanship, he pronounced that “a good joiner may be a clumsy watch-maker; that an able carpenter may be a blundering taylor; and that a good General may be a most miserable politician.” In time, when he ran out of coy metaphors, Bache would directly assail Washington’s generalship.
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In September 1794 President Washington became General Washington again, and rode at the head of an army. Hamilton rode with him. Another of his generals, Virginia governor Henry Lee, who just a year before had fantasized joining the French Revolutionaries, went along—all of them in pursuit of a domestic enemy. The improbable “enemy” was a nearly invisible corps of western Pennsylvania whiskey distillers who were refusing to pay taxes on their product—taxes established by Hamilton in 1791. At some point between 1791, when he attacked Hamilton in the strongest terms, and 1794, when he decided that the threat of the mob was the greatest threat America faced, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee had turned away from Madison and Jefferson to become an ardent Federalist.
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In the whiskey rebels’ corner were two prominent Republicans from western Pennsylvania: Hugh Henry Brackenridge (another of Madison’s Princeton classmates) and the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, who was just beginning an illustrious career in politics and finance. As the tax resisters made theirs an issue of freedom from oppressive government, they found solidarity all across the backcountry of western Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky.

Washington called up nearly thirteen thousand militiamen, larger than the size of his entire force during the Revolution. With Hamilton at his side, he led a large contingent of them toward Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Hagerstown, Maryland. These were sites of resistance, to be sure, but only two of many locations in the trans-Appalachian counties of states where the federal government was too weak to make a real show of force. Rural populations communicated easily across state lines, facilitating the movement of arms while giving the backcountry a sense of the government’s
weakness. Washington faced the logistical nightmare of feeding and marching an undisciplined army during a change of seasons in the mountains. As they moved about, government troops encountered sporadic protests from plain people in Philadelphia, Norfolk, Baltimore, and other places. In Baltimore a dissenter cried out “God save King George!” and was tarred and feathered by his social betters, who evidently did not appreciate political satire when the butt of the joke was George Washington.

In this phase of the conflict, shots were fired but few casualties resulted. The whiskey men, who had resorted to strongly worded petitions in the early days of the protest, saw themselves as reborn Sons of Liberty, those roguish heroes of the American Revolution whose legend loomed large. But Washington and Hamilton were not in a conciliatory mood, though they might have been: the army they raised was comprised of the kinds of people they were opposing, not those whose interests they were defending. Brackenridge and Gallatin, seeing the hopelessness of outright rebellion, delivered a message of moderation to the disaffected, pleading with them to reject radical methods and exhibit loyalty to the government.

In fact, no rebel army ever took the field against federal conscripts. Madison wrote to Monroe that the whole episode was a ploy by Hamilton to add military despotism to the catalog of powers he wanted the executive to engross. It was clear that aside from a handful of identifiable mischief-makers, there were no rebel leaders. That did not stop Hamilton from ordering the arrest of 150 men, all of whom Washington eventually pardoned. Under these circumstances, the administration’s response to the rebels was an obvious case of overkill.

The president had had to report to Philadelphia, because Congress was back in session. He left the army in Hamilton’s hands. After a month the troops returned east, having accomplished nothing that could reflect well on the administration. Some two thousand of the tax resisters had by this time moved into deeper frontier, where the army of the federal government could not reach them. Once the threat of force ended, the distillers resumed their normal operations, and no one came back to enforce the excise laws.
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The war on the whiskey rebels served the purposes of Madison and Jefferson, who saw value in exploiting social division in the North. The president laid blame on the democratic societies for having fomented the rebellion, a position from which he could not turn away. The only member of his cabinet to oppose a military response was Edmund Randolph, who advocated the use of commissioners to negotiate a peaceful solution—he listed eleven solid reasons in support of his opinion. Randolph, the former
attorney general and now secretary of state, argued that the rebellion did not meet the constitutional standard of treason. Washington had not wanted to act precipitously, so he gave Randolph’s plan a chance to work.

Randolph never looked so good as he did at this moment of decision. He had told the president the unvarnished, embarrassing truth—that there was no crisis. But then Hamilton stepped in front of him, outmaneuvering Randolph by refusing to give the commissioners time to do their job. Pretending that negotiations had failed, Hamilton brought the president on board with his plan and called up the militia. Randolph had no traction left after this.

The problem was compounded by the president’s poor judgment. Indeed, the sequence of events revealed Washington’s tragic flaw: he was not one to admit defeat. Randolph was not merely sidelined; he was forced to submit, to demonstrate his loyalty to Washington by retreating from his principled stand. He went on the record agreeing with his president that the democratic societies had stirred up all the trouble. Randolph went so far as to say that the “late insurrection” had “threatened the authority of the government” and “degraded the American character.”
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If ever there was a moment when Jefferson could have been justified in suspecting Randolph of “Cameleon” tendencies or a lack of backbone, this was it. In November 1794 Randolph served as ghostwriter of the president’s attack on what were now being called “self created” societies. Congressman Madison did not at all like the implication of the phrase and led an effort in Congress to remove “self created” as a designation for what were, in fact, civil gatherings of republicans. Politically charged words continued to drive debate.

With Randolph neutralized, Madison refused to let the matter go. This generally unheralded moment actually serves to define Madison’s centrality in national politics over the first five years of rule by the Constitution. For when Washington came into office in 1789, it was Madison on whom the first president relied most; and in 1794 the same man was defining Washington’s failure as a leader. The fact that Greenville, South Carolina, called its democratic society the “Madisonian,” and Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States
identified the political clubs en masse as “Madisonian,” probably contributed to the president’s apprehension that his agreement to serve a second term could ruin him. Neither said so, but Madison and the president were now pitted against each other directly. And in 1794, as in 1789, Jefferson was absent from the government and Madison most formidable as a one-man political force.
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As soon as he heard of Washington’s assault on the “self created” societies, Jefferson related to Madison his astonishment that the president would allow himself “to be the organ of such an attack on the freedom of discussion, the freedom of writing, printing and publishing.” If the “democratical societies” plotted anything, he wrote, it was “nourishment of the republican principles of our constitution.” Never one to lose hope, Jefferson took solace in reports from militiamen just back from service who said that the frontier resisters were at no point cowed by the overwhelming show of federal force.
They
had let the army escape harm, not the other way around. But he also took the reports to mean that a more coordinated western separatist movement was in the offing—a possible dismemberment of the Union. “The excise-law is an infernal one,” Jefferson growled, perversely encouraged that further frontier disturbances would be blamed on the administration.
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