Prologue
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By June of 1807, the United States had been a free and independent nation for forty years, and it had been governing itself under the Constitution for just under thirty years. The American people were proud of these achievements, which no previous nation on earth could match. But these were hard-won victories, none of them guaranteed or foreordained. And there always was the possibility that things won even with such labor and pain could be lost, or taken away.
The Constitution went into effect on March 4, 1789, but the new House of Representatives did not achieve a quorum for doing business until 1 April, and the new Senate only amassed a quorum on 6 April. The new government thus had a slow and worrisome start, but it soon acquired momentum. Within a year it had established and set into motion the presidency, executive departments, and courts. Within two years it had proposed, and the states had ratified, amendments to the Constitution popularly known as the Bill of Rights. And its officials were hard at work, dealing with the major problem facing the United States—its staggering burden of debt from the Revolution.
Americans assured one another and the rest of the world that they had devised a new science of politics—but they could not agree on how it was to work or on what kind of nation it was to foster. As a result, Americans who had taken the same side against Great Britain now viewed one another with suspicion and distrust. Those who favored the brash, energetic treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal plans for restoring the nation’s public credit confronted those who joined Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s and Representative James Madison’s opposition to those plans. Would the United States be a nation of sturdy yeoman farmers, as Jefferson and Madison hoped, tilling the soil and refusing to risk the corruption and decadence of the Old World? Or would the United States encourage commerce and manufacturing, as Hamilton urged, rivaling the great powers of Britain and France and becoming a wealthy, powerful, and respected nation? Would the government authorized by the Constitution be strictly limited in its powers to those clearly authorized by the text, as Jefferson and Madison urged? Or would there be a bold and innovative government, claiming whatever powers were not specifically denied by the Constitution, as Hamilton maintained it should be? The divisions between these brilliant, confident, and stubborn men both shaped and reflected divisions emerging among the people as a whole.
Domestic issues seemed to promise trouble enough for the new nation. But then, in 1789, the French Revolution burst on the world. Some Americans agreed with Jefferson, embracing the French Revolution as the French people’s bid to learn from the American Revolution, sweeping away centuries of corruption and oppression. Others agreed with Hamilton and John Adams that the French Revolution promised nothing but disaster. The matter worsened in 1793, when the French executed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and then plunged into war with the rest of Europe. Should the United States honor its 1778 treaty of alliance and friendship with France, or should it remain neutral, or should it take sides with the old monarchies of Europe against the dangerous French Republic?
President George Washington struggled to hold the nation on a steady course, as he struggled also to hold his cabinet together. The United States indeed stayed neutral in 1793 and thereafter, but the controversy further widened the splits among the people of the United States. By the mid-1790s, two loose partisan alliances competed for power and votes—the Federalists, led by Hamilton and Adams, and the Republicans, led by Jefferson and Madison. At first President Washington refused to take sides, trying to set an impartial standard for his countrymen. But, as partisan strife worsened and the pressures of age and politics wore him down, he sided more and more with Hamilton and the Federalists.
In September 1796, Washington announced his decision to retire from the presidency after two terms of office. In the election that fall, the electoral votes made Vice President John Adams the narrow but clear victor; but his rival, Thomas Jefferson, amassed the second-highest number of votes and became Adams’s vice president. At his inauguration, Adams imagined that Washington was saying to him, “Aye, you are fairly in and I am fairly out. We will see which one of us is happiest.” Awed by Washington, Adams kept Washington’s cabinet as his own, even though its members looked down on him and repeatedly sought advice and leadership behind Adams’s back from Alexander Hamilton, now a lawyer in private practice in New York City.
Adams’s presidency was turbulent and unhappy. Attempting to smooth over the difficult relations between France and the United States, he sent a three-man diplomatic team to open negotiations—but French stubbornness, and the strong hint from three French officials (whom the Americans in their report to Adams called X, Y, and Z) that a bribe would be the only way to grease the wheel of diplomacy, enraged Charles C. Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry. When news of the impasse broke, the American people reacted with fury against France. Congress proposed a package of laws designed to protect national security against enemy aliens and those who dared to criticize the president or other leaders of the government. The government’s prosecutors used these laws against newspaper editors who dared to criticize Adams’s war policies, one of the editors a member of the United States House of Representatives. Although the two nations never declared war on each other, the United States Navy fought a series of engagements with French vessels, and Adams called George Washington out of retirement to command a newly assembled American army, guarding against the possibility of a French invasion. To Adams’s dismay, Washington insisted that Hamilton be named his second-in-command.
As time passed, however, Adams became more and more convinced that such an invasion never would happen, and he brooded over the possibility that Hamilton would use the army to make himself a dictator. Washington’s death in December 1799 solidified Adams’s decision not to continue with the war. He decided to send a new diplomatic mission to France, overruling his outraged cabinet members. Then Adams discovered that his chief advisors had been taking their marching orders from Hamilton. In a towering rage, he demanded the resignation of Secretary of War James McHenry and fired Secretary of State Timothy Pickering. Hamilton, equally outraged after a shouting match with the president, stalked off and penned a vitriolic pamphlet attacking Adams’s character and conduct. He hoped to circulate this pamphlet privately among key Federalist leaders, but somehow the pamphlet got into the newspapers, embarrassing Adams and Hamilton alike and advertising to the world that the Federalists were splitting down the middle. Not even the success of Adams’s emissaries to France could stop the Federalist free-fall in public opinion.
Meanwhile, the Republicans were united behind Vice President Jefferson and his chosen running-mate, former Senator Aaron Burr of New York. In the voting that fall, it became clear that the Republicans would take both houses of Congress and capture the presidency as well—but an unexpected development threw the nation into confusion. Jefferson and Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each. Burr was ready to defer to Jefferson, but the vehement demands of Jefferson’s backers that Burr deny that he was worthy to be considered for president as opposed to Jefferson angered the proud New Yorker. In turn, the Jeffersonians became convinced that Burr was going to do a deal behind their backs with the defeated Federalists to grab the Presidency for himself. At the same time, an aghast Alexander Hamilton, who had distrusted and feared Burr since 1789, wrote a series of letters to leading Federalist politicians begging them not to deal with Burr, whose ambition was for himself and without any restraint of principle.
In cases where no candidate received a clear majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives had to resolve the deadlock. In February 1801, the old House—the new House would not convene until that December—met and voted in ballot after ballot. Not until the thirty-sixth ballot did the House finally agree on Jefferson as the victor.
Early on the morning of March 4, 1801, John Adams boarded a coach to take him home to Quincy, Massachusetts. He was not only hurt by his defeat by his former friend and ally, Jefferson; he was mourning the death of his son Charles, who either had drowned by accident or committed suicide after having lost a large sum of money entrusted to him by his oldest brother, John Quincy Adams. Later that morning, Jefferson arose in his boarding house, dressed carefully, and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue in the city newly renamed Washington to the site of the Capitol of the United States. Only one wing had been completed, and it was there, before the assembled senators and representatives and other onlookers, that he took the oath of office from Chief Justice John Marshall. It was the first successful transfer of power from one political party to another, and Jefferson realized the importance of the event. He termed his victory in the election of 1800 a revolution as important as that of 1776.
Jefferson’s first term in office was a great success. His efficient and capable treasury secretary, the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, did great work in paring down the national debt and regularizing American finances—though Gallatin concluded that Hamilton’s system was so well established and so well devised that it could not and should not be cast aside. Jefferson and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Madison, sought to chart a careful course for the United States through the troubled waters of great-power politics. In particular, when the diplomatic team he sent to France to negotiate with First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte for the purchase of New Orleans reported instead that they had been offered a deal for the entire Louisiana Territory, Jefferson seized the opportunity—though wondering whether it was constitutional to do so. At the same time, he planned a major military, scientific, and diplomatic exploration of the vast Louisiana Territory, to be led by his secretary and distant relative Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lewis’s chosen colleague, Captain William Clark. His major disappointment was that he and his allies in Congress could not use the impeachment power to clear the federal bench of Federalist judges committed, as he feared, to blocking his administration’s measures and distorting the Constitution’s meaning.
Jefferson triumphantly won re-election in 1804, but his second term was nowhere near as successful as his first. Whereas in his first term he had taken the lead in defining American policies and shaping events, in his second term events over which he had little control dominated what he tried to do. Former Vice President Aaron Burr, dropped from the Republican ticket in early 1804, had killed Alexander Hamilton in a controversial duel in New Jersey. Burr then had helped to frustrate the impeachment campaign by presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial of Justice Samuel Chase, Burr’s last act as vice president. In early 1805, Burr headed west, engaging in mysterious discussions and murky plans with western politicians and sparking a host of rumors about his plans. Convinced that Burr intended to detach the western states and territories from the United States and establish himself as an emperor, Jefferson ordered Burr’s seizure and arrest and hoped that he would be tried for and convicted of treason.
The most worrisome thing for Jefferson, however, was world affairs. His first term had seen a temporary cooling of hostilities between Napoleonic France, which had conquered most of Europe, and the alliance of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Now the European continent was at war again, and each side was determined to cripple its adversary’s trade. The United States had profited from trading with the several warring powers, but now its ships were fair prey under the generally accepted laws of war. Nobody knew what the new nation would do if its honor and its flag were insulted on the high seas . . .
Richard B. Bernstein