Chapter V WASHINGTON, HAMILTON, ADAMS I

MR. JEFFERSON landed at Norfolk late in the autumn of 1789, bringing with him his fine French clothes, and all the furnishings that he had bought for his two houses in Paris, carefully packed and ready for further use at Monticello; all the toile de Jouy, nearly a thousand francs worth of it, the lawn curtains, the red damask window-curtains, the blue damask bed-curtains, the pictures and ornaments. His mind was full of happy anticipations—Christmas at Monticello, and Martha’s marriage early in the new year. The only cloud on his sky came out of a letter that he found waiting for him at Norfolk from President Washington, requisitioning his services as Secretary of State in the new Government. He had already heard that something of the kind was in the wind; Madison had sounded him out some weeks before. He was not sure of his duty in the matter. Washington, for whom he had great respect, was in a difficult position, needing all the help he could get; this was the first consideration. Mr. Jefferson felt that he could manage foreign affairs well enough, probably, but if there were any domestic responsibilities attaching to the office, the case was different; he had been long out of contact with domestic matters, and knew next to nothing about them. The proposal was disappointing, take it as one would, for the centre of his interest in public affairs had, for the time being, shifted to France. Still, one must do the right thing. He could see that there was really no one else for the place. Of those who had had much practical experience in foreign affairs, Adams was now Vice-President, John Jay was at the head of the newly-formed Supreme Court, and Franklin was too old and ill to be at work. It would be delightful to go back to Paris for another year and see the end of the French Revolution, and Washington had given him a free option in the matter; yet, as things were, one might not be hard-headed about it.

Mr. Jefferson made a slow progress from Norfolk to Monticello, visiting along the way, and gathering odds and ends of information about the state of the country. Madison came to see him. The precise little scholar set him straight about the duties of the new office. The Secretary of State was to look after foreign affairs, and all he needed to know about domestic concerns could easily be picked up as he went along. So much to the good. But politics at large were in a dubious way, and Madison was uncertain about them; the new Government would not have easy going, by any means. The Constitution looked fairly good on paper, but it was not a popular document; people were suspicious of it, and suspicious of the enabling legislation that was being erected upon it. There was some ground for this. The Constitution had been laid down under unacceptable auspices; its history had been that of a coup d’état. It had been drafted, in the first place, by men representing special economic interests. Four-fifths of them were public creditors, one-third were land-speculators, and one-fifth represented interests in shipping, manufacturing and merchandising. Most of them were lawyers. Not one of them represented the interest of production—Vilescit origine tali. In the second place, the old Articles of Confederation, to which the States had subscribed in good faith as a working agreement, made all due provision for their own amendment; and now these men had ignored these provisions, simply putting the Articles of Confederation in the waste-basket and bringing forth an entirely new document of their own devising.

Again, when the Constitution was promulgated, similar economic interests in the several States had laid hold of it and pushed it through to ratification in the State conventions as a minority-measure, often—indeed in the majority of cases—by methods that had obvious intent to defeat the popular will. Moreover, and most disturbing fact of all, the administration of government under the Constitution remained wholly in the hands of the men who had devised the document, or who had been leaders in the movement for ratification in the several States. The new President, Washington, had presided over the Constitutional Convention. All the members of the Supreme Court, the judges of the Federal district courts, and the members of the Cabinet, were men who had been to the fore either in the Philadelphia Convention or in the State ratifying conventions. Eight signers of the Constitution were in the Senate, and as many more in the House. It began now to be manifest, as Madison said later, who was to govern the country; that is to say, in behalf of what economic interests the development of American constitutional government was to be directed.

Mr. Jefferson was slow to apprehend all this. He had hitherto regarded the Constitution as a purely political document, and having that view, he had spoken both for it and against it. He had criticized it severely because it contained no Bill of Rights and did not provide against indefinite tenure of office. With these omissions rectified by amendment, however, he seemed disposed to be satisfied with it. Its economic character and implications apparently escaped him; and now that for the first time he began, very slowly and imperfectly, to get a sense of it as an economic document of the first order, he began also to perceive that the distinction between Federalist and anti-Federalist, which he had disparaged in his letter to Hopkinson, was likely to mean something after all.

He set out on the first of March, 1790, for New York, the temporary capital, where he found himself a cat in a strange garret. Washington and his entourage greeted him cordially, and the “circle of principal citizens” welcomed him as a distinguished and agreeable man. He had grown handsomer as he approached middle age, and his elaborate French wardrobe set him off well. His charm of manner was a reminiscence of Fauquier; he was invariably affable, courteous, interesting. The people of New York could have quite taken him to their hearts if they had not felt, as every one felt in his presence, that he Was always graciously but firmly holding them off. Yet if they had any suspicions of his political sentiments and tendencies, they put them in abeyance; his attitude towards the French Revolution had shown that he was amenable to reason. As soon, no doubt, as this well-to-do, well-mannered, highly cultivated and able man of the world saw which way the current of new national ideas was setting, he would easily fall in with it.

At any rate, everything should be made easy for him. “The courtesies of dinner-parties given me as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society.” But every hour thus spent increased his bewilderment. Every one talked politics, and every one assiduously talked up a strong government for the United States, with all its costly trappings and trimmings of pomp and ceremony. This was a great let-down from France, which he had just left “in the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to these rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise.” No one in New York was even thinking of natural rights, let alone speaking of them. The “principal citizens” held the French Revolution in devout horror. “I can not describe the wonder and mortification with which the table-conversations filled me.” Where indeed was the old high spirit, the old motives, the old familiar discourse about natural rights, independence, self-government? Where was the idealism that these had stimulated —or the pretence of idealism that these had evoked? One heard nothing here but the need for a strong government, able to resist the depredations which the democratic spirit was likely to make upon “the men of property,” and quick to correct its excesses. Many even spoke in a hankering fashion about monarchy. All this, manifestly, was nothing to be met with the popgun of Constitutional amendments providing for a Bill of Rights and rotation in office; manifestly, the influential citizenry of New York would but lift their eyebrows at a fine theoretical conception of the United States as a nation abroad and a confederacy at home. Mr. Jefferson’s ideas were outmoded; nothing was of less consequence to the people about him; he might have thought himself back in Paris in the days of Calonne, at a soirée of the Farmers-General. Other ideas were to the front; and when Washington’s Cabinet came together, Mr. Jefferson confronted the coryphæus of those ideas in the person of a very young and diminutive man with a big nose, a giddy, boyish and aggressive manner, whom Washington had appointed Secretary of the Treasury.

II

Alexander Hamilton came to the colonies at the age of sixteen, from his home in the West Indies, dissatisfied with the prospect of spending his days in “the grovelling condition of a clerk or the like, . . . and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. . . . I mean to prepare the way for futurity.” This was in 1772. He found the country ripe for him. There was something stirring all the time, something that an enterprising young man might get into with every chance to make himself felt. At eighteen he came forward in a public meeting with a harangue on the Boston Port Bill, and he presently wrote a couple of anonymous pamphlets on public questions, one of which was attributed by an undiscriminating public to John Jay, who, as Mr. Jefferson said, wielded “the finest pen in America,” and therefore resented the imputation of authorship with a lively chagrin. He showed his bravery conspicuously on two occasions in resisting the action of mobs; once to rescue the Tory president of King’s College, now Columbia, and once to rescue another Tory named Thurman. He saw that war was almost certainly coming on, bearing a great chance of preferment to the few in the colonies who had learned the trade of arms; so he studied the science of war, and the outbreak of hostilities found him established as an artillery officer. He had an unerring instinct for hitching his fortunes to the right cart-tail. Perceiving that Washington would be the man of the moment, he moved upon him straightway, gained his confidence, and remained by him, becoming his military secretary and aid-de-camp.

But the war would not last forever, and Hamilton had no notion of leading the life of a soldier in time of peace. Arms were a springboard for him, not a profession. He served until the end of the campaign of 1781, when he retired with some of the attributes of a national figure, and with the same persistent instinct for alliance with power. He always gave a good and honorable quid pro quo for his demands; he had great ability and untiring energy, and he threw both most prodigally into whatever cause he took up. Money never interested him. Although he inaugurated the financial system which enriched so many, he remained all his life quite poor, and was often a good deal straitened. Even in his career as a practicing lawyer, conducting important cases for wealthy clients, he charged absurdly small fees. His marriage in 1780 with one of the vivacious Schuyler girls of Albany, made him a fixture in “the circle of principal citizens” of New York; it was a ceremony of valid adoption. He was elected to Congress in 1782; he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; and now he was in the Cabinet, as the recognized head of the centralizing movement.

The four great general powers conferred by the Constitution upon the Federal Government were the power of taxation, the power to levy war, the power to control commerce, and the power to exploit the vast expanse of land in the West. The task now before Congress was to pass legislation appropriate to putting these powers into exercise. There was no time to be lost about this. Time had been the great ally of the coup d’état. The financial, speculative and mercantile interests of the country were at one another’s elbow in the large towns, mostly on the seaboard; they could communicate quickly, mobilize quickly, and apply pressure promptly at any point of advantage. The producing interests, which were mostly agrarian, were, on the other hand, scattered; communication among them was slow and organization difficult. It was owing to this advantage that in five out of the thirteen States, ratification of the Constitution had been carried through before any effective opposition could develop. Now, in this next task, which was, in Madison’s phrase, to administration the government into such modes as would ensure economic supremacy to the non-producing interests, there was urgent need of the same powerful ally; and here was the opportunity for the great and peculiar talents that Alexander Hamilton possessed.

Perhaps throughout, and certainly during the greater part of his life, Hamilton’s sense of public duty was as keen as his personal ambition. He had the educated conscience of the arriviste with reference to the social order from which he himself had sprung. A foreigner, unprivileged, of obscure origin and illegitimate birth, “the bastard brat of a Scots pedlar,” as John Adams testily called him, he had climbed to the top by sheer force of ability and will. In his rise he had taken on the self-made man’s disregard of the highly favourable circumstances in which his ability and will had been exercised; and thus he came into the self-made man’s contemptuous distrust of the ruck of humanity that he had left behind him. The people were “a great beast,” irrational, passionate, violent, dangerous, needing a strong hand to keep them in order. Pleading for a permanent President and Senate, corresponding as closely as might be to the British model of a King and a House of Lords, he had said in the Constitutional Convention that all communities divide themselves into the few and the many, the first being “the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. . . . The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share of government. . . . Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. Their turbulent and uncontrollable disposition requires checks.” He had no faith in republican government, because, as Gouverneur Morris acutely said, “he confounded it with democratical government, and he detested the latter, because he believed it must end in despotism, and be in the meantime destructive to public morality.”

But republican government was here, and he could not change it. Of all among “the rich and well-born” who talked more or less seriously of setting up a monarchy, there was none doubtless unaware that the republican system could hardly be displaced, unless by another coup d’état made possible by some profound disturbance, like a war. Hamilton, at any rate, was well aware of it. The thing, then, was to secure the substance of absolutism under republican forms; to administration republican government into such absolutist modes as the most favourable interpretation of the Constitution would permit. Here was the line of coincidence of Hamilton’s aims with the aims of those who had devised and promulgated the Constitution as an economic document. These aims were not identical, but coincident. Hamilton was an excellent financier, but nothing of an economist. In so far as he had any view of the economics of government, he simply took for granted that they would, as a matter of course and more or less automatically, arrange themselves to favour “the rich and well-born,” since these were naturally the political patrons and protectors of those who did the world’s work. In a properly constituted government, such consideration as should be bestowed upon the producer would be mostly by way of noblesse oblige. The extent of his indifference to the means of securing political and economic supremacy to “the rich and well-born” cannot be determined; yet he always frankly showed that he regarded over-scrupulousness as impractical and dangerous. Strong in his belief that men could be moved only by force or interest, he fearlessly accepted the corollary that corruption is an indispensable instrument of government, and that therefore the public and private behaviour of a statesman may not always be answerable to the same code.

Hamilton’s general plan for safeguarding the republic from “the imprudence of democracy” was at bottom extremely simple. Its root-idea was that of consolidating the interests of certain broad classes of “the rich and well-born” with the interests of the government. He began with the government’s creditors. Many of these, probably a majority, were speculators who had bought the government’s war-bonds at a low price from original investors who were too poor to keep their holdings. Hamilton’s first move was for funding all the obligations of the government at face value, thereby putting the interests of the speculator on a par with those of the original holder, and fusing both classes into a solid bulwark of support for the government. This was inflation on a large scale, for the values represented by the government’s securities were in great part—probably sixty per cent—notoriously fictitious, and were so regarded even by their holders. A feeble minority in Congress, led by Madison, tried to amend Hamilton’s measure in a small way, by proposing a fair discrimination against the speculator, but without success.

Before any effective popular opposition could be organized, Hamilton’s bill was driven through a Congress which reckoned nearly half its membership among the security-holders. Its spokesmen in the House, according to Maclay, who listened to the debate, offered little argument, and contented themselves with a statesmanlike recourse to specious moralities. “Ames delivered a long string of studied sentences. . . . He had public faith, public credit, honour, and above all justice, as often over as an Indian would the Great Spirit, and if possible, with less meaning and to as little purpose. Hamilton at the head of the speculators, with all the courtiers, are on one side. This I call the party who are actuated by interest.” Hamilton’s own defence of indiscriminate funding was characteristic; he declared that the impoverished original holders should have had more confidence in their government than to sell out their holdings, and that the subsidizing of speculators would broadcast this salutary lesson.

Hamilton’s bill contained a supplementary measure which reached out after the State creditors, united them with the mass of Federal creditors, and applied a second fusing heat. The several States which had at their own expense supplied troops for the Revolutionary army, had borrowed money from their citizens for that purpose; and now Hamilton proposed that the Federal Government should assume these debts, again at face value—another huge inflation, resulting in “twenty millions of stock divided among the favoured States, and thrown in as pabulum to the stock-jobbing herd,” as Mr. Jefferson put it. Two groups of capitalist interest remained, awaiting Hamilton’s attentions; one of them actual, and the other inchoate. These were the interest of trade and commerce, and the interest of unattached capital looking for safe investment. There was no such breathless hurry about these, however, as there had been about digging into the impregnable intrenchments of funding and assumption. The first group had already received a small douceur in the shape of a moderate tariff, mostly for revenue, though it explicitly recognized the principle of protection; it was enough to keep them cheerful until more could be done for them. Considering the second group, Hamilton devised a plan for a Federal bank with a capital of ten million dollars, one-fifth of which should be subscribed by the Government, and the remainder distributed to the investing public in shares of four hundred dollars each. This tied up the fortunes of individual investors with the fortunes of the Government, and gave them a proprietary interest in maintaining the Government’s stability; also, and much more important, it tended powerfully to indoctrinate the public with the idea that the close association of banking and government is a natural one.

There was one great speculative interest remaining, the greatest of all, for which Hamilton saw no need of taking special thought. The position of the natural-resource monopolist was as impregnable under the Constitution as his opportunities were limitless in the natural endowment of the country. Hence the association of capital and monopoly would come about automatically; nothing could prevent it or dissolve it: and a fixed interest in the land of a country is a fixed interest in the stability of that country’s government—so in respect of these two prime desiderata, Hamilton could rest on his oars. In sum, then, the primary development of republicanism in America, for the most part under direction of Alexander Hamilton, effectively safeguarded the monopolist, the capitalist and the speculator. Its institutions embraced the interests of these three groups and opened the way for their harmonious progress in association. The only interest which it left open to free exploitation was that of the producer. Except in so far as the producer might incidentally and partially bear the character of monopolist, capitalist, speculator, his interest was unconsidered.

III

The debate over funding and assumption was at its height when Mr. Jefferson took his place in the Cabinet. There was relatively little trouble about funding, but assumption was dragging its keel; it failed in the House, but was restored by the Senate, and sent back to the House for reconsideration. “Going to the President’s one day,” Mr. Jefferson wrote in a private letter two years later, “I met Hamilton as I approached the door. His look was sombre, haggard and dejected beyond description; even his dress uncouth and neglected. He asked to speak with me.” He walked Mr. Jefferson back and forth before the President’s house for half an hour, urging him to use his influence with the Virginian members in behalf of assumption. He put it as a matter of preserving the Union, and quite sincerely; there was a great deal in what he said. New England, which comprised the principal creditor States, was in a position to hold the threat of secession over the rest of the country, as in fact it did at intervals for many years. Mr. Jefferson, aware, as he wrote Dr. Gilmer, that “the question had created greater animosities than I ever yet saw take place on any occasion,” was properly impressed by Hamilton’s representations. If assumption failed outright, he could see that the failure might amount to “something very like a dissolution of the government.” He had no sentimentalist’s repugnance to the idea of secession. At the end of his first term in the Presidency, he wrote frankly to Dr. Priestley that “whether we remain in one confederacy, or break into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part.” If now he “could scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the Union into two or more parts,” or if he condemned with indignation “the machinations of parricides who have endeavoured to bring into danger the Union of these States,” it was because of his ever-present fear that the country would be picked up piecemeal by “the plundering combinations of the old world.” Assumption in some form, then, should be admitted; but as he told President Washington, he hoped it would be “put into a just form, by assuming to the creditors of each State in proportion to the census of each State, so that the State will be exonerated towards its creditors just as much as it will have to contribute towards the assumption.” More than this he could not say. The formulation of the thing was in Hamilton’s department, not his, and while he had an instinctive dislike of Hamilton’s terms, he knew himself to be “really a stranger to the whole subject.” Moreover, he felt himself quite incompetent in financial matters at large; he had naïvely written the Treasury Board from Paris in 1785, that they were “very foreign to my talents.”

With regard to the practical matter of effecting assumption, however, he saw that it must be one of political trade-and-deal; it could not be anything else. The quid pro quo was the location of the national capital. The members from the Middle States wanted the capital at Philadelphia or Baltimore, and were indifferent about assumption, save as a trading-point with “the Eastern members, who have had it so much at heart.” After hearing Madison and Hamilton discuss the matter at his own dinner-table, the day after Hamilton had accosted him on the street, Mr. Jefferson decided that “the least bad of all the turns the thing can take” was to let Hamilton have his way on condition that the capital should be established at Georgetown on the Potomac. If there must be a bargain, it might as well be one from which the producer as well as the speculator—especially the Virginian and Mid-Western producer—would stand to get something. He had written Washington the year before that he considered the union of the Ohio and Potomac rivers by the proposed Potomac Canal, as “among the strongest links of communication between the eastern and western sides of our confederacy. It will moreover add to the commerce of Virginia, in particular, all the upper parts of the Ohio and its waters.” In view of this, he now thought that placing the capital at the foot of the canal would tend to “vivify our agriculture and commerce.”

Thus Mr. Jefferson made what he afterwards called, with some exaggeration, the greatest political error of his life. Really, what he did or did not do in the premises was of little practical consequence to the ultimate issue, namely: what economic interests should control the government of the United States. He simply did not see the end of Hamilton’s plan; nor, it must be said, did Hamilton himself clearly see it, except with the eye of instinct. When one examines this collision of statesmanship, one is most struck, perhaps, by the rapidity with which one’s instincts invariably outrun one’s own interpretation of them. Both men represented an economic class-interest in government; in any proper use of the term, Mr. Jefferson seems to have been but little more a theoretical democrat than Hamilton. To view him as a theoretical or doctrinaire democrat is to disregard the most inadmissable inconsistencies, both in his public acts and in his expressions of governmental theory—inconsistencies which resolve themselves immediately when one views him as the representative of an economic class-interest. He was for control of government by the producing class; that is to say, by the immense majority which in every society actually applies labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth. His instincts reacted like the reflex action of an eyelid against anything that menaced that interest. Hamilton’s instinct reacted as promptly against anything that threatened to disturb the preponderance of the exploiting class—the minority, that is, which in every society appropriates without compensation the labour-products of the majority. The intellectual account which both gave themselves of the operation of this instinct, however, was as inadequate and sprawling as such accounts invariably are. Mr. Jefferson’s infatuation with Hamilton’s monarchism and Anglomania, for instance, his habitual view of him as “chained by native partialities to everything English,” and his public character “bewitched and perverted by the British example”—all this, however sincere, is no more competent than Hamilton’s own loose talk about “a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain.”

Others were more quick than Mr. Jefferson to assess the economic implications of Hamilton’s fiscal system. The science of economics was then in its cradle. By an odd coincidence, Mr. Jefferson had stood by the bedside of its birth in Paris; he knew its parents and godparents, both personally and by their writings, and yet seems never quite to have known what manner of child had been brought forth. As late as ten years before his death, he remarked that economics assumed the form of a science “first in the hands of the political sect in France, called the Economists. . . . Quesnay first, Gournay, Le Frosne, Turgot and Dupont de Nemours . . . led the way in these developments.” But the tone of his discussion is purely academic, never showing a sense of the vital relation which the work of these men bore to the fiscal system which he instinctively opposed. He had occasional brilliant flashes of insight into fundamental economics and its relation to government, but they were too brief and unsteady to be illuminating; they but deepened the darkness that followed them.

Others, however, almost immediately applied to Hamilton’s system a kind of homespun economic analysis that reached to its bottom. In dealing with funding and assumption, Mercer of Maryland, Jackson of Georgia and Taylor of Virginia, at once penetrated to the fundamental truth that all largesse to the speculator must ultimately be paid out of production, and that Hamilton’s proposal therefore was actually to put a gratuitous first lien on future labour. They also took the same ground of public policy in opposing the Bank bill. The bank project was simply a continuous monopoly of public funds, raised by taxation, by investors in a semi-private corporation—or rather, nominally semi-public but really private, since so large a proportion of the Senate and House were themselves investors who had already profited egregiously by funding and assumption, and who would certainly become shareholders in the new bank. All this, they insisted, was to be brought about at the uncompensated expense of production. A levy of taxes for this purpose was, according to Taylor, an outright conversion of labourmade values into law-made property, vested in hands which had done nothing to produce them. “An annuity to a great amount is suddenly conjured up by law,” said Taylor. “. . . It is paid out of labour, and labour in all countries falls on the poor. . . . But the aristocracy, as cunning as rapacious, have contrived to inflict upon labour a tax, constantly working for their emolument.” Mercer also had laid down the same principle a little earlier. “All public revenue or private income,” he declared, “is a contribution, mediate or immediate, of the labour of the industrious farmer or mechanic.”

It does not appear that Mr. Jefferson’s mind ever quite struck through to this fundamental ground of economic objection to Hamilton’s fiscal system, or that it ever effectively followed those which did. He sometimes speaks somewhat in the language of Taylor and Mercer, but his precision of terms seems rather casual than studied; as when, for instance, he wrote to John Adams in 1819, protesting against the sacrifice of “our citizens, their property and their labour, passive victims to the swindling tricks of bankers and mountebankers.” He had a clear view of Hamilton’s system, considered by its aspect of pure financiering. “The bank has just notified its proprietors,” he wrote in 1792, “that they may call for a dividend of ten per cent on their capital for the last six months. This makes a profit of twenty-six per cent per annum. Agriculture, commerce and everything useful must be neglected when the useless employment of money is so much more lucrative.” He had already written Edmund Pendleton in 1791, concerning Hamilton’s general scheme, that “as yet, the delirium of speculation is too strong to admit sober reflection. It remains to be seen whether in a country whose capital is too small to carry on its own commerce, to establish manufactures, erect buildings, etc., such sums should have been withdrawn from these useful pursuits to be employed in gambling.” In relation to the total wealth of the country, these sums were indeed so huge that one can quite understand a proximate and partial view of their employment, to the exclusion of economic theory. While an earthquake is going on, one does not generalize about the persistence of force. Mercer estimated the entire public debt, after its egregious inflation by Hamilton, at “one-fourth of the whole value of the property” of the United States. This is probably an exaggeration; but even cutting it down by one-half, one can imagine the menacing predominance of a single vested interest equal to one-eighth of a country’s total wealth. No wonder Mr. Jefferson complained bitterly that “the more debt Hamilton could rake up, the more plunder for his mercenaries.”

Clearest of all, Mr. Jefferson saw the political effect of Hamilton’s efforts in rearing up “that speculating phalanx, in and out of Congress, which has since been able to give laws to change the political complexion of the Government of the United States.” He wrote to President Washington in 1792, that “Alexander Hamilton’s system flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the Republic by creating an influence of his Department over members of the Legislature. I saw this influence actually produced, and its first fruits to be the establishment of the great outlines of his project by the votes of the very persons who, having swallowed his bait, were laying themselves out to profit by his plans.” He gives a most vivid picture of the state of things ensuing upon the first trial of Hamilton’s strength in Congress, with reference to the Funding and Assumption bill. When it became known what form the bill would take, “this being known within doors sooner than without, and especially than to those in distant parts of the Union, the base scramble began. Couriers and relay-horses by land, and swift-sailing pilot-boats by sea, were flying in all directions. Active partners and agents were associated and employed in every State, town and country neighbourhood, and this paper was bought up at five shillings, and often as low as two shillings in the pound, before the holder knew that Congress had already provided for its redemption at par. Immense sums were thus filched from the poor and ignorant. . . . Men thus enriched by the dexterity of a leader would follow of course the chief who was leading them to fortune, and become the zealous instrument of all his enterprises.”

In great measure, no doubt, his concern with the immediate political bearings of Hamilton’s system diverted his attention from its theoretical economics. In this he was far from exceptional. On the one side, Oliver Wolcott, one of Hamilton’s most interested supporters, wrote explicitly that he attached no importance to the funding measure save as “an engine of government,” and that “without assumption, the political purposes which I have enumerated can not be attained.” On the other side, Jackson brought out the historical parallel, taken from Blackstone, of the political reasons for creating the British national debt; “because it was deemed expedient to create a new interest, called the moneyed interest, in favour of the Prince of Orange, in opposition to the landed interest which was supposed to be generally in favour of the King.” Mr. Jefferson wrote Washington to the same effect, that “this exactly marks the difference between Colonel Hamilton’s views and mine, that I would wish the debt paid tomorrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the Legislature.” Of the Bank project also, he wrote in retrospect, nearly twenty years after the event, “The effect of the Funding system and of the Assumption would be temporary. It would be lost with the loss of the individual members whom it had enriched, and some engine of influence more permanent must be contrived while these myrmidons were yet in place to carry it through all opposition. This engine was the Bank of the United States.”

Perhaps naturally, then, Mr. Jefferson’s official memorandum on the constitutionality of the Bank bill does not lead into the large question of public policy exhibited by the economics of the measure. When the bill came up for the President’s signature, Washington asked the four members of his Cabinet to prepare him each a written opinion for his guidance. Hamilton wrote an affirmative opinion, of great ability; General Knox, Secretary of War, a good soldier, quite out of his depth in any matter of this kind, agreed with him. Mr. Jefferson and Edmund Randolph, the Attorney-General, wrote negative opinions. Mr. Jefferson took strictly legalistic ground, not passing from this to the ground of public policy, though it was well open to him. He enumerated the legal principles contravened by the bill, demolished the doctrine of the Federal Government’s “implied powers,” and laid down as fundamental to the Constitution the formula of the Tenth Amendment, that “all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.” Beyond this he did not go; it was a lawyer-like pronouncement, but in the premises hardly, perhaps, to be called statesmanlike.

It was not, at all events, the production of a man desirous of making himself the focus of a great popular movement of insurgency. It had a curious effect upon his reputation as a public man—curious, that is, until one remembers the tendency of terms originally fresh, vivid and special in their significance, to divest themselves of their original meaning, and either degenerate into mere petrifactions, or else to take on a new and different content. Mr. Jefferson’s legalistic attitude towards Hamilton’s fiscal system placed him before the country as a doctrinaire advocate of State rights and of strict Constitutional construction; whereas he was really neither. His advocacy of both was occasional. Class-interest led him almost always to the side of the smaller political unit against encroachment by the larger, because the greater the power of local self-government, as a rule, the better for the producer and the worse for the exploiter. Thus he was quite regularly for State rights against the Union, for county rights against the State, for township rights or village rights against the county, and for private rights against all. But in this he was far from doctrinaire; when the producer’s interest lay in the other direction, he promptly changed sides. He showed himself as little doctrinaire, also, towards construction of the Constitution. He was always well aware that law, even fundamental law expressed in a Constitution, is merely something that succeeds in getting itself measurably well obeyed, and that a Constitution must therefore be, in the last analysis, a device by which anything can be made to mean anything. “Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence,” he wrote in his old age, “and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” He had seen too much lawmaking and law-mongering to entertain any such illusions; his view was always practical. “I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and Constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and”—he adds, suggestively—“find practical means of correcting their ill effects.” As Secretary of State, in 1792, he says in an official opinion that where a phrase in the Constitution is susceptible of two meanings, “we ought certainly to adopt that which will bring upon us the fewest inconveniences.” Yet when the interest of the producer leaned that way, he could, and invariably did, stand out as stiffly as any one for the letter of the law, and for the “safe and honest meaning contemplated by the people of the United States at the time of its adoption.”

Mr. Jefferson had always a sound and clear view of the function of capital as a factor in production, always drawing a sharp distinction between capitalism and monoply. He would not have understood a condemnation of Hamilton’s system because it was capitalistic, any more than he would have sympathized with idle conjurations of a “menace of capitalism” in general. “To the existence of banks of discount for cash, as on the Continent of Europe, there can be no objection, . . . I think they should even be encouraged by allowing them a larger than legal rate on short discounts, and tapering thence in proportion as the term of discount is lengthened.” He did not object, even, to a national establishment of merchant-banking, but rather advocated it. “The States should be urged,” he wrote in 1813, “to concede to the General Government, with a saving of chartered rights, the exclusive power of establishing banks of discount for paper.” It was the monopoly-feature, the element of law-created economic privilege, to which he objected. He perceived, in short, the difference in economic status held by the industrial or merchant-banker, furnishing capital for productive enterprise, and the banker who underwrites and hawks a lien which a government imposes, through an exercise of the taxing power, upon the products of future labour.

The last of Hamilton’s fiscal measures was a protective tariff; and here again Mr. Jefferson showed a sound instinct outstripping a rather hamstrung economic interpretation. He was a natural free-trader. During the Revolution he had urged upon Franklin, then at the French court, the advisability of supporting public credit by securing “free trade by alliance with some naval power able to protect it,” and in his official report on foreign commerce, in 1793, he recurs to the same step-by-step policy. “Would even a single nation begin with the United States this system of free commerce, it would be advisable to begin it with that nation; since it is one by one only that it can be extended to all.” He saw international commerce in the large general terms of “an exchange of surpluses for wants between neighbour nations”; if this exchange could be made free, it would be a great natural stimulus to production all round—“the greatest mass possible would then be produced of those things which contribute to human life and human happiness; the numbers of mankind would be increased, and their condition bettered.”

On the other hand, he accepted the doctrine of retaliatory tariffs, apparently without perceiving that as an economic weapon, any form of tariff, boycott or embargo kicks farther than it carries, and that the best reason for a tariff is invariably a better reason against one. He never anticipated, for example, the appalling economic consequences brought indirectly upon the producer by the great embargo which he imposed upon the country in 1807. Although he correctly calls tariff-taxes “duties on consumption,” he assumes that they are paid at first hand instead of being passed along. He also assumes that taxation should be based on ability to pay, rather than on a rental-basis determined by the value of economic privilege received from government. “Taxes,” he says, “should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.” The theory of taxation set forth by the Economists seems not to have stirred his usually sensitive curiosity. He regarded it as an academic matter of little interest. “Whatever may be the merit of their principles of taxation, it is not wonderful they have not prevailed; not on the questioned score of correctness, but because not acceptable to the people, whose will must be the supreme law.” Hence it is not surprising to find him accepting a revenue-tariff as a device for making the rich pay all the taxes. As the tariff-taxes “fall principally on the rich,” he writes the Comte de Moustier in 1790, “it is a general desire to make them contribute the whole money we want, if possible.” This failure to trace the actual incidence of taxation may be said to have made his own fiscal measures almost as bad for the producer, in the long-run, as Hamilton’s.

In their economic judgment on the protective system, Mr. Jefferson’s contemporaries again outran him. His Virginian neighbour, Taylor, seems to have caught sight of the fundamental principle that in international trade as well as in domestic trade, goods can be paid for only in goods or services, and that money, or any form of credit which apparently pays for them, does not really pay for them, but is merely a device for facilitating their exchange. “Currency is the medium for exchanging necessaries”—it must have goods behind it, and whatever medium has the guarantee of goods behind it is valid currency. Trade, then, should follow the natural lines set by purchase in the cheapest market and sale in the dearest; and any mechanism of interference, like a tariff, is disabling. He also saw that a tariff, by artificially raising prices to the domestic consumer, is a “distribution of property by law” —by political means, in other words, rather than by economic means. Moreover, by successive shiftings, the final incidence of this tax falls inevitably on production, for any governmental “bounties to capital are taxes upon industry.” Tightening his terms a little, the values absorbed by the “chartered monoply” created by a tariff-law, must come from somewhere, and there is nowhere for them to come from, finally, but out of production. By the last analysis somebody, in Mr. Jefferson’s phrase, must “labour the earth” to produce them.

Mr. Jefferson stood out against Hamilton in every Cabinet meeting, but he always lost. He was a poor disputant; contention of any kind was distasteful to him, as having at best a touch of vulgarity about it. Unable even formally to concur with Hamilton, as the President hoped he might, he at last told Washington that “my concurrence was of much less importance than he seemed to imagine; that I kept myself aloof from all cabal and correspondence on the subject of the Government, and saw and spoke with as few as I could. That as to a coalition with Mr. Hamilton, if by that was meant that either was to sacrifice his general system to the other, it was impossible. We had both, no doubt, formed our conclusions after the most mature consideration; and principles conscientiously adopted could not be given up on either side.” At Washington’s request he continued to hold office in an ad interim fashion for a time, but a series of stirring events in the following year, 1793, determined him; he resigned on the last day of that year, and shortly afterwards went home. Washington’s Administration was headed straight for the rocks; and Mr. Jefferson, quite indisposed to martyrdom for a cause he did not believe in, went overboard and struck out for Monticello and safety.

IV

England went into a counter-revolutionary war with the new-born French Republic in 1793. In the spring of that year, a stormy-petrel made its way from France to the United States, in the person of Edmund Charles Genêt, the first French republican minister accredited to this country. The terrible latter phase of the French Revolution was a windfall to the American economic interests represented by Hamilton, since it enabled them to manufacture a serviceable public sentiment. By holding up the Revolution as a movement for democracy, and illustrative of democracy in action, they could say a great deal for Hamilton’s general view of the people as “a great beast,” needing a strong centralized government to keep its excesses in check; and at the same time they could effectively divert attention from the economics of the French revolutionary movement, and from the economic character of the strong centralized government that they were advocating for the United States. “The Anglomen and monocrats had so artfully confounded the cause of France with that of freedom that both went down in the same scale.” To represent the French Revolution in terms of political theory, rather than in terms of economics, was highly advantageous for their immediate purposes; just as in the American Revolution it was advantageous for the New England traders to express their revolutionary doctrine in the political terms of the Declaration, rather than in terms of molasses, rum, codfish and the carrying trade, or the Virginians in terms of free land, tobacco and debts due British creditors. The idea liberated by a successful revolution is always greater than the idea actually animating it. The American and French Revolutions released upon the world the idea of the right of individual self-expression in politics; but neither was actually animated by that idea.

In the promotion of this myth, however, sincerity and interest played, as they always do, alternate and indistinguishable parts. With Washington and Hamilton, sincerity was certainly uppermost; they were shocked and horrified by the Red Terror of Democracy. The sincerity of the Vice-President, John Adams, was transparent. “You never felt the terrorism of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, . . .” he wrote Mr. Jefferson plaintively, years later. “You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genêt in 1793, when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day by day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the Government, or compel it to declare war in favour of the French Revolution and against England. . . . I have no doubt you were fast asleep in philosophical tranquillity when . . . Market Street was as full of men as could stand by one another, and even before my door; when some of my domestics, in frenzy, determined to sacrifice their lives in my defence.” It was all very well for Mr. Jefferson, safe and sound in Monticello, to view the French Revolution with complacency, and stand by his declaration that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.” Bearing the burden and heat of the day in Philadelphia, holding off a rabble of discontented scallawags incited by a rascally French incendiary, was another matter. There was something in this, perhaps; still, Mr. Jefferson had given a pretty good account of himself in the revolutionary cause, and given it without complaint. Cornwallis had been a reality to him, and so were the hoodlums of Paris who had twice robbed his house.

The French had the measure of matters in America. They knew that no issue of academic political theory had set the country by the ears. State rights, anti-Federalism, anti-monarchism and all that kind of thing, were but the American equivalent of their own liberté, egalité, fraternité. What really had divided the country, in their view, was a mode of constitutional development inaugurated by a bold seizure of power, and designed to subordinate the economic interests of the producing class to those of the monopolist and exploiting class. The French agents in America were able men, hard-baked realists, no better and no worse than the average run of men who hold such positions. Their reports to the French Foreign Office showed that they knew their game. Fauchet, in so many words, ascribes to Hamilton’s policy the solid intrenchment of a class which “shows a threatening prospect of becoming the aristocratic order,” non-titular, indeed, but in solid substance of economic control, precisely like that which the French proletarians had just ousted; and Fauchet puts his finger firmly upon the consequent formal opposition between the producing interest, l’intérêt foncier ou agricole, and the monopolist exploiting interest, l’intérêt fiscal.

Here was something to be taken advantage of, and the French agents knew how to do it. Ternant, the predecessor of Genêt, had already embarrassed the Government by politely suggesting that it pay its debts to France. The Government mulled the matter over awhile, and as politely replied that it could not pay at the moment—France must wait until things looked up a little. Genêt pressed upon Washington the obligation of the treaty of 1778, which bound the United States to fight on the side of France, on demand, in any European war. When he received the cold shoulder, he went over the head of the Government with an appeal to the people, making himself the centre of a popular demonstration too lively to be disregarded. If the Government and its supporters could get up a great current of idealism in behalf of law and order, he could get up a counter-current of the same serviceable motive power in behalf of the warmed-over spirit of ’76. Even the glossary of ’76 was but so recently out of currency that Genêt had no trouble in putting it into circulation again, almost as good as new. He could talk in quite the old familiar phrases about liberty, natural rights, democracy and the like, and get first-rate effects with them; and all this he promptly did. He was helped, too, by several matters of economic discontent that affected even upholders of the established order; such as the British war policy of seizing neutral ships engaged in the newly-opened and highly profitable French West Indian trade, which made important commercial interests restless under what they regarded as the slackness of the Administration in protecting them.

Washington was in a tight place; he declared that he would rather be in his grave than in his present situation. War with England was impracticable, for the best of reasons. John Jay, with great acuteness, had put the whole doctrine of war in a dozen words, when he said that “nations in general will go to war whenever there is a prospect of getting anything by it;” and if the United States took the part of France against England, the dominant interests must face the prospect of loss. England, conscious of the strength of her position with these interests, was offering America every provocative indignity; yet the inexorable fact remained that trade with England was five times greater than with France, that war with England meant a stoppage of credit, depreciation of securities, a check on land-speculation—one American speculator, Robert Morris, had sold as much as a million acres of American land in England in 1791—and it would thus tend powerfully to embarrass and disintegrate the solid body of supporters which Hamilton had built up for the Government. There was good reason for Hamilton to be “panic-struck,” as Mr. Jefferson contemptuously wrote Monroe, “if we refuse our breech to every kick which Great Britain may choose to give it.”

Moreover, if the Government kept faith with the treaty of 1778, it would have to reckon with the turbulent masses of excited citizenry at home—"all the old spirit of 1776,” wrote Mr. Jefferson, “rekindling the newspapers from Boston to Charleston.” The whole debtor class was involved; a quarrel with England would void the stipulations for payment written into the treaty of 1783, and to a man they were determined, as Wolcott put it, “to weaken the public force so as to render the recovery of these debts impossible.” From this it would be a short step to summary dealing with domestic exploiting interests. Hatred of Hamilton’s “corrupt squadron of paper-dealers” in Congress, and resentment at the oppressive ascendency of their affiliated interests outside, the “stock-jobbers and king-jobbers,” was being busily organized; so-called “democratic societies” were springing up everywhere, and propounding what seemed to the Government a thinly-veiled Jacobinism. If America took the side of France, Hamilton wrote, “it was to be feared that the war would be conducted in a spirit which would render it more than ordinarily calamitous. There are too many proofs that a considerable party among us is deeply infected with those horrid principles of Jacobinism which, proceeding from one excess to another, have made France a theatre of blood. . . . It was too probable that the direction of the war, if commenced, would have fallen into the hands of men of this description. The consequences of this, even in imagination, are such as to make any virtuous man shudder.”

Washington’s perplexity was as deep as his difficulties. A sincere republican, he was really friendly to the French struggle towards republicanism. An honest man, he felt the profound inconsistency of his position if, as head of the new Western republic, he should discountenance or discourage that struggle. Sensitive to oppression in its gross and obvious forms, he believed in revolution—had he not been a revolutionist himself?—as long as its conduct remained in the right hands and brought the right kind of people out on top. He could see the point of a revolution against the British King and his ministers, for instance, but not of one against American revenue-officers in Pennsylvania or against the merchant-creditor ring in Massachusetts. He understood rebellion against taxation arbitrarily imposed by an interested foreign Power, but not against taxation as arbitrarily imposed by an interested native minority. His mind was “slow in operation,” Mr. Jefferson said, “being little aided by invention or imagination,” and his education had been rudimentary, “merely reading, writing and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at a later day.” He read little. He was one of the richest men in the country, and though a Virginian and a planter, neither his instincts nor his pursuits were primarily those of a producer; his chief interests were in landholding and money-lending; and his predilections followed his interests no less closely, and no more, probably, than is the case with the average of upright men. Paine’s bitter condemnation of him for having turned the country over to the tender mercies of monopolists and speculators merely wounded his sensibilities without ever reaching his understanding. Why, to whom else should the country be turned over?—to the ignorant rabble of workingmen and farmers? He had done the best he could. Had he not himself bitterly deplored speculation when it got out of the hands of the judicious and began to run wild among Tom, Dick and Harry? He was, in short, a thorough-going liberal of the best type, eager to see “with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good,” but with all a liberal’s nervous horror of an overdose, and all a liberal’s naïve assumption of competent natural authority to prescribe and regulate the dose.

Washington set himself against the French. The treaty of 1778 did not trouble his conscience; he had gone far enough in statecraft to become aware that a treaty is merely the memorandum of an accomodation of interests, usually made under duress, and that it imposes no moral obligation when the balance of those interests shifts. He therefore announced that the treaty had been made with the French monarchy, now defunct, and that he could not recognize the right of a succeeding government to claim American assistance under its provisions.

One of Mr. Jefferson’s last acts as Secretary of State was to arrange for the recall of Genêt. He was disgusted with the bad manners, so necessary to successful popular agitation, which Genêt displayed in the character of agent provocateur to embroil Washington with Congress and the whole Administration with the people. Never, he thought “was so calamitous an appointment made as that of the present minister of France here. . . . His conduct is indefensible by the most furious Jacobin.” Yet he dealt with him patiently, “doing everything in my power to moderate the impetuosity of his movements,” and thought he should be put up with as long as possible, believing that his heated indecencies would overreach themselves, and that the net effect of his presence might be to make some weight in favour of “a fair neutrality,” which was what Mr. Jefferson most desired.

He too had no scruples or superstitions about the treaty of 1778, always having strong notions of the value of American neutrality as a bargaining-point whereby the incessant wars of Europe might be regularly used as leverage for the promotion of American producing interests. In a letter from Paris in 1788, he had urged this upon Washington as a continuous national policy; and a sense of it had most to do, probably, with his inveterate aversion to entangling alliances abroad. Though he disliked war, he was never a doctrinaire pacifist; he kept his sentiments and preferences quite separate from his practical view of national circumstances. He saw peace, in the present instance, as simply the most profitable asset of the American producer, and war as the most profitless sacrifice of the producer’s welfare. “I hope France, England and Spain will all see it their interest to let us make bread for them in peace, and to give us a good price for it.” America could well afford to put up with a good deal of chivvying for the sake of this hope, and though he feared that at first “a fair neutrality will prove a disagreeable pill,” to the French, he knew that only a fair neutrality could realize his hope, and he was confident that self-interest would in the end cause France to worry down the pill without overmuch retching.

What he most feared was that Washington’s proclamation of neutrality would not really mean a fair neutrality. He had an inkling of the conscious solidarity of Anglo-American monopolistic and capitalistic interest. He wrote Madison in May, 1793, that “the line is now drawn so clearly as to show on one side, 1. The fashionable circles of Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Charleston (natural aristocrats). 2. Merchants trading on British capital. 3. Paper men (all the old Tories are found in some one of the three descriptions). On the other side are, 1. Merchants trading on their own capital. 2. Irish merchants. 3. Tradesmen, mechanics, farmers, and every other possible description of our citizens.” Would the Government, in its international relations, take the same side that it had always taken in its domestic relations? Would it go over to the side of the producer by “a manly neutrality, claiming the liberal rights ascribed to that condition by the very Powers at war,” or would it, by “a sneaking neutrality,” really pro-English, keep on the side of the international monopolist and exploiting interests? There was no doubt about the disposition of the President’s advisers; a good deal depended upon the President’s own disposition; but much more depended upon the producer’s own vigilant readiness to assert himself. “If anything prevents its being a mere English neutrality,” Mr. Jefferson wrote his anxious friend Madison, “it will be that the penchant of the President is not that way, and above all, the ardent spirit of our constituents.”

Washington made his proclamation. He then sent to London the best Anglo-American in the country, Chief Justice Jay, a man of flawless character and great ability, whose devotion to Hamilton’s principle of preponderance for “the rich and well-born” was austerely conscientious. He was downright candid in declaring that “those who own the country should govern the country.” John Jay negotiated a treaty with the British Foreign Office, which William Cobbett, then acting as a propagandist in the United States, afterwards described in a letter to Pitt as a victory for England, “infinitely more important than all [Lord Melville’s] victories in the West Indies put together, which latter victories cost England thirty thousand men and fifty millions of money.” Mr. Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, spoke of it indignantly as “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.” News of the treaty shook the country. “I have never,” Mr. Jefferson wrote Monroe, who was then minister in Paris—poor soul!—trying in sincere puzzlement to smooth down the irate French, “I have never known the public pulse beat so full and in such universal union on any subject since the Declaration of Independence.” Jay was burned in effigy from one end of the country to the other, and Hamilton was stoned from the platform while speaking in defence of the treaty.

Even Washington, whose second term was about expiring, went under a cloud. When he refused the demand of the House of Representatives that he should lay before them a copy of Jay’s instructions and the correspondence relating to the British treaty, the people lost faith in him. Mr. Jefferson, whose estimate of him was always singularly just, defended him staunchly. “He errs as other men do,” he wrote to a wrathful neighbour in Virginia, “but he errs with integrity”; and somewhat more informally he wrote later to Madison, “I wish that his honesty and his political errors may not furnish a second occasion to exclaim, ‘Curse on his virtues, they have undone his country!’” Resentment against Washington, however, did not last. Indeed, in the long-run quite probably, as Mr. Jefferson said, his reputation came to be even “more deeply seated in the love and gratitude of the republicans,” whose regard for his virtues was disinterested, “than in the pharasaical homage of the federal monarchists,” whose main concern was with making use of him, and with building a supporting tradition around him in behalf of their policies. Long after the death of the three men whose names are most closely associated with the establishment of America’s economic system, John Adams wrote Mr. Jefferson a rambling disquisition on the “abuses of grief,” in which he made a vivid incidental reference to this technique of tradition building.

The death of Washington diffused a general grief. The old Tories, the hyperfederalists, the speculators, set up a general howl. Orations, prayers, sermons, mock funerals, were all employed, not that they loved Washington, but to keep in countenance the funding and banking system; and to cast into the background and the shade all others who had been concerned in the service of their country in the Revolution.

The death of Hamilton, under all its circumstances, produced a general grief. His most determined enemies did not like to get rid of him in that way. They pitied, too, his widow and children. His party seized the moment of public feeling to come forward with funeral orations and printed panegyrics, reinforced with mock funerals and solemn grimaces, and all this who have buried Otis, Sam Adams, Hancock and Gerry in comparative obscurity. And why? Merely to disgrace the old Whigs, and keep the funds and banks in countenance.

The death of Mr. Ames excited a general regret. His long consumption, his amiable character and reputable talents, had attracted a general interest, and his death a general mourning. His party made the most of it by processions, orations and mock funeral. And why? To glorify the Tories, to abash the Whigs, and maintain the reputation of funds, banks and speculations.

Mr. Jefferson foresaw that Washington’s retirement was coming on the nick of time to carry over a rich legacy of trouble to the succeeding Administration. “The President is fortunate,” he wrote Madison, “to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag. Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see that they will be ascribed to the new Administration, and that he will have his usual good fortune of reaping credit from the good acts of others, and leaving to them that of his errors.” He was interested in this, inasmuch as he had just been elected to play a kind of supernumerary part in the new Administration, as Vice-President under John Adams.

V

Mr. Jefferson made the most of his three years retirement from the dishevelling squalor of routine politics. For a long time he did not even read the newspapers. He wrote his former colleague, Edmund Randolph, who had succeeded him as Secretary of State, “I think it is Montaigne who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. I am sure it is true as to everything political, and shall endeavour to estrange myself to everything of that character. I indulge myself on one political topic only, that is, in declaring to my countrymen the shameless corruption of a portion of the representatives to the First and Second Congresses, and their implicit devotion to the Treasury. I think I do good in this, because it may produce exertions to reform the evil.” He shortly gravitated into the position, quite alien to his natural bent, of leadership in a great popular movement; and he also came to be regarded, by no means properly, as the philosopher and thinker of that movement. All this came about because a double bill of availability had to be filled, and there was no one else to fill it. Among the profounder students of public affairs, like Taylor, none was enough of a national figure to be a vote-getter; and among those who relished popular leadership and had a gift for it, none had Mr. Jefferson’s peculiar record of aloofness from the general scuffle for easy money. Patrick Henry, for example, in the best sense of the word a great demagogue, had been busy in various speculative enterprises, and had done well out of them—so well that the Federalists thought it safe to approach him as a possible candidate for the Presidency.

Thus Mr. Jefferson was projected into the campaign of 1796, and finally found himself in the one public office that exactly suited him. He was a born Vice-President. He wrote Madison that “it is the only office in the world about which I am unable to decide in my own mind whether I would rather have it than not have it,” which was a great concession. He wrote Gerry that “the second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery,” and to Volney that it seemed possible “you may see me in Philadelphia about the beginning of March, exactly in the character which if I were to reappear at Philadelphia, I would prefer to all others; for I change the sentiment of Clorinda to l’alte temo, l’humile non sdegno.” Gossip went abroad that he would refuse the Vice-Presidency as infra dig., and this rumour set off the only flash of interest that he manifested in the whole campaign. He wrote at once in great consternation to several friends that there was nothing in it; that he had always played second fiddle to John Adams, and had every desire to keep on doing so. “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in the civil Government.” He wrote Madison that the election was likely to be close; if it reached the danger-point, “I pray you, and authorize you fully, to solicit on my behalf that Mr. Adams may be preferred.” Towards the close of the same letter he let the cat out of the bag with the observation that public affairs, as he saw them, “never wore so gloomy an aspect since the year 1783. Let those come to the helm who think they can steer clear of the difficulties. I have no confidence in myself for the undertaking.”

The best thing for the opposition-movement for the next four years was to let it precipitate itself into solidarity, like accretions of limestone, around the fossil of the Vice-Presidency. The election turned out that way by a scary margin of three votes; and there was uncommon warmth in Mr. Jefferson’s letter of thanks to his old friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, for “your congratulations on the public call on me to undertake the second office in the United States, but still more for the justice you do me in viewing as I do the escape from the first. I have no wish again to meddle in public affairs, being happier at home than I can be anywhere else. Still less do I wish to engage in an office where it would be impossible to satisfy either friends or foes, and least of all at a moment when the storm is about to burst, which has been conjuring up for four years past. If I am to act, however, a more tranquil and unoffending station could not have been found for me, nor one more analogous to the dispositions of my mind. It will give me philosophical evenings in the winter, and rural days in summer.”

VI

John Adams’s position as a candidate was somewhat like Mr. Jefferson’s. Both sides were about equally hard up for just the right kind of man. Able men, for the most part, naturally preferred to profit by politics rather than engage in them, especially in a land whose resources made the opportunities for quick profit so great; and hence the practice of politics began quite early to go into the hands of mere professional agents. Washington had great difficulty in filling up his second cabinet, and in the end had to be content with poor figures. Of the few first-rate men available for the Presidency in 1796, the best by far was Jay; but with the odium of the British treaty reeking in the public’s nostrils, he would have been an utter failure as a vote-getter. As Mr. Jefferson sardonically wrote Monroe, he was “completely treatyfoundered.” Hamilton himself never had any popular following; he was never able to attract the confidence of the public in any large way, and he was aware of it. About the only thing left in stock that stood any chance of suiting the market was Adams, and there were prayerful misgivings about him.

The figure of Adams is perhaps the most congenial—one may say perhaps the most lovable—of any made on the page of history by an American of his period. Franklin said, and Mr. Jefferson often quoted it with approval, that Adams was always an honest man, often a great man, and sometimes absolutely insane. His faults were all faults of temper; they laid him continually open to deception, and betrayed him on occasion into incredible inconsistency and pettiness. He was vain, irascible, truculent, suspicious; and these faults were offset by a corresponding excess of the virtues that usually accompany them and are often, in a sense, coloured by them—even his integrity was pugnacious. He never cared to conceal anything that was in his mind, and perhaps the most prepossessing thing about him was his utter inability to do so if he had. Engaging as the sum of his qualities undoubtedly was, it did not precisely recommend him to those who, in their search for a candidate, were considering it by the dry light of partisan exigency. They knew, moreover, that while he was in a general way on their side, he differed sharply from them in certain important particulars, and it was a question how well he could be managed into “going along.” Hamilton, indeed, was so uncertain about this that he tried a piece of political sharp practice to defeat him in the electoral college in favour of Thomas Pinckney, but with no result except to earn for himself the fine old man’s imperishable hatred.

Not long before the campaign, Adams had published a large treatise on the theory of government, which marked him as a political tertium quid. He was for government by “the rich and well-born,” on the ground of their superior competence, but only under definite checks and restraints. He frankly acknowledged that all politics rests on the basis of economics. He was therefore against democracy, because it meant that the poor and low-born would use politics to despoil the rich and well-born; and here, from a partisan point of view, he was sound. But he also saw that an unchecked aristocracy would use politics to despoil the poor and low-born, and that by virtue of their superiority in intelligence and cunning, they would carry this spoliation to the point of mastery over all a country’s economic resources, and a consequent reduction of the poor and low-born to a state of living on sheer sufferance. He was as much afraid of the rich, in short, as of the poor; and his book was an effort to devise a scheme of governmental mechanics which should impartially restrain the rapacity of both. Without such apparatus, he said, “The struggle will end only in a change of impostors. When the people, who have no other property, feel the power in their hands to determine all questions by a majority, they ever attack those who have property, till the injured men of property lose all patience and recur to finesse, trick and stratagem to outwit those who have too much strength, because they have too many hands to be resisted in any other way.”

On the veiled issue of the campaign, therefore, which Was its real issue, his position was questionable. One could never be sure whether, on some special point of division, he might not be found heretical. In foreign affairs, also, his attitude was anomalous. He was perhaps the only man in public life whose sentiments were not in some degree pro-English or pro-French; he did not care twopence for the fortunes of either France or England. Hence it was again a question whether on occasion he could be managed into a proper service of international interests in monopoly and finance; it would be quite like him to go blustering off into some commitment against the one country or the other, on the strength of a petty issue of schoolboy’s patriotism, like impressing sailors or rifling cargoes, when really serious considerations made it imperative that he should do nothing of the kind. Managing Mr. Adams would be a very delicate business, and his political sponsors contemplated it with trepidation; yet he was the only shot in their locker, and the alternative, as they put it, was the red and ruthless Jacobinism of an enraged majority.

The French had a splendid chance at Mr. Adams, and threw it away; yet it was a chance that only an extraordinary political sagacity could improve. If they had so far masked their dislike of the Jay treaty as to abstain from further hectoring tactics against the American Government, they would have had no trouble with Adams, and would have profited by the popular dissatisfaction which was bound to keep on in their favour if only let alone to take its own course. Adams sent commissioners to France to reach a modus vivendi; they came back, saying that they had been badly received, that the French Government had dealt with them only at second-hand through three unofficial representatives (whom Adams designated in his report to Congress as Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. Z), and that these men had demanded a cash bribe and an annual cash tribute as the price of French good will.

Unfortunately it was never clear how far these men actually represented the French Government, or whether anything like these fatuous demands was actually authorized—whether, indeed, any such thing was ever in Talleyrand’s mind. Mr. Jefferson exculpated the Directory on the strength of a parallel case. “When the Portuguese Ambassador yielded to like attempts of swindlers, the conduct of the Directory in imprisoning him for an attempt at corruption, as well as their general conduct, really magnanimous, places them above suspicion.” He made no bones of his belief that whatever basis of fact the incident may have had, the commissioners, led by John Marshall, had made an utterly unscrupulous use of it in behalf of damming the current of pro-French sentiment in America. “You know what a wicked use has been made of the French negotiation,” he wrote Edmund Pendleton, “and particularly the X. Y. Z. dish cooked up by Marshall, where the swindlers are made to appear as the French Government.” The one certain thing is that the French Government had behaved in such a high-handed way as to give colour to almost any kind of report that Marshall saw fit to make. Adams promptly communicated Marshall’s report to Congress, and its publication as promptly turned the tide of popular feeling. “The odiousness of the corruption supposed in these papers excited a general and high indignation among the people,” Mr. Jefferson wrote. “Unexperienced in such manœuvres, they did not permit themselves even to suspect that the turpitude of private swindlers might mingle itself unobserved, and give its own hue to the communications of the French Government, of whose participation there was neither proof nor probability.”

The American people, never difficult to stir up, and never troubling itself to inquire too closely into politico-economic motive, went into a violent war-hysteria, fomented by every effort of the economic interests affected. This went on increasing in volume until suddenly one day, without a word to his Cabinet or to Congress, John Adams took all the wind out of it by appointing a minister to France. He somehow heard that the French Government had disavowed the X. Y. Z. incident, that it quite wished to be friendly and would gladly receive a minister. Well, if that were so, that was all there was to it; with the casus belli removed, there was no point to keeping on with war preparations just because they had been started in good faith, and there was even less point to keeping on with them merely to gratify a spirit of interested and more or less meretricious belligerency—and so, with one motion, the sturdy old man split his whole political organization from end to end.

The organization, indeed, had already rather over reached itself with the people. The powers behind it had had such easy going since the X. Y. Z. incident that their strength seemed impregnable. Naturally disposed to make all the hay they could while the sun shone, they fostered a reckless Congressional prodigality with public money. Adams had gone along splendidly in this, for he had been as warm as any one over the X. Y. Z. proposals up to the moment when he smelt a rat in them, and for the first and only time in his life he was the idol of his party. He recommended measures for establishing a navy, for raising an army, for defending harbours, for purchasing supplies. All this meant money, money meant taxes, and taxes meant a certain recrudescence of the old critical spirit against the economic interests which were so obviously capitalizing resentment against France, and raking money out of it with both hands—Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, for example, opened a loan of five million dollars at eight per cent! The organization of civil recalcitrance, however, like the organization of war, must have a pretext as well as a cause; and the Administration itself furnished a pretext that fitted as if made to order, by the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

These laws were intended as a clincher for the stability of the existing order, by providing for the deportation of foreign propagandists who were on the wrong side, like Genêt, and for the jailing of disaffected native editors, spellbinders and publicists. The Alien Act was never enforced; there seems to have been no occasion. The Sedition Act was enforced in a strictly partisan way. In themselves, however, these laws were probably not objectionable to the people. Americans were never sticklers for theory; they have been always more concerned with the inconveniences of despotism than with its iniquities. The fate of a few aliens or of a few home-grown seditionists might therefore not have troubled them much—and least of all, perhaps, would they have been disturbed by the inconsistency of such laws with the libertarian principles so lately set forth on dress-parade in the First Amendment. But they looked at these laws with eyes already jaundiced by various afflictions, which Mr. Jefferson enumerated as “the vexations of the Stamp Act, the disgusting particularities of the direct tax, the additional army without an enemy, and recruiting-officers lounging at every court-house, a navy of fifty ships, five millions to be raised to build it, on the ruinous interest of eight per cent, the perseverance in war on our part when the French Government shows such an anxious desire to keep at peace with us, taxes of ten millions now paid by four millions of people, and yet a necessity in a year or two of raising five millions more for annual expenses.”

Mr. Jefferson took a strong position in precipitating popular sentiment against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Some malcontents in Pennsylvania made a move towards insurrection, which Mr. Jefferson disapproved, believing that “anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion, and rally them around the Government.” He was for getting the State Legislatures to declare these laws null and void, himself writing a pattern resolution for the legislature of Kentucky. Mr. Jefferson apparently never believed that the important function of Constitutional interpretation should be vested in any one branch of the Government, probably perceiving that such an investiture would be equivalent to the establishment of an oligarchy. He seems to have regarded Constitutional interpretation as an occasional function in the general system of checks and balances, to be exercised by the Legislature, Judiciary or even by the Executive, whenever one or another should display any tendency to usurpation or tyranny. “Our country has thought proper to distribute the powers of its government among three equal and independent authorities constituting each a check upon one or both of the others in all attempts to impair its Constitution.” Thus when during the Administrations of Washington and Adams, minority class-control was carried on chiefly through the instrumentality of Congress and the Executive, he was for nullification by the Judiciary or the State Legislatures. When during his own Administration, minority class-control was carried on through the Judiciary, he was for nullification by Congress and the Executive. A letter to Mrs. John Adams, written at the end of his first term in the Presidency, shows how far he thought fit to go, and did go, in the nullification by executive order of laws duly passed and pronounced valid by a preceding Administration. “I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image; and that it was as much my duty to arrest its execution in every stage as it would have been to rescue from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into it for refusing to worship the image.”

The opera-buffa character suddenly put by Adams upon all the high-pressure patriotism vented in preparedness for the French war, made the populace look at one another in the blank and rueful fashion of those who feel themselves “sold.” The Administration had set off all the thunder and lightning in the world, and not a drop of rain fell. They counted up the cost of this eccentric exhibition, and decided that they had seen enough. Hamilton and all that he represented turned viciously upon Adams, who boiled with rage. Conscious of having done the right thing, he struck out blindly against friend and enemy. He stood for re-election in 1800, but got no support. “The rich and well-born” saw that their intrenchment in the legislative and executive branches of the government was no longer safe, and that they must shift it to the Judiciary. As Wolcott wrote to Ames, “The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the judicial department, and I hope that their measures will be very decided. It is impossible in this country to render an army an engine of government; and there is no way to combat the State opposition but by an efficient and extended organization of judges, magistrates and other civil officers.” Here Adams, in sheer pique and resentment, was easily influenced to do them an incalculable service. At the very fag-end of his Administration, the Judiciary Act was passed, creating twenty-three new Federal judicial districts. Adams sat up half the last night of his term, signing commissions to fill these judgeships with men whom, for the most part, he did not know, but who were of the right stamp. He also appointed John Marshall, author of the X. Y. Z. reports, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, first offering the position to John Jay, who declined it. Then, having made all the political trouble possible for his successor—and with no idea that his acts had any deeper significance—he packed up in high dudgeon, and set forth for his home in Massachusetts, disregarding the customary formality of attending his successor’s inauguration.