Founding Brothers (10 page)

To
Virginians like Madison and Jefferson, on the other hand, Duer was not the
exception, but the rule. The Virginia gentry were psychologically incapable of
sharing Hamilton’s affinity with men who made their living manipulating
interest rates. Land, not fluid forms of capital, was their ultimate measure of
wealth. Investment bankers and speculators, as they saw it, made no productive
contribution to society. All they did was move paper around and adjust numbers.
At the nub, the issue was not rich versus poor or the few versus the many,
since the planter class of Virginia was just as much an elite minority as the
wealthy merchants of New York or Boston. The issue was agrarian versus
commercial sources of wealth.

Nor did it help that a significant
percentage of Virginia’s landed class, Jefferson among them, were heavily
in debt to British and Scottish creditors, who were compounding their interest
rates faster than the profit margins in tobacco and wheat could match. One
cannot help but suspect that the beleaguered aristocracy of Virginia saw in
Hamilton and his beloved commercial elite of the northern cities the American
replicas of British bankers who were bleeding them to death. The more one
contemplates the mentality of the Virginia planters—the refusal to bring
their habits of consumption and expenditure into line with the realities of
their economic predicament, the widespread pattern of denial right up to the
declaration of bankruptcy—the more likely it seems that an entrenched and
even willful ignorance of the economic principles governing the relationship
between credit and debt had become a badge of honor in their world. These were
simply not the kind of concerns that a gentleman of property should take
seriously. In a sense, they took considerable pride in not having the dimmest
understanding of what Hamilton was talking about.
²⁸

T
HE THIRD
participant in the
dinner-table bargain, and the host for the occasion, was Thomas Jefferson. He
was not being characteristically diplomatic when he claimed that Madison and
Hamilton both understood the issues at stake more fully than he did. After all,
he had only returned from his five-year tour of duty in France six months
earlier and had just taken up his post as secretary of state in March. His mind
was also on other things: the recent marriage of his eldest daughter, Martha;
finding suitable quarters in New York; drafting a lengthy report on weights and
measures; reading dispatches from Paris on the ongoing French Revolution. The
onset of his chronic migraine headache had also incapacitated him for much of
May. In fact, Jefferson’s headache coincided with a veritable plague that
seemed to descend on the leadership of the Virginia dynasty. Madison was laid
up with dysentery, Edmund Randolph remained in Virginia to care for his wife,
who had nearly died delivering a stillborn baby, and, most ominously of all,
George Washington came down with the flu and developed pulmonary complications
that the physicians considered life-threatening. “You cannot conceive the
public alarm on this occasion,” Jefferson reported to William Short, his
former secretary in Paris, adding that Washington’s demise would in all
probability have meant the abrupt end of the whole national experiment.
²⁹

Slightly
above six feet two, Jefferson towered over both Madison and Hamilton, and at
forty-seven he was sufficiently their senior to enjoy the kind of respect
accorded an older brother. Neither his physical stature nor his age, however,
could compensate for his lengthy absence abroad throughout the great
constitutional reforms of the late 1780s. Madison had kept him apprised of the
debates at the Constitutional Convention (no better source existed on the
planet), and Madison had also beaten down the rumors circulating in the
Virginia ratifying convention that Jefferson was at best lukewarm on the
constitutional settlement itself. The rumors were in fact true, though on all
constitutional questions Jefferson deferred to Madison’s superior
judgment, so he could accept the offer to become America’s first
secretary of state without political reservations. It also helped that foreign
policy was the one area where he believed the nation should speak with one
voice. Beyond that elemental level, his views on federal power were unknown, in
part because he had not been involved in the great debates of 1787–1788,
and in part because his own mind did not operate at Madisonian levels of
specificity and legalistic clarity. “I am not a Federalist,” he
declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my
opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go
to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” The temporary
capital in New York was hardly heaven, but he had agreed to go there in the
spring of 1790 with his allegiances undeclared and his own lofty political
principles uncontaminated by the kind of infighting that Madison and Hamilton
had perfected to an art.
³⁰

He had come
reluctantly. This was part of a lifelong pattern of reticence, dating back to
the prerevolutionary years in Virginia, when he had first emerged from the
mists of the Blue Ridge Mountains to attend William and Mary, study law with
George Wythe, and win marginal acceptance by the Tidewater elite. He gained his
reputation as an effective writer against British encroachments but was a
reclusive nonpresence in debates. In the Continental Congress, John Adams had
described him as a staunch advocate of independence who never uttered more than
two or three sentences, even in committees. His lasting fame, indeed
immortality, derived from his authorship of the Declaration of Independence in
June of 1776, but few Americans knew about that role in 1790. The Declaration
was still regarded as a product of the whole Continental Congress, not the work
of one man, and had yet to achieve the symbolic significance it would in the
nineteenth century.
³¹

His service
as wartime governor of Virginia had ended disastrously when British troops
burned the capital as Jefferson galloped off and into official disgrace. Though
later cleared of any wrongdoing, he vowed never to accept public office again.
The hurly-burly of politics did not suit his temperament, which was only
comfortable when ensconced on his mountaintop and redesigning his mansion at
Monticello. Always poised for retirement, he had accepted the diplomatic post
in Paris to escape the painful memories of his wife’s premature death in
childbirth, had performed his duties ably, and had even gained a semblance of
fame in France as Franklin’s successor as the Gallic embodiment of the
archetypal American in Paris. His protestations when offered a position in the
new government in 1789 were utterly sincere, but Madison had been his usually
persuasive self and, more to the point, America’s only indispensable
figure had suggested that Jefferson was also indispensable. One did not turn
down George Washington.

The dinner invitation he had extended to the
embattled Madison and Hamilton was perfectly in keeping with his character. Put
simply, Jefferson could not abide personal conflict. One of the reasons he was
so notoriously ineffective in debate was that argument itself offended him. The
voices he heard inside himself were all harmonious and agreeable, reliable
expressions of the providentially aligned universal laws that governed the
world as he knew it, so that argument struck him as dissonant noise that defied
the natural order of things. Madison, who knew him better than any man alive,
fully realized that there was an invisible line somewhere in Jefferson’s
mind above which lay his most cherished personal and political ideals. Cross
that line and you set off explosions and torrents of unbridled anger of the
sort that got spewed at George III in the Declaration of Independence.
(Jefferson did not regard such occasions as arguments, but rather as holy wars
to the death.) But short of that line, he was endlessly polite and
accommodating, genuinely pained at the presence of partisan politics. This was
clearly his posture in June of 1790.

There were also practical reasons
why he wanted to broker a compromise. As a former foreign minister now serving
as secretary of state, Jefferson required no instruction on the international
implications of America’s debtor status. Until her foreign debts were
paid and her credit with the Dutch bankers in Amsterdam restored, the United
States would simply not be taken seriously in Europe’s capitals.
Jefferson had learned this the hard way during his Paris phase. He therefore
felt even more sharply than Madison that the fiscal goals of Hamilton’s
plan were absolutely essential. Without credit, the new nation would remain a
laughingstock in foreign eyes. And therefore when those same frenzied
Virginians who were writing Madison about the fatal curse of assumption also
wrote him, he was even less supportive, though characteristically elusive.
“It appears to me one of those questions which present great
inconveniences whichever way it is decided,” he wrote his new son-in-law.
Or when Henry Lee flooded him with apocalyptic premonitions if assumption
somehow were to pass, he counseled patience and greater trust in the wisdom of
Congress. “In the meanwhile,” he observed rather elliptically,
“the voice of the nation will perhaps be heard.” While vague, the
intended effect of the Jeffersonian message was to calm his fellow Virginians.
“My duties prevent me from mingling in these questions,” he
explained to George Mason just a week before the dinner: “I do not
pretend to be very competent to their decision. In general I think it necessary
to give as well as take in a government like ours.”
³²

T
HE GIVING
and the taking on the
location of the permanent national capital had been positively fierce ever
since the question had come before Congress in September of 1789. The
Constitution had provided for Congress to identify a “seat of
government” not to exceed one hundred square miles in size to be
purchased from the proximate states. The question was where. From the start,
the prospect of congressional representatives reaching an easy consensus on the
location was problematic at best. One newspaper editor had sagely, if
cynically, observed that “the usual custom is for the capital of new
empires to be selected by the whim or caprice of a despot.” While this
was obviously not the republican way, perhaps an exception was justified. Since
George Washington, as the editor observed, “has never given bad advice to
his country,” did it not make practical sense to “let him point to
a map and say ‘here’?”
³³

What
became known as the “residency question” was a logistic nightmare.
All the regional voting blocs—New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the
South—could cite plausible reasons for claiming primacy. And each of the
twelve states—Rhode Island did not show up in the Congress until June of
1790—could imagine schemes whereby the capital fell within its borders or
the support for another location promised collateral benefits to be negotiated
at a price. The crisscrossing patterns of regional and state bargaining were
further complicated by two political considerations almost guaranteed to
preclude consensus: First, legislation had to pass both the Senate and the
House, so as soon as an apparently victorious option made its way through one
branch of the Congress, the opposition mobilized against it in the other;
second, early on a decision was made to choose a temporary location, which
would serve as the capital for ten to twenty years, then a permanent location,
which would presumably require the extra time to ready itself for the federal
occupation. This distinction played havoc with congressional debate by creating
doubt that the temporary location, once chosen, would ever be abandoned. As a
result, by the time Jefferson had arrived in New York in March, sixteen
possible sites had been proposed but had failed to muster a majority. The
leading candidates (in alphabetical order) were: Annapolis, Baltimore,
Carlisle, Frederick, Germantown, New York, Philadelphia, the Potomac, the
Susquehanna, and Trenton. Given its geographic centrality, some location in
Pennsylvania appeared to have the edge.
³⁴

“The
business of the seat of Government is become a labyrinth,” Madison
reported back to a fellow Virginian, “for which the votes printed furnish
no clue, and which it is impossible in a letter to explain to you.” The
political wheeling and dealing inside the Congress and out had reached such
epidemic proportions that Madison was given the unofficial title “Big
Knife” for cutting deals: “If the Big Knife would give up Potowmack
the Matter would be easily settled,” one Pennsylvania man reported to
Jefferson. “But that you will say is as unreasonable as it would be to
expect a Pennsilvanian to surrender at Discretion to New York. It therefore
amuses me to see the Arguments our grave politicians bring forward when I know
it will be determined by local Interests.” While the Virginians were not
accustomed to thinking of their interests as merely local, by the eve of the
dinner at Jefferson’s the prospects for a Potomac site had faded and
Madison’s formidable skills as a political negotiator had assumed a
wholly defensive posture—coordinating opposition to a Pennsylvania
victory.
³⁵

The case Madison had tried to make for the Potomac was simultaneously
crafty and driven by romantic illusions about its prowess that were shared by
Jefferson, Washington, and most members of the Virginia dynasty. In the crafty
vein, Madison was ingenious at contesting the strongest argument for a
Pennsylvania location, which was its geographic centrality. (The Pennsylvanians
were not devoid of craft either, arguing that the Susquehanna River was
destined to become the center of the United States because the
trans-Mississippi West would never enter the union and eastern Canada almost
surely would.) Madison countered that centrality could be measured
demographically as well as geographically, so they should await the results of
the census of 1790 before deciding. Then he argued that a purely geographic
measure on a north-south axis revealed that the exact midpoint between northern
Maine and southern Georgia was not just the Potomac; it was Washington’s
estate at Mount Vernon, a revelation calculated to carry providential
overtones.
³⁶