Founding Brothers (22 page)

Therefore,
while Jefferson could talk with genuine conviction about American neutrality
and the need to remain free of European entanglements, thereby sounding much
like Washington, his version of American neutrality was decidedly different. He
did not view the clash between England and France for supremacy in Europe as a
distant struggle far removed from America’s long-term national interest.
Instead, he saw the French Revolution as the European continuation of the
spirit of ’76. He acknowledged that the random violence and careening
course of the French Revolution were lamentable developments, but he insisted
they were merely a passing chapter in the larger story of triumphant global
revolution. “I am convinced they [the French] will triumph
completely,” he wrote in 1794, “& the consequent disgrace of
the invading tyrants is destined, in the order of events, to kindle the wrath
of the people of Europe against those who have dared to embroil them in such
wickedness, and to bring at length, kings, nobles & priests to the
scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with blood.” In one
moment of revolutionary euphoria, he dismissed all critics of mass executions
in France as blind to the historic issues at stake: “The liberty of the
whole earth was depending on the issue of that contest,” he observed in
1793, “and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own
affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but
rather than it should have failed I would rather 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.”
⁴²

If France
was the revolutionary hero in this international drama, England was the
counterrevolutionary villain. Jefferson’s highly moralistic language
castigating George III and the English government in the Declaration of
Independence was not just propaganda, at least for Jefferson. It reflected his
genuine conviction that England was an inherently corrupt society, the bastion
of monarchical power, aristocratic privilege, and courtly intrigue. Since
Washington had spent eight years sending American soldiers to their death in
battle against Great Britain, one might expect that he harbored even more
hostile opinions toward his former adversary. But he did not. Jefferson’s
Anglophobia was more virulent in part because it was more theoretical, a moral
conclusion that followed naturally from the moralistic categories he carried
around in his head. (If he wanted to stigmatize a political opponent, the worst
name he could call him was “Angloman.”) For Jefferson, France
represented the brightest future prospects; England represented “the dead
hand of the past.” At the nub of his opposition to Jay’s Treaty,
then, was his utter certainty that it threw the weight of the United States
onto the wrong side of history. “The Anglomen have in the end got their
treaty through,” he observed from his mountaintop in 1796, “and so
far have triumphed over the cause of republicanism.” But their victory,
painful as it was to witness, had also exposed their vulnerability. For it was
now quite obvious “that nothing can support them but the Colossus of the
President’s merits with the people, and the moment he retires, that his
successor, if a Monocrat, will be overborne by the republican sense.… In
the meantime, patience.”
⁴³

Just a few
weeks before he wrote these words, Jefferson had felt the urge to assure
Washington that, contrary to the gossip circulating in the corridors and byways
of Philadelphia, he was not responsible for the various rumors describing the
president as a quasi-senile front man for the Federalist conspiracy against the
vast majority of the American people. The historical record makes it perfectly
clear, to be sure, that Jefferson
was
orchestrating the campaign of
vilification, which had its chief base of operations in Virginia and its
headquarters at Monticello. But Jefferson was the kind of man who could have
passed a lie-detector test confirming his integrity, believing as he did that
the supreme significance of his larger cause rendered conventional distinctions
between truth and falsehood superfluous.

Washington’s response
was designed to let Jefferson know that his professed innocence itself sounded
like the defensive comments of a guilty man, and that Washington already knew a
good deal more than Jefferson realized about who was whispering what behind his
back. “If I had entertained any suspicious before,” wrote
Washington, “the assurances you have given me of the contrary would have
removed them; but the truth is, I harboured none.” (Translation: Your
protests confirm my suspicions.) Then Washington parted the curtain covering
his soul just enough to show Jefferson a glimpse of what he truly felt:
“As you have mentioned the subject yourself, it would not be frank,
candid or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as
derogatory from the opinion I had conceived you entertained to me.”
(Translation: I am onto your game.) “That to your particular friends and
connexions you have described, and they have described me, as a person under a
dangerous influence.” (Translation: My sources are impeccable.) “My
answer has invariably been that I had never discovered any thing in the conduct
of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions in my mind of his insincerity.”
(Translation: I have not done unto others what they have been doing unto
me.)

Washington concluded with an impassioned defense of his support
for Jay’s Treaty: “I was using my utmost exertions to establish a
national character of our own, independent, as far as our obligations and
justice would permit, of every nation of the earth.” But somehow he had
“been accused of being the enemy of one Nation [France], and subject to
the influence of another [England]; and to prove it, that every act of my
administration should be tortured, and the most insidious mis-representations
of them be made (by giving one side only of a subject, and that too in such
exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a
notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket.) But enough of this; I
have already gone farther in the expression of my feelings than I
intended.” (Translation: Even this mere glimpse into my soul is more than
you deserve, my former friend.)

For the next year, Jefferson attempted
to sustain at least the veneer of a friendship with Washington by writing him
letters in the Virginia gentleman mode, avoiding politics and foreign policy
altogether, focusing instead on his crop-rotation scheme at Monticello, the
vagaries of the weather, his vetch and wheat crop, and—a rather potent
metaphor—the best way to spread manure. Washington responded in
kind—that is, until the newspapers printed Jefferson’s old letter
to Phillip Mazzei (the one about America’s degenerate Samson and
Solomon). Then all communication from Mount Vernon to Monticello ceased
forever.
⁴⁴

Beyond the purely personal dimensions of their estrangement, beyond
Washington’s sense of betrayal and Jefferson’s artful minuet with
duplicity, this episode provides an invaluable clue to the larger and more
impersonal political concerns that were on Washington’s mind when he sat
down to compose the Farewell Address. They went far past the loss of
Jefferson’s friendship, important though it was, because
Jefferson’s behavior was symptomatic of more than a betrayal of trust; it
accurately reflected a fundamental division within the revolutionary generation
over the meaning of the Revolution and the different versions of
America’s abiding national interest that followed naturally from that
disagreement. The words that were used at the time, or the words employed by
historians later to capture the essence of the argument, are mere labels:
Federalists versus Republicans; pro-English versus pro-French versions of
American neutrality. Underlying the debate that surfaced in full-blown fashion
over Jay’s Treaty lurked a classic confrontation between those who wished
America’s revolutionary energies to be harnessed to the larger purposes
of nation-building and those who interpreted that very process as a betrayal of
the Revolution itself.

From Washington’s perspective, the
republic established by the Constitution created a government of laws that must
be obeyed once the duly elected representatives had reached a decision. That
was why he had acted so decisively to put down the Whiskey Rebellion and why he
expected compliance with Jay’s Treaty once its terms were approved by the
Congress. From Jefferson’s perspective, on the other hand, all laws and
treaties that reined in the liberating impulses of the Revolution were
illegitimate. That was why he regarded the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion
as reprehensible. Were not these Pennsylvania farmers protesting taxes to which
they did not consent? As for Jay’s Treaty, who in his right mind would
countenance the acceptance of neocolonial status within the hated British
Empire? Not obeying, but rather violating such unjust laws and treaties was the
obligation of every citizen. Was this not the higher law that Americans should
follow, arm in arm again with their trusted French brethren? In this
formulation, political behavior that was, strictly speaking, traitorous and
treasonable was, in fact, the only course that enjoyed the sanction of
America’s most hallowed revolutionary principles.

Perhaps the
most extreme example of this Republican mentality in action was James Monroe, a
zealous Jefferson protégé currently serving as the minister to
France. Though not in Jefferson’s league as a thinker or political
strategist, Monroe more than made up for these deficiencies by embracing the
core articles of the Republican faith with near-total abandon. He assured his
French hosts that Jay’s Treaty would never be approved by the Congress,
that the vast majority of the American people were eager to join France in war
with England, that the U.S. government stood ready to advance France a $5
million loan to subsidize its military expenses and that, when none of these
wild predictions materialized, the French government should patiently but
firmly disregard all messages from the American president, since he obviously
spoke for the aristocratic Anglomen and would soon be hurled from office by the
people. In the meantime, the French should feel perfectly free to retaliate
against American ships on the high seas. When they began to do so in the spring
of 1796 and the first prize confiscated was a ship named the
Mount
Vernon,
Monroe thought it was a providential version of poetic justice.
And by the way, he hoped that Benjamin Franklin Bache at the
Aurora
would see fit to publish, under a pseudonym of course, some of his confidential
communiqués from Paris protesting the most outrageous provisions of
Jay’s Treaty. All this from America’s official emissary to the
French government.
⁴⁵

A slightly
less extreme but infinitely more befuddled example of the same mentality had
surfaced inside Washington’s cabinet at the very moment he was making the
decision to send Jay’s Treaty to the Senate in August of 1795. The
successor to Jefferson as secretary of state was Edmund Randolph, like Monroe a
second-tier member of the Virginia dynasty, whose principal recommendation for
the job was an unblinking loyalty to Washington, but whose chief political
habit was to blink incessantly at any decision that demanded clear convictions
of his own. Poor Randolph, an otherwise-decent man who was clearly in over his
head, had granted an interview with the outgoing French minister to the United
States, Joseph Fauchet, who had then transcribed the high points of the
conversation in a dispatch that was subsequently intercepted at sea by a
British cruiser. The British were only too willing to forward the dispatch to
the American government. The day after Washington read it out loud to the full
cabinet, Randolph submitted his resignation.
⁴⁶

What the
Fauchet dispatch claimed and what we know on the basis of subsequent
scholarship are not synonymous. According to Fauchet, Randolph requested a
bribe as part of some mysterious scheme in support of the Whiskey Rebellion.
Although Randolph was almost certainly innocent of this charge, the whole tenor
and tone of Fauchet’s account revealed Randolph confiding his personal
opposition to the entire domestic and foreign policy of the Washington
administration, lamenting the ascendance of a “financiering class”
that aimed at the restitution of monarchy, decrying the enslavement of American
trade to “the audacity of England,” depicting Randolph himself as
the sole voice of “the patriotic party” within the government and
the last hope for bringing a sadly dazed and thoroughly confused President
Washington to his senses. Randolph’s unfortunate utterances were not
truly treasonable, as he spent the remainder of his life trying vainly and in
his foggy style to explain. In truth, he had simply allowed himself to get
caught engaging in the same talk that Jefferson was conveying to friends and
Monroe was sputtering out loud to anyone in Paris who would listen. The notion
that a diabolical conspiracy of moneymen and monarchists had seized control of
the federal government under Washington’s very nose was so widespread
within Virginia’s political elite that they had lost all perspective on
how conspiratorial their own words sounded to those denied the vision.
⁴⁷

And so when
Washington sat down to draft his Farewell Address, three salient features rose
up out of the immediate political terrain to command his attention: First, he
needed to demonstrate that, while poised for retirement, he was still very much
in charge, that those rumors of creeping senility and routinized ineptitude
were demonstrably wrong; second, he wanted to carve out a middle course, and do
so in a moderate tone, that together pushed his most ardent critics to the
fringes of the ongoing debate, where their shrill accusations, loaded language,
and throbbing moral certainty could languish in the obscurity they deserved;
third, the all-time master of exits wanted to make his final departure from the
public stage the occasion for explaining his own version of what the American
Revolution meant. Above all, it meant hanging together as a united people, much
as the Continental Army had hung together once before, so that those who were
making foreign policy into a divisive device in domestic politics, all in the
name of America’s revolutionary principles, were themselves inadvertently
subverting the very cause they claimed to champion. He was stepping forward
into the battle one final time, planting his standard squarely in the center of
the field, inviting the troops to rally around him rather than wander off in
romantic cavalry charges at the periphery, assuring them by his example that,
if they could only hold the position he defined, they would again prevail.