Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

The other member of the Cabinet, the Attorney-General, was a political cipher. Knowing what we now know of the characters and factional affiliations of the President and his advisers, it will not be difficult to follow the serpentine trail of the next four years, nor to understand one of the forces that worked with Jefferson for the utter destruction of the Federalist Party.

CHAPTER XV
COMEDY AND HEROICS

I

SCARCELY had Adams entered upon his office when he found himself confronted with the possibility of a war with France. Some time before, Gouverneur Morris, the American Genêt in Paris, had been recalled, none too soon, and James Monroe had been sent to smooth the ruffled feathers of the French. Because he had followed his instructions too enthusiastically and failed to understand that ‘a diplomat is a person sent abroad to lie for his country,’ he had been recalled in disgrace, as Jefferson had foreseen, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a Charleston Federalist, had been sent as Minister. Not only had the French Government refused to receive him, but he had been ordered from the soil of France. All this seems wicked perversity on the part of France without a hasty glance at the antecedents of the story.

Primarily nothing could have been more unfortunate than the appointment of Morris. No more charming or clever diplomat than this bosom friend of Hamilton has served America abroad. Born to the purple, he was an aristocrat by nature, with a blatantly cynical and contemptuous conception of the masses of mankind. His was the shimmer due to generations of polishing. As a young man in the society of New York and Philadelphia, he was enormously popular because he was handsome, dashing, witty, eloquent, a bit risqué and in consequence of his fashionable and gilded background. In the Constitutional Convention no one spoke with greater fluency or frequency—or with less effect. He sought the establishment of an aristocratic state, and made no secret of his hostility to democracy. To an even greater degree than Hamilton he foreshadowed the extreme policies of the Federalist Party. He was, in truth, its personification, able, brilliant, rich; socially delightful, cynical, aristocratic, masterful, and disdainful of the frontier.[1300] Like Hamilton, he failed in the Convention, but his was the hand that fashioned the phrasing of the fundamental law.

There was more than a hint of the fashionable roué in this handsome fellow when he went to Paris. Women and their pursuit was ever an engrossing game with him. Even his graduation essay was on ‘Wit and Beauty,’ and for his Master’s Degree he wrote on ‘Love.’ He was the sort of beau that Congreve would have cherished, elegant in dress and manner, given to levity and light banter, eagerly sought. The loss of a leg through an accident in 1780 did not sour him nor diminish his appeal to women. On ‘a rough oak stick with a knob at the end,’[1301] he hobbled on to his triumphs.

Such was the man sent to succeed Jefferson, the philosopher of democracy, at the moment the Revolution was breaking on the boulevards—a bitter, outspoken partisan of the old régime, a sarcastic enemy of the Revolution, a champion of privilege less compromising than the nobility itself. While Genêt was intriguing against the Government in America, Morris was intriguing against the Government in France. But his love flowers were still thrown over the garden wall of politics. Jefferson had been shocked at his reactionary opinions in Paris. Madame Lafayette had chided him on being an aristocrat.[1302] Quite early he began his affair with Madame de Flahaut, the novelist, a pretty, winsome woman who effectively used her marriage to an old man as a lure for lovers, and his diary teems with references to the frail beauty. There were evenings at her home, sneering at liberty and democracy; teas in her salon; drives and dinners, when he was entranced by the ‘spirituel and delicate repartee’ of his friend.[1303] Then walks in the Gardens of the Tuileries and about the Champs Élysées, afternoons at Madame’s house reading ‘La Pucelle,’ while she rode about Paris in the well-known carriage of the American Minister,[1304] and finally, when danger came, he took her into his house. The Minister aimed high, and even the Duchess of Orleans was not above his amorous expectations, thinking her beautiful enough ‘to punish the duke for his irregularities,’ and we find him writing poems to her, and buying her a Newfoundland dog in London.[1305] No young blade ever found Paris more seductive.

On swept the Revolution, on came the Terror, with Morris openly and defiantly sneering at the former and its principles. The coldness of the crowds in the streets when the Queen rode by enraged him.[1306] In the terrible August days of 1792 he drove the reactionary Madame de Flahaut through the Bois de Boulogne,[1307] and when the nation imprisoned the King he was soon neck-deep in intrigues to effect his rescue.[1308] Messages were exchanged with Louis, plans perfected, and only the King’s courage failed. Later Louis made him the custodian of 750,000 livres to be used in bribing those who stood in the way of his escape. America’s Minister was paymaster of the King seeking to join the allied monarchs in the crushing of the Revolution.[1309] Much of this was known in Paris, and much of it known and approved by Federalist leaders in America, Ames objecting to the publication of certain papers because they would disclose Morris’s intolerable activities.[1310]

II

Monroe was the antithesis of Morris. Where Morris was brilliant, Monroe was dull; where Morris was bubbling with a sense of humor, Monroe had none at all; where Morris was a lover of dinners and dances, Monroe was indifferent; where Morris was a Cavalier, Monroe was a Puritan in his relations with women; where Morris was an aristocrat, Monroe was a democrat; Morris was a monarchist at heart, Monroe, a robust republican; Morris an enemy of the French Revolution, Monroe, a friend. But if Monroe was not scintillating, he was sincere, and if not brilliant, he was industrious.[1311] Soon he was as popular in Paris as Morris had been unpopular—so popular that Jay thought it not beneath his dignity as an American Minister to England to exchange belittling letters with Grenville about him. He had ironed out old differences when the Jay Treaty compromised his position.