Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

IV

The opening of the session found the New England Federalists in high glee over the prospects. The correspondence of their leaders discloses their grim determination to have war with France; and if they had failed in their efforts to prevent a renewal of negotiations, they could use the extra session for the spreading of war propaganda. Upon this task they entered with unprecedented arrogance and intolerance.

The Message of Adams was dignified and calm, reviewing the situation, announcing the plans for a new attempt at negotiations, and urging the adoption of defensive measures in the meantime. The first fight came in the framing of the Reply to the Address in the House—and two young brilliant new members forged to the front to assume the aggressive leadership of the war party. The persuasive, polished eloquence of Ames could not be heard, for he was nursing himself in his fine new house at Dedham; nor, on the other side, could the lucid, convincing logic of Madison appear, for he was in retirement in Virginia. Sedgwick had been sent to the Senate, Fitzsimons had been defeated, Murray of Maryland was on his way to The Hague as Minister. On the Democratic side, Gallatin, Giles, and Nicholas of Virginia were to bear the brunt of the battle, and the two new men were to lead the Federalists with an audacity seldom equaled and never surpassed. These two young blades, Harrison Gray Otis of Boston and Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, were in their thirty-second year. The former was strikingly handsome, tall and well proportioned, with coal-black hair, eyes blue and sparkling with vivacity, nose thin and patrician, complexion rosy—his presence in any assembly would have been felt had he remained silent, and he was seldom silent. In dress fastidious, in manners affable, in repartee stinging, in the telling of a story a master of the art: a devotee to pleasure, dinners, dances, and women carried for him an irresistible appeal. His eloquence was of a high order. A thorough aristocrat, he prided himself on having no illusions as to liberty and democracy, and he made no secret of his contempt for the masses. The rising of the French against the ineffable cruelties of the nobility and monarchy merely meant to him an attack of beasts upon the homes and rights of gentlemen. Speedily he became an idol of his party, and he enjoyed the bitter conflicts of the House as keenly as the dinners where he was the life of the party.

Robert Goodloe Harper had much in common with Otis. Like him, Harper was a social lion and a dandy in dress. Of medium height, and with an uncommonly full chest which accentuated his pomposity, he had a handsome head and features, creating withal an impression of physical force and intellectual power. In eloquence he made up in force what he lacked in ornament. He had all of Giles’s bumptiousness without his consistency, and no member of the House approached him in insolence. Coming upon the scene when the conditions seemed ripe for bowling over the Democrats with abuse and intimidation, he fitted into the picture perfectly. Thus he became the outstanding orator against the French. True, four years before, in Charleston, he had paid court to the Jacobins with an assiduity that should have made him blush in later life—but did not. Appealing for membership in an extreme Jacobin society, he had worn the paraphernalia, spouted his harangues on the rights of man, paid his tribute to the Revolution, become the vice-president of the organization—and all he lacked to make him a Camille Desmoulins was a table on the boulevards and a guillotine.[1335] Now a convert to ‘law and order,’ he outstripped the most rabid enemies of the French. From ‘dining almost every day’ in 1793 at the table of the French Consul in Charleston, he passed without embarrassment four years later to the table of Liston, the British Minister.[1336] The rabid democrat had become a rabid aristocrat, and the society of the capital took him to its heart. In social intercourse, he was entertaining, amiable, and pleasing.[1337] Fond of the epicurean feast, expansive in the glow of women’s smiles, he became a social favorite, and his enemies broadly hinted that he was a master in the gentle art of intrigue.

Brilliant, charming men, these two young orators of the war party, and it is easy to imagine the homage of the fashionable ladies when, after their most virulent attacks on the Democrats, they found themselves surrounded in Mrs. Bingham’s drawing-room.

Even before Congress met, the premonitions of the coming Terror were in the air. With the impatient Giles, this was intolerable, and he soon retired to fight elsewhere; but Gallatin determined to ignore insults, disregard abuse, and to fight for moderate measures to keep the door open for negotiations. He was of the rare few who can keep their heads in the midst of riots and remain calm in a tempest. For a while he could count on Giles for rough blows at the enemy, on Livingston for eloquence and courage; he would have to rely upon himself for wisdom and the strategy of statesmanship.

V

The Message received, the war party in the House set itself with zest to the framing of a bellicose Reply calculated to compromise the chances for a peaceful accommodation of differences. Nicholas of Virginia, representing the Jeffersonians, proposed a substitute, couched in more conciliatory language, promising a review of the alleged grievances of the French—and this let loose the dogs of war. In presenting his amendment, Nicholas deprecated the Reply as framed because extreme, denunciatory, and provocative and not calculated to assist the embassy the President was sending. In negotiations it would necessarily follow that there would be an examination of the charges made against America by the French.[1338] It irritated Smith of Charleston that the Virginian should be ‘so wonderfully afraid of using language to irritate France,’ albeit he had protested against language that would irritate England when Jay was sailing on his mission.[1339] Otis was weary of references to England’s offenses against American commerce. ‘The English were stimulated to annoy our commerce through apprehension that we were united against them, and the French by a belief that we are divided in their favor.’[1340]

Livingston followed with a brilliant five-hour address, pointing out the flagrant violation of Article XVII of the treaty with France. We had made that treaty upon the basis that free bottoms make free goods, and in the Jay Treaty we had abandoned that ground in the interest of England. Of what was it that the French complained? What but the adoption of the British Order in Council which we had not resented? Even so, she was not justified in her course. That she would recede in negotiations he had no doubt, provided we used ‘language toward her suitable to that liberality which befits a wise and prudent nation.’ He had no apology to offer for his devotion to the cause of France. ‘I could read by the light of the flames that consumed my paternal mansion, by the joy that sparkled in every eye,’ he said, ‘how great were the consequences of her union with America.’[1341] Giles followed, a little more severe on the Federalist discriminations for England against France; and Gallatin closed in a sober, dignified, dispassionate analysis of the phrasing of the amendment to show that it was firm without being offensive.[1342]

Then Harper, with an elaborate speech laboriously wrought in seclusion, entered the debate. The French were intemperately denounced, the Democrats lashed, and Monroe treated with contempt. It was a war speech, prepared as war propaganda, the first of his war speeches to be published and widely circulated throughout the country, and printed and acclaimed in England. Like Smith and Ames before him, he was to have his triumph in Downing Street. The profits of one of his war productions, which had a ‘prodigious sale’ in England, were given to a benevolent society in that country.[1343] The Democrats were infuriated by Harper’s attack, and the ‘Aurora’ truly said that he had ‘unseasonably unmasked the intentions of his party.’[1344] When, about this time, Liston, the British Minister, was seen to tap the orator unceremoniously upon the shoulder while seated at his desk—for Liston was then a familiar figure upon the floor—and to whisper to him, Bache saw red. ‘If the French Minister had acted thus familiarly with Mr. Giles or Mr. Livingston, we should have heard something about French influence.’[1345] Pooh! sneered Fenno in the ‘Gazette,’ Liston was merely reminding Harper of a dinner engagement for that night. ‘Having heard it whispered,’ he added, ‘that Mr. Harper has received an invitation to dinner from another British Agent, the Consul General, we think ourselves bound to mention it.’[1346] Nothing could better illustrate the confident arrogance of the Federalist leaders at this time.