Pennsylvania Avenue, stretching from the President’s house to the Capitol, bordered by miasmic swamps, did not at this time boast a single building; nor would it have been possible to have lived along this causeway ‘without devoting its wretched tenant to perpetual fevers.’[1867] From the steps of the Capitol one could count seven or eight boarding-houses, one tailor’s shop, one shoemaker’s, one printing establishment, the home of a washwoman, a grocery shop, a stationery store, a dry-goods house, and an oyster market. And this was all. Three quarters of a mile away on the Eastern Branch stood five or six houses and an empty warehouse. At the wharf, not a single ship. From the President’s house to Georgetown living conditions were better because of immunity from swamps, but the wretched roads made it all but prohibitive as a place of residence for members of Congress. Six or seven of the more fastidious braved the distance and found comfortable quarters; two or three found lodgings near the President’s house; but the remainder crowded into the boarding-houses on Capitol Hill. In the best of these, by sharing a room one could have attendance, wood, candles, food, and an abundance of liquor for fifteen dollars a week. However, the fare was unsatisfactory, the beef not good, and vegetables hard to get.[1868] Such was the hair-trigger delicacy of the political situation that this packing of the politicians might easily have led to altercations and bloodshed had they not seen fit to herd together according to their political views. There was some gambling, some drinking, but Gallatin observed that for the most part the members ‘drank politics’ instead of liquor.[1869]
How the dandies of the Federalist circle must have missed the royal hospitality at Mrs. Bingham’s! Pathetic efforts were put forth to create something that might pass for society, but so limited were the resources that the lone church at the bottom of Capitol Hill, which had previously served as a tobacco house, was found alluring, and women donned their finery for worship.[1870] The Thomas Laws, who had one of the few pretentious houses, organized a ‘dancing assembly’ to which many subscribed.[1871] Mrs. Law, related to both Lord Baltimore and Mrs. Washington, who aspired to the scepter of Mrs. Bingham, was a worldly woman, over-fond of admiration and company, and finally there was a divorce. But at this time she drew the gayer element to her by her merry hospitality. ‘Lay down your hat, we have a fine roast turkey and you must stay and eat it,’ she would say to a caller, and soon others would casually appear, and an informal party would result.[1872] Callers in the old houses in Georgetown where Southern hospitality held sway, found ‘bread, butter, ham, and cakes set before them,’ and on leaving they would likely as not carry away cake and apples in their pockets, a bottle of milk in their hands.[1873] Great was the amusement of the fashionable men and women, who had been so elegantly served at the Binghams’ by the French chef, on finding themselves jolting over the dirt roads to their lodgings with their pockets crammed with cake.
This was the Washington into which Jefferson was carried in a stage-coach for the decisive struggle of his career. Wishing to pay his respects to Adams, for whom he felt more respect than did the Hamiltonian wing of the President’s own party, he wondered if the inordinate vanity of his defeated rival would interpret the call as an attempt to humiliate him. He determined to take the chance. Entering the President’s house, he found Adams alone—the old man in those difficult days was all but isolated. One glance was enough to justify the caller’s fears. In great agitation, and neglecting first to offer his visitor a chair, Adams burst forth: ‘You have turned me out; you have turned me out.’
With the gentleness of an elder soothing a hurt child, Jefferson replied, drawing on his familiarity with the workings of the minds and hearts of men, ‘I have not turned you out, Mr. Adams; and I am glad to avail myself of this occasion to show that I have not and to explain my views. In consequence of a division of opinion existing among our fellow-citizens, as to the proper constitution of our political institutions, and of the wisdom and propriety of certain measures ... that portion of our citizens that approved and advocated one class of these opinions and measures selected you as their candidate ... and their opponents selected me. If you and myself had been inexistent, or for any cause had not been selected, other persons would have been selected in our places; and thus the contest would have been carried on, and with the same result, except that the party which supported you would have been defeated by a greater majority, as it was known that, but for you, your party would have carried their unpopular measures much further than they did.’ Suffering as he was under the treachery of the Hamiltonians, this softened the unhappy President’s mood. Jefferson was offered a chair. The two men, who had been intimate in Revolutionary days and in Paris, engaged in a friendly discussion of the topics of the day, and parted with mutual expressions of respect.
Jefferson returned to Conrad’s boarding-house, where he had taken a suite of rooms. It was a commodious house, standing on a hill, the precipitate sides of which were covered with grass and shrubs in a natural state. The windows of Jefferson’s rooms commanded a beautiful view of the surrounding country—the level plain between the hill and the Potomac through which the tree-lined Taber wound its course; and the man of Monticello could look down from his windows on the tulip-poplar trees, the magnolia, the azalea, the wild rose, the hawthorn. Characteristically enough, he had gone to Conrad’s because of the charms of the scenery. There the man of the hour lived like the other lodgers, with the exception of having a drawing-room for the reception of visitors; eating at the common table with the others, at the foot of the table nearest the door and most remote from the fire. When Mrs. John Brown, wife of the Kentucky Senator, insisted that he sit at the head of the table, as the oldest man if not as the Vice-President, he waved the suggestion aside with a smile of deprecation, and there, in the coldest part of the room, he continued until he moved into the President’s house. But for Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Theodorus Bailey, wife of a Jeffersonian Congressman from New York, the mess table would have resembled ‘a refectory of monks.’[1874] Living under the same roof during the hectic weeks that followed were Gallatin who shared his room with Varnum, a Democrat from Massachusetts, Senator John Langdon, General Sam Smith of Maryland, Senator Abraham Baldwin of Georgia, Senator Wilson Carey Nicholas of Virginia, his brother, the Virginia Representative, and the Browns and Baileys. In the impending crisis Jefferson could scarcely have surrounded himself with a better board of strategy. There we will leave him for a while to take up the threads of the Federalist conspiracy to prevent his election and thwart the public will.
II
While Jefferson was calmly observing the development of the conspiracy, and Gouverneur Morris was reflecting on the absurdity of the human comedy, Alexander Hamilton sat in his office in New York writing feverishly to the leaders of his party. If he wrote in bitterness it was because he was fighting for the last vestige of his prestige as a leader. It had been ominous enough when he lost control of the party caucus and the leaders of the second class deserted him for Adams, but now, to his horror, he found the leaders of the first class scheming for the election of Burr, his pet aversion, to the Presidency. This was too much. Through the latter part of December, the indignant sparks flew from his fast-flying pen as he sought desperately to dissuade the conspirators who had been his faithful servitors. On the 16th he wrote Wolcott of his hope that ‘New England at least will not so far lose its head as to fall into this snare.’ Jefferson was infinitely preferable, because ‘not so dangerous a man’ and because he had ‘pretensions to character.’ But Burr was a ‘bankrupt beyond redemption except by the plunder of his country.’ He was ‘the Catiline of America.’ Would Wolcott communicate these views to Marshall and Sedgwick and reply speedily?[1875] The next day Hamilton and his erstwhile idolater, Otis, were both busy with their pens. The former, in an evident fever of anxiety, was writing again to Wolcott. It was incredible that Federalists should be considering Burr. Within the last three weeks at his own table he had toasted the French Republic, the commissioners on both sides who had negotiated the peace, Bonaparte and Lafayette. Could anything have been more monstrous? ‘Alas, when will men consult their reasons rather than their passions?’ he asked. Elect Burr merely to mortify the Democrats by the defeat of Jefferson? ‘This disposition reminds me of the conduct of the Dutch moneyed man, who, from hatred of the old aristocracy, favored the admission of the French into Holland to overturn everything. Adieu to the Federal Troy if they once introduce this Grecian horse into their citadel.’[1876]
While Hamilton was writing thus to Wolcott, Otis, in Boston, was writing to Hamilton. ‘It is palpable,’ he wrote, ‘that to elect Burr is to cover the opposition with chagrin and to sow among them the seeds of morbid division.’ But how open communication with Burr? ‘We in Massachusetts do not know the man. You do. Please advise us.’[1877] Hearing a few days later that Sedgwick was deep in the plot, Hamilton wrote him with almost hysterical earnestness. ‘For heaven’s sake, let not the Federalist party be responsible for the elevation of this man [Burr].’[1878] Two days more, and Hamilton was writing in New York; Harper, who had been his idolater, was similarly engaged in Baltimore. The former was writing Morris, seeking an understanding with Jefferson; Harper was writing Aaron Burr, proffering an alliance. ‘Jefferson or Burr? The former without all doubt,’ wrote Hamilton. ‘Let our situation be improved to obtain from Jefferson assurances on certain points—the maintenance of the present system, especially on the cardinal articles of public credit—a navy, neutrality. Make any discreet use you think fit with this letter.’[1879] Alas, the flimsiness of political friendship! At that very hour Harper was writing Burr that the contest would be settled in the House. ‘The language of the Democrats is that you will yield your pretensions to their favorite.... I advise you to take no step whatever by which the choice of the House ... can be impeded or embarrassed. Keep the game perfectly in your own hands, but do not answer this letter, or any other that may be written to you by a Federal man, nor write to any of that party.’[1880]
No importunities from Hamilton were necessary in the case of Morris, who had taken the high ground ‘that since it was evidently the intention of our fellow citizens to make Mr. Jefferson their President, it seems proper to fulfill that intention.’[1881] Such was his response to Hamilton, who responded gratefully to the loyalty of one follower. ‘If there is a man in the world I ought to hate,’ he wrote, ‘it is Jefferson. With Burr I have always been personally well. But the public good must be paramount to every private consideration.’[1882] The next day Hamilton was bearing down hard on James A. Bayard, a Federalist Representative from Delaware, with an excoriation of Burr as liable to overturn the government to extend his power. Was it possible that Federalists were thinking of arrangements with a man of Burr’s character? ‘No engagement that may be made with him can be depended upon. While making it, he will laugh in his sleeve at the credulity of those with whom he makes it; and the first moment it suits his views to break it he will do so.’[1883] At the same time he was appealing to John Rutledge of South Carolina to assist in crushing the Federalists’ conspiracy as ‘a service to your country.’[1884] That month, too, Senator Ross of Pennsylvania heard from New York. ‘Mr. Burr is the last man in the United States to be supported by the Federalists,’ he read. Why not seek an understanding with Jefferson?[1885]
But as December faded from the calendar, the colossal genius of Federalism found himself in a position of pitiful impotency and isolation. Morris and Jay shared his views, but even the New York friends of his youth, like Troup, were unresponsive, and most of the leaders, who had once responded gladly to his nod, were ignoring his frantic efforts and proceeding with their plans. On the day he was writing Bayard, two men knocked at the lodgings of Morris, and Robert Goodhue Harper and Senator Henry Latimer of Delaware appeared to electioneer the delightful cynic whose cynicism held so much of wisdom. The voluble Harper was the spokesman. Burr, he said, was his ‘intimate friend.’ It was advisable, he thought, to elect Burr ‘without asking or expecting any assurances respecting his future administration.’ There was enough in Burr’s temper and disposition to give ample security ‘for a conduct hostile to the democratic spirit.’ Morris listened patiently, and dryly suggested the wisdom of the House suspending its determination ‘until they can have more light as to the merit and probable conduct of the candidates.’[1886] Unable to see with the majority of his party, Morris, who had touched life at so many points and in so many places, did not share in Hamilton’s rage. ‘Indeed, my dear friend,’ he wrote Robert Livingston about this time, ‘this farce of life contains nothing which should put us out of humor.’[1887] With Harper making a personal canvass for Burr, Judge Samuel Sewall, of the Essex Junto, was urging Otis to stand for ‘a steady and decided vote of the Federal party for Mr. Burr,’ because it might at any rate prevent an election—a consummation ‘most desirable.’[1888]