Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

Leaving New England, the leader found much to interest him in New York. There was that sturdy, indomitable champion of State rights, and inveterate enemy of aristocracy, George Clinton, an uncompromising republican of Cromwellian audacity and decision, with an unequaled hold on the confidence and affections of the people. There, too, were the Livingstons, mortally offended by the political stupidity of Hamilton in defeating the brilliant Chancellor’s aspirations for the Senate. Had this numerous and powerful family a conference one night to discuss the affront and to emerge a unit in opposition?[566] Whatever the cause, the effect was clear—the Livingston clan was only too eager to join the insurgents, and this was not lost on the astute politician of Monticello. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, convincing orator, erudite lawyer, profound statesman, fascinating personality, possessing the glamour of wealth and tradition so important to a Jeffersonian leader in New York with its commercial princes and barons of the soil—here was a man to be cultivated with all the finesse of which Jefferson was capable. The master of Monticello could speak the language of the master of the New York manor house.

And Burr? Just what Jefferson expected of Burr is a mystery unsolvable. He appreciated his brilliancy and professional prestige, but were the penetrating eyes blind to the weaknesses of character? Just a little while before Burr had joined with Hamilton against Clinton, and Federalist votes had sent him to the Senate. There, to be sure, he had arrayed himself on the popular side, but could he be relied upon? He had played a lone hand, holding aloof from the Clintonians and the Livingstons, and dining often at the table of Hamilton; but that he was singled out for assiduous cultivation we may be sure. No one was closer to Jefferson than Dr. Rush when, in the early fall of 1792, the latter wrote a wheedling note to Burr. ‘Your friends everywhere,’ wrote the Doctor, ‘look to you to take an active part in removing the monarchical rubbish of our government. It is time to speak out or we are undone.’[567] Previous to this, Jefferson had been most courteous in permitting the charming Senator from New York to examine papers in the archives of the State Department until Washington interposed.[568]

Clinton, Livingston, and Burr—a triumvirate that caught Jefferson’s fancy; but he was interested in opportunities in New York having no direct connection with any of the three. The less imaginative Maclay had seen in a parade of the Sons of Tammany only ‘a grotesque scene,’ with the members ‘in Indian dresses,’ and while he had addressed them at a dinner he had concluded that ‘there is some kind of a scheme’ which was ‘not well digested as yet.’[569] Jefferson made it his business to learn more. He found that the strange organization was an answer, in part, to the Cincinnati which stood, in the popular mind, for aristocracy; that it was rabidly republican and wholly democratic; that it sympathized with the revolutionists in France, and resented the property disqualifications of our own Revolutionary soldiers for the suffrage, while the wealthy, notoriously friendly to England when these soldiers fought, were being accorded political recognition and place. Here was a society after his own heart, here a method to make the masses felt—a combination and coördination of their efforts. All over the land the hundreds of thousands of inarticulate, unimportant, ineffective, commonplace friends of democracy, and in one city these had been given a voice, an arm, a rostrum. It was not ‘grotesque’ to Jefferson. He did not join these imitation red men in their wigwam, nor drink of their ale, but John Pintard the chief became his friend and idolater, and with him the great man talked. The non-partisan society grew more and more democratic, soon intensely partisan, and at Tammany dinners the welkin rang to the toast to ‘Thomas Jefferson.’ New York became a cock-pit from the start.

But when the Jeffersonian board of strategy turned to New Jersey, the problem was more difficult. No outstanding leader, strong in the faith, stood ready to mount and ride. There, true, the Janus-faced Jonathan Dayton was ready to flirt with any force that might serve his personal ends. He was a speculator—and worse. Supporting and profiting from the Hamilton policies, he smiled on the Jeffersonians significantly.

In Pennsylvania there was the nucleus of a party and virile men to lead it—men like Mifflin, who, despite his drunkenness, was popular and a power; like Maclay, who had the force that intense conviction brings in spite of temperamental handicaps; men like Alexander J. Dallas, aggressive, daring, able; men utterly unfit for

the rough-and-tumble combats of practical politics whose characters and abilities made them potent in the fight—like Rush the physician, Rittenhouse the scientist, Logan the philosopher, and, looming above the tops of the Western forests, a young giant and genius, Albert Gallatin.

In Delaware, nothing; in Maryland, John Francis Mercer, fighter and intriguer, sapper and miner, agitator and organizer, with whom democracy was a religion, Hamilton a devil, and Jefferson a saint. In Virginia, a sparkling galaxy, Madison, Monroe, the accomplished Pendleton, the resourceful Giles, the extraordinary John Taylor of Caroline.

In North Carolina, Jefferson found a leader cut from his own pattern, an aristocratic democrat, a radical rich man, a consummate politician who made the history that lesser men wrote without mentioning his name, Willie Jones of Halifax. His broad acres, his wealth, his high social standing were the objects of his pride, and he lived in luxury and wore fine linen while the trusted leader of the masses, mingling familiarly with the most uncouth back-woodsman, inviting, however, only the select to partake of the hospitality of his home. There was more than a touch of the Virginia aristocrat of the time in his habits—he raced, gambled, hunted like a gentleman. Like Jefferson he was a master of the art of insinuation, a political and social reformer. He loved liberty, hated intolerance, and prevented the ratification of the Constitution in the first State Convention because of the absence of a Bill of Rights. There he exerted a subtle influence that was not conspicuous on the floor. If he was neither orator nor debater, he was a strategist, disciplinarian, diplomat, who fought with velvet gloves—with iron within. A characteristic portrait would show him puffing at his pipe in the midst of his farmer followers, suggesting, insinuating, interspersing his political conversation with discussions of the crops, farming implements, hunting dogs, horses. An Anthony in arousing the passions by subtle hints, he was an Iago in awakening suspicions.[570] Here was the man with the stuff that Jefferson required, generous and lovable in social relations, in politics relentless, hard as iron. He was the Jefferson of North Carolina—‘a man ... the object of more hatred and more adoration than has ever since lived’ in that State.[571] Nor did he stand alone without assistants, for there was Nathaniel Macon, honest, intense, man of the soil who loved his few acres, his dogs and horses, and his class; and there was Timothy Bloodworth whose fierce adherence to democracy and fanatical hatred of privilege may have been a poignant reflection of his poverty. Jones, the aristocratic lord of many acres; Macon the representative of the small farmer; Bloodworth the artisan, smithy at the forge, watchmaker, wheelwright, as well as preacher, doctor, and cultivator of the soil: his radicalism was born in suffering and in suffering he had grown.[572]