Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

The evidence is abundant that he resented the fame and popularity of Washington. Like Pickering, he did not share the enthusiasm over the great man’s military genius. During the war he had sometimes found fault with his military tactics.[1222] Later, when he became the second official of the Republic, he secretly resented the distance that separated him from the chief. He had played the patriot’s rôle long before Washington had shown a marked interest in the quarrel of the colonies; had been one of the makers of the Revolution; had served with distinction in diplomacy; and, unlike Washington, had studied politics and statecraft all his life. Why should he, with such a record, be so completely overshadowed, and why relegated to the end that upstarts like Hamilton—‘the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar’—might be pushed to the front? This, the reasoning of his jealousy which was to destroy his perspective and lead him into trouble.

IV

This was due in some measure to the distance between reality and the dream world in which he lived. As he grew older, he became more and more impressed with the pomp of power. The son of a Yankee shoemaker was covetous of the ribbons of distinction. The masses receded to a respectful distance. In the forefront were the gods, and he among them; and among these he claimed a right to the front rank. Ceremony became important. Titles were safeguards of organized society. An order of nobility sprang up in his imagination. ‘You and I,’ he wrote Sam Adams, ‘have seen four noble families rise up in Boston—the Crafts, Gores, Dawes, and Austins. These are really a nobility in our town, as the Howards, Somersets, Berties in England.’ His feet lost contact with the earth—he soared. ‘Let us do justice to the people and to the nobles; for nobles there are, as I have proved, in Boston as well as in Madrid.’[1223] Many things, he thought, can make for nobility—even matrimony. ‘Would Washington have been Commander of the Revolutionary army or President ... if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis? Would Jefferson have been President ... if he had not married the daughter of Mr. Wales?’ Thus he challenged John Taylor of Caroline.[1224]

Infatuated with such views, he was naturally in harmony with his party in its contempt for democracy.[1225] ‘If our government does well I shall be more surprised than I ever was in my life,’ he said one day, standing by the stove in the Senate Chamber before the gavel had fallen. Carroll ventured the opinion that it was strong enough. ‘If it is, I know not whence it is to arise,’ Adams replied. ‘It cannot have energy. It has neither rewards nor punishments.’[1226] This distrust of democracy was ingrained. We find it outcropping in his early life, as toward the end. When he was summoned to go over the reply of the Massachusetts Legislature to the pretensions of Hutchinson, the royal Governor, in 1773, he found ‘the draught of a report[1227] was full of very popular talk and of those democratical principles that have done so much mischief to this country.’[1228] Even Paine’s ‘Common Sense,’ which was tonic to the Revolution, was spoiled for him because ‘his plan was so democratical.’[1229] Haunting the bookstalls in London he thought ‘the newspapers, the magazines, the reviews, the daily pamphlets were all in the hands of hirelings,’ and was convinced that the men who ‘preached about ... liberty, equality, fraternity, and the rights of man’ could be hired ‘for a guinea a day.’[1230] It was after this that he wrote the ‘Discourses of Davilla’—an onslaught on democracy. And fourteen years after his retirement he wrote from his library at Quincy to John Taylor: ‘Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.’[1231] This distrust and distaste for the masses weakened him as much with the people as his temperamental defects with his party associates. I have dwelt on these weaknesses because they explain the tragedy of his failure. There were other qualities that entitled him to a happier fate.

V

Chief among these were the fervor and the disinterestedness of his love of country. Had he died the day after the signing of the Declaration, he would have been assured a permanent place in history. No man played a more heroic part in the fight for independence. The struggling young lawyer who refused a position under the Crown that he might not be embarrassed in supporting his countrymen in their inevitable struggle;[1232] who, awakened by the sinister drum-beats of the red coats every morning, ‘solemnly determined at all events to adhere to [his] principles in favor of [his] country’;[1233] who defended Hancock in the courts on the charge of smuggling with stubborn tenacity until the case ‘was suspended at last only by the battle of Lexington’;[1234] who, when the crisis came, prepared to immolate himself and family upon the altar of liberty;[1235] and who had the audacity to base an argument against the Stamp Act on the principles of the Revolution itself, and, standing four square against more petitions to the King, won the lasting gratitude and admiration of Jefferson when, as ‘the Colossus of the Debate,’[1236] he bore the brunt of the battle for the Declaration—that man could well hold his head high in the presence of Washington himself. ‘Politics,’ he wrote Warren, ‘are an ordeal path among red-hot plough shares. Who then would be a politician for the pleasure of running about barefooted among them. Yet some one must.’[1237] And again: ‘At such times as this there are many dangerous things to be done which nobody else will do, and therefore I cannot help attempting them.’[1238] Nor was he blind to his fate in the event of the failure of his cause. ‘I go mourning in my heart all day long,’ he wrote his wife in dark days, ‘though I say nothing. I am melancholy for the public and anxious for my family.... For God’s sake make your children hardy, active and industrious.’[1239] This intense Americanism did not moderate with time. As a politician he was all too often open to censure; as a patriot he was above reproach. Jefferson never doubted his absorption in his country; and Hamilton, temperamentally unable to get along with him, wrote him down as ‘honest, firm, faithful, and independent—a sincere lover of his country.’[1240] Because he had more enemies than friends, and more detractors than admirers, one might conclude from the opinions of his contemporaries that he had but mediocre ability. There is no question as to the fallibility of his judgment where his prejudices were enlisted and the characters of men were involved. Again we find Jefferson more friendly than the Federalists. ‘A bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men,’ he wrote; and then added, ‘This is all the ill that can possibly be said of him; he is profound in his views and accurate in his judgment except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment.’[1241] Hamilton thought him ‘a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric,’ and was not impressed with his intellectual endowments.[1242] The father of Wolcott thought him ‘of a very moderate share of prudence, and of far less real abilities than he believes he possesses.’[1243] And McHenry, having been expelled from the Cabinet for his disloyalty, declared ‘the mind of Mr. Adams like the last glimmerings of a lamp, feeble, wavering and unsteady, with occasionally a strong flash of light, his genius little, and that too insufficient to irradiate his judgment.’[1244] The Adams who emerges from these opinions is a man of ability often reduced to impotency by the lack of judgment. This is, no doubt, the whole truth about his intellect. The sneers from men who could not forgive him for the wrong they had done him, and from others who could not control him, cannot stand in the light of what he did, and said, and wrote.

As a writer, he suffers in comparison with Hamilton and Madison, and his more ambitious productions, like the ‘Discourses of Davilla,’ while showing much erudition and some ingenuity, are heavy and pompous. But in the earlier days when he was writing shorter papers for the press, he did better. Whether he could write or not, he loved to do it. The author of the earlier period was more interesting and attractive than that of later times.

However much the critics may quarrel over his capacity to write, the evidence is conclusive as to his ability to speak. As an orator he was the Patrick Henry of New England. His argument against the Writs of Assistance in 1761 fired the heart of Otis and swept him into the ranks of the active patriots. Jefferson bears testimony to the power of his eloquence in the fight for the Declaration. Given a cause that appealed to his heart and imagination, he never failed to find himself by losing himself in the fervor of the fight.

Nor can there be any question of his courage. It required temerity to step forth from the patriots’ ranks to face the representative of the Crown with the most audacious denials of his pretensions; courage, too, to lead the fight against further attempts at conciliation with the King. But the most courageous act of his career was his defense in court of Captain Preston, the British officer charged with murder in the Boston massacre. Not only physical courage was here demanded, for he invited personal attack, but moral courage at its highest. He was dependent for clientage on the Boston public and the victims of the massacre were Bostonians. He was an American, and he was standing between a hated redcoat and an American revenge. He gambled with his career, for he armed his enemies with ammunition, and he was charged with selling his country for an enormous fee. The fact that he received but eighteen guineas would have been the answer, but he maintained a dignified silence. There is nothing finer or more courageous in the records of a public man.[1245] This courage was to stand him in good stead when he defied his party for his country in the French negotiations, and played for the verdict of history.

This courage could only have sprung from the consciousness of an honest intent—and his honesty, personal or political, has never been questioned. Sedgwick recommended him to Hamilton for the Vice-Presidency as ‘a man of unconquerable intrepidity and of incorruptible integrity,’ and Hamilton was to find to his chagrin that the compliment was not given in a Pickwickian sense.[1246] And yet he was not a Puritan of the intolerant sort. In early life he was given to the reading of sermons and at one time confessed to an inclination to the ministry—but it did not last long. In early manhood, we find him moralizing in his diary against card-playing, but not on moral grounds. ‘It gratifies none of the senses ...; it can entertain the mind only by hushing its clamors.’[1247] Even the scurrility of his times spared him the charge of immorality. ‘No virgin or matron ever had cause to blush at sight of me,’ he wrote in his ‘Autobiography.’[1248] And while Franklin and Morris appear to have taken advantage of the moral laxity of Paris, we are quite sure that Adams, packed in tight among fashionable ladies watching the Queen eat soup, never gave a flirtatious glance, and are more than half persuaded that his declination to join Madame du Barry in her garden was due to her none too spotless reputation. But if he was not given to women or to song, it appears that he consumed his full share of wine. We have his own story of the fashionable dinners in the Philadelphia of the Continental Congress, when he would sit at the table from three until nine ‘drinking Madeira, claret and burgundy.’[1249] We get a glimpse of him in a New York Club before the Revolution with ‘punch, wine, pipes and tobacco.’[1250] And on another occasion he records with boastful pride that he ‘drank Madeira at a great rate and found no inconvenience in it.’[1251] Even so, we may be sure that he seldom drank to excess.