Mr. Jefferson had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to France, but he yielded to Washington’s earnest request that he should become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months. The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on what seems to have been a [pg 83]neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks. It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which Mr. Jefferson observed: “Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter days interspersed.” But there were other causes beside homesickness and headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward he described them as follows:—
“I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were [pg 84]the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative houses.”
It must be remembered that Jefferson’s absence in France had been the period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men’s minds. The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question, and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by Jefferson on the other, which ended [pg 85]with the election of Jefferson as President in the year 1800.
Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.[2] John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton’s notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways,—by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of “a thousand Spanish dollars” as the proper qualification for a voter.
The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises chiefly from [pg 86]a different belief as to the connection between education and morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows:—
“The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.... It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”
This is sound philosophy. The great prob[pg 87]lems in government, whether they relate to matters external or internal, are moral, not intellectual. There are, indeed, purely intellectual problems, such as the question between free silver and a gold standard; and as to these problems, the people may go wrong. But they are not vital. No nation ever yet achieved glory or incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As Jefferson himself said, “The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and short-lived.”
Washington’s cabinet was made up on the theory that it should represent not the party in power, but both parties,—for two parties already existed, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, who, under Jefferson’s influence, soon became known by the better name of Republicans. The cabinet consisted of four [pg 88]members, Jefferson, Secretary of State, Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General.
Knox sided almost always with Hamilton, and Randolph was an inconstant supporter of Jefferson. Though an able and learned man, he was given to hair-splitting and hesitation, and, in allusion to his habit of arguing on one side, but finally voting upon the other, Jefferson once remarked that he usually gave the shell to his friends, and reserved the oyster for his opponents.
The political opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton were so diametrically opposed that the cabinet was soon torn by dissension. Hamilton was for a strong government, for surrounding the President with pomp and etiquette, for a central authority as against the authority of the States. In pursuance of these ideas, he brought forward his famous measures for assumption of the state debts by the national government, for the funding of the national debt, and finally for the creation of a national bank. Jefferson opposed [pg 89]these measures, and, although the assumption and the funding laws had grave faults, and led to speculation, and in the case of many persons to financial ruin, yet it must be admitted that Jefferson never appreciated their merits.