Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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serious sovereign statehood that he had promised to pursue after the failure of the Congress and states to do so in the interregnum between Yorktown and Philadelphia, but he was determined to establish the presidency as a very republican but majestic office that was above faction, region, and partisanship. He alone was responsible for patronage and was very circumspect in resisting the importunity of office-seekers and filling the senior positions and federal bench with highly qualified people. (John Jay was a superlative choice as first chief justice.) Washington had an elegant (but not ostentatious) carriage, with six matched cream-colored horses, held rather ceremonious levees, and entertained somewhat opulently, with profusions of wigged footmen in full livery. Washington in public addresses referred to himself in the third person, and the iconography of his presidency, especially official portraits and medals, was an imitation of European monarchy. He never dined in a citizen’s private home and traveled somewhat elaborately but not with absurd trappings, as in his trips about New England in 1789 and through the South in 1791. There were criticisms that he had monarchical flourishes but he had made it widely known that he would resist at any cost any suggestion of such a transition for the presidency, and he encouraged Madison to oppose Adams’s effort to have the president referred to as “His Most Benign Majesty,” which would have reduced the office to an absurdity. (Adams was a terrible fidget with styles of address, and ruminated nervously aloud in the Congress about what he would be called when President Washington visited the Congress, since that title would preempt his as president of the Senate. The answer effortlessly emerged: Mr. Vice President.)
The United States quickly achieved, though the retention of this felicitous balance would vary with Washington’s successors, a fine combination of the solidity and dignity of monarchy with the spirit and effervescence of popular democracy. Not until the Fifth Republic of France, 165 years after the tumultuous founding of the First, would the fiercely contesting French national traditions of monarchy and republicanism be reconciled in a president with immense powers and a renewable seven-year term, an elected sovereign, the fusion (in Charles de Gaulle) of monarchy and republicanism. In other major European republics, such as Germany and Italy, the post–World War II presidents would be just stand-ins for deposed monarchs. In the United States, and in the latest of the French Republics, the president is chief of state and head of government. Madison devised and Washington inaugurated, this brilliant novelty of government.
Another indication of the grandiose ambitions of the new nation was the engagement of the French engineer Pierre-Charles l’Enfant to design a splendid capital of grand straight boulevards in what was an unpromising swamp but grew in one long lifetime to be an elegant and monumental capital of a great nation. None of the founders of the republic, and as far as can be discerned, none of its founding citizens either, dissented from the cult of predestined greatness that Washington, especially, but all of the founders according to their means and talents, lavished upon the national experiment as if from giant and constantly swinging incense-pots.
2. THE RIVALRY BETWEEN HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON
Under Jefferson’s influence, Madison moved away from his friendship with Hamilton, which had flowered while Jefferson was in Paris, and Madison and Hamilton, with John Jay and a few others, were writing the Federalist Papers. Jefferson found Hamilton’s cynicism, materialism, and brusqueness, his lack of the idealism of the contemplative Enlightenment and disrespect for the gracious civilities of France, jarring. He and Madison took to referring to Hamilton and his entourage as “speculators, stock-jobbers, and Tories,” the last an especially odious word in the aftermath of the Revolution. With the death of Franklin, Jefferson was able to hold himself out as the worldly traveler and connoisseur of civilization at its rich sources, protesting all the while to be the true democrat, patrician and elitist though his notions of democracy were. Washington, who remained above attack, even after his whole-hearted support of Hamilton’s suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, was trying to run a government whose principal cabinet members were starting to splinter badly apart. The spirit of party and notion of opposition was not immediately respectable, but Jefferson and Madison began press attacks on Hamilton and Adams.
A battle developed between rival newspapers, John Fenno’s strongly Federalist Gazette of the United States, founded in 1789, and Philip Freneau’s opposition National Gazette, founded in 1790. Freneau was incentivized by being named an official interpreter by the State Department and his newspaper was a fire-breathing spigot of billingsgate and sensationalism directed at Hamilton, Adams, the Federalists, and, by implication, the president himself. The government was accused of promoting monarchism and an aristocracy, as well as a sleazy commercialism, and subverting republicanism and Jefferson’s notions of democracy (which were, to say the least, idiosyncratic). Fenno took the gloves off at once and directly attacked Jefferson as a scheming and treacherous enemy of the Constitution. It was an improbable and swift descent into an ear-splitting slanging match between Fenno and Freneau.
British precedents were somewhat replicated, as Hamilton and Adams were portrayed by their enemies as “the court,” the Tories around Washington’s crowned majesty, while Jefferson and Madison fancied themselves the country gentry loyal opposition, with Jefferson having the aspect of the sly Whig grandee with popular, if far from egalitarian, affectations, a new Walpole. The Whigs became the Republican Party, and the Federalists evolved from the supporters of the Constitution, which soon had general adherence, so almost everyone was in that sense a federalist, to a more urban and commercial bloc that Freneau and his sponsors labeled, as tendentiously as possible, Tories. It was a preposterous state of affairs, as the two senior cabinet members hurled muck at each other, and Jefferson employed in the government an anti-government propagandist flinging vitriol at the administration of which Jefferson was a senior member. Washington urged Hamilton to reply to Jefferson, to reassure general opinion, and tried to assure Jefferson that there was no such plot against the Constitution and to promote monarchic leanings, as he feared and alleged.
Both Hamilton and Jefferson were urging Washington to take a second term, but the cabinet meetings by mid-1792 had the two senior cabinet secretaries quarrelling, as Jefferson said, like roosters. Washington wrote to both in July 1792, asking for “more charity for the opinions and acts of one another.” Both men replied the same day to Washington, Hamilton in terms of forthright grievances against Jefferson’s attacks on his policies and on Hamilton personally. Jefferson sent a rather labored attack on Hamilton and spent much of his letter defending the hiring of Freneau at the State Department. Given the brilliance and historic importance of the men, it was a disappointingly immature performance, a schoolyard shouting match, in which Hamilton seemed several grades more advanced than his rival. Jefferson wrote Washington that he would retire soon but that “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment when history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head”—pretty juvenile carping from the author of the Declaration of Independence, and vulgar snobbery as well, toward the illegitimate son of a Scottish West Indian merchant who had rendered invaluable service to the new nation.5
3. WASHINGTON’S SECOND TERM
By simply not responding to endless requests from all sides that he allow himself to be selected for another presidential term, Washington backed into his reelection, again unanimously. Adams ran more strongly for vice president than he had four years before, clinging tightly to the president’s coat-tails, and was irritated to have come only 77 votes to 50 ahead of the long-serving governor of New York, George Clinton, who just four years before had been one of the leading opponents of ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton had feared that Jefferson might manage to slip into the vice presidency over the less agile Adams. The Treasury secretary was less preoccupied with personal disparagements of Jefferson, but regarded him as “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination entertaining and propagating notions inconsistent with dignified and orderly government.”6 In January 1793, Jefferson’s followers moved five motions of censure against Hamilton in the House of Representatives, all of which Hamilton had rejected handily, probably with the known support of the unanimously reacclaimed president.
Lost in the controversy was the testimony Washington’s unanimous reelection gave to the unquestionable success, great dignity of office, and successful