Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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by Washington, and the strong resistance, with clear military overtones, of Adams to the original maritime impressments and seizure crisis of 1798 had been successful, Jefferson had been spared the exposure of his ill-considered economic reprisals against larger economies of much less vulnerability than America’s to misconceived and largely unenforceable laws. He was finally free to present and force through the docile Congress a policy that laid the U.S. economy low and exposed Jefferson as an innumerate blowhard and a hypocrite. He spent much of the last year of his presidency in an immobilized state, racked by migraines and digestive problems.
Only the happenstance of the Louisiana Purchase made Jefferson a more successful president than Adams, and in that as in previous offices, Jefferson did not have the steady judgment and self-control of Washington, any more than had the quirky and irascible Adams.
Yet, though Jefferson botched his mad essay at economic warfare, he was a great expander of the country, popularizer of the presidency, and decentralizer of government, and one of the most politically gifted and effective leaders in the country’s history, clearly surpassed in this regard only by Franklin D. Roosevelt and possibly by Lincoln and Reagan also. His principal rival as the greatest intellectual in the presidency, Woodrow Wilson (though John Quincy Adams, John Adams’s son, could also be a rival), wrestled 110 years later with similar maritime provocations in a European war, and had the same pacifistic tendencies as Jefferson, but, at the head of a much more powerful America, would make war rather than tolerate the humiliation of America. Jefferson had done little as the country’s first secretary of state, and less, other than in partisan organization and political rough and tumble, as its second vice president. He was a talented president, but it is not accidental that he directed that his gravestone should refer to his status as author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia statute on the rights of man, and to his status as founder of the University of Virginia, and not to his great offices of state.
Only the reputation of the Democratic-Republicans as sincere adherents to popular government (which was not an imposture), and the continued erosion of the Federalists and the absence of a galvanizing figure to rally the opposition, prevented a political upheaval in the 1808 elections. Hamilton was sorely missed. Three of the candidates for national office from the previous election ran again. Jefferson followed the Washington precedent and retired after two terms, though he could presumably have been reelected, because of the disarray of his opponents and despite the fiasco of his trade policies. He was replaced by Madison as the presidential candidate of the Democratic-Republicans (Democrats, as they became, and Jefferson and Madison are celebrated as the founders of the modern Democratic Party), and George Clinton was again nominated for vice president. The Federalists again chose Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for president and Rufus King for vice president.
Some of the Jeffersonians splintered off under the half-mad but brilliant John Randolph of Roanoke, who was a states’ rights and nullification advocate (he proposed that states could decide the federal government had exceeded its powers and simply nullify the application of the offending law within their own borders). The eastern Jeffersonians nominated George Clinton, on what amounted almost to a free-trade platform. Clinton thus became the first and to date only person in American history to be nominated and stand for election as president and as vice president in the same year. Technically, he was running against himself, as the same person could not simultaneously hold both positions. The Randolphites were known as the “Quids” (because Randolph said they were neither Democratic-Republicans nor Federalists, and were a “third something,” or Tertium Quids—it was a mark of an erudite electorate that a splinter party acquired a Latin name). They nominated James Monroe for president, but he, unlike his administration colleague Clinton, declined to allow his name to stand against his old friend Madison. The vote was closer than in the previous election, but Madison and Clinton won, by 122 electoral votes to 47 for Pinckney and six for Clinton, who had the consolation of being reelected vice president by 113 to 47 for King. The Federalists made substantial gains in the Congress, but did not secure the majority of either house. Pinckney only received about 32 percent of the votes for president against about 55 percent for Madison.
The Americans suffered their first serious strategic setback, going back 50 years to the Seven Years’ War, when Jefferson had said that taking Canada was “a mere matter of marching.” It proved to be more complicated than that, but he didn’t even endow his country with the men to make the march. If Jefferson had taken a leaf from the book of his predecessors, and built up a large army and equipped it, he could have threatened Britain with the permanent seizure of Canada, and could have forced some variance in the maritime provocations of the British. The application of simple grade-three arithmetic would have told him, as it told his opponents and the countries he was aiming to influence, that the policies he did adopt could not succeed, and their failure squandered a good deal of the political capital and credibility that had been built up by his comrades in the establishment of the United States—Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Adams.
This setback would be compounded by Madison, but was a lost opportunity, not a lasting defeat, and was more than overshadowed by the Louisiana Purchase. In strategic terms, the Jefferson presidency, though more ambiguous than its predecessors, continued America’s advance, in a world where almost all other nations were wracked by war.
1. Disclosure requires reference to the author’s legal travails as the actual basis of this reflection; they are fully described in my previous book, A Matter of Principle, and summarized in the last footnote of Chapter 16.
2. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life, New York, Penguin, 2010, p. 554.
3. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2003, p. 470.
4. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 100.
5. Wood, op. cit., p. 157.
6. Ibid. p. 158.
7. Ibid. p. 162.
8. Daniel Ruddy, Theodore Roosevelt’s History of the United States in His Own Words, New York, Harper Collins, 2010, p. 1.
9. Wood, op. cit., p. 234.
10. Wood, op. cit., p. 208.
11. Wood, op. cit., p. 240.
12. Wood, op. cit., p. 267.
13. Wood, op. cit., p. 265.
14. Wood, op. cit., p. 285.
15. By the time Jefferson was inaugurated, Poland had been carved up entirely by the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Empires and had no king.
16. Pope Pius VII said, as the Barbary pirates regularly seized hostages and held them for ransom, that “the United States had done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages.” (Christopher Hitchens, “Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates,” City Journal, Spring 2007.)
17. Ruddy, op. cit., p. 89.
Andrew Jackson
Reconciling with Britain Abroad, and with Slavery at Home, 1809–1836
1. JAMES MADISON AS PRESIDENT
Madison was the last principal founder of the nation still in harness. His presidency was heavily preoccupied with the perpetual crisis caused by the refusal of the British and French to take the United States and its sovereignty seriously. The novelty had worn off America, and Napoleon was a far more epochal and immense historic figure—other than in the