The Friendship - Adams and Jefferson

Ellis returns to Adams and Jefferson for his last essay in Founding Brothers. He focuses on their reconciliation and the exchange of letters which continued for 14 years until their deaths within hours of each other on July 4th, 1826.

The contortions involved in their reconciliation, although not as valuable historically as the letters themselves, interests me because of the light it sheds on the personalities -- Adams as the grumpy old man of American politics and Jefferson as the "republican" aristocrat and master of denial. If Adams had a tendency to lacerate himself, Jefferson was equally inclined to believe that nothing was ever his fault.

Reconciling two such stubborn and different men required an intermediary and that was role taken by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.  As they exchanged letters, Rush proposed to Adams  "that they dispense with the usual topics and report to each other on their respective dreams."  In 1809, Rush reported "his most amazing dream yet":

 . . . that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life. Jefferson had then responded to his magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness. The two great patriarchs had then engaged in a correspondence over several years in they candidly acknowledged their mutual mistakes, shared their profound reflections on the meaning of American independence, and recovered their famous friendship.

That fact that this "dream" was to become a reality did not keep Adams from mocking the possibility.  Yet he admitted the bonds of his friendship with Jefferson and noted, "If I should receive a letter from him, I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it."

Rush had also been writing to Jefferson and suggesting "that Adams had indicated he was now eager for a reconciliation and virtually on his deathbed."  But Jefferson would not take the bait, "convinced as he was after his earlier exchange with Abigail that he had already made a heroic effort that had been summarily rejected."

The "reconciliation" came closer in 1811 when Edward Coles, "a Jefferson protege" visited Adams who "let it be known that his political disagreements with Jefferson had never killed his affection for the man."  Yet Jefferson still refused to write.  On Christmas Day of 1811, Adams confronted Rush:

"I perceive plainly, Rush, that you have been teasing Jefferson to write me, as you did me to write him." Adams also knew full well that Rush was sending edited versions of his letters to Jefferson, removing the potentially offensive passages.

In the end, Ellis notes, "it was Adams who made the decisive move."  Why?  As Ellis points out, "the friendship and the mutual trust on which it had rested had, in fact, not been recovered by 1812."  Ellis comes up with two reasons.

[First,] The resumption of his correspondence with Jefferson afforded Adams the opportunity to challenge the Jeffersonian version [of history] and to do so in the form of a written record virtually certain to become a major historical document of its own."  

Second, the reconciliation and ensuing correspondence permitted Adams to join Jefferson as the costar of an artfully arranged final act in the revolutionary drama. Adams had spent most of his retirement years denouncing such contrivances as gross distortions of history. But he had also spent those same years marveling at the benefits that accrued to anyone willing to pose for posterity in the mythical mode. If he could only control himself, if he could only speak the lines that history wanted to hear, if he could yet fit himself into the heroic mold like a kind of living statue, he might yet win his ticket to immortality.

So Adams saw the correspondence with Jefferson as a way to write his own version of history -- and have history pay attention.

The Collaborators - Adams and Jefferson

My title might suggest John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the collaborators, but in reality Ellis's essay describes how their friendship fell apart to be replaced by secondary collaborations -- Adams with his wife, and Jefferson with Madison -- and by partisan politics.

Although they had been close friends for over twenty years, Adams and Jefferson found themselves on opposites sides of the political divide that emerged after the ratification of the Constitution.  The natural tendency is to ask: who was to blame?  The answer is: Jefferson.  He put political considersations above friendship.

Having narrowly defeated Jefferson for president, Adams wanted to bring Jefferson into the circle of his administration-- in a way that Adams had not been during Washington's presidency.  According to Ellis, Adams was "disposed to agree and consider a bipartisan political alliance grounded in the personal trust of the once-great collaboration."

Jefferson seemed to inclined to accept the alliance, but Madison persuaded him against it.  "Jefferson must not permit himself to be drawn into the policy-making process of the Adams administration," the argument ran, "lest it compromise his role as leader of the Republican opposition."

Jefferson presented his "friend" Adams with his decision, and Ellis summarizes the encounter:

On March 6, 1797, Adams and Jefferson dined with Washington at the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. Adams learned that Jefferson was unwilling to join the cabinet and that neither Jefferson nor Madison was willing to be part of the peace delegation to France. Jefferson learned that Adams had been battling his Federalist advisers, who opposed a vigorous Jefferson presence in the administration. They left the dinner together and walked down Market Street to Fifth, two blocks from the very spot where Jefferson had drafted the words of the Declaration of Independence that Adams had so forcefully defended before the Continental Congress almost twenty-one years earlier. As Jefferson remembered it later, "we took leave, and he never after that said one word to me on the subject or ever consulted me as to any measure of government." 

Adams "was left alone with Abigail, the only collaborator he could truly trust." This is what he wrote to her:

"I never wanted your advice and assistance more in my life. . . . The times are critical and dangerous and I must have you here to assist me. . . . You must leave the farm to the mercy of the winds. I can do nothing without you." 

The Farewell - George Washington

I've been away from this blog a considerable time. An election has come and gone (though it seemed to most an agonizingly long and expensive election); a president has been re-elected for a second term. Barack Obama grew tearful at the thought of those who had worked so hard for him in his "last" campaign.

The fact that an American president only has two terms was a precedent set by George Washington. In this section of Joseph Ellis's historical sketches, he focuses on Washington's famous Farewell Address, the letter to the American people in which Washington declared he was retiring and would not run for a third term. 

Ellis declares that Washington's "Farewell Address achieved transcendental status, ranking alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address as a seminal statement of America's abiding principles."  (That may have been true twenty or thirty years ago, but in the American Literature anthology I taught from it no longer puts in an appearance.) 

What were the "abiding principles" expressed in Washington's "letter"?  (It was never really an address, never spoken publicly; instead it was, by design, a letter published in newspapers.)  According to Ellis: 

Washington devoted several paragraphs to the need for national unity. He denounced excessive partisanship, most especially when it took the form of political parties pursuing a vested ideological agenda or sectional interest groups oblivious to the advantages of cooperation.  The rest of the address was devoted to foreign policy, calling for strict American neutrality and diplomatic independence from the tangled affairs of Europe.

His admonishment against "excessive partisanship" has obviously not been heeded, though everyone still pays lip service to it.  And his call for "strict American neutrality" seems woefully outdated, though there are still those who call for it.

What was important about the Farewell Address was not just its admonitions but the simple fact that it announced Washington's retirement.  "By resigning voluntarily," Ellis states, "he was declaring that his deepest allegiances, like those of his critics, were thoroughly republican."  In other words, "Washington was making his ultimate statement as America's first and last benevolent monarch."

The Silence - Franklin and Madison

This chapter is about one of Benjamin Franklin's last acts -- his attempt to break the official silence about the institution of slavery.  Franklin's action was in the form of his signature on a petition from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society that arrived at the House of Representatives on February 12, 1790.

It urged the Congress to "take such measures in their wisdom, as the powers with which they are invested will authorize, for promoting the abolition of slavery, and discouraging every species of traffic in slaves." . . . this new petition made two additional points. . . First, it claimed that both slavery ands the slave trade were incompatible with the values for which the American Revolution had been fought . . . Second, it challenged the claim that the Constitution prohibited any legislation by the federal government against the slave trade for twenty years, suggesting instead that the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution empowered the Congress to take whatever action it deemed "necessary and proper" to eliminate the stigma of traffic in human beings and to "Countenance the Restoration of Liberty for all Negroes."

The reaction from the representatives of the southern states was strong:

. . . several representatives from South Carolina . . . objected to the suggestion that the petitions should be read along in the halls of Congress.  Aedanus Burke . . . warned that the petitioners were "blowing the trumpet of sedition" and demanded that the galleries be cleared of all spectators and newspaper reporters. . . . The position of all the speakers from the Deep South seemed to be that the Constitution not only prohibited the Congress from legislating about slavery or the slave trade; it forbade anyone in Congress from even mentioning those subjects publicly.

Hence the name of the chapter -- "The Silence."

Although James Jackson from Georgia was the major spokesman for those who opposed the petition, the politician who did the most, not only to defeat the petition but to strengthen the Southern position, was James Madison.

Madison's position on slavery captured the essence of what might be called "the Virginia straddle." On the one hand, he found the blatantly proslavery arguments "shamefully indecent" and described his colleagues from South Carolina and Georgia as "intemperate beyond all example and even all decorum." . . . But a fault line ran through the center of his thinking, a kind of mysterious region where ideas entered going in one direction but then emerged headed the opposite way.

Ellis goes on to explain as best he can:

In the midst of this willful confusion, one Madisonian conviction shone through . . . -- namely, that slavery was an explosive topic that must be removed from the political agenda of the new nation. It was taboo because it exposed the inherent contradictions of the Virginia position, which was much closer to the position of the Deep South than Madison wished to acknowledge, even to himself. And it was taboo because, more than any other controversy, it possessed the political potential to destroy the union. 

The contrast between Franklin and Madison is summed up as follows:

Franklin wanted to put slavery onto the national agenda before it was too late to take decisive action in accord with the principles of the Revolution. Madison wanted to take slavery off the national agenda because he believed that decisive action would result in the destruction of either the Virginia planter class or the nation itself.

Franklin lost, and Madison won. But Madison's "victory" went far beyond defeating the petition: "Madison wanted to use the vote on the committee report to create the equivalent of a landmark decision prohibiting any national scheme for emancipation."

When Madision succeeded, even George Washington was "relieved," writing to a Virginia friend that "the slave business has at last [been] put to rest and will scarce awake."

Of course, it would awake again, and the full awakening would be called the Civil War.

The Dinner - Hamilton and Madison

At the center of this chapter is a dinner party, arranged by Thomas Jefferson, between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.  According to Jefferson, by arranging this simple dinner, he had "brokered a political bargain of decidedly far-reaching significance." However, exactly what the bargain was and who got what is not a simple matter.

Conventional history declares that:

Madison agreed to permit the core provision of Hamilton's fiscal program to pass; and in return Hamilton agreed to use his influence to assure that the permanent residence of the national capital would be on the Potomac River.

But what was this "core provision of Hamilton's fiscal program"? There's the rub. Whenever money is involved, nothing is what it seems.

Hamilton's program seemed simple; he wanted the new federal government to assume the debts incurred by the states during the Revolutionary War and "all citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par --- that is, the full value of the government's original promise. "

Here's the problem, as Madison increasingly saw it:

But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. . . . The picture that began to congeal in his ]Madison's] mind was the essence of injustice: battle-worn veterans of the war for independence being cheated out of their just rewards by mere moneymen." 

But Madison had other problems with Hamilton's proposal:

. . . his core objections were economic. Most of the southern states, Virginia among them, had paid off the bulk of their wartime debts. The assumption proposal therefore did them an injustice, by "compelling them, after having done their duty, to contribute to those states who have not equally done their duty."

So why did Madison ultimately support the Assumption Bill?  Madison was from Virginia, and out of the deal his state got more than just the location of the new federal capital.

. . . the new version of the Assumption Bill would reduce the state's [Virginia's] total obligation so that the debt assumed and the federal taxes owed would turn out, rather miraculously, exactly equal ($3.5 million). Being therefore to receive exactly what she is to pay," . . . "she will neither win not lose by the measure."

Plus the capital would be in Virginia!  And that would "vivify our agriculture and commerce by circulating thro' our state an additional sum every year of half a million dollars."

So, for Virginia, it was as much about the money as the location.

The Duel - Burr and Hamilton

According to Ellis, the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was the "culmination of a long-standing personal animosity and political disagreement" between the two men, "that emerged naturally . . . out of the supercharged political culture of the early republic."

The more immediate cause of the duel, which resulted in Hamilton's death and Burr's disgrace, was a letter published in March, 1804 by Dr. Charles Cooper in the Albany Register in which Cooper "recalled a harangue Hamilton had delivered against Burr the preceding February." Cooper didn't report exactly what Hamilton said, but the letter concluded with this statement: "I could detail to you a still more despicable opinion which General HAMILTON has expressed of Mr. BURR."

On June 18th, Burr sent Hamilton a letter drawing his attention to Cooper's published letter.   He wanted Hamilton to "explain or disavow" the word despicable.  It was Hamilton's response that escalated the exchange:

Hamilton's fate was effectively sealed once he sent this letter [his response to Burr]. Not only did he miss the opportunity to disown the offensive characterization of Burr; he raised the rhetorical stakes with his dismissive tone and gratuitously defiant counterthreat."

Why did Hamilton go out of his way to antagonize Burr?  Here's what Ellis writes:

The full meaning of the duel . . . cannot be captured without recovering those long-lost values of the early American republic, which shaped the way Burr and Hamilton so mistrusted and even hated each other. . . . Hamilton believed --- and he had a good deal of evidence to support his belief --- that the very survival of the infant American nation was a stake. Understanding why he entered such hyperbolic thoughts is key to the core meaning of the duel.

And why did Hamilton so hate Burr?

Burr's reputation as a notorious womanizer or as a lavish spender who always managed to stay one step ahead of his creditors did not trouble Hamilton. What did worry him to no end was the ominous fit between Burr's political skills and the opportunities for mischief so clearly available in a nation whose laws and institutions were still congealing. . .  Personal character was essential in order to resist public temptations . . . because the temptations being served up by the political conditions in this formative phase of the American republic put the moral fiber of national leadership to a true test.

In other words, Burr was a blatant political opportunist; the republic might not survive if such men secured too much power.  In 1801, Hamilton had this to say about Burr:

His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement. . . . If he can he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure himself permanent power and with it wealth. He is truly the Catiline of America. 

Everyone in Hamilton's generation would recognize the reference.  According to Ellis, Catiline "was the treacherous and degenerate character whose scheming nearly destroyed the Roman Republic and whose licentious ways inspired . . . Cicero's eloquent oration on virtue."

Hamilton was afraid men like Burr might destroy the American republic in the very hour of its birth.  They prized their own power over the needs of the fledgeling country.  It was his duty, as a man who was concerned for the country, to do as much as possible to keep such men at bay.

This was not a debate about different ways to serve the country, it was a duel to the death between the forces that would nurture the republic and those that would destroy it.

If Hamilton came back today he would probably see those same forces still at work.

Preface - The Generation

This initial chapter summarizes Ellis's take on the period after the American Revolution. Here's a key passage:

The creation of a separate American nation occurred suddenly rather than gradually, in revolutionary rather than evolutionary fashion. . . [It was] an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck -- both good and bad -- and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the outcome.

He also says that the United States was "founded on a contradiction" and is still engaged in on-going debate that has yet to be resolved.

. . . the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. And the subsequent political history of the United States then became an oscillation between new versions of the old tension, which broke out in violence only on the occasion of the Civil War. In its most familiar form . . .  [it is seen] as a conflict between state and federal sovereignty. 

When you consider the current "polarization" of the political process, you might wonder how much longer the two party system will be able to contain the "explosive energies" of this ongoing argument.

Historians also seem caught up in this argument as they attempt to summarize the early history of the republic.  One version is known as the "pure republicanism" interpretation or the "Jeffersonian interpretation."

It depicts the American Revolution as a liberation movement, a clean break not just from English domination but also from the historic corruption of European monarch and aristocracy. The ascendence of the Federalists to power in the 1790s thus becomes a hostile takeover of the Revolution by corrupt courtiers and moneymen (Hamilton is the chief culprit), which is eventually defeated and the true spirit of the Revolution recovered by the triumph of the Republicans in the elections of 1800.

The alternate verison "sees the American Revolution as an incipient national movement with deep, if latent, origins in the colonial era."

The constitutional settlement of 1787-1788 thus becomes the natural fulfillment of the Revolution and the leaders of the Federalist party in the 1790s -- Adams, Hamilton, and, most significantly, Washington -- as the true heirs of the revolutionary legacy. (Jefferson is the culprit.) The core revolutionary principle in this view is collectivistic rather than individualistic, for it sees the true spirit of '76 as the virtuous surrender of personal, state, and sectional interests to the larger purposes of American nationhood, first embodied in the Continental Army and later in the newly established federal government.

No matter what the interpretation, the fact is the original colonies achieved nationhood. Not only that, but they managed to create a democratic republic on a large scale -- something that had never been done before. How the Founding Fathers did it is the question Ellis explores in his series of stories about them, starting with the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.