Washington [460]
Disturbed by the expansion of federal power under Hamilton’s programs, Jefferson and Madison suspected a secret counterrevolution was at work, an incipient plot to install a monarchical government on the British model. Their defeat over the bank bill in late February 1791 convinced them that Hamilton had hopelessly bewitched the president. Hamilton’s assertion of federal power also awakened fears that meddlesome northerners might interfere with southern slavery. As one Virginian later said, “Tell me, if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they cannot free all the slaves in the United States.”3
Unlike the Anglophile Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison often seemed to want to make the American government everything that the British government was not. To denigrate his foes, Jefferson applied to them hyperbolic labels, including “monocrats” and “Anglomen”—words with an evocative conspiratorial ring. As the French Revolution grew more sanguinary, Hamilton in turn demonized the Jeffersonians as involved in a worldwide Jacobin conspiracy emanating from Paris.
To organize opposition to the dangerous political backsliding that they perceived, Jefferson and Madison took a tour of New York and New England in May- June 1791. The cover story Jefferson supplied to Washington was that he needed a break “to get rid of a headache which is very troublesome, by giving more exercise to the body and less to the mind.”4 Jefferson and Madison supposedly planned to collect botanical specimens, but they actually intended to recruit political partisans, especially on Hamilton’s home turf of New York. A courtly, charismatic leader, Jefferson was adept at fostering camaraderie among like-minded politicians. If more circumspect, Madison was no less crafty or committed to the cause. The long-standing friendship of these two men now deepened into a powerful political partnership.
It seems strange that the revolt against Washington’s administration originated with a member of his own cabinet and a close confidant. When the president delivered his annual message to Congress in October 1791, Madison chaired the House committee that drafted a response, and Washington asked him to draft his own reply to that document. At the time, no political protocol insisted that disgruntled cabinet members should resign from an administration with which they disagreed. Nor was there yet a tradition of a loyal opposition. Washington sometimes found it hard to differentiate between legitimate dissent and outright disloyalty. He tended to view criticism as something fomented by wily, demagogic people, manipulating an otherwise contented populace.
In an extreme act of duplicity, Madison and Jefferson installed a flaming critic of Washington right in the heart of his own government. They wanted to counter the views of John Fenno, editor of the pro-administration Gazette of the United States, which Jefferson accused of peddling “doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of the influence of the people.”5 To woo him to Philadelphia, Jefferson offered a job as State Department translator to the poet Philip Freneau, who knew only one language and was scarcely qualified. The suggestion came from Madison, a friend and former Princeton classmate of his. During the war Freneau had written a rhapsodic paean to Washington entitled “Cincinnatus.” After being incarcerated in a loathsome British prison ship, he came to detest everything British and turned against President Washington and the Hamiltonian program with a vengeance. In late October 1791, after taking the State Department job, Freneau launched the National Gazette, which became the virulent organ of the Jeffersonian opposition. In its premier issue, it accused Hamilton of being the kingpin of a monarchist