Washington [490]
At first Jefferson professed sublime indifference to politics. “I live on my horse from morning to night,” he declared to Henry Knox. “I rarely look into a book or take up a pen. I have proscribed newspapers.”10 In departing from office, Jefferson maintained that his political activity would henceforth be restricted to his hobbyhorse, “the shameless corruption of a portion” of Congress and “their implicit devotion to the treasury.”11 But when asked whether Washington was “governed by British influence,” Jefferson supposedly replied, facetiously, that no danger existed so long as Washington “was influenced by the wise advisers or advice, which [he] at present had.”12 When Governor Henry Lee told him about this patent gibe that he was biased toward Britain and hoodwinked by Hamilton’s malevolent influence, Washington reacted with fury. Jefferson could not honestly accuse him of such bias, he retorted, unless “he has set me down as one of the most deceitful and uncandid men living,” because Jefferson had heard him “express very different sentiments with an energy that could not be mistaken by anyone present.”13 Two years later, hotly rejecting the accusation of being a “party man,” Washington insisted to Jefferson that he had ruled against Hamilton in the cabinet as often as he had sided with him.14
After leaving office, Jefferson was demoted to a lower rung in Washington’s ever-shifting hierarchy of relationships. Their correspondence, however friendly, centered on mundane matters, such as crops and seeds, and Washington never again sought him out for policy advice. He dropped the salutation “My dear Sir” in favor of the cooler “Dear Sir.” Thus did the subtle Washington consign ex-colleagues to slow oblivion. If Washington suspected that Jefferson belonged to a cabal against him, Jefferson was no less insistent that “federal monarchists” had captured the president’s ear in order to vilify him, Jefferson, as a “theorist, holding French principles of government, which would lead infallibly to licentiousness and anarchy.”15 For someone as cordial as Washington, the avoidance of meetings with an old friend underlined the true depth of his hostility toward Jefferson.
We are accustomed to viewing the founding era as endowed with an inexhaustible supply of superlatively able men available for public service. But once the most gifted public servants—Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, and Jay—were already accounted for, Washington, like many later presidents, had a fiendishly hard time finding replacements for his sterling first-term cabinet and turned by default to comparative mediocrities. Moreover, some worthy figures weren’t prepared to make the financial sacrifice that accompanied public office. To perpetuate some modicum of geographic and political diversity, Washington tapped Edmund Randolph as his new secretary of state and brought in a Federalist, William Bradford of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, to replace him as attorney general. Nevertheless Randolph fell woefully short of Jefferson’s intellectual standard and was viewed in Republican quarters as an unreliable partner. His shortcomings tilted the cabinet’s power balance decisively toward Hamilton, giving a far more Federalist tint to Washington’s second term. Both Hamilton and Knox had promised to stay on until the end of 1794; Hamilton’s stature was only enhanced after a second House inquiry into his conduct granted him a full vindication in May 1794.
One of the first challenges for the new team was to figure out how to deal with the lawless North African, or “Barbary,” states—Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—which plundered foreign vessels