Chapter 5 - Land of Hope PDF

CHAPTER FIVE THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS THE NEW U.S. CONSTITUTION HAD NOW BEEN DRAFTED AND approved by the Philadelphia Convention – but it still would have to be ratified by the states before it could become the supreme law of the land. The Framers knew that the road to that goal was not going to be e...

CHAPTER FIVE THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS THE NEW U.S. CONSTITUTION HAD NOW BEEN DRAFTED AND approved by the Philadelphia Convention – but it still would have to be ratified by the states before it could become the supreme law of the land. The Framers knew that the road to that goal was not going to be easy or certain. As was the case with the Revolution, so with the Constitution: a great many Americans were not yet on board with the idea of abandoning the status quo, especially if it meant a great expansion of national power. High principles were at stake, but so too were entrenched political and economic interests. Local elites feared being overtaken and superseded by national ones. State legislatures were likely to look with suspicion on any new national constitution that would reduce their powers. Even in the fragile and tenuous new American republic, there were already enough vested interests to ensure that there would be stiff resistance to change. Anticipating these obstacles and wishing the new charter to get the strongest possible endorsement from the people, whom Madison lauded as “the highest source of authority,” the Framers of the Constitution specified in Article VII that this Constitution would become law automatically upon ratification by conventions from nine of the thirteen states. The specifying of “conventions” was very important. In requiring that the ratification be the work of state conventions created for the occasion, rather than the existing state legislatures, the Framers followed a method already pioneered successfully in 1780 by the state of Massachusetts when it submitted its new constitution to the voters for ratification. It was a shrewd move, because it improved the chances of success by allowing the process to work around the existing officialdom, which might be expected to be resistant to any change that challenged the status quo. But in every state, there would be heated debate pitting supporters of the new Constitution, who called themselves Federalists, against opponents, who came to have the ungainly name Anti-Federalists, and who for various reasons favored retaining the loose and decentralized approach of the Articles and distrusted the Constitution’s more nationalist orientation and its concentration of power in the national government, and especially the presidency. It is not easy to generalize about the sort of people who took either side. The Federalists, many of whose leaders had been participants in the Convention, were likely to be well-off professional people, knowledgeable, organized, worldly, and articulate, adept at producing the kind of sophisticated arguments and publicity that could sway delegates to vote their way. The Anti- Federalists were a more varied lot, and although a few were quite wealthy, a great many others were small farmers and debtors of modest means. In any event, the issue of ratification was very much in doubt; it was not a forgone conclusion which side would prevail. The Federalist versus Anti-Federalist debates were a vivid and important instance of a persistent tension, one we have already seen in action before, between those who favored a strong and activist central government and those who deeply distrusted all forms of centralized power. This division would run through a great many of the conflicts in the American nation’s early history, from the Anglo- American imperial debates of the 1760s through to the early years of the nineteenth century and beyond, even unto the present day. Both sides had compelling arguments to make, and indisputable patriots were making them, which is why in so many states the convention votes would be exceedingly close. Political debate stimulates political reflection and political expression, and in this regard the debates over the Constitution proved to be very productive, giving rise to a profusion of spirited and thoughtful writings on both sides: pamphlets, broadsides, editorials, and articles whose authors, their identities often disguised behind Roman pseudonyms like Brutus and Cato, reflected with remarkable breadth and insight on the issues at hand. It was a great process of public self-education. Arguably the most distinguished of these writings were the eighty-five articles written in support of ratification by three of its chief proponents: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. These fascinating essays, historically informed and erudite in ways that reflected the Founding generation’s remarkable combination of intellectual maturity and political savvy, were published serially over a ten-month period beginning in October 1787, in the New York newspapers, always appearing under the collective pen name of Publius. The collection of all eighty-five essays into a single volume has been known ever thereafter as The Federalist or The Federalist Papers, and it is still generally regarded today as the single best interpretation of the Constitution as the Framers themselves intended it and understood it. Jefferson even called them “the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.” Many of the papers in The Federalist showed considerable originality and went on to become minor classics in the history of political thought – an improbable fate for mere newspaper columns. In Federalist 10, for example, James Madison put forward an incisive discussion of the problem of factions in political life – whence they come, how they can be controlled – and showed how a large and diverse republic like the United States could solve the factionalism that besets small republics by “extending the sphere,” that is, by enlarging the republic to encompass so many different varieties of faction that no one of them would be able to predominate. In Federalist 51, he put forward a compelling account of how the Constitution’s complex federal system could afford a “double security” for the rights of the people, pitting the states against the national government and dividing the national government against itself. Beneath it all was a darkly realistic view of human potentialities, reflecting the chastened Calvinist view of human nature that permeated eighteenth-century America and informed the thinking of the Framers themselves, making them suspicious of concentrated power. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison warned, because although a society needed the energy of its ambitious men, the most ambitious men were likely also to be the worst if they became corrupt, and the causes of faction were everywhere “sown into the nature of man.” Hence the need for a Constitution that would not only create and bestow additional powers on officials of the central government but would see to it that those powers were incorporated in a larger design whose elements were carefully arranged so as to check and counter one another. But perhaps the most portentous statement offered in the Federalist was penned by Hamilton and appeared at the beginning of Federalist 1: It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind. In other words, the proponents of the new Constitution believed the stakes were very high. They saw their fight for a viable and effective constitution, created not by the collision of brute forces but by calm and patient reason, as an effort on behalf not only of the American people but of the whole world. They were echoing the Puritan idea of “commission,” of a quasi-covenantal responsibility, both grand and grave, even though they were doing something quite different from what John Winthrop had sought to do. They were not establishing a Zion in the wilderness; they were trying to establish a constitution, a charter of fundamental law that could sustain a great republic built on the foundations of liberty and self-rule, for ages to come. They were engaged in one of the great experiments in the annals of politics, attempting to use the example of previous republics to avert those republics’ fate. They used the new science of politics in trying to remedy the fatal flaws of republics past. They used history to defy history. The ratification debates are well worth studying in great detail. But suffice it to say that the better organized Federalists were able to carry the day in the end, even winning ratification in the difficult and contentious state of New York. But the Anti-Federalists, despite their defeat and their awkward name, deserve credit for making a vital contribution to the eventual shape of the nation. They had feared, not without reason, that a more powerful central government might turn out to be tyrannical and become abusive of the fundamental rights and liberties for which Americans had fought their revolution. No one expressed that fear more memorably than the revolutionary hero-patriot Patrick Henry, who rose to speak vehemently against the Constitution at the Virginia State Ratifying Convention, decrying it as a document that “squints toward monarchy,” aiming to make the country “a great and mighty empire” whose passion for grandeur and vainglory would prove “incompatible with the genius of republicanism.” Many Virginians preferred the republican simplicity of agrarian life, and Henry’s powerful words touched deep anxieties in them and convinced them and many Americans of the need for a bill of rights. In response to these legitimate fears, the victorious Federalists promised to add a bill of rights to the Constitution as one of the first acts of the new government. They were true to their word, and the result was the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which have ever thereafter come to be regarded as integral to it. These were passed almost immediately by the First Congress and adopted by the states in 1791, with the goal of guaranteeing that the new Congress would make no laws infringing upon such rights as the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech and press, the right to bear arms, the right to a trial by jury, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, protection against the requirement to offer self-incriminating testimony, protection of due process rights, and other similar rights. In addition, the Tenth Amendment provided that any rights not explicitly delegated to the national government, or prohibited by it to the states, remained in the hands of the states or individuals.  The adoption of the Bill of Rights calmed all but the most determined critics of the Constitution. And although Madison and others had thought such a bill of rights was unnecessary, subsequent history showed them to be quite wrong about that and the Anti-Federalists to have been quite prescient, even prophetic, in many of their anxieties. Few today would ever want to contemplate the Constitution stripped of its Bill of Rights. It is one of the glories of the American constitutional system and, despite its added-on status, has become part of the very heart of the Constitution. It is one of the ironies of history that some of the fiercest opponents of the Constitution turned out to be among its chief benefactors. Although maybe that was not as ironic as it might seem, since the Constitution itself was consciously designed as an instrument to harness the energies of contending factions and groups, and since the Framers themselves incorporated their own quarrels into a Constitution that was in many ways better than what either side would have sought on its own. Countless skeptics at the time were convinced that the Constitution could not last very long. Even George Washington confided to one of his fellow delegates that he did not expect it to last more than twenty years. He would have been as shocked as anyone to find it still functioning more than 230 years later. That pessimism was not completely unwarranted, though. The Constitution itself was a remarkable achievement and a harbinger of hope. But it was also very much an experiment: a rough outline rather than a detailed plan, an architect’s rendering rather than a finished building. No one could know for sure whether it would work. It had an elaborate system of checks and balances, but who could know for sure what that system would look like when put to use? It laid down some of the procedures by which decisions were to be arrived at, but it offered little guidance as to what the content of those decisions should be. It featured a much-empowered presidency, but offered little insight into how and where the president ought to exercise that power.  If the Constitution could be compared to a work of music, it could be said that in early 1789, it was nothing more than sheet music, elaborate musical notation printed on paper: artfully composed, perhaps, but meaningless until translated into actual sound – and no one yet knew what it would actually sound like. So many things remained to be filled in, connected, made concrete, actualized – and fought over. The new nation was moving into uncharted territory, while still carrying on its back the same crushing problems that had led it to turn in near-desperation to an entirely new Constitution. Each decision in the days ahead would be consequential, because each would fill in the picture, establishing practices and precedents and experiences that would steer the institution one way rather than another, as the experiment was little by little put to the test. All this was happening, too, at a moment at which the nation had not yet had time to draw together, catch its breath, and develop a strong and cohesive sense of itself. History just kept coming at it. More than ever, it struggled to manage its considerable internal diversity – social, economic, cultural, religious – reflecting the regional tensions between the northern, southern, and middle sections that had already become evident in the colonial era, as well as a distinctive outlook emerging in the rowdy and expanding western areas, into which nearly uninterrupted streams of migrants were flowing and in which the pressures for further territorial expansion were ceaseless. But even with all these differences pulling it in different directions, it was also true that the United States remained an overwhelmingly agricultural and rural society, hugging the Atlantic seaboard, with only a handful of small cities and only the most rudimentary institutions and systems of transportation and communication to knit the nation together. It made all the difference, though, that the dignified and universally trusted figure of George Washington would be available to serve as the first president. It had been in fact presumed by many at the Convention that he would be the one to hold that office. Sure enough, when the ballots of the first presidential electors were counted in the Senate on April 6, 1789, Washington was unanimously elected. On April 30, he took the oath of office at Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City, which would be the seat of the national government for the next year. In his inaugural address delivered in the Senate chamber that day, Washington clearly and crisply echoed the vision that Hamilton had put forward in Federalist 1: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” The very future of liberty and self-rule: the stakes entailed in the American experiment would be nothing less. Truth be told, though, Washington did not want the job. Even observers at his inauguration noted a certain hesitancy in his manner and modesty in his words, notwithstanding the military bearing of his tall, impressive figure and the ceremonial army sword he held. Nearing the age of sixty, after enduring two grinding decades of war and politics in which he always found himself thrust into a central role in determining the direction of his country, he wanted nothing so much as to be free of those burdens – and to retire from public life and return to Virginia, where he could enjoy the private joys of a gentleman farmer at his beautiful estate at Mount Vernon. But it was not yet to be. Washington was blessed and cursed with the destiny of being the American nation’s “indispensable man,” as his biographer James Thomas Flexner rightly called him, the natural leader to whom everyone looked again and again for his judicious wisdom, his impartiality, and his selfless ability to rise above faction and partisanship to inspire and embody the guiding spirit of the fractious new nation. If the task before the country was a great experiment on behalf of all humanity but entrusted to the American people – a hugely consequential experiment that, like all experiments, could fail – how could he refuse to do his duty, particularly when he knew that he could discharge the tasks ahead more effectively than anyone else, at the nation’s hour of greatest need? His enormous sense of personal responsibility also made him acutely self-conscious. He knew that every decision he made and every action he took would have consequences, and this made him uncomfortable. “The eyes of Argus,” the mythical giant of a hundred eyes, “are upon me,” he complained, “and no slip will pass unnoticed.” He told his friend Madison that “everything in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent,” and for that reason, “it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles.” And so they were. Every one of his actions was carefully thought through, from his cautiously distant relations with Congress to his scrupulous avoidance of any hint of favoritism and nepotism in his appointments to his extreme care to project the right kind of public image, with a dignified and tasteful magnificence untainted by excess, as he thought appropriate to the republican leader of a great country. His leadership style was reflected in the choices he made for his executive branch appointments. These men were chosen for their general competence and loyalty, not for their membership in any particular faction, for like so many military men Washington disliked political parties, and like so many of the Framers, he hoped that the new nation could avoid having them altogether. Following that pattern, he picked Thomas Jefferson to be his secretary of state, Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the Treasury, General Henry Knox of Massachusetts for secretary of war, and Edmund Randolph of Virginia as attorney general. He also established the precedent, not mentioned in the Constitution, of bringing these advisors together as a “cabinet,” for the purpose of offering general advice to him, even outside their assigned areas. Among the most urgent of the problems that Washington’s new administration would have to face immediately was the country’s parlous financial state. His Treasury secretary Hamilton, a brilliant and forward-thinking young leader with boundless energy and a firm commitment to the ideal of national greatness, addressed those problems head-on. Hamilton was a self-made man who had risen from a lowly birth on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis to become Washington’s personal aide during the Revolutionary War, and then one of the most successful lawyers in New York, as well as a political operator extraordinaire in the struggle to draft and then ratify the Constitution. He had vast ambitions for the American economy. America, he enthused, was a “Hercules in the cradle” that would flourish extravagantly if it could attract sufficient capital to develop its tremendous resources. To that end, he had devised and presented to Congress an ingenious three-part plan for bringing the nation’s finances into a healthy order and igniting dynamic growth in the American economy. First, the national government would pay off the national debt at face value and would assume all the war debts of the states. This bold action would at a single stroke demonstrate to the world the nation’s creditworthiness and attract investors, even as it strengthened the union by shrewdly binding the self-interest of the grateful states to the union’s general success. Second, high tariffs would be imposed on imported goods, which would protect the development of American industries by driving up the price of imports, even as it provided revenue for the Treasury from those very tariffs. Third, Congress would create a national bank for the storage of government funds and the printing of bank notes, which would provide a basis for a stable U.S. currency. These initiatives all were adopted, although none without some measure of controversy. The debt-assumption idea, for example, was not universally applauded. Southern states, which generally had far less accumulated debt than the northern ones, saw the national government’s assumption of state debts as inequitable. That was not an insuperable problem, though; the southern states would be mollified by the northern promise to locate the permanent capital of the country in the middle south on the Potomac River and dropped their objections. But a very fundamental debate, the first great debate about constitutional interpretation, was to erupt over the creation of a national bank. Madison and his fellow Virginian Jefferson strongly opposed the idea, arguing that there was no basis in the Constitution for the creation of such a bank and that such a bold move would violate both the letter and spirit of the Constitution as a charter of limited and enumerated powers. Hamilton disagreed. He believed that justification for such expansive power was implicit in the Constitution’s very essence and was stated fairly directly in Article I, section 8, which granted Congress power to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper” for carrying out the functions of government, as listed in that same section of the article. “The criterion,” Hamilton said, “is the end,” the larger purpose that the Constitution was meant to serve, “to which the measure relates as a mean.” To Jefferson, though, this was tantamount to saying that the end justifies the means – and that inevitably meant the creation of “a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.” As in many of the most bitter struggles, there was something to be said for, and against, both positions. But in the end, Washington sided with Hamilton, and the bank became a reality – and an instant success. Similarly successful was the bulk of Hamilton’s entire bold economic program, which liberated the nation from its heavy debt burdens in surprisingly short order and established a sound and solvent basis for the capital accumulation and rapid economic growth that were the hallmarks of a dynamic capitalism. But the philosophical difference between Jefferson and Hamilton, and particularly the difference between “strict” and “loose” interpretations of the Constitution, was something that went very deep and would not go away so easily. In fact, it was a difference that would become one of the central points of contention in the nation’s subsequent history. For many years to come, the opposition between Jefferson and Hamilton would define the field of debate in much of American political thought. That opposition went far beyond the two men’s different views of the Constitution, beyond their intense rivalry and personal antagonism, and beyond their frequent policy jousting within the Washington cabinet. The two men symbolized two different ways of thinking about the kind of republic that the United States should become. Hamilton was an urban man, a patron of business interests, a New Yorker intent on building an expanding economy featuring extensive trade and manufacturing and using a powerful and active central government to help create the conditions favoring such an economy. Jefferson, by contrast, was an agrarian gentleman farmer from Virginia, a brilliant and cosmopolitan intellectual who nevertheless disliked cities and distrusted commerce and financial wizardry and regarded government as a necessary evil, at best, to be kept as small as possible. He favored a decentralized republican form of government, overseeing a society inhabited primarily by a multitude of small, self-sufficient farmers. Farming, he believed, was the way of life most conducive to the development of virtuous character in the citizenry. “Those who labor in the earth,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God … whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for genuine and substantial virtue.” By contrast, he feared that if Hamilton were to get his way, the result would be a large class of wage laborers and other landless and propertyless men concentrated in the cities, highly dependent on others for their well-being and highly susceptible to the snares and deceptions and promises of demagogic politicians. Nor were domestic matters the only source of the two men’s opposition. When the French Revolution, which had begun in summer 1789, led to a major war between France and England, President Washington was presented with a sticky foreign-policy problem: should the United States give assistance to the French, who had, after all, been indispensable allies in the American Revolution, who continued to be technically in an alliance with the United States, and whose desire to establish a republican form of government was something that most Americans were inclined to support enthusiastically, as a movement resembling their own? Jefferson, who deeply sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France, and thought the British corrupt and decadent by comparison to the noble republicans on the other side of the English Channel, believed that American foreign policy should show a preference for the French. Hamilton, by contrast, was known to be pro-British and an admirer of the stable hierarchy of British society; he broke with the French Revolution by 1794, decrying the chaos into which the Revolution in France had so quickly descended. In the end, Washington followed neither advisor entirely, insisting on a neutral course until the United States could grow stronger. He issued a proclamation to that effect on April 22, 1793, declaring the United States to be “friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers” and cautioning American citizens against “aiding or abetting” either side. Jefferson was highly displeased with this formulation, which he believed effectively favored the British, and resigned his position as secretary of state in furious opposition. But Washington understood that the needs of the nation, which was in no position to contest the doings of a great power like England or France, dictated a near-extreme reluctance to allow the nation to be dragged into European conflicts on either side. Washington went to great lengths to stay steady on the path of neutrality, even risking popular discontent with his leadership from a volatile public that failed to understand how damaging a war could be at this time. There is no better example of this costly prudence on Washington’s part than the controversial and deeply unpopular Jay Treaty (1794), negotiated with the British by Supreme Court chief justice (and Publius co-contributor) John Jay. The Jay Treaty was admittedly a very mixed bag, falling far short of what most Americans, and even Washington himself, had hoped for. The good news was that it pried the British out of their western frontier forts at last, eliminating a persistent and insulting thorn in the nation’s side, and it settled some compensation claims related to British seizures of American ships in the West Indies. It worked in the direction of helping the nation consolidate its control over its own lands. But it did so at the price of leaving in place terms of trade that were highly favorable to the British and letting the British off the hook for a great many legitimate claims against them. Much of the American public reacted with fury at this rather one- sided treaty, and Washington himself privately hesitated before signing it. In retrospect, though, it was an act of wise statesmanship to accept it, since nothing was more important to the future of the country than the calming and regularization of relations between the United States and Britain. But because of its political unpopularity, it had the unsought side effect of drawing more Americans into the Jeffersonian camp and thus contributing to the polarization that would lead to an eruption of political partisanship. Given the comprehensive range of the Jefferson–Hamilton feud, it is no wonder that it turned out to be the seedbed of the first system of opposing political parties in the history of the United States. In addition, it is no wonder that a national beginning as fraught with large expectations as the American one would be productive of immense anxieties, constant worries that the great national experiment was being destroyed from within, by those of the opposing faction. We already saw these kinds of concerns come to the fore during the debate over ratification, but the French Revolution sharpened these concerns to a razor’s edge. There was exaggeration and misperception on both sides. The Hamiltonians feared that Jefferson’s followers were soft on mob rule and the violent overthrow of elites; the Jeffersonians feared that Hamilton and his followers really wanted a monarchy and that Hamilton’s admiration for a vigorous central government and his admiration for Britain went hand in hand. Both sides feared, perhaps excessively, at times even hysterically, that the other side did not have the country’s best interests at heart. Under such circumstances, the formation of political parties was almost inevitable. Nevertheless, this development would be a bitter disappointment to a great many of the Framers. Nearly all of them, particularly Washington himself, had hoped that political parties would never have a chance to arise under the new government, a position that in retrospect seems more than a little bit utopian. In any event, the party lines that were steadily forming, pitting Hamilton’s Federalist Party against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans*, did not become overt and hardened until after Washington stepped down from the presidency. This was out of deferential respect for the indispensable man himself, who continued to be a compelling figure of national unity, like a great dam holding back flood waters, even as the fierce quarrel between the two opposing camps gathered strength and looked for opportunities to manifest itself. By the end of a second term of office, however, Washington was ready to retire and at long last to return to Mount Vernon for good. He announced his decision to do so in a “Farewell Address” to the nation, delivered on September 17, 1796, the ninth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution in Philadelphia, and then published in the nation’s newspapers in fall 1796. But the title was deceptive; the speech did much more than say good-bye. It was a profound reflection on the national condition, containing the “disinterested warnings of a parting friend.” It was an effort on Washington’s part to project his wise and stabilizing influence forward into the American future, informing the thinking of future leaders, summarizing in durable form his wisdom about questions of statecraft, and voicing his worries about the new nation’s presenting challenges. As such, it became an instant classic in the annals of American oratory and a point of reference in the centuries to come. Even today, the speech has much to tell us and richly repays careful study. If its theme could be summed up in a single term, that term would be national unity. All around him, Washington saw evidence of growing divisions, which presaged troubles to come. Washington began by making it clear how much he deplored “the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” the acrimony that was pushing the nation into the institutionalizing of partisan politics. He expressed his concern about the related rise of sectional conflict, in which northerners and southerners and easterners and westerners all seemed to be placing their local interests above those of the country as a whole, thereby forgetting all the ways in which their differences were mutually beneficial and necessary for the thriving of the whole. The most enduringly influential part of the speech dealt with foreign affairs and America’s proper disposition to the rest of the world. In such matters, Washington advised being discreet, dispassionate, and carefully aloof, always placing the interests of the nation over other considerations. He firmly cautioned against American citizens allowing “passionate attachments” to foreign nations and causes to override their commitment to their own nation’s unity and interests. In addition, he urged American citizens to be constantly on their guard against efforts by foreign countries to infiltrate and destabilize and otherwise manipulate American politics to their own advantage. The new American nation had an inestimable advantage over all others in its remoteness, an existence buffered by a vast ocean. That advantage should not be forfeited, Washington cautioned, out of misplaced passion. The controversies that had been roiling Europe since 1789 were “foreign to our concerns,” and America should stay clear of them, avoiding all “permanent alliances,” a formulation that well reflects the thinking behind his neutrality policies. That admonition, that the United States should avoid foreign entanglements, especially permanent ones, remained a touchstone of American foreign policy for a century to come. In the election of 1796, the first contested election in American history, Washington’s vice president, John Adams narrowly defeated Jefferson. The closeness of his victory was a sign of the growing strength of the Republican faction and the corresponding discontent with the Federalists, who had been in power since 1789. So Adams began his administration with some disadvantages. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage of all was the extent to which he was doomed to suffer from comparison to his illustrious predecessor. If the default sentiment toward Washington was respect bordering on reverence, Adams excited something like the opposite emotions. He utterly lacked Washington’s imposing stature and stately reserve; instead, he was a short, stocky, and voluble man, transparently vain, peevish, and easily roused to anger. But Adams was also incorruptibly honest and public spirited, one of the greatest of the patriots, having been a revolutionary leader, a member of the Continental Congress, an effective diplomat who served the new nation with distinction in Europe, and a man of impressive intellectual sophistication and stubborn independence of mind. We know a great deal about his long and unusually affectionate marriage to Abigail, a formidable and witty woman who was fully his partner and equal, thanks to the survival of their extensive correspondence, a by-product of the months and years they were forced to spend apart because of his tireless service to his country. Through thick and thin, Abigail would be his soul mate and his most trusted advisor. In retrospect, this quirky and flawed but compulsively truthful man may well be the most lovable of all the Founders. As president, though, he was dealt a very tough hand. The spillover from the ongoing French problem, which had been greatly exacerbated by public outrage over the Jay Treaty, threatened to engulf Adams’s administration from the outset. French attacks on American shipping had long been a problem, and they were now escalating. When Adams attempted to negotiate with the French about the matter, his commissioners were presented with a crude demand from three of French foreign minister Talleyrand’s intermediaries (known only as X, Y, and Z) for a very large bribe as the precondition of their even being permitted to begin such negotiations. The Americans curtly refused, and when Adams released the commissioners’ report to the public, publicly revealing the French agents’ outrageous and insulting demand, it caused an uproar and an abrupt reversal in the public’s formerly affectionate view of France. “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” was the cry that went up throughout the country, and even some Republicans joined in the demand for war against the French as the only suitable answer. Yet Adams resisted the feverish cries for a declaration of war, soberly recognizing that the nation, which lacked even the semblance of a navy and had a grand total of thirty-five hundred men under arms, was spectacularly ill equipped for any such venture. It was a wise move, but one that did not endear him to the public. But then, making himself endearing to his own public was not one of John Adams’s talents. All this foreign turbulence also rocked the nation’s internal politics and led it into a season of instability and genuine peril, in which the fragility of its unity was made all too alarmingly clear. The Republicans had always favored friendly relations with France, but now they found themselves on the defensive about that, having to choose between appearing to favor the revolutionary objectives of one of their nation’s external adversaries (the French) or endorsing the position of their own internal political enemies (the Federalists). Meanwhile, some of the more extreme elements among the Federalists saw in this situation a rare opportunity to corner and demolish their ideological opponents. They allowed themselves to be persuaded, whether rationally or not, that the Republicans might well decide to side with the French in the event of war. If that were to happen, it would represent a clear threat to the nation, and so it should be prevented at all costs. The specter of such treasonable potential acts, accompanied by a veritable flood of wild fabrications and misrepresentations filling the public press – the 1790s version of “fake news” – enraged the Federalists. Adding to their rage was the fact that Jefferson himself proved such a skilled and ruthless practitioner of hardball electoral tactics, attacking his enemies indirectly by planting rumors about them in the press or publishing anonymous editorials against them – or hiring writers to portray opponents like John Adams in a harshly negative light, as secret monarchists who longed to reign as kings. The Federalists were not above doing the same thing, but they did not do it nearly as well. In any event, the polarized and overheated atmosphere allowed the Federalists to push through Congress and obtain Adams’s signature for legislation designed to suppress discordant or defamatory voices and prevent foreign infiltration of American politics. These were the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which authorized the president to expel “dangerous” aliens at his pleasure and severely limited freedom of speech and the press. Adams did not originate the acts, but he did not hesitate to support them, and that proved to be a grave error on his part, both substantively and politically. The First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and press were regarded by most Americans as fundamental to their way of life and therefore sacrosanct, and yet those sacred guarantees were seemingly being casually set aside so that the party in power could go after its opposition more readily. It now became a crime to publish what someone else might judge to be “false, scandalous, and malicious” criticism of high government officials; twenty-five Republican newspaper editors were prosecuted in the run-up to the election. In angry response, Jefferson and Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts, and declared that because the Constitution was a “compact” among previously existing states, the individual states had the right to interpose themselves against, or to nullify outright, unconstitutional acts of the national government. Such propositions were every bit as dangerous as the Alien and Sedition Acts, for if implemented, they would have the effect of undermining the nation’s entire constitutional structure. George Washington was appalled by them and warned Patrick Henry that, if pursued, such measures would “dissolve the union.” The conflict had ratcheted up several notches, into extremely dangerous territory. Clearly both parties were veering out of control, supplying an object lesson in the reasons why Washington loathed political parties. If the Alien and Sedition Acts had been excessive and dangerous, so too were the doctrines of interposition and nullification being offered by Jefferson and Madison. It seemed that in the heat of the moment, both sides of this controversy were losing their bearings and introducing ideas and practices that were inimical to the heart and soul of American constitutionalism. As the election of 1800 approached, the Federalists painted their opponents as wild-eyed Jacobins, atheists, and revolutionaries bent upon plunging the nation into a bloody French-style social revolution. Meanwhile, the Republicans depicted the Federalists as cryptomonarchists and would-be aristocrats, rabid enemies of liberty and friends of the wealthy who were using the instruments of government to consolidate their power and negate the effects of the Revolution. To top it all off, Adams’s statesmanlike but politically costly decision to seek peace with the French rather than go to war against them lost him essential political support from members of his own party. It was a volatile situation in which anything could happen. All was in readiness for an extremely contentious, and close, election. It seemed both unutterably sad and eerily ominous when the news came, in December 1799, of the death of George Washington, the august unifier whose presence had always pulled the nation together in the past. Had something vitally important gone out of the nation’s life and spirit along with him? Who or what in the current madhouse of contention could possibly arise to take his place as a national unifier? Such worries turned out to be unwarranted, at least in the short term. In the end, Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams by a small but decisive margin, seventy-three electoral votes to Adams’s sixty-five. The outcome was complicated by the fact that, owing to a defect in the Constitution, which would soon be corrected by adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, Jefferson’s vice presidential running mate Aaron Burr received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson, and the matter of who became president had to be decided by a contested vote of the House of Representatives. That vote became a great drama, requiring the intervention of Hamilton on his arch-rival’s behalf to thwart the candidacy of the disreputable Burr – an act of great statesmanship on Hamilton's part, but one that would eventually lead to a duel between Hamilton and Burr, in which Hamilton would be killed. But none of this baroque complexity and legislative melodrama altered the fact that the outcome of the election was decisive, that it was accepted by all parties as decisive, and that it therefore represented a very important inflection point in the development of American government and society. This was so for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the inauguration of Jefferson in 1801 was the first time that the orderly, peaceful, and legitimate transfer of power from one political party to another had taken place in the United States under the new Constitution. The importance of this achievement is hard to exaggerate. Almost every kind of political regime stumbles when it arrives at the threshold of a major transition, and one of the best measures of stability in such a regime is precisely in the ease, or difficulty, with which it surmounts that challenge and replaces one leader with a new one. Even under the best of circumstances, that can be difficult. Even the best ruler can be followed by a bad one who undoes the good his predecessor had achieved. Even the best regime can buckle and bend under the pressures of war, social unrest, or economic deprivation. Even under the best of times, a transfer of power is a dicey proposition, because it necessarily takes place outside the guardrails of what is unusual and habitual and requires the initiation of something new, something that has not existed before. And these were not the best of times. Given the frenetic circumstances under which the 1800 election took place, and the relative newness of the institutions that the Constitution had created, it could hardly have been a worse time to put the new Constitution to the test. How stable was this post-Washington America? How sturdy could those institutions be – and how deeply had they been sunk into the hearts of the people? The fact that the electoral outcome might mean the defeat and removal from office of an incumbent president, John Adams, made the question even more challenging. For what if, as many people feared, there was armed resistance? All these were legitimate questions. If one had set out purposely to design things so that the divisions in society were so deep that Americans’ respect for the rule of law would surely be defeated by their passions and their fears, one could hardly have improved on this scenario, short of imagining a fully launched and bloody civil war. That the nation did surmount this challenge, and did so not only peacefully but with surprising finesse, was quietly astonishing – and the best augury imaginable for the future success of the American experiment. In addition, the election of 1800 was an important transition because it marked a change of direction. The Republican victory would mean a movement in the direction of somewhat greater democratization, wider political participation, a permanent place for political parties in the American system, and a shift in the tone and direction of many elements of both domestic and foreign policy. But one should not exaggerate the extent of these changes. Jefferson himself grandly referred, in an 1819 letter written long after his retirement from public life, to “the revolution of 1800,” and many historians have followed him in employing that expression. But Jefferson was referring in those words not to his implementation of transforming revolutionary policies but merely to the peaceable transfer of power itself: the nation’s success in producing change “not effected indeed by the sword … but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.” Indeed, Jefferson as president turned out to be a far less revolutionary leader than his enemies had feared or his friends had hoped. He signaled this would be the case in his First Inaugural Address, a speech nearly as masterly as Washington’s Farewell Address, marked by its humility (“the task is above me…. I approach it with anxious and awful presentiments”), its respect for the losing side (“the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect”), and above all, its desire to heal and unify the country (“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle…. We are all Republicans – we are all Federalists”). He also signaled a generous tolerance of dissent and varied opinion: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” He concluded with a list of principles he would follow, none of which could be seen as controversial and some of which echoed Washington’s warnings against foreign entanglements very closely, repeatedly invoking the same rights of Englishmen that had been respected since time immemorial, products of “the wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes,” nearly all of them enshrined in the Bill of Rights. It is hard to imagine a more winning and conciliatory speech for the occasion and a more welcome balm to jangled public nerves after a season of near-hysteria that threatened the Union itself. Jefferson continued in the same calming and moderate vein during his early days as president. While he would go on to make some policy changes, there were but few that could be called dramatic, let alone drastic. He made modest reductions in military expenditures, reduced excise taxes that the Federalists had imposed, and worked hard to pay down the national debt. But he accepted that the Hamiltonian financial program, which he had fought tooth and nail while in Washington’s cabinet, was here to stay, and he made a point of indicating his support for it. The “revolution of 1800” is better thought of, then, as a significant step forward in the unification and maturation of the fledgling republic. The Constitution itself was a great achievement, but from its ratification debates forward, it was in the process of being worked on, and worked out, in actual political practice. Jefferson was an intellectual, but he was not an ideologue. The party system that the Framers had not wanted had arisen anyway, inexorably, and it served the Constitution well, as a way not only to express and channel controversy but to organize it and contain it. An important outward sign of this maturation was the very venue at which Jefferson took the presidential oath of office and delivered his address. It did not occur in New York or Philadelphia but rather, for the first time, in the brand-new capital city of Washington. The Washington of that time, of course, only faintly resembled the grand capital city of today. But even then it possessed the bones of its later body, in the form of the grand urban design that French military engineer Pierre L’Enfant had been commissioned in 1791, by George Washington, to produce. L’Enfant was a genius, but a temperamental one, and in the end he did not stay to finish his project. But thanks to the fundamental design he provided, Washington was to be unique among American cities. Most of those cities would be laid out to the extent possible as simple functional grids; one might think, for example, of the central business districts of such cities as Chicago or New York. L’Enfant’s Washington would include such a functional grid but also would superimpose upon it a graceful latticework of wide diagonal avenues that interconnected through circles and squares, providing for an endless array of dramatic and unexpected vistas as well as numerous park sites for the erection of statuary and monuments to celebrate and memorialize the unfolding national story. Capitol Hill, site of Congress, would be the center of the Federal City, and diagonal boulevards named after the states of the union would radiate out from it, from the President’s House, and from a few other important nodes. Under L’Enfant’s plan, the area west of the Capitol was to be a garden-lined public promenade, a “grand avenue” open to all comers, something that would have been unthinkable in L’Enfant’s France but seemed to him perfectly appropriate to the more democratic ethos of the new United States – as indeed it was. But the “grand avenue” L’Enfant envisioned was not built, and it was not until the twentieth century that the area, now known as the Mall, would be made into an open space, eventually to become home to the Smithsonian Institution and a distinguished collection of museums, as well as being a national stage and premier site for public celebrations and civic protests. As such, it would realize L’Enfant’s essential intention, but in a way very different from what he had in mind. All that would still be many years into the future, though. At the time of Jefferson’s inauguration, it was not uncommon to find farm animals grazing on the verdant land, content as if they were in the countryside. At this outwardly bucolic moment in the city’s history, a mere ten years into its construction, Washington, D.C., was still a very rough work in progress, like the largely agrarian nation itself. But like the nation, the city had begun life with a brilliant founding plan, and like the nation, it would now take shape according to that plan. * Hereinafter referred to as “Republicans,” but not to be confused with the Republican Party formed in 1854.