History of the United States During Thomas Jefferson's Administrations (Complete 4 Volumes). Henry Adams
href="#ulink_4571ef67-0398-54a7-b25d-20ee95fac0b9">22
No man who stood within the circle of the President's intimates could be perplexed to understand how this apparent self-contradiction might have occurred. Callender was neither the first nor the last to take advantage of what John Randolph called the "easy credulity" of Jefferson's temper. The nearest approach Jefferson could make toward checking an over-zealous friend was by shades of difference in the strength of his encouragement. To tell Callender that his book could not fail to produce the best effect was a way of hinting that it might do harm; and, however specious such an excuse might seem, this language was in his mind consistent with a secret wish that Callender should not write. More than one such instance of this kindly prevarication, this dislike for whatever might seem harsh or disobliging, could be found in Jefferson's correspondence.
A man's enemies rarely invent specious theories of human nature in order to excuse what they prefer to look upon as falsehood and treason. July 17, 1803, Callender was drowned in some drunken debauch; but the Federalists never forgot his calumnies, or ceased ringing the changes on the President's self-contradictions,—and throughout New England the trio of Jefferson, Paine, and Callender were henceforward held in equal abhorrence. That this prejudice did not affect Jefferson's popular vote was true, but it seriously affected his social relations; and it annoyed and mortified him more than coarser men could understand, to feel in the midst of his utmost popularity that large numbers of his worthiest fellow-citizens, whose respect he knew himself to deserve, despised him as they did the vermin they trod upon.
In the ferment of the Callender scandal, October 29, Paine arrived from Europe. Unable to come by the "Maryland," he had waited a year, and then appeared at Baltimore. The Republican newspapers made the same blunder in regard to Paine which they had made in regard to Callender,—they denied at first that he had been invited to return in a Government ship, or that Jefferson had written him any such letter as was rumored; and they were altogether perplexed to know how to deal with so dangerous an ally, until the President invited Paine to the White House and gave him all the support that political and social influence could command. In a few days the "National Intelligencer," Jefferson's more than semi-official organ, published the first of a series of letters addressed by Paine to the American people; and no one could longer doubt what kind of "useful labors" Jefferson had invited him to continue. Fourteen years of absence had not abated the vigor of that homely style which once roused the spirits of Washington's soldiers; and age lent increased virulence to powers of invective which had always been great. His new series of letters overflowed with abuse of the Federalists, and bristled with sarcasms on the Federalist Presidents. Unfortunately for Jefferson's object Paine had exhausted the effect of such weapons, which resemble the the sting of a bee lost in the wound it makes. The bee dies of her own mutilation. Paine, too, was dying from the loss of his sting. Only once in any man's career could he enjoy the full pleasure of saying, as Paine said to President Washington: "You are treacherous in private friendship, and a hypocrite in public life." To repeat it in other forms, to fumble and buzz about a wound meant to be deadly, was to be tiresome and ridiculous. Paine, too, was no longer one of a weak minority struggling for freedom of speech or act; he represented power, and was the mouthpiece of a centralized Government striking at the last remnants of Puritan independence. The glory of wounding Cæsar on his throne was one thing; that of adding one more stab to his prostrate body was another. Paine's weapon no longer caused alarm. The Federalist newspapers were delighted to reprint his letters, and to hold the President responsible for them. The clergy thundered from their pulpits. The storm of recrimination raged with noisy violence amid incessant recurrence to the trio of godless ruffians,—Jefferson, Paine, and Callender; but the only permanent result was to leave a fixed prejudice in the New England mind,—an ineradicable hatred for President Jefferson, in due time to bear poisonous fruit.
The summer of 1802 was a disappointment to Jefferson. He had hoped for better things. The time-servers and those voters whose love of nationality was stronger than their local interests or personal prejudices were for the most part drawn over to the Administration,—even Boston and Salem chose Republican Congressmen; yet Massachusetts as a whole was still Federalist, and of course, as the Federalists became fewer, the extreme wing became more influential in the party. The Essex Junto were still far from control, but they succeeded better than the moderate Federalists in holding their own. Thus these three influences in Massachusetts had nearly reached an equilibrium, and Jefferson was at a loss to understand why the growth of his popularity had been checked. He saw that provincial jealousies were strengthened, and this consequence of isolation he chose to look upon as its cause. Even an ode of the Massachusetts poet Thomas Paine, whose better-known name of Robert Treat Paine recorded the political passions which caused him to petition for the change, served to console Jefferson for the partial defeat of his consolidating schemes. Paine's refrain ran,—
"Rule, New England! New England rules and saves!"
and this echo of Virginia sentiments in 1798, this shadowy suggestion of a New England Confederacy, jarred on the President's ear. Toward autumn he wrote to his friend Langdon, of New Hampshire:23—
"Although we have not yet got a majority into the fold of Republicanism in your State, yet one long pull more will effect it. We can hardly doubt that one twelve-month more will give an executive and legislature in that State whose opinions may harmonize with their sister States,—unless it be true, as is sometimes said, that New Hampshire is but a satellite of Massachusetts. In this last State the public sentiment seems to be under some influence additional to that of the clergy and lawyers. I suspect there must be a leaven of State pride at seeing itself deserted by the public opinion, and that their late popular song of 'Rule, New England,' betrays one principle of their present variance from the Union. But I am in hopes they will in time discover that the shortest road to rule is to join the majority."
The struggle was full of interest; for if Jefferson had never yet failed to break down every opponent, from King George III. to Aaron Burr, the New England oligarchy for near two hundred years were a fatal enemy to every ruler not of their own choice, from King Charles I. to Thomas Jefferson.
Had the clergy and lawyers, the poets and magistrates of Massachusetts been the only troublesome element with which Jefferson had to deal, the task of the Republican party would have been simple; but virulent as party feeling was in New England during the summer of 1802, a feud broke out in New York which took a darker hue. Vice-President Burr, by his birthday toast to the "Union of honest men" and by his vote on the Judiciary Bill, flung down a challenge to the Virginians which De Witt Clinton, on their behalf, hastened to take up. With a violence that startled uninitiated bystanders, Cheetham in his "American Citizen" flung one charge after another at Burr: first his Judiciary vote; then his birthday toast; then the suppression of a worthless history of the last Administration written by John Wood, another foreign adventurer, whose book Burr bought in order, as Cheetham believed, to curry favor with the New England Federalists; finally, with the rhetorical flourish of an American Junius, Cheetham charged that Burr had tried to steal the Presidency from Jefferson in February, 1801, when the House of Representatives was divided. All the world knew that not Cheetham, but De Witt Clinton thus dragged the Vice-President from his chair, and that not Burr's vices but his influence made his crimes heinous; that behind De Witt Clinton stood the Virginia dynasty, dangling Burr's office in the eyes of the Clinton family, and lavishing honors and money on the Livingstons. All this was as clear to Burr and his friends as though it were embodied in an Act of Congress. No one ever explained why Burr did not drag De Witt Clinton from his ambush and shoot him, as two years later he shot Alexander Hamilton with less provocation. At midsummer the city was startled by the report that John Swartwout the marshal, one of Burr's intimates, had charged Clinton with attacking the Vice-Presidnt from personal and selfish motives; that Clinton had branded Swartwout as a liar, a scoundrel, and a villain; that they had met at Weehawken, where, after lodging two bullets in his opponent, Clinton had flung down his pistol at the sixth shot, swearing that he would have no more to do with the bloody business. Among the stories current was one that Clinton had expressed regret at not having Swartwout's principal before his pistol. Swartwout, wounded as he was, returned directly to Burr's house. In the face of all this provocation, the Vice-President behaved with studied caution and reserve. Never in the history of the