Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black

       Thomas Jefferson

CHAPTER THREE

       Creating a New Republic and Launching It in the World, 1789–1809

      1. THE WASHINGTON PRESIDENCY

      There was no precedent for Washington. It had been centuries since there had been even a marginally serious republic and there had never been a constitutional one. The whole notion of constitutional government was fragmentary. In Britain, some of the Swiss cantons, parts of the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and a few of the German and Italian jurisdictions there were some institutional restraints on executive authority and some rights vested in individual citizens. But the Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, insurance against capricious prosecution, just compensation for seized property, the presumption of innocence for accused, access to counsel, prompt justice, reasonable bail (almost all of which have become pretty moth-eaten in practice at time of writing)¹ and the attribution of unallocated powers to the states or the people themselves showed at least a conceptual respect for individual liberties that was unique in the world and was widely acclaimed as such.

      There was no assumption in the late eighteenth century that government had any purpose except defending the country, maintaining internal order, overseeing a currency of integrity, and generally administering laws and facilitating lawful and useful activities as defined from time to time. Washington had challenged the Continental Congress, when he took leave of his demobilized army in 1783, to maintain adequate armed forces, honor the Revolution’s debts with a reliable currency, maintain an indissoluble union, and promote a spirit of sacrifice and cooperation among all the states. The Congress and the states had completely failed to do any of that, and he intended to provide them himself. He saw himself, with perfect justice, as the emblem and symbol of the nation, not only for having led the armies of the Revolution to victory and presided over the assembly that wrote the Constitution, but as the man summoned by popular and general demand, and without opposition, to take the headship of the new nation and, by his conduct, define its presidency. In his inaugural address, he spoke of an “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.” This was a rather unspecific message of exhortations and velleities, more remarkable in its serenity by the fact that Washington had lost a lot of money during the Revolution and had to borrow $100 at 6 percent interest just to attend his own inauguration.²

      Washington toured most of the country in stages, reassuring people with his majestic presence, and promised in famous letters to the Newport synagogue and to the Roman Catholics of America (through the bishop of Baltimore) that their congregants and co-religionists would not be discriminated against in the new nation as they probably had been in the countries they or their forebears had departed. To the Jews, he wrote: “The Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. . . . May the children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” To the Roman Catholics he wrote: “May the members of your society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free government, enjoy every spiritual and temporal felicity.” He had not been as loquacious as Franklin in expressing confidence that the United States would relatively quickly become the premier nation of the world. But the whole ambiance of the new nation, the tenor of the wording of its earliest and most basic state papers, exuded confidence in the exalted and exceptional destiny of America, and of its unique and evangelical status as a light unto the whole world, showing the way forward for the rights of man and the organization of government. Implicit in this was America’s predestined and natural right to expand across America and become a country on a grander scale than any European nation.

      This notion of destiny and exceptionalism was in part simply true and evident in the world’s only and revolutionary constitutional republic, in part reasonable supposition of growing immigration and the settling of the generally rich and largely vacant land westward to and beyond the Mississippi, and in part an act of levitation and denial, to rise above inconvenient facts, such as that there were other democracies in the world, that slavery was objectively evil, and that to patch the country together, indecent electoral Danegeld had had to be paid to the minority of the states where it was established. Washington, as president in Philadelphia, where the law was that after six months’ residence slaves were automatically free, cycled his slaves in from Mount Vernon for a little over 20 weeks and then platooned them with others, to avoid emancipation of them. To be arbitrary, the American claim to moral leadership was one-third pure virtue, one-third ambitious but plausible striving, and one-third humbug and hypocrisy. The virtue would be strained at times but not discarded or altogether sullied; the ambitions of the most ardent patriots to world leadership would be attained in prodigies of courage, imagination, and diligence; but the fraud and corruption would constantly nag and periodically haunt the nation through all the astounding times ahead.

      Foreign affairs were to be entrusted to a department of state, which was directed ad interim by John Jay, and then by the first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. At first, there was little to do in foreign affairs, though loose ends remained with the British, and France began her revolutionary perturbations with the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris less than three months after Washington’s inauguration. The American fiscal shambles was to be addressed by the brilliant, bold, and vehement Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the Treasury. Armed forces were in the hands of the secretary of war, Henry Knox, a journeyman colleague from the Revolutionary War, who presided over a permanent army of 5,000, the navy, shipyards, the armory, and Indian affairs. He was not at all of the quality of Jefferson and Hamilton, and nor was the attorney general, Virginia’s Governor Edmund Randolph, who did not have an office but took a retainer as the government’s lawyer. In these brave and halcyon days, what became the United States Department of Justice was not even an embryo. Samuel Osgood was the first postmaster general. Washington’s confidence in John Adams had been shaken by his advocacy of an all-militia army, and during his incumbency his office was, and would long remain, anomalous, although relations between the two men were satisfactorily revived later in the administration. It was a cabinet of only seven. But one of the very most important figures continued to be Congressman James Madison, who was Washington’s most trusted adviser, the champion of the Bill of Rights, and generally recognized and deferred to as the principal author of the Constitution. This group of five (Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison), who with Franklin are generally considered the principal founders of the United States, continued through all of the decade, and Jefferson and Madison through the first quarter of the next century, as leaders of the new republic’s public life, assuring and symbolizing continuity.

      Washington’s only rival as the very greatest American and co-founder of the nation, Benjamin Franklin, finally passed away on April 17, 1790, aged 84. He had seen the new government in and fairly launched. Benjamin Franklin was universally saluted as a great man, statesman, scientist, inventor, writer, and publisher, and especially as a unique, wholly admirable personality. When he was buried, approximately half the whole population of Philadelphia, about 20,000 people, crowded the few blocks to the Christ Church cemetery, and the casket was preceded by all the clergy of the city, of every denomination.³

      The main focus of the administration was in the complex series of measures very skillfully formulated and advanced by Hamilton to create