The Feuding Fathers

Americans lament the partisan venom of today's politics, but for sheer verbal savagery, the country's founders were in a league of their own. Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse.

RON CHERNOW

In the American imagination, the founding era shimmers as the golden age of political discourse, a time when philosopher-kings strode the public stage, dispensing wisdom with gentle civility. We prefer to believe that these courtly figures, with their powdered hair and buckled shoes, showed impeccable manners in their political dealings. The appeal of this image seems obvious at a time when many Americans lament the partisan venom and character assassination that have permeated the political process.

Mick Coulas; Nathaniel Welch/Redux Pictures for The Wall Street Journal (Golf Journal)

Unfortunately, this anodyne image of the early republic can be quite misleading. However hard it may be to picture the founders resorting to rough-and-tumble tactics, there was nothing genteel about politics at the nation's outset. For sheer verbal savagery, the founding era may have surpassed anything seen today. Despite their erudition, integrity, and philosophical genius, the founders were fiery men who expressed their beliefs with unusual vehemence. They inhabited a combative world in which the rabble-rousing Thomas Paine, an early admirer of George Washington, could denounce the first president in an open letter as "treacherous in private friendship…and a hypocrite in public life." Paine even wondered aloud whether Washington was "an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any."

Such highly charged language shouldn't surprise us. People who spearhead revolutions tend to be outspoken and courageous, spurred on by a keen taste for combat. After sharpening their verbal skills hurling polemics against the British Crown, the founding generation then directed those energies against each other during the tumultuous first decade of the federal government. The passions of a revolution cannot simply be turned off like a spigot.

By nature a decorous man, President Washington longed for respectful public discourse and was taken aback by the vitriolic rhetoric that accompanied his two terms in office. For various reasons, the political cleavages of the 1790s were particularly deep. Focused on winning the war for independence, Americans had postponed fundamental questions about the shape of their future society. When those questions were belatedly addressed, the resulting controversies threatened to spill out of control.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 had defined a sturdy framework for future debate, but it didn't try to dictate outcomes. The brevity and generality of the new charter guaranteed pitched battles when it was translated into action in 1789. If the constitution established an independent judiciary, for instance, it didn't specify the structure of the federal court system below the Supreme Court. It made no reference to a presidential cabinet aside from a glancing allusion that the president could solicit opinions from department heads. The huge blanks left on the political canvas provoked heated battles during Washington's time in office. When he first appeared in the Senate to receive its advice and consent about a treaty with the Creek Indians, he was so irked by the opposition expressed that he left in a huff. "This defeats every purpose of my coming here," he protested.

Like other founders, Washington prayed that the country would be spared the bane of political parties, which were then styled "factions." "If I could not go to heaven but with a party," Thomas Jefferson once stated, "I would not go there at all." Washington knew that republics, no less than monarchies, were susceptible to party strife. Indeed, he believed that in popularly elected governments, parties would display their "greatest rankness" and emerge as the "worst enemy" to the political system. By expressing narrow interests, parties often thwarted the popular will. In Washington's view, enlightened politicians tried to transcend those interests and uphold the commonweal. He was so opposed to anything that might savor of partisanship that he refused to endorse congressional candidates, lest he seem to be meddling.

In choosing his stellar first cabinet, President Washington applied no political litmus test and was guided purely by the candidates' merits. With implicit faith that honorable gentlemen could debate in good faith, he named Alexander Hamilton as treasury secretary and Jefferson as secretary of state, little suspecting that they would soon become fierce political adversaries. Reviving his Revolutionary War practice, Washington canvassed the opinions of his cabinet members, mulled them over at length, then arrived at firm conclusions. As Hamilton characterized this consultative style, the president "consulted much, pondered much; resolved slowly, resolved surely." Far from fearing dissent within his cabinet, Washington welcomed the vigorous interplay of ideas and was masterful, at least initially, at orchestrating his prima donnas. As Gouverneur Morris phrased it, Washington knew "how best to use the rays" of intellect emitted by the personalities at his command.

During eight strenuous years of war, Washington had embodied national unity and labored mightily to hold the fractious states together; hence, all his instincts as president leaned toward harmony. Unfortunately, the political conflicts that soon arose often seemed intractable: states' rights versus federal power; an agrarian economy versus one intermixed with finance and manufacturing; partiality for France versus England when they waged war against each other. Anything even vaguely reminiscent of British precedent aroused deep anxieties in the electorate.

As two parties took shape, they coalesced around the outsize personalities of Hamilton and Jefferson, despite their joint membership in Washington's cabinet. Extroverted and pugnacious, Hamilton embraced this role far more openly than Jefferson, who preferred to operate in the shadows. Although not parties in the modern sense, these embryonic factions—Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans—generated intense loyalty among adherents. Both sides trafficked in a conspiratorial view of politics, with Federalists accusing the Republicans of trying to import the French Revolution into America, while Republicans tarred the Federalists as plotting to restore the British monarchy. Each side saw the other as perverting the true spirit of the American Revolution.

As Jefferson recoiled from Hamilton's ambitious financial schemes, which included a funded debt, a central bank, and an excise tax on distilled spirits, he teamed up with James Madison to mount a full-scale assault on these programs. As a result, a major critique of administration policy originated partly within the administration itself. Relations between Hamilton and Jefferson deteriorated to the point that Jefferson recalled that at cabinet meetings he descended "daily into the arena like a gladiator to suffer martyrdom in every conflict."

The two men also traded blows in the press, with Jefferson drafting surrogates to attack Hamilton, while the latter responded with his own anonymous essays. When Hamilton published a vigorous defense of Washington's neutrality proclamation in 1793, Jefferson urged Madison to thrash the treasury secretary in the press. "For God's sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public." When Madison rose to the challenge, he sneered in print that the only people who could read Hamilton's essays with pleasure were "foreigners and degenerate citizens among us."

Slow to grasp the deep-seated divisions within the country, Washington also found it hard to comprehend the bitterness festering between Hamilton and Jefferson. Siding more frequently with Hamilton, the president was branded a Federalist by detractors, but he tried to rise above petty dogma and clung to the ideal of nonpartisan governance.

Afraid that sparring between his two brilliant cabinet members might sink the republican experiment, Washington conferred with Jefferson at Mount Vernon in October 1792 and expressed amazement at the hostility between him and Hamilton. As the beleaguered president confided, "he had never suspected [the conflict] had gone so far in producing a personal difference, and he wished he could be the mediator to put an end to it," as Jefferson recorded in a subsequent memo. To Hamilton, Washington likewise issued pleas for an end to "wounding suspicions and irritating charges." Both Hamilton and Jefferson found it hard to back down from this bruising rivalry. To his credit, Washington never sought to oust Jefferson from his cabinet, despite their policy differences, and urged him to remain in the administration to avoid a monolithic uniformity of opinion.

Feeding the venom of party strife was the unrestrained press. When the new government was formed in 1789, most newspapers still functioned as neutral publications, but they soon evolved into blatant party organs. Printing little spot news, with no pretense of journalistic objectivity, they specialized in strident essays. Authors often wrote behind the mask of Roman pseudonyms, enabling them to engage in undisguised savagery without fear of retribution. With few topics deemed taboo, the press lambasted the public positions as well as private morality of leading political figures. The ubiquitous James T. Callender typified the scandalmongers. From his poison-tipped pen flowed the expose of Hamilton's dalliance with the young Maria Reynolds, which had prompted Hamilton, while treasury secretary, to pay hush money to her husband. Those Jeffersonians who applauded Callender's tirades against Hamilton regretted their sponsorship several years later when he unmasked President Jefferson's carnal relations with his slave Sally Hemings.

At the start of his presidency, Americans still viewed Washington as sacrosanct and exempt from press criticism. By the end of his first term, he had shed this immunity and reeled from vicious attacks. Opposition journalists didn't simply denigrate Washington's presidential record but accused him of aping royal ways to prepare for a new monarchy. The most merciless critic was Philip Freneau, editor of the National Gazette, the main voice of the Jeffersonians. Even something as innocuous as Washington's birthday celebration Freneau mocked as a "monarchical farce" that exhibited "every species of royal pomp and parade."

Other journalists dredged up moldy tales of his supposed missteps in the French and Indian War and derided him as an inept general during the Revolutionary War. In his later, anti-Washington incarnation, Thomas Paine gave the laurels for wartime victory against the British to Gen. Horatio Gates. "You slept away your time in the field till the finances of the country were completely exhausted," Paine taunted Washington, "and you had but little share in the glory of the event." Had America relied on Washington's "cold and unmilitary conduct," Paine insisted, the commander-in-chief "would in all probability have lost America."

Giraudon / Art Resource

George Washington pleaded with Alexander Hamilton to end his feud with Thomas Jefferson, saying he hoped that "liberal allowances will be made for the political opinions of one another." He continued, "Without these I do not see how the reins of government are to be managed, or how the union of the states can be much longer preserved."

Another persistent Washington nemesis was Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and nicknamed "Lightning Rod, Jr." for his scurrilous pen. In his opposition newspaper, the Aurora, Bache questioned Washington's loyalty to the country. "I ask you, sir, to point out one single act which unequivocally proves you a FRIEND TO THE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA." Resurrecting wartime forgeries fabricated by the British, he raised the question of whether Washington had been bribed by the Crown or even served as a double agent.

So stung was Washington by these diatribes that Jefferson claimed he had never known anyone so hypersensitive to criticism. For all his granite self-control, the president succumbed to private outrage. At one cabinet session, Secretary of War Henry Knox showed Washington a satirical cartoon in which the latter was being guillotined in the manner of the late Louis XVI. As Jefferson recalled Washington's titanic outburst, "The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself," and only regained control of his emotions with difficulty. A few years later, in a strongly worded rebuke to Jefferson, Washington reflected on the vicious partisanship that had seized the country, saying that he previously had "no conception that parties" could go to such lengths. He hotly complained of being slandered in "indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pick-pocket." To Washington's credit, he tolerated the press attacks and never resorted to censorship or reprisals.

As it turned out, the rabid partisanship exhibited by Hamilton and Jefferson previewed America's future far more accurately than Washington's noble but failed dream of nonpartisan civility. In the end, Washington seems to have realized as much. By his second term, having fathomed the full extent of Jefferson's disloyalty, he insisted upon appointing cabinet members who stood in basic sympathy with his policies. After he left office, he opted to join in the partisan frenzy, at least in his private correspondence. He no longer shrank from identifying with Federalists or scorning Republicans, nor did he feel obliged to muzzle his blazing opinions. To nephew Bushrod Washington, he warned against "any relaxation on the part of the Federalists. We are sure there will be none on that of the Republicans, as they have very erroneously called themselves." He even urged Bushrod and John Marshall to run as Federalists for congressional seats in Virginia.

Only a generation after Washington's death in 1799, during the age of Andrew Jackson, presidents were to emerge as unabashed chieftains of their political parties, showing no qualms about rallying their followers. The subsequent partisan rancor has reverberated right down to the present day—with no relief in sight.

—Ron Chernow is the author of "Alexander Hamilton" and "Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr." His next book, "Washington: A Life," is due out in October.