LEADERSHIP SHAPES THE CHARACTER OF THE REPUBLIC

Washington as America’s first president.  There had never been any question about who would head up the new Republic as its president.  George Washington’s power of leadership was fabled.  He had led the small American army through the darkest of times – by personal example of his own steadiness, his own willingness to sacrifice personally for the cause, his own obvious devotion to the God on whom ultimately all things were dependent.  Even during the heated debates that took place constantly the summer that the Constitution was being worked out, Washington had sat there quietly as its presiding officer, his mere presence reminding those present to stay focused on the task before them – not to get caught up in petty rivalry.  This is the power of true moral leadership.

But there was nonetheless a big question on people’s mind as Washington now took office as the country’s President:  would he simply serve one four-year term – or, like so many of the colonial leaders, stand repeatedly for reelection, becoming something like President-for-Life – like a European monarch? 

Actually, Washington was hoping, after serving his country as military general and then chairman of the Constitutional Convention, to retire to his farm at Mount Vernon – and only rather reluctantly agreed to serve – just one term, he assured them.

A number of very big issues faced him as he took office: the massive indebtedness of the American states resulting from the long war for independence, the uncertainty of where exactly the lines of authority were to be found under the new regime, and where America stood in the constant tension between France and England – which America was not going to be able to avoid getting caught up in. 

Alexander Hamilton.  The first issue – America’s huge money problem – was handled swiftly by his newly appointed Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton – who had served Washington bravely and faithfully during the war.

Hamilton was the classical Realist – born of questionable circumstances in the Caribbean Islands, orphaned at a very young age, but able early on to demonstrate a brilliance of mind that got him a scholarship, allowing him to head off to New York for study at King’s College (the future Columbia University), where he prepared himself for a law career.  During the rising contention with King George, Hamilton wrote numerous articles in defense of the colonies’ rights in opposing the King’s ambitions – yet jumped to the personal defense of the college president when an angry mob wanted to take the president down for his Tory loyalties. 

When fighting finally broke out, Hamilton undertook the study of military history and tactics, eventually organizing an artillery company of Patriot militia and becoming the unit’s captain.  His company served bravely in Washington’s army – all the way from the near-disaster in New York City to the victories at Trenton and Princeton.  Hamilton was courted by various commanding officers to become part of their staff.  But he said yes only when it was Washington himself who made the request. 

Washington soon came to depend heavily on Hamilton – who seemed to have a well-informed understanding of what to do in various situations, diplomatic as well as military – and let Hamilton himself issue orders to both military and diplomatic officers on his own behalf.  And it was Hamilton – much to the deep concern of Washington – who begged for and was finally permitted the dangerous honor of leading the Patriot charge on the last of the British defenses at Yorktown. 

After the war Hamilton went back to his law practice, often defending Tories who were having enormous financial, social and personal difficulties in the post-war period.  At this point Hamilton took up the study of finance and in 1784 founded the successful Bank of New York.  Recognizing his brilliance, but also serious grounding in life’s hard realities, the State of New York chose Hamilton to be one of its delegates to the Constitutional Convention.  We have also seen that he and Madison wrote most of the articles of the Federalist Papers, very insightful commentaries that explained brilliantly why support of the new Constitution was so critically important to the country.

And ultimately it was to Hamilton that Washington once again turned in his quest to have a strong team working with him in his new role as US President.  And the country’s economic difficulties being the most challenging of the issues facing the country, Washington asked Hamilton to serve as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury.

Hamilton’s debt assumption program – and the “Whiskey Rebellion.”  As Treasury Secretary, Hamilton decided to have the new Federal government assume all the debts of the states, restoring vital confidence in the country’s finances necessary to get the country up and running again – but requiring the imposition of new taxes to pay off these debts.  This however caused frustration among many of the Patriot soldiers who had sold their service payments to speculators for a mere fraction of their face value, believing that this was the best that they would ever get out of these payments – only now to see the value abruptly rise – and the speculators being paid off in full by Hamilton’s new policies.  They felt enormously cheated – especially then when in 1791 they had to face new taxes on their whiskey (whiskey being a major source of income to these farmers) to cover the costs of Hamilton’s policies. 

A huge rebellion broke out in 1794 among the veterans (the Whiskey Rebellion as it is known in history) and Washington once again regretfully had to send the standing army (with himself in command) to break what was becoming a violent rebellion – in order to make it clear that the new government intended seriously to follow and defend its laws.  Whiskey taxes would always remain difficult to collect.  But at least the country now understood that they had a strong hand in Washington’s command of the new country.

Indeed, Washington made it clear that the federal laws were not up for challenge in the streets.  America was not going to let itself become like Revolutionary France (the French Reign of Terror was in full swing at this time).  Laws put properly in place under the new constitution would be obeyed.  Period.

Thomas Jefferson.  As much as Hamilton was the arch-Realist, Thomas Jefferson was the arch-Idealist.   Much of that resulted from the fact that they grew up differently – very differently.  Whereas Hamilton had to fight for everything that came his way, Jefferson was born to privilege – and found that this carried him forward in life quite nicely.  Jefferson was born within the ranks of the Virginia aristocracy, his mother being of the prestigious Randolph family – with young Thomas joining his Randolph cousins in being tutored in the classics of language, literature and science.  He continued his studies of the classics at the College of William and Mary, and upon graduation took up the study of law under the prestigious George Wythe.  At age 21 he inherited from his father 5,000 acres and 52 slaves, including land where he began his designs for the place of perfect habitation – Monticello – which as a fervent Idealist he would work on for the rest of his life in the attempt to use the powers of reason to bring it to full perfection (which also led him “unreasonable” financial debt!).

As a practicing lawyer he became a delegate to the House of Burgesses (1769-1775) and in 1772 married a cousin, Martha, adding 11,000 acres and 110 more slaves to his estate.  With the calling of the Second Continental Congress in 1775, the young aristocrat was sent to represent Virginia.  Here he met John Adams – and joined the small committee called on to draft a Declaration of Independence – a task that Adams turned over to Jefferson to initiate.  In completing this task, Jefferson would gain for himself great fame, even though much of what he wrote was simply a rephrasing of Locke’s philosophy.  And – much to Jefferson’s deep annoyance – not only was some of his wording amended by the full Congress, about a third of it was rejected because it went overboard in the way that it tried to justify the American revolt.

That same year he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates and joined the committee designing a new Virginia State Constitution.  This gave him the opportunity to advance his agenda of keeping the religious “establishment” out of the affairs of state, in sponsoring a bill entitled, Establishing Religious Freedom.  He understandably disliked intensely the dominating role that King George’s Episcopalian Church of England had played in Virginia life.  However his bill failed to pass in the Virginia House.

But two years later he was able to participate in the task of reviewing all the laws of Virginia, thus finally allowing him to recast these laws according to his rather Deist/Humanist worldview (religion). 

The next year he was even elected Virginia governor – putting yet more power into his hands as a designer of the perfect legal domain.  However, his work was interrupted in 1781 by the attacks in Virginia of the turncoat Benedict Arnold – who burned Richmond to the ground, and sent Jefferson and his government officials scurrying pathetically here and there to avoid capture.^[1]  

After the war (in 1784), as a member of the American Confederation’s Congress, he chaired the committee that was to plan the development of the Northwest Territories – in which Jefferson outlined nine territories (with very exotic-sounding names!), eventually trimmed down to five territories (with largely Indian names). 

But that same year he was sent by the Confederation to join Franklin and Adams in Europe, to secure various diplomatic agreements with England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, etc.  At this point Jefferson fell completely in love with the French lifestyle, especially French intellectualism – which was becoming increasingly aggressive at this point.  And he came very close to being an on-site spectator to those events that broke out in July of 1789 – except that, in what was supposed to be a brief return to America for the summer, he was called on by Washington to take the post as America’s first Secretary of State.  Thus Jefferson had to watch events unfold in Paris from a distance. 

But his heart was clearly with the wildly enthusiastic French Revolutionaries.  He was certain that – in overthrowing the Old Order of Monarchy, Aristocracy and Church – the Revolution would be bringing France to an Ideal realm of pure Reason.

Jefferson vs. Hamilton.  Soon, because of all the political turmoil unleashed by the French Revolution, facing America was the matter of France versus England – and where America would position itself in the midst of the ongoing feud between these two countries.  Jefferson, now (at least theoretically) in charge of American diplomacy – was all-out in his support of France – to a point of dangerous blindness when he refused for the longest time to see any injustice in the way the French Revolution was turning itself into a violent, cruel and bloody mess.^[2]  

On the other hand – although they had personally fought the English fiercely in their effort to maintain American independence (while Jefferson had spent the war avoiding the English enemy) – Washington and Hamilton understood that England, despite that recent war, was still the more logical American ally. 

But this pro-British stance of Washington and Hamilton so infuriated Jefferson that at the end of 1793 he stepped down from Washington’s Cabinet – to form an anti-Federalist faction designed to fight Washington, Hamilton and the Federalists. 

Now also Madison switched sides and joined Jefferson to develop the new Republican party (led at the time mostly by Virginians – not connected at all with the modern Republican Party!).

Jay’s Treaty.  The British did not help their case in America by refusing to abandon their forts located to the west across the Appalachian Mountains – and by maintaining their alliances with the American Indians living in that region.   But most infuriating to the Americans was the British practice of stopping American ships and seizing their hardiest sailors, claiming these to be Englishmen avoiding English naval service – when this was seldom the case.  Americans protested – and in 1794 sent Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay to England to try to straighten matters out.  Actually, the English were not greatly impressed by American power and Jay returned home with only small concessions – giving Jefferson’s Republicans all sorts of opportunity to mock “Jay’s Treaty” and attack Washington and the Federalists.

Washington’s second – and final – term.  When Washington had approached the end of his term in office in 1793, the Federalists had pleaded with him to accept another term, for there was no one else with the stature to oppose the Republicans.  He very reluctantly agreed to do so – more than ever determined that this would be his last term of service to the country.  As it turned out, it was – as Washington by the end of his second term in office was exhausted by the slander coming from Jefferson’s Republicans about how pro-monarchy he and Hamilton were for supporting the English monarchy against the French Republic.  Certainly Washington and Hamilton’s choice of Britain over France had nothing at all to do with somehow being pro-monarchy – which definitely they were not (it was they, after all – and not Jefferson – who had just put their lives on the line in fighting the British)!  The accusation was simply a case of emotionally-charged cheap-shot politics against the Federalists waged by Jefferson’s Republicans.

But in any case, Washington’s departure thus helped establish the tradition that two terms of service (eight years) was the absolute limit on Presidential service.  It would eventually even become a written Constitutional law in 1951 (the 22nd Amendment) – after Roosevelt abused this principle by running for a third and then a fourth term in the 1940s.

John Adams.  Washington’s Vice President John Adams was barely elected as the next President.  Adams was a small man with very big ambitions – but also very measured in the way he worked out the moral lines of events going on around him, and what he expected of himself in response.  He was always subject to a battle that raged within between the strict Puritan structuring he underwent growing up – and his desire to prove himself as a man ahead of the times.  His father was disappointed that John’s Harvard education led not to the ministry but instead to the law – the son seeing in the law a better road to the greatness that he hungered for so deeply. 

But his Puritan side would put his law practice under moral restraints that lawyers do not usually worry about.  Thus it was that Adams provided the defense in court of the Redcoats who fired on the Boston mob that was assaulting them, potentially putting him in great disfavor with the Bostonians – but instead earning a degree of admiration for his bravery, such that took him several steps down the road of greatness that he sought.

Then speaking and publishing strong defenses of the rights of the colonies to oppose the King’s attack on their long-standing ability to govern themselves fully, he put himself out in the lead of the growing movement against the king. This earned him the appointment as a Massachusetts delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, the latter which asked him to head up a committee to draft a Declaration of Independence. The fact that he let Jefferson take the initiative rather than he himself in actually providing the original draft – and thus Jefferson gaining fame forever for doing so – would remain for Adams a perpetual torment! 

Adams served on a number of committees of Congress over the next years.  Then from 1778 onward he was sent back and forth (along with Franklin) to Paris to develop a working alliance with the French.  And he too was part of the discussions that produced the Treaty of Paris formally ending the war in 1783.  But in the meantime, he had also been working with the Dutch to coordinate with them their role in supporting American independence – and Dutch banks in helping post-war America financially.   Then in 1785 he was sent to London as America’s first Ambassador to the Court of St. James (as that position has always been known).  While there, he contributed his own excellent writings in support of the adoption of the new American Constitution (which, because he was in England at the time, he had no direct part in drawing up). 

By this time he was so well known in America that he came in second in the Presidential vote – and thus, by the understanding at the time, the recipient of the position as America’s first Vice President.  But as Adams would come to discover, it was a position with a title only, and no real political power or importance of any kind.  But finally it did put him in position to run for the presidency when Washington stepped down. 

And thus in 1796 he was elected President (barely) over his competitor Jefferson – and only when the election was placed in the hands of the House of Representatives because no candidate had a majority of votes.  In the House, Hamilton and his Federalist supporters finally decided that they disliked Jefferson more than they disliked Adams!  Thus in electing Adams to the presidency, this made runner-up Jefferson the new Vice President – and Hamilton even more greatly disliked by Jefferson and his Republicans.  In the end this action in support of Adams put Hamilton on the Republican hate list.^[3] 

Adams as President.  In any case, with Adams as President, he had to face the fact that it was now the French who were seizing American ships – embarrassing Jefferson and the pro-French Republicans.  Hamilton and the Federalists now called for war against the French.  It was all that Adams could do to keep tempers cooled down – especially with the “XYZ Affair” that scandalized Americans when Americans were sent to try to solve this problem, but were told they would first have to pay enormous bribes to French agents (self-identified only as X, Y and Z) in order to get discussions going.  They refused.  Consequently, Americans became even more enraged at hearing of the French behavior.

Then in 1798, Congress passed (and unfortunately Adams signed) the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, which branded as punishable “traitors” anyone (principally Jefferson’s Republicans) who supported France – or who opposed the position of the President or the heavily Federalist Congress.  They would be subject to expulsion from the country. 

By the next year (1799) it seemed as if America was actually at war with France (the “Quasi War”) on the high seas.  And with a large sweep of the 1798 congressional elections by the Federalists, the demand for an actual declaration of war was now very strong.

It was at this point the doctrine of “nullification” began to be discussed openly by the Republicans – as they claimed that sovereign rights in the new Federation belonged with the States and the people, not the Federalist-dominated Congress.  And any laws that Congress might want to pass (such as the Alien and Sedition Laws) could simply be nullified by a decision of the states.  The congressional majority of course ignored the challenge.  But the right of nullification by the states of decisions made in the nation’s capital would be heard all the way up to the outbreak of the Civil War some 60 years later.

In the end, to avoid war at all costs, Adams sent an envoy to Paris to work out some kind of understanding with the French that could reduce diplomatic tensions.  The envoy came back with a treaty in which the French agreed to leave American ships alone – a treaty which Adams signed – understanding that this would hardly satisfy the war-hungry Federalists, nor bring the angry Republicans back to a cooperative spirit in Congress. In fact, he understood that by signing it he was undercutting any chance he had of victory in the elections coming up only a month away.  He was right.  But it was a brave thing to do – sparing the country from a war it did not need to fight.

One final act of Adams just as he was about to leave office was the rush to sign some six dozen appointments to positions in the Federal Judiciary – including the all-important appointment as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court the Virginian (but, exceptional for the Virginian group, a very strong Federalist), John Marshall.  This action would not only upset the wave of new Republicans voted to Congress – but would put at the head of the American judiciary an individual who in so many ways would rewrite the American Constitution with respect to the role that the Federal Courts would come to play in the nation’s political affairs – putting in the hands of the Supreme Court justices powers never intended by the Constitution’s original Framers.

Anyway, having completed his service as the country’s second president, Adams slipped quietly out of the new capital at Washington, D.C., as America’s new president, Jefferson, was sworn into office there.

Jefferson as President (1801-1809).  And once in office Jefferson began to undo the Federalist legacy – by removing the land taxes imposed on the farmers – making him very popular in the South and the West – and shifting the source of revenue to customs duties imposed on (largely Northern) imports and exports.  He also raised revenue by selling (quite cheaply) Western land to new settlers – another very popular move among Westerners or those headed West – which came at a great cost to the Indians living there of course!   Thus Jefferson built the Republican Party into a great political powerhouse.

To Jefferson’s great credit,^[4] it was during the early years of his presidency that America purchased from the French the huge Louisiana territory to the West of the Mississippi (the Indians living there not being consulted on this matter, of course) – blocking the possibility of any European power getting there before the Americans – who were spreading westward rapidly.  This purchase effectively doubled the land claim of the American nation! 

And in great part this bargain purchase had been made possible because American public finances had such a very strong credit rating – due to Hamilton’s monetary policies, ones that Jefferson had so recently hated intensely!

Lewis and Clark explore this new region.  What it was that America had exactly come to in this Louisiana Purchase was largely unknown to its new owners.  Thus Jefferson commissioned Captain Meriwether Lewis (accompanied by William Clark) and a team of fifty men to explore this new territory (1804-1806).^[5]  They followed the Missouri River West, hoping to find a water route to the Pacific.  But as winter set in they found themselves bogged down in the Dakotas, and thankfully were able to bring on a French fur trapper and his Indian wife Sacajawea to guide them westward. 

The next summer they reached the Rocky Mountains, crossed them, and in November finally arrived at the Pacific Ocean.  They wintered there, then in early 1806 began their trek back East, arriving in St. Louis as heroes.

To the shores of Tripoli.  Further to his credit, Jefferson had the navy tackle the problem of Muslim pirates operating out of the Mediterranean towns of North Africa.  Jefferson refused to pay tribute any longer (formerly paid out to release hostages or just prevent attacks on American shipping in the Mediterranean), instead sending American ships in concert with the Italian King of Naples against the pirates.  This worked somewhat – but would need the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 before the task could be completed.

Jefferson takes command of American foreign trade.  But on the negative side of his political balance sheet, Jefferson imposed an embargo on the sale of American goods to Britain, in response to the ongoing British impressment of American sailors – the logic of this move being that this would deprive the British of vital American goods and bring Britain to its senses.  But Jefferson’s commercial boycott served only to make America appear to the British to be clearly a French ally – at a time when French dictator Napoleon, who had managed to seize control of nearly all continental Europe, had also placed an embargo on all European trade with Britain – in an effort to collapse the British economy.  So England’s response to Jefferson’s policy was to become more, not less aggressive, against America – at a time that Jefferson had weakened considerably America’s own military capabilities. 

Then to make things “fairer,” Jefferson decided to extend the same restriction against trade with France as well, shutting down pretty much all of America’s export business – and nearly collapsing the American economy.

Jefferson cuts back on the navy.  To make bad matters even worse, Jefferson then chose to meet the European challenge by not building more warships (frigates), the likes of which had proven themselves so capably in the war with the Barbary states.  He figured that not having a fighting navy would help keep Americans from making the mistake of wanting to go to war with either France or Britain.^[6]  Instead he chose to build a number of much smaller gunboats.  These would not be terribly effective in defending American shipping overseas, but certainly could be used to help prevent the American smuggling that his embargo encouraged.

Thus it was that Jefferson continued to see himself not as a warrior but as “a man of peace” – unable to understand how international power actually works, and consequently leaving America increasingly vulnerable to European power politics abroad – and vengeful Indians at home.

It is also important to note that for one who had been so loud about protecting “states’ rights” against the assumption of autocratic power by an uncontrolled government in Washington, Jefferson had no problems personally acting in such an autocratic fashion when he himself was president (imposing his restrictions on American trade and downsizing America’s military defenses). 

But of course Jefferson was among the most “enlightened” of Americans, and that justified his autocracy (as “enlightenment” always does!).

But thankfully, just as he was about to leave office in 1809, Jefferson somehow awoke finally to the realization of the magnitude of the disaster his economic policies had produced – and he finally repealed his ill-conceived embargo.  And the American economy soon revived.

John Marshall – and the empowerment of the Supreme Court.  As we have just noted, one of the last things Adams did before he turned the presidency over to Jefferson was to make the last-minute appointment of John Marshall to the position as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Marshall would go on to hold that position from 1801 to 1835.  This would have a huge impact on the shaping of American government, for Marshall would gradually, case by case, assign to the Supreme Court increasing powers to decide which laws of Congress – and the states – were “constitutional” and which were not, and if not (by the Court’s own decision on the matter), then that they would not be supported by the judiciary as the law of the land.   Or even the Court might decide that the law ought to be interpreted in this or that particular manner – in essence revising (even extensively) the very purpose of such law.  As stated before, this would make the Supreme Court, not Congress, the highest legislative body of the land!

Why did the Supreme Court assume such power for itself?  Basically because Marshall saw that it was there for the taking – and because no one at the time understood the dynamic and thus did nothing to block this huge assumption of power by the Supreme Court.  Eventually because nothing was done, it became simply assumed that the Supreme Court had such constitutional powers.  But unlike the rest of the federal system, which was put in place with a number of built-in checks on its various powers, the Supreme Court was originally defined with no known checks on its power.

The presumption was that a long-held Anglo legal ethic would somehow direct the action of the Court.  But such an ethic would prove over time susceptible to being interpreted widely and deeply in a number of quite different ways, depending on the personal political or ideological makeup (always well rationalized, as lawyers are indeed trained to do) of the nine members of the court – or even just five of the justices constituting a slight voting majority for any particular case.   That’s a lot of unrestricted power to put in the hands of a very small group of enlightened individuals!

^[1]It was later that year decided by the Virginia Assembly that Jefferson had acted appropriately in taking himself and his officials into hiding in his various plantations.  But he had lost such stature that he was not reelected governor.

^[2]When William Short, a Jeffersonian supporter, wrote Jefferson from Paris that mobs had taken over the French Revolution and had even butchered some of their French friends, Jefferson in January of 1793 wrote back a sharp rebuke: “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it now is.”

^[3]In 1804, Aaron Burr shot and killed Hamilton in a pistol duel over insulting comments Hamilton had made in letters about Burr as Republican candidate to the position of New York governor, comments Hamilton intended to remain private but got printed somehow.

^[4]Actually, such credit belongs to his envoys sent to France, Livingston and Monroe, who were originally authorized to purchase (for an amount not to exceed $10 million) only the town of New Orleans located near the mouth of the Mississippi River – but who on their own authority answered with an immediate “yes” when Napoleon offered them the entire Louisiana Territory for $15 million.  In part this came about so easily for the Americans because Napoleon was short on funding at the time and found American money rather than American land more supportive of his ambitions.

^[5]Jefferson would also send out other teams to explore the new territory, including that of Gen. Zebulon Pike who in 1806 ventured as far west as the territory that would become Colorado (who also was captured by the Spanish in the process, but released in 1807!).

^[6]Liberal Humanists such as Jefferson have always supposed that it is weapons that cause wars – and thus disarming the people will automatically cut back on the dangers of the people falling into a war with someone else.  But in fact self-disarmament – that is, disarmament if not mutual on the part of all contending societies – will merely undercut the ability of a society to protect itself against another society that has come to hold such power that it no longer fears the consequences of its efforts to bully others into submission.  Weapons are not the problem.  The political-moral intentions of societies are what are critical in matters such as this.