If any proof were wanting of how completely Madison had gone over to the opposition, he gave it in the memorable attack upon the secretary of the treasury in the spring of 1793, within four days of the close of the second session of the Second Congress. It was hoped by that proceeding to overwhelm Hamilton with disgrace, and that the President would feel himself obliged to expel him from the cabinet. When the resolutions with this aim were offered, a member said that delicacy, decency, and every rule of justice had been violated; "a more unhandsome proceeding he had never seen in Congress;" he might have remained a member to this day, and, save for the attempts in our time to expel John Quincy Adams and Joshua R. Giddings, not have changed his opinion.

In the course of the preceding year Hamilton, under various signatures, had met his opponents in the newspapers. But it was a veil, not a visor, behind which he fought; for everybody knew from whom came the vigorous blows that he dealt about him right and left. It was a boast always of Jefferson that he never condescended to newspaper[186] controversy; but it was pretty well understood that he himself did not enter upon that rather unsatisfactory mode of warfare because he preferred the safer method of fighting by proxy. Hamilton never was in doubt as to who was his real antagonist, and he aimed his blows over the heads of his petty assailants to where he knew they would hit home. They left bad bruises upon his colleague in the cabinet. Among other papers of the time, though not a newspaper article, was an official letter to the President, in which Hamilton defended his principles and his measures. Early in 1792 the President, longing to escape the toils of public life and to spend the rest of his days in tranquillity, had consulted Madison and his two secretaries, Jefferson and Hamilton, upon the propriety of his declining a re?lection. He soon changed his mind, influenced, perhaps, as much by the dissensions, so evident in the expostulations of his friends, as by the expostulations themselves. He deprecated this open feud between his secretaries as a public misfortune, and sought, if he could not reconcile them, to silence it. That the Federalists were monarchists, as Jefferson and Madison never ceased asserting, he knew was not true, without the emphatic and indignant declarations of Hamilton, Adams, and other leading men of that party, when they condescended to notice a charge which they deemed so absurd that it was difficult to believe that anybody could make it in earnest. But, while he knew there was no real[187] danger from that quarter, he could not fail to see that the reverence and love in which he was held constituted a bond of unity, so long as he remained chief magistrate; and he may have felt that, should he retire, there was no other common tie strong enough at that moment to hold together a union, the possible dissolution of which was, both at the North and at the South, considered with calmness, sometimes with complacency, and, when party passion was at a red heat, even as a thing to be prayed for. At any rate, the President consented to take the advice of the counselors whom he had consulted; but in asking that advice he unwittingly aggravated the quarrel among them which caused him so much uneasiness.

Jefferson, in the arguments he set forth both in conversation and by letter to influence Washington's decision, dwelt upon the unhappy condition of public affairs. It was a storm which he himself meant to get out of by retiring to Monticello, though he thought it was Washington's duty to remain at the helm and keep an eye to windward. This unhappy condition of affairs, he said, had all come from the course pursued by the secretary of the treasury, and was the natural consequence of the acts of Congress in relation to the public debt, the Bank, excise, currency, and other important measures passed in accordance with the secretary's policy. Whether this policy was meant to destroy the union, subvert the republic, and establish a monarchy upon its ruins, at any rate[188] such must be the inevitable result of those mischievous measures. He urged this view of the subject with such pertinacity that Washington, either because he was impressed by so much earnestness, or because he was curious to know how the assertions could best be answered, sent them to Hamilton, with other objections of a similar character from other persons, and asked for a reply. No names were given, but it is not likely that Hamilton was at any loss in guessing where such strictures upon his administration of affairs came from. "I have not fortitude enough," he said in his answer, "always to hear with calmness calumnies which necessarily include me as a principal object in the measures censured, of the falsehood of which I have the most unqualified consciousness.... I acknowledge that I cannot be entirely patient under charges which impeach the integrity of my public motives or conduct. I feel that I merit them in no degree, and expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort to suppress them." There were only two men in the country whom he could have had in mind when he wrote such words as these. In all Washington's career there is nowhere a stronger proof of his strong will, self-reliance, and passionless impartiality than that he could stand between two such furnaces as Hamilton on one side and Jefferson and Madison on the other, both glowing at the intensest white heat, while he remained usually as calm and as unmoved as if breathing[189] the softest, balmiest, and gentlest airs of a day in June. But all this personal controversy in the public prints, and in the official intercourse of the cabinet, left on both sides an intense exasperation, which could not fail to have a controlling influence in the conduct of political parties. Whether Jefferson was conscious or not—and whatever his feeling was, Madison shared it with him—that in this paper warfare he was signally defeated, the attempt to ruin Hamilton by an attack upon him in Congress followed, if it was not the consequence of, the mortification of defeat.

In February, 1793, Mr. Giles, a representative from Virginia, offered a series of resolutions calling upon the President for certain information relating to the finances. They were a bold attack upon the secretary of the treasury, and, should it prove that they could not be satisfactorily answered, would convict him of mismanagement of the financial affairs of the government, of a disregard of law, of usurpation of power, and even of embezzlement of the public funds. Any reasonable ground for believing such charges to be well-founded would be quite sufficient to bring the secretary to trial by impeachment. There was probably little doubt at the moment as to whence this blow came; for though the hand might seem the hand of Esau, the voice was the voice of Jacob. Behind Giles was Madison; and behind Madison, of course, was Jefferson. Mr. John C. Hamilton, in his "History of the Republic," asserts that the resolutions were[190] still—when he wrote, twenty-five years ago—in the archives of the State Department at Washington, in Madison's handwriting; and he further declares that Giles assured Rufus King that Madison was their author.

Hamilton's reply, so far as any intentional wrong-doing was imputed to him, was conclusive. There had been technical violations of acts of Congress in one instance, but it was only to carry out the acts themselves. Congress had, three years before, passed two acts authorizing the negotiation of two loans, one for twelve million dollars for the discharge of the foreign debt, and another for two million dollars to be used at home. It had been convenient, and had conduced to the success of the negotiation, to offer in Holland to contract a loan for fourteen million dollars, without the unnecessary, and to foreigners probably the confusing, statement that the authority for borrowing that amount was derived from two separate acts of Congress. It was only in this borrowing of the money that there was any seeming disregard of the letter of the law. The loans and their purposes were kept entirely distinct in the accounts of the department. Other questions touching the management of these loans were so clearly and frankly explained that nothing but the captiousness of party could refuse to be satisfied. On one point—the charge of an alleged deficit—the opposition was absolutely silenced. The secretary indignantly explained that the sum—as anybody could have[191] known for the asking from any officer in the Treasury Department—which was made to appear as missing was in credits for customs bonds not yet due, and bills of exchange on Europe sold but not yet paid for.

Though there was enough of decency, or of prudence which took the place of decency, to drop the insinuation that the secretary had stolen what had never been in his possession, it was not so with the rest of the accusations. Only four days before Congress was to adjourn, Giles offered another set of resolutions. These assumed that the defiance of law and unwarranted assumption of power, which, at first, were only suggested by the inquiries, were now proved to be true by the explanations that had been given. The indictment, therefore, was made to include the verdict and the sentence; the criminal was accused, was to be found guilty, and condemned to capital punishment in one proceeding, without the privilege of trial, or a recognition of the right to be heard. The argument of the resolutions was, that certain acts were a violation of law; that the secretary had committed all those acts; and therefore it was the will of the House that the facts be reported to the President. The presumption obviously was, that the President would immediately dismiss from office a disgraced and faithless public servant. But the prosecution was an utter failure. The largest vote received for any of the resolutions was only fifteen; that on the others was[192] from seven to twelve, in a quorum of from fifty to sixty members. In the course of the debate Mr. Madison had said that "his colleague [Giles] had rendered a service highly valuable to the legislature, and no less important and acceptable to the public." The House showed by its votes how very far it was from agreeing with him. But Fisher Ames wrote about that time: "Madison is become a desperate party leader, and I am not sure of his stopping at any ordinary point of extremity." If it be really true that he instigated this attack upon Hamilton, and was the author of the resolutions, using Giles as his tool to get them before the House, Ames's reflection was not uncharitable.

It would not be just, however, to leave the impression that the hostility shown in this affair was purely personal. Both Jefferson and Madison had a hearty hatred for Hamilton which would have been greatly gratified could they have made it the plain duty of the President to put him out of the Treasury Department a dishonored and ruined man. But this particular outbreak of their enmity was intensified by their sincere and earnest enthusiasm for France. They were quite willing to bring Hamilton to grief at any time because he was Hamilton; they were more than ordinarily exasperated against him just now because in recent newspaper and other controversies he had altogether got the better of them; but in this particular instance they wanted to punish him[193] because of delay of payments in discharge of the indebtedness of the United States to France. This was the essential delinquency at which the Giles resolutions were pointed. The difficulty was, not that the secretary of the treasury was not careful enough of the public money, but that he was too careful. He insisted upon being quite certain, when paying off a public debt, that he was paying it to the right persons, and that no risk should be incurred of its being demanded a second time. He felt there was no such certainty about payments to France. The king was dethroned; but it was not wise, the secretary thought, to be hasty in recognizing revolutionary governments. It was a republic to-day; it might be a regency to-morrow; a monarchy again the third day. It was more prudent to await a reasonable period for the evidence of permanency on one side or the other. Those old enough to remember the late war of the rebellion know how important the maintenance of this doctrine was in regard to the recognition of the rebel confederacy by England and France.

But to all this Jefferson did not in the least agree; neither did Madison. They were in full, even passionate, sympathy with the men who brought Louis XVI. to the guillotine. Money, they knew, was needed, and it was a crime against liberty to delay payment when payment was due to the French government. With Hamilton the question was, not whether the revolutionists ought[194] to be, but whether they were, France. With Jefferson and Madison they were France, because they ought to be. Hesitation to acknowledge that the Revolution was the nation, they thought, could only come from an "Anglican party," the "enemies of France and of Liberty," who would lead the American people "into the arms and ultimately into the government of Great Britain,"—to use the terms in which Madison spoke, a little later, of the Federalists. Which of these men, in this regard at least, were the thoughtful and prudent statesmen, and which were doctrinaires, nobody now, probably, questions. The larger proportion of the people, however, were then carried away by the enthusiasm for the French revolutionists. It was so, no doubt, at first without much distinction of party; but it was inevitable, when the government should be called upon to take some decisive stand in relation to European politics, that the country should divide into two hostile camps; or, rather, that the two camps already existing should become more hostile to each other than ever. It is not necessary to assume that the mass of the people gave themselves up to any very hard thinking about the matter. For the most part they followed, as the way is with parties, the political leaders to whom they were already accustomed, never doubting that not to do so would be treacherous to the gratitude America owed to France, and to the cause of liberty and democracy, which, in the hands of the Frenchmen,[195] was hurling monarchs from their thrones—at least one monarch from his, and more, it was hoped, would follow. But when the revolution ran into the terrible excesses of a later stage, if any Federalists had wavered in their allegiance to their chiefs they soon returned, persuaded that the wild and bloody anarchy of Paris was not the road that led to the establishment of a wise and safe popular government.

There was no need now of pretexts for quarreling; real causes came fast enough. France declared war against England, and the United States had its part to play in this strife of giants. Its real interest was to keep out of trouble; and, if all were agreed on that point, it does not seem that there should have been much difficulty in saying so. "It behooves the government of this country," wrote Washington to Hamilton, "to use every means in its power to prevent the citizens thereof from embroiling us with either of those powers, by endeavoring to maintain a strict neutrality." It is difficult to conceive of a man being sincerely desirous of helping neither one side nor the other; of injuring neither one side nor the other; of maintaining, so far as help or harm could go, an attitude of absolute impartiality towards both,—it is difficult to conceive of such a man quarreling with the word "neutrality" as applied to his position. But Jefferson, nevertheless, quarreled with it; not frankly and directly as a thing he did not want, but captiously and[196] hypercritically objecting............