MATTHEW
LIVINGSTON DAVIS’S
NOTES FROM THE POLITICAL UNDERGROUND:
The
Conflict of Political Values in the Early American Republic
by Jeffrey L. Pasley
University of Missouri-Columbia
©2000 by
Jeffrey L. Pasley
Please do not
quote without permission of author.
[ABOUT
THIS ARTICLE: This piece was completed in January 1996 and submitted to a major
scholarly journal. During the review process, it was highly praised by three
out of four readers, but it was not published in the end. Someday I plan to
revise and update it for another run at print publication. I am posting the
earlier version here to allow those who have requested to read or cite the
essay to do so. Any constructive comments that readers may wish to email would
be appreciated.]
Early
in the summer of 1830, Matthew Livingston Davis finally sat down with a stack
of books he had long been eager to read.
The tomes were Thomas Jefferson Randolph's Memoir, Correspondence and
Miscellanies, from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, the recently released
first publication of Jefferson’s works.
For more than 30 years a politician, journalist and businessman
in New York City, Davis had a more than scholarly interest in
the writings of the late third President.
He hoped the books would help make sense of the bitterest disappointment
of his life, the downfall of his hero, mentor, and close friend, Aaron
Burr. Now a ruin of his former self,
Burr had sent Davis
the work with appropriate passages marked for his attention. Over four decades, Davis had been Burr's most effective
lieutenant and most loyal friend, by 1830, almost his sole remaining
friend. While living in European exile
after his disgrace, Burr had kept in touch with only two people: his daughter and Matthew Davis.
As
a charter member of Jefferson's Republican party, Davis was shocked at what
he read in the Memoirs. Here was
a Jefferson whose "malignity . . . never ceased but with his last breath,"
whose writings teemed with a hatred "smothered, but rankling in his
heart." Here was Jefferson
professing friendship to Burr while condemning him privately, accepting Burr as
a political partner then later persecuting him.
Davis
began to scribble furious commentaries on the Memoirs in his notebook,
returning day after day to the task. A
few years later, he set to work on a book that would finally tell Burr's side
of the story, a project that the subject
himself had long urged but which Davis had always refused -- until after he
read Jefferson's writings.
The
outlines of the story Davis
brooded upon are familiar. In 1800,
Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were nearly peers on the national scene. Jefferson
was only one of a number of political leaders who could claim a place just
below George Washington as a founder of the republic. Jefferson
was unquestionably the most nationally prominent figure associated with the
Republican opposition of the 1790s, but his prestige was heavily concentrated
in the South. He needed the added luster
and direct efforts of his running mate to win a narrow victory in the election
of 1800. Thereafter, Burr might have been a future
presidential prospect himself if not for the series of events that soon
destroyed his reputation: the controversy surrounding the electoral deadlock of
1801, the murder of Alexander Hamilton, the ill-fated western expedition, and the
ensuing treason trial. Though he
protested innocence in all these cases, Burr lived the rest of his life as a
political and social pariah. As Jefferson
rose to the rank of national icon, Burr's one-time popularity was forgotten and
his accomplishments willfully misremembered.
Matthew Livingston Davis knew better. Davis knew
from personal experience that the Sage had kept well away from direct
involvement in political campaigning and party organization, and recent
scholarship has demonstrated that Jefferson and most of the Early Republic’s
other gentleman officeholders considered such activities neither respectable
nor legitimate. Among the upper-class political leaders of
the 1790s, Burr -- a prominent attorney, Princeton
graduate, and former U.S. Senator -- was quite unusual
in his willingness to engage directly in political campaigning, and one of the
few such leaders who had any close involvement in the creation of the
opposition party organization. As a printer who edited several Republican newspapers
during the 1790s, Burr’s henchman Davis was much more typical of the early
party organizers. Genteel disdain for
partisanship and practical politics left the work of organizing the party,
promoting its views, and campaigning for its candidates to more obscure men --
newspaper editors, petty officeholders, and similar folk -- who inhabited lower
levels of both the social structure and the political system. As the parties developed, many of these
people essentially became political professionals, people who made their
livings as political organizers and spokesmen, or as a result of those
activities. Political professionals
would come to dominate the American political system by the 1830s, but in
Jefferson’s time, incipient professionals like Davis were relegated to a kind of political
underground, vital to the functioning of the system but officially
unacknowledged by most of its leaders.
Nineteenth-century writers overlooked the
contributions of this underworld, and twentieth-century historians have seen
the early party struggle only a little more clearly than their
predecessors. Scholars from Claude G.
Bowers to Merrill D. Peterson portrayed Jefferson himself as generalissimo of a Republican party "machine."
When the efforts of Burr and the political underground
were acknowledged, as by the early political scientist Moisei
Ostrogorski, they were generally cast in a sinister
light. The rise of the "republican
synthesis" in the 1960s and '70s placed Davis, Burr, and their
confederates in an even more ignominious position. Historians such as Richard Hofstadter, Ronald
Formisano, and Paul Goodman correctly described the Founders' antipathy to
political parties and their commitment to a politics of consensus. Yet some
went on to reason -- based on the Founders' rhetoric and the low level of
institutionalization that characterized the early parties -- that
competitive popular politics did not even exist in the period to any
significant degree. A near-consensus
congealed around this opinion by the late 1980s, and, until very recently, the
study of early national politics languished as a result.
The
tendency to downplay early party politics has left prevailing interpretations
of the Early Republic's political culture
incomplete. How much confidence should
we have in broad statements about the relative strength of
"republicanism" and "liberalism," or about the dominant
attitudes toward party organization, if the voices of those most deeply engaged
in political conflict are excluded? The
historical profession's current take on early national politics corresponds
rather closely with the self-serving and myopic view of the gentlemen statesmen
at the top of the system, who generally found it more comfortable to assay the
role of disinterested patriots than to acknowledge the partisanship being
committed in their behalf. Surely in
this era of "history from the bottom up," such a skewed perspective
requires correction.
Matthew
Livingston Davis and his notebook on the writings of Jefferson
(which to my knowledge no historian has used before) help provide a starting
point for such a correction. Read in the
context of Davis's life and
career, the notebook reveals the full complexity of the republic's early
political development. In Jefferson’s
letters, Davis fully confronted Jefferson’s classical republican political values for the
first time and discovered how different those values were from his own. "From early life to his death, he was a
politician," one of Davis's
obituaries read, and he never the impulse to hide or apologize for his
partisanship. As one of New York’s
original Democratic Republicans, a key architect of Jefferson’s 1800 victory,
and the principal founder of the Tammany Hall political machine, Davis looked
back from the 1830s with pride on a long and (to his way of thinking)
productive career. The joy of Davis’s later years was lounging about the lobbies and
taverns of Washington, D.C., regaling listeners with tales of his
political adventures and acquaintances.
Davis’s notebook reveals two major sources of this
divergence of political values within Jefferson’s
party. First, positive attitudes toward
party organization and other forms of political “liberalism” came much more
easily to people who had never been part of the colonial or revolutionary
political elite, and especially to people of Davis’s lower middling rank: small master
artisans, ambitious journeymen, shopkeepers, clerks, and bottom-feeding
lawyers. A political system in which
parties rather than personal reputations were the driving force, and in which
it might be possible for party activists to earn a living for their work, was
one in which men without large personal fortunes or prominent family
connections could participate. Second,
positive attitudes about partisanship came more easily to natives of the Middle
States. Socially and economically much
more heterogeneous than the Jefferson’s South or John Adams’s New England, the
Middle States of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had experienced
continuous, organized political competition since the colonial period. Political consensus was not expected or even
valued to the same degree as elsewhere, because in the Middle States it was
assumed that the various interests at large in society would naturally compete
for power and benefits in the political arena.
While the 1790s brought political profound changes in the Middle States
as elsewhere, partisan politics itself was not new. Among the politicians of the region, party
canons of behavior -- including (to varying degrees) vigorous campaigning,
party discipline, and the “spoils system” -- had been long been in force.
While
the case of Davis
and his notebook do not settle the lengthy debate over the fundamental
character of early American political culture, it does suggest that the debate
may have rested on false premises. Jefferson was clearly more a “republican”
and Davis more a “liberal,” but the fact that the latter was a long-time worker
for the party headed by the former suggests that there was no single hegemonic
political culture in early America. Political values varied according to social
class, occupation, region of the country, and level of the political
system. Republicanism and liberalism
could be fused together, or overlay each other, and co-exist within the same
party, the same community, or even the same person. Sometimes this mixing occurred without
tension, but more often it led to sudden schisms and shocking turnabouts such
as Davis and Burr experienced in their dealings with Jefferson. The much-noted volatility of early American
politics resulted as much from ideological confusion as from a passionate
commitment to one creed or the other.
1.
Davis’s response
to Jefferson’s letters must be seen in the
context of his background and early career, which gave him a perspective on
political life very different from Thomas Jefferson’s. Jefferson was born into the
highest ranks of his society and entered politics as a birthright. In his mind, party politics was linked with
corruption, disorder, and creeping despotism.
Davis,
by contrast, was born into a social stratum in which the only birthright was
work. He found in party politics not
only an emotionally satisfying and absorbing activity, but also all the
opportunities for wealth, social mobility and public honor he ever enjoyed.
Davis’s father, also
called Matthew Davis, seems to have been an artisan of some kind, and, like
many New Yorkers of the middling and lower sorts, his first involvement in
politics came during the anti-British protests of the 1760s. After fleeing occupied New York some time earlier in the war, the
elder Matthew Davis lost his life fighting the British in June 1780. After the war, his
widow Phebe Davis operated a series of
boarding houses in busy commercial districts such as Hanover Square. Boardinghouse life did not provide the younger
Matthew Davis with either classical education or gentility, but it did imbue
him with a love of the noisy, crowded atmosphere of taverns, print-shops, and
hotels, the places in which he would spend his political life.
Eventually
Phebe bound Matthew and his brother William out as
apprentice printers. Printing attracted
many intelligent working-class boys because, unlike most artisanal occupations,
it required literacy
and provided opportunities for reading and self-expression. In Matthew Davis’s case, printing also had
the additional allure of a chance for political involvement. He became co-proprietor of Levi Wayland’s
printing office in 1794, and immediately began injecting politics into the
firm’s formerly blandly commercial output.
Davis and Wayland’s newspaper, the Evening Post, joined
vociferously in defending the "self-created" Democratic Societies and
preventing the fledgling Tammany Society from siding with the Washington administration. At the same time, Davis began to take a direct part in Tammany
and other artisan groups, overseeing the maneuvers that drove out Tammany's
remaining Federalists and began the fraternity’s politicization.
In doing all this, Davis followed a path trodden by many young
Republicans during the 1790s. Filled
with ideological fervor and political ambition but lacking the social status or
financial means for a conventional political career, Davis found a side-door into political life
through the printing trade and its increasingly close connection to the
emerging political parties. Davis
was luckier than many printers in attracting the favorable attention of several
older and more influential men, among them Commodore James Nicholson
(father-in-law of Albert Gallatin) and Senator Aaron Burr. After successful if controversial careers in
the military and the law, Burr had recently decided to "commence
politician" and was in the market for disciples. It was a heady experience for the young
artisan Davis to hob-nob with an urbane gentleman,
and he quickly became one of a group of "young and ardent
politicians" who devoted themselves to Burr and Burr’s political career.
The
firm of Davis and Wayland was swept away by rampaging inflation and a yellow
fever epidemic only a year after Davis
joined it. Later publishing ventures
were only slightly more successful. Like many other printers who tried making
their living from political publishing, Davis did much better in the political
half of his business, rising through the Republican ranks even while his
printing firm foundered. Davis’s growing
reputation owed primarily to his efforts as an effective information-gatherer
and innovative political organizer. He
proved particularly adept at orchestrating the proceedings of supposedly open
and spontaneous public meetings. As one
New York editor put it in 1850, Davis
“was the father of all those nice modes of manufacturing public opinion, carrying
primary meetings, getting his own candidate nominated, carrying a ward, a city,
a county, or even a State, which were then new and novel” but came to dominate
urban politics in the 19th century.
Davis’s innovations won
elections and but they also had the larger purpose of opening political life to
men of his own relatively plebeian origins. Before the 1798 elections, for
instance, Davis
created an organization called the Society for Free Debate. Simultaneously a charitable organization and
a vehicle for proselytizing the voters, the Society furnished a forum in which
young, undereducated Republicans like Davis
could develop their skills in oratory and political argumentation. Before audiences drawn from the general
public, Davis and his friends held forth on politically charged topics such as
the defense of American shipping, imprisonment for debt, and the injuries
caused by "the Influence of Wealth . . . to the liberties of
mankind." Federalists sniffed that the group was little
more than a "Jacobin Club in disguise," and lampooned the notion of
political orations being made by political and social unknowns such as Davis
and an "Irish Shoemaker" who also spoke one evening, but the society
clearly made an effective training ground for young politicians. As Davis wrote in reviewing the Society's
proceedings for his newspaper, not all the speakers did well, but many of them
needed only "time and practice, to enable them to vie with the best." Davis
soon made himself into one of the New York Republicans’ more effective speakers
and earned numerous honors from the various organizations in which he was
involved.
Not
long after the 1798 election, Burr gave Davis
a more tangible kind of reward, a responsible position (either as cashier or a
high-ranking clerk) at the Burr-controlled Manhattan Company bank. The job not only rescued Davis from his lackluster printing business,
but also gave him a chance to surpass the status of artisan. For the first time in his life, he had
gentlemen rather than journeymen for coworkers, and a job that involved no
physical labor or grimy clothing. At a
time when a "white collar" middle class was just beginning to emerge,
Burr had given Davis
a lift into it.
Davis's
new job also allowed him additional free time to pursue his activities as
second-in-command of Burr’s tightly knit "little band" of
politicians. So loyal and so effective
was this group, which also included John Swartwout,
David Gelston, and William Peter Van Ness, that the "Burrites"
remained a significant force in New
York politics for years after Burr himself was
disgraced. What was the nature of Burr's hold over his followers, that they would keep going long after their chief
had been cut down? Undoubtedly much of
it was simply personal. Over his
lifetime, countless men and especially women succumbed to Burr's charms in one
way or another. (Davis, in his capacity as literary executor,
saw to it that the details of Burr's many sexual seductions were never made
public, by burning a trove of love letters from women of all ages and
stations.)
Yet ultimately more important for Davis were Burr's
political attractions. As Davis saw him, Burr represented a salutary alternative to
the politics of personal patronage and family dynasty that had long dominated New York. When Burr came on the scene, Davis
wrote in his notebook, New York had been "almost
entirely under the influence and control of a few distinguished families, some
of them in the strictest sense of the word aristocratic" -- the DeLanceys, Livingstons,
Van Rensselaers, Schuylers,
etc. -- and their clients. Though
political battles had always been hard fought, they mostly concerned which
family could lay hold of the most offices and honors. The only way for an outsider to rise in this
system was to attach himself to one or another family
"interest" by marriage or service.
(Alexander Hamilton had become a leader of the Van Rensselaer-Schuyler
interest by marrying Gen. Philip Schuyler's daughter.) In Davis's
mind, Burr was an exception to this rule, one that might repeal the rule and
open up honor and preferment to people outside the charmed circle of the
leading families. The Burrites saw their hero as a free agent in the struggle
among the great families, a man who owed his prominence solely to the
reputation he had built as a lawyer, soldier, and statesman. For this reason, according to Davis, Burr frightened
the Clintons and Livingstons, the family interests
who had aligned themselves with the Republicans. Although Burr supported the
same side of most issues, the Clintons and Livingstons
considered him "a plebeian, whose talents, industry, and perseverance they
respectively dreaded."
It
was Burr’s political work ethic that Davis and his friends particularly
admired. Unlike his fellow gentlemen, Davis believed, Burr won
elections and legislative votes by out-organizing and out-working his
opponents, rather than simply trusting to the power of reputation and personal
influence. These traits of Burr's showed
most strongly during the New York City
legislative campaign of 1800, during which Burr and Davis essentially delivered
the presidency to Jefferson. While other Republican notables such as De
Witt Clinton "never appeared at the poll, but observed the most shameful
indifference and inactivity," Burr invested weeks of planning and
preparation and, when the election arrived, spent three days constantly at the
polling places, haranguing voters, addressing crowds, and sometimes debating Federalists
who showed up to counter him
(Davis matched his idol hour for hour, at one point campaigning
15 hours at a stretch without eating or sleeping.) The admiring disciple bragged to Albert
Gallatin that Burr’s efforts were the main cause of the Republican victory in that
election and had made him the most feared man in the party. “The management and industry of Col. Burr,” Davis reported proudly,
“has effected all that the friends of civil liberty
could possibly desire.” In Davis’s mind, Burr stood
for a more democratic and “liberal” political culture, in which work and merit
would be the basis for success. Once the
election was over, Davis was instrumental in
delivering the Vice Presidency to Burr, prevailing on Commodore Nicholson and
his son-in-law Gallatin to support Burr over George Clinton as Jefferson’s running mate.
In the aftermath of this great victory, Davis
witnessed what should have been Jefferson's gratitude to Aaron Burr curdle into
reserve, distrust, and hatred, beginning with snubs in the matter of
appointments and ending with Jefferson eagerly pursuing his former understudy's
death in the treason trial at Richmond. As Davis saw
it, the combination of Jefferson and Burr's New York enemies had put Burr to political
death long before that. Davis and Burr
had always known that the Clintons and the Livingstons
would turn against them someday, but Jefferson
surprised them. They knew that it was
Jefferson who had first made overtures to Burr, and that in return, Burr and
his friends had been effective and loyal supporters. The origins of their betrayal were what Davis primarily sought in Jefferson's
letters.
2.
Though no longer affiliated with Jefferson’s party by 1830, Matthew Davis still considered
himself a Jeffersonian. He found nothing
in the letters to cast doubt on this commitment. The Sage of Monticello remained
"uniformly republican" throughout his life, and Davis
disagreed with Jefferson critics -- such as
the old, embittered Aaron Burr -- that the great man lacked ideological
consistency and "moral firmness."
Davis became one of Henry Clay’s chief New York supporters in the 1820s and 1830s,
but this did not mean he abandoned Jeffersonianism. Davis and many other former Republicans
opposed Andrew Jackson but contended that they, rather than the Jacksonians,
were the true inheritors of Jefferson’s old
party. While departing from Jefferson on
many specific matters, Clay’s supporters believed that their Virginia-born candidate
upheld Jefferson’s larger principles of republican government and national
independence, both of which were threatened by Jackson’s autocratic leadership and hostility
to the “American System” of economic development. Eventually the Clayites
joined with other anti-Jacksonians and took the name Whig for their new party
to reclaim the republican high ground by linking themselves to the American
revolutionary “whigs.”
Despite Davis’s
commitment to Jefferson’s principles, Thomas
Jefferson the politician had not made a very reliable ally. In reading the letters and comparing them
with his own knowledge, Davis found that while Jefferson always stated his principles with
forthrightness and eloquence, he exhibited an appalling lack of either candor
or intellectual honesty when dealing with his political ambitions. With a mixture of asperity and delight, Davis's notebook
commentaries punctured the Sage of Monticello's aura of republican simplicity
and selflessness. "In relation to
office," Davis observed, Jefferson
"was very jesuitical, always disclaiming
any wish to fill public stations, yet always ready to accept them." As a veteran of countless Republican
political campaigns, Davis cast a skeptical eye on a letter Jefferson wrote in
1775, at the very beginning of his lengthy political career, longing for a time
when “consistently with duty, I may withdraw myself totally from the public
stage . . . banishing every desire of ever hearing what passes in the
world."
Davis
found this statement totally unbelievable, and he discovered little as he read
further in the letters to change his mind.
Jefferson's vow to George Washington in
1784 that he would "take no active part" in political matters for
"the remaining portion of my life" elicited a snort of incredulity. "What a commentary upon this was his
political career from 1784 to the close of his life," Davis clucked after transcribing the passage. As Davis interpreted the letters, Jefferson’s
“uniform practice" was to express indecision or distaste for public
service whenever some office or honor came within reach, while secretly lusting
for the prize and positioning himself to get it. Though the "cases are numerous where Mr.
Jefferson made professions of his love of retirement and an ardent hope that he
would not be called into public life," Davis found only "one instance
in which he declined accepting any office that was tendered to him." That was during the Revolution, when
Jefferson refused to become a Commissioner to France because of Mrs. Jefferson's
ill health and his own fears of capture by the British.
Davis could find
many other examples in which Jefferson
desperately wanted to fill an office but put himself through unbelievable
contortions to deny the fact. The New
Yorker was bemused and exasperated by Jefferson's
reactions to finishing second to John Adams in the 1796 presidential
election. Jefferson
claimed to be pleased at the result, relieved that the Chief Magistrate's
responsibilities were not his in such difficult times. Yet "notwithstanding his . . .
philosophy," Davis wrote, "[Jefferson] evinces great and evident chagrin." Davis
did not hold such a reaction against the third President. Indeed, from Davis's vantage point, "This feeling was
natural, and there would be no impropriety in avowing it." What incensed Davis was "the cant about the
satisfaction of filling the second, instead of the first
place."
Davis was at
loss to explain the origins of Jefferson’s
penchant for antipartisan cant. He eventually concluded that Jefferson’s character was deeply flawed, that his former
idol was simply a habitual liar and "unexampled" hypocrite who was incapable of dealing honestly with his own desires and
ambitions. Davis devoted
many hours to amassing evidence in support of this interpretation, complete
with page citations from Jefferson's published
letters. He extended his search into
many other topic areas besides office-seeking.
The most infuriating example of Jeffersonian duplicity
was, of course, the Sage's dealings with Aaron Burr. Jefferson came to know Burr during his tenure
as Secretary of State, and well understood that the Republicans would need the
New Yorker’s support if they were to win many votes outside Jefferson’s
southern base. For this very reason,
Burr was put forward as Jefferson’s running mate in 1796, and the New York
leader personally campaigned through the North in the fall of that year. A potential schism arose when the Virginia electors,
suspicious that Burr wanted the presidency for himself and that he did not
really have southern interests at heart, diverted most of their promised second
votes to Sam Adams instead. After the
election, Jefferson wrote Burr what Davis
accurately describes as "a very long and friendly letter” apparently
designed to show that Jefferson did not share
his fellow Virginians’ antipathy. Davis underlined a sentence in which Jefferson
mentioned "evidencing my esteem” for Burr as his main motive for writing.
Then Davis read Jefferson's letter to Burr from December 1800, when the
possibility that the two of them would tie in the Electoral College had begun
to dawn. This letter contained a paean
to Burr's abilities and lamented in highly colored terms the "chasm"
that would be left in Jefferson's planned
administration by Burr serving as vice-president. There was nobody else available who could
"inspire unbounded confidence in the public mind" as Burr could, Jefferson wrote. Davis pronounced this
letter inexplicable. "No circumstance
rendered necessary the professions which [the letter] contains," Davis fumed, "and if
they were not sincere, then they are the most profligate and
unprincipled." How could Jefferson
write of Burr's absence from his administration when there "was not an
intelligent politician in the nation, of any party" who did not expect
Burr to win the vice presidency as Jefferson's
running mate?
Davis read
between the letter's lines that Jefferson feared a contest in the House with
Burr, but even he failed to comprehend the depth of Jefferson's
duplicity in this case. Jefferson in fact planned no substantive role at all for
Burr in the coming administration, even if he was vice president, and had
written only to elicit Burr's withdrawal from the presidential contest. Far from scheming to steal the prize from
Jefferson, Burr took the letter at face value and immediately wrote back
offering to resign the vice presidency and take one of the other Cabinet posts
if Jefferson thought best.
Jefferson's letters to Burr of 1797 and 1800
were cast in an appalling light by what Davis
read in Volume Four of T.J. Randolph's Memoir, which contained the
collection of memoranda and notes known as the "Anas." In a note dated January 26, 1804, when
Jefferson and Burr were in the process of openly breaking with each other, Davis read Jefferson's
claim that he had distrusted Burr almost from the moment they met and
"habitually cautioned Mr. Madison against trusting him too
much." The evidence in Jefferson's letters seemed to prove one of two
propositions to be true, neither of them very complimentary to the Apostle of
Democracy's character. Either Jefferson
had truly "entertained a high regard for Col. Burr, and placed confidence
in him" before 1801, then later revised the historical record and lied to
friends about the fact; or (as appears more likely) Jefferson had
"unnecessarily and uninvited, made professions that were false and
deceptive" to win Burr's support, then treacherously cast his ally aside. Searching for a motive behind Jefferson's
malevolence, Davis concluded that Jefferson had planned for years before 1800 not only to
be president, but also to be succeeded by his best friend, James Madison. Burr was a rival to both of them.
Yet as committed as he was to the notion of
Jefferson's personal animus toward Burr, Davis
could not help but notice that there was a larger pattern to Jefferson's
malignity: the Sage exhibited a strong distaste for the type of partisanship
and political work at which Davis
and Burr excelled. One example that Davis noted was Jefferson's
contradictory attitude toward political newspapers. Newspapers had come to play an increasingly
central role in the American political system over the course of Jefferson's career.
They had given countless young Jeffersonians like Davis
their initial access to political life and had done not a little to make Jefferson president.
After 1800, it became axiomatic for Davis and most other political
leaders that no political movement could be successful without a
newspaper. When the Burrites’
newspaper was about to go under in 1805, Davis
declared that they would be “uninfluential atoms”
without it: “there would be no rallying point” and other politicians would have
only contempt for a party faction that could not even support a newspaper.
Thus Davis was
surprised and stung by the
numerous occasions in the letters in which Jefferson
"claims for himself the great merit that he never wrote for
newspapers." Davis
doubted the veracity of these disclaimers, but he also found that, even if it
were true that Jefferson never soiled his
hands at the political press, “These letters prove incontestably, that he
continually urged others to do it, and that he assisted in supplying both facts
and arguments for the purpose. On Mr.
Madison he principally relied when an appeal, through the medium of newspapers,
became necessary in relation to any point he wished to carry. . . . There is nothing . . .
wrong in this; but . . . he makes it wrong by his continued efforts to
impress the public that he was not in any way connected with newspapers. . .
.” Davis
then cited several of Jefferson's now-famous pronunciamentos
on the power of the press, and examples, such as the case of Philip Freneau's National
Gazette, in which the Virginia
leader had covertly sought to encourage or subsidize
the political press. In Davis's judgment (one in which scholars have
concurred), "There was no man living who placed more reliance on
newspapers than Mr. Jefferson."
Davis also marveled at Jefferson's
double standard on the question of political parties. The letters made it clear that the great
Virginian "disdained being a party man." For instance, there was Jefferson's
famous remark to Francis Hopkinson that he “never submitted the whole system of
my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in
philosophy, in politics, or in any thing else . . . . Such an addiction is the last degradation of
a free and moral agent. If I could not
go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” Davis
had a hard time reconciling such eloquent protestations with the fact that he
had personally helped organize a political party that considered Jefferson its
great leader and symbol. But party
appeared to be another field for Jeffersonian hypocrisy, especially when it
came to such practical aspects as party loyalty and discipline. "It would appear," wrote Davis, "that he
never was favorable to anything like party discipline insofar as he
was to be governed by it."
In lesser men, on the other hand, party discipline was not only acceptable,
but desirable. Davis cited the example
of Jefferson's presidency, during which he had very effectively kept his
congressional supporters in line: “At the same time, it is within my own
knowledge, that during [Jefferson's] presidency, he kept the democratic party
united on all great and important measures, by his own interference,
personally; always sending for the . . .
discontented Members of Congress, and making them feel, that
their personal interest, as well their political influence,
required that they should be kept strictly within the party lines of
demarcation.”
Jefferson's
"jesuitical" approach to practical politics
irritated Davis
profoundly. The Sage had been willing to
reap the benefits of political innovations such as party organization and the
partisan press but unwilling to accept responsibility for them. Disavowing the activities conducted on his
behalf, Jefferson could not stomach a man like Burr, who
made no apologies for working in partisan politics. The very qualities in Burr that Davis had found so admirable and that had done so much to
win the election of 1800 Jefferson seemed to
find shameful.
Reading
the letters reminded Davis of his own personal
encounter with Jefferson. In the summer of 1801, Davis
had made a fateful journey to Monticello
that formed a key moment in the break between Jefferson and Burr and in the
confrontation between two of the Republican party's
divergent value systems.
With Republican victory certain in late 1800,
Davis, Burr, and friends turned their thoughts to distributing the federal
offices that they expected to become available in their area once Jefferson swept out the Federalists. “Rotation in office” had long been practiced
by incoming regimes in New York,
and the state’s Republican leaders never doubted that the new President would
clear the Federalists from the national government payroll. Controlling the distribution of federal
offices was critical to the future plans of Burr and Davis. Burr hoped to become the New
York party's undisputed leader and Davis needed a new employer because Burr's
control over the Manhattan Company was waning.
Davis
also craved the public recognition and further upward mobility that even a
modest federal appointment would confer. Burr inundated President Jefferson and
Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin with suggestions and recommendations
regarding federal appointments. One of
the persons most frequently mentioned, for a potentially lucrative job as
Naval Officer in the New York
custom house, was Matthew Davis. Burr
couched his appointment advice in frankly partisan language, and did not
confine himself to New York. In all, Burr submitted suggested appointments
for eight states plus the Northwest Territory.
The case that Burr and others made for Davis reflected the partisan values of New
York and of the political underworld in which Davis moved.
There was no shame in being a party man, Davis's supporters argued; on the contrary, a
man who gave loyal and effective service to the party deserved to be sustained
and rewarded. Davis's recommendations affirmed his ability
to perform the duties of the office, but they emphasized his political
abilities and principles. "Mr.
Davis is one of those active Citizens who have been instrumental in the late
triumphant election . . . ," wrote
Isaac Ledyard. "He has very
considerable . . . decisiveness of mind, & promptitude of
action.” Another recommender predicted
that Davis's
appointment would have "the most happy
consequences [for] the republican interest." Yet Davis's
recommenders did not see his appointment simply as a selfish act to advance the
party. His exertions on behalf of the
Republican had contributed to the public weal and deserved recognition. "Our citizens are under great
obligations to him for his Zeal and industry in the common cause," argued
Ezekiel Robins.
With the recent campaign fresh in memory, Davis’s appointment was a considered a foregone conclusion
in New York
political circles. Yet as the spring of
1801 turned to summer, Davis and Burr began to suspect that something was
amiss. Several other customs officers
were replaced according to their wishes, but the incumbent Naval Officer remained
untouched. Davis
and Burr’s suspicions were well founded. Against the imprecations of many in
the Republican rank and file, the new President was trying to pursue a moderate
course in removing Federalist officials.
Jefferson deemed this approach critical
to his larger goal of ending the party conflict: he planned to convert the
moderate Federalists, destroy the Federalist party’s
base of support, and thus eliminate the need for continued party
competition. He pledged to remove only
those Federalists against whom there was some cause of complaint other than
mere political opinion. Where removals were made, as whiggish
public administration historian Leonard White put it, the Republican
replacements would come "from the same reputable social class of gentlemen
relied on by the Federalists," with some added emphasis on college
graduates.
Appointing Davis
would have seriously compromised Jefferson's
removal policies. Jefferson took very
seriously warnings (not from Burrites) that Davis might not be
"a respectable appointment in the public estimation." Though nominally a supporter of Davis’s,
Albert Gallatin had to admit that there were grave objections to Burr's aide,
namely, that "he has not heretofore moved in a very elevated sphere"
and had very little formal education. Jefferson and Gallatin also understood that
Davis and Burr were expert practitioners of the
aggressive style of politics for which New
York was known.
Putting Davis in the Naval Office would
be tantamount to an endorsement of New
York partisanship, at a time when the administration
was already embarrassed by the alacrity and thoroughness with which the
victorious New York Republicans were purging Federalists. However, Davis’s lack of gentility seems to have
been the primary sticking point: other members of Burr’s “little band,” with
more education and more respectable backgrounds, had already received
appointments, but in choosing a Naval Officer, Jefferson began turning to
Burr’s covertly hostile allies, the Clintons and the Livingstons,
for advice. A Clintonian named Samuel
Osgood eventually got the job.
By midsummer, the possibility of Davis’s rejection had begun to dawn in New York, and hardly any politician there failed to perceive it as a
direct and intentional affront to Burr. Gallatin predicted that Davis’s rejection would be taken as a
"declaration of war" on Burr, but the president seemed little moved. Eventually Davis’s anxiety increased to the point that
he took a rash step. Gathering a large
number of recommendations and petitions in his favor from other New York
Republicans, he set out on a desperate mission to Monticello itself, determined to solicit the
President personally and save his appointment.
He stopped in Washington en route to
dun Gallatin
for a letter of introduction. The
Treasury Secretary anxiously entreated the young man not to invade Jefferson's privacy, but failed to turn him back.. After Davis left, Gallatin sent his chief a
lengthy apology, admitting that the New Yorker was more ill-bred than he had
previously supposed: "...to want of
early education and mixing with the world I ascribe his want of a sense of
propriety on this occasion, and his going is the worst thing I have known of
him."
Davis arrived at Monticello
a few days later and lingered for a holiday of several mortifying days. Having disturbed the tranquillity
of Jefferson's aerie, the brazen New Yorker
found himself suddenly bashful. It took more than a day for Davis
to find the nerve to state his business, and Jefferson was happy to let his
guest to suffer, studiously avoiding the subject of the appointment and making Davis as uncomfortable as
possible. A Boston
newspaper had recently attacked Jefferson for inviting Thomas Paine, disgraced
in some circles for his antireligious writings, to return to the United States. At the breakfast table one morning, the
President thrust a copy of the paper into Davis's
hands. "Well, sir, what do you
think of that?" Jefferson asked pointedly, apparently holding Davis responsible for the
sins of all his brother printers. While
the embarrassed Davis
cast about for an answer, Jefferson launched into a lengthy defense of his
treatment of Paine, ending the tirade with a cryptic reference to the reason
for Davis's
visit: "I have no idea of
abandoning old friends for new." Apparently, Jefferson expected Davis to have faith in
his leader's gratitude despite his apparent snubs.
When the young printer finally revealed his
business, Jefferson said only that nothing would be decided in the case until
the Cabinet could meet in Washington. Many years later, New York politicians told an anecdote
concerning Davis and Jefferson's conversation that well captured its
tenor. According to this story, Davis was telling Jefferson of the important role that New York had played in
his election, when the philosopher-president suddenly reached out his hand and
caught a large fly. Holding the
wriggling insect between the presidential fingers, Jefferson remarked to Davis on the great and
disproportionate size of its head in relation to its body. Unsure whether the fly was meant to symbolize
New York or himself, but suspecting the
latter, Davis
immediately left off pressing his case and soon after began his long journey
home.
Needless to say, Davis's
visit to Monticello
was a terrible mistake. None of the many
other office seekers of 1801 dared to bring the scramble for office into Jefferson’s own home.
The visit had only confirmed Jefferson’s impressions that Davis lacked breeding and
that Burr and his followers carried partisanship to distasteful extremes. Whatever the disjunctions between his ideas
and behavior, Jefferson truly believed the
office should seek the man, but in this case, the man traveled 300 miles
uninvited to seek the office. Could a
virtuous republican be capable of such unseemly avidity for a government
salary? Jefferson
apparently thought not, and Matthew Livingston Davis would have to wait until
the Zachary Taylor administration to get his federal appointment.
Jefferson's
“declaration of war” on Burr allowed his New
York enemies to quickly close in for the kill. After his return from Virginia,
Davis was
warned by James Cheetham, editor of the American
Citizen (the city’s only Republican daily newspaper) that a major attack on
Burr was planned. For 1,500 to 2,000
dollars, Cheetham offered to defend Burr and turn his
paper against Jefferson, the Clintons, and the Livingstons. To his everlasting regret, Davis rejected the proposition, and Cheetham enlisted with the Vice President's enemies. “If Cheetham had been purchased,” Davis sighed later in his notebook. “I have no doubt the future destiny of Mr.
Burr would have been different, through life.” Cheetham launched
the opening salvos in a pamphlet war that would last almost two years and
reduce Burr's reputation, as Davis put it,
"from the proud eminence he once enjoyed to a condition more mortifying
and more prostrate than any distinguished man has ever experienced in the United States." The attacks revolved around Burr's alleged
collusion with the Federalists, beginning with the charge that he had
suppressed a book because it was too critical of John Adams (in reality Burr
found the work so inaccurate and scurrilous that it would backfire on the
Republicans) and escalating to fabricated specifics about Burr's behavior
during the electoral tie of 1801. Davis and the other Burrites fought back, but to
little avail. Burr's political standing was mortally
wounded by the controversy. Politically
isolated and increasingly desperate, the Vice President stumbled into the
well-known misadventures that destroyed him forever.
3.
Perhaps
more than any single incident, Davis's Monticello trip and the
events surrounding it encapsulate the wide divergence in political values that
had emerged between men at different levels of the early party conflict and in
different regions of the country. Davis’s notebook makes it clear that he never grasped the
nature of the faux pas he had committed or what the basis of Jefferson's
distrust might have been, other than malevolence and his apparent hypocrisy
with regard to partisanship and his own political ambitions.
With
the hindsight provided by historians espousing the "republican
synthesis," we can see that many of the Jefferson statements and actions
that puzzled Davis merely reflected the
conventional political values of Jefferson’s
class, era, and region. In the genteel Virginia
political culture in which Jefferson came of
age, a prospective officeholder was expected to declare his lack of ambition
for office, and an artful two-facedness regarding one’s own fortunes was almost
a requirement for political success. The
planter who aspired to office was expected to play the role of disinterested
statesman and lord of the manor, emerging from his agricultural seclusion only
when duty irresistibly called. Yet at
the same time, few aspirants could win office without engaging in many
activities that today would be labeled campaigning: riding the countryside to visit neighbors,
consorting familiarly with men of all classes on "court day," and
hosting lavish barbecues for the voters.
The successful Virginia
office-seeker had to strike a delicate balance between rhetorical complacency
and strenuous activity in his own cause. It helped to have friends or followers who
could campaign on his behalf while insulating the candidate from the appearance
of unseemly partisanship and ambition.
In just this way, Aaron Burr, Matthew Davis and countless others were
highly useful to Jefferson.
Yet while the Virginia political tradition may have
allowed some competition among individuals and some campaign-like activities,
it was still deeply committed to classical republican values. Campaigning became very threatening in the context
of permanently organized, continually competing parties, groups devoted to
their own interests rather than the good of the community. The planter gentry strongly valued consensus
on all fundamental matters and considered any sustained dissent from that
consensus dangerous. Jefferson's
partisanship during the 1790s was rooted in the idea that the Federalists
were an illegitimate "faction" that had happened to take control of
the government. Convinced that this
faction was bent on reconstructing the American political economy along
British lines, Jefferson was willing to pursue extraordinary means to stop it,
but even in this extreme case, Jefferson tolerated partisan political
behavior only so long as it did not involve a partisan's personal fortunes and
so long as the party did not become an end in itself. This idea can be discerned in what was
arguably the strongest pro-party statement Jefferson ever made, penned in 1795:
“Were parties to be divided merely by greediness for office, as in England, to
take part in either would be unworthy of a reasonable or a moral man, but where
the principle of difference is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as
that between the republicans & the Monocrats of
our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm & decided part, and as
immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of Honest men, &
Rogues, into which every country is divided.” Jefferson's attitudes were widely shared --
and practiced -- by his fellow gentlemen leaders, especially those from the
South and New England.
From
Matthew Livingston Davis’s point of view, Jefferson’s
classical republican approach to party and political ambition seemed both
mystifying and dishonorable. Other New
Yorkers agreed. In his notes, Davis approvingly recalled George Clinton's reaction when
Burr and friends asked him to stand for the legislature in support of Jefferson in 1800.
Pressed for an answer, the blunt old governor became "violently
enraged." Clinton
had thrown his forces behind Jefferson in 1796
but had been deeply offended by the candidate's apparent ingratitude and lack
of devotion to the party after the election.
"`If you, Sir, was the candidate for President, I would serve with
pleasure," Clinton
had fumed to Burr, "but to promote the election of Mr. Jefferson, I will
not. . . ." The source of Clinton’s
irritation was Jefferson's post-election support for the victor John Adams,
whom Republicans far and wide had castigated in the campaign as a bloated
monarchist and worse: “We were unsuccessful [in 1796], but [Jefferson] was
elected Vice President. What he did
do? His first act in the Senate was, to
make a damned time serving trimming
speech, in which he declared, that it was a great pleasure to him, to have
an opportunity of serving his country under such a tried patriot as John
Adams, which was saying to his friends, ` -- I'm in; kiss my and go to H ll.’”
While
classical republican rhetoric and concerns were by no means absent from the Middle
States, or from the strata of lower-middle-class political activists in which Davis traveled, they were
clearly subordinate to a decidedly liberal pattern of political thought and,
especially, behavior. Republicanism
described the world accurately only in political societies that were less
heterogeneous and chaotic than those of the Middle States. There were simply too many conflicting
interests and diverse social groups in New York
and Pennsylvania
for a single, virtuous course of action ever to be clear. Republicanism was also a discourse that
favored upper-class political leadership.
Only the wealthy and prominent possessed the material independence and
public prestige to exercise virtue and disinterestedness; only those without a need for money or
social mobility could be immune to the attraction of public honors and public
salaries. On neither
count did Matthew Davis and his fellow campaigners have much use for
classical republican political culture.
They could not afford the luxury of holding themselves “above party.”
Ironically,
Jefferson’s refusal to give Davis
an appointment -- out of a desire to keep the corruption of partisan politics out of his administration -- forced the former
printer into money-making activities that were much more corrupt. Davis
spent much of the rest of his life trading on his political connections and on
inside knowledge gained from politics.
Following Burr's example, he involved himself in a number of political
banking schemes, speculating in bank stock and working behind the scenes to
have new banks chartered. During the War
of 1812, he set up a lucrative military contracting business, and, thanks to
friendship with the shady but Republican financier Jacob Barker, became a
broker in government bonds. After the
war, Barker secured him a position as secretary of an insurance company that
failed in 1826 amid charges that Barker, Davis, and others connected with
Tammany Hall had conspired to siphon millions out of the company.
Matthew Livingston Davis misunderstood much of
what he read in Jefferson’s letters, and
filled his notebooks with bitter and semi-accurate diatribes. Yet the misunderstandings between Jefferson
and the New Yorkers -- which were matched by similar misunderstandings between
Jefferson and Pennsylvania Republican activists such as John Beckley and
William Duane -- stemmed from a very important aspect of Jeffersonian politics
that historians of the Early
Republic’s political
culture have often missed. Thomas
Jefferson and other high leaders from the South and New England, whose
statements are used to diminish the significance of parties in the early
national period and to proclaim the hegemony of classical republicanism,
operated according to political values and customs completely different from
those observed by their erstwhile allies in other regions and at other levels
of the political system. Jefferson’s attempt at rebuilding a patriotic consensus
in 1801 was seen by many of his allies and followers as a cowardly act of
betrayal. It was inevitable that the
diverging values within the Republican party would
come into conflict with each other at some point, and Davis and Burr became two
of the early casualties. Historians of
early American political culture should take into account the views of the
losers as well as the winners of the Republican struggles after 1800.
