How did Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, get along with his fellow Founding Fathers? Not all that well, actually. The nation’s Founders may have agreed heartily on the need for liberty, but they rarely agreed on how to run their new country. Seldom just spats or squabbles, their clashes involved big, and enduring, issues about the structure and funding of the federal government, and how big a role it should have in the affairs of individual states.
To boot, the Founders didn’t always like each other. Jefferson, in particular, was prone to prickly relationships. While generally mild-mannered and reserved, he had strong opinions and tangled with his fellow Founders continually.
Politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds,” wrote historian Henry Adams, a descendent of two American presidents. But the momentous challenge of nation-building also involves friendships, which can be complicated, given the personalities of great leaders.
Below, a handy guide to this clash of the American titans:
Alexander Hamilton
Jefferson’s greatest disagreements over policy, and political philosophy itself, came with Alexander Hamilton. Both served in George Washington’s cabinet—Jefferson as the nation’s first secretary of state and Hamilton as the first secretary of the treasury. Hamilton, a Federalist charged with resolving the new nation’s considerable debts with no revenue to speak of, believed in an “energetic” central government, including a national bank and a program of tariffs. Jefferson, as a Southern planter (and slaveholder), saw Hamilton’s plan as a farmer’s nightmare: more taxes, less local control and the ascendance of wealthy urban merchants over agrarian interests. He believed the only way to secure individual liberty was through strong states and a relatively weak federal government.
The result? "Hamilton and myself were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks,” Jefferson wrote. By 1791, they were attacking each other anonymously in newspapers.
Jefferson also believed Hamilton wanted to impose on the United States a form of government the American Revolution was fought to avoid—and that he had convinced George Washington himself to support a system more English than American. “In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly thro’ the war,” Jefferson wrote, “an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up,” meaning Hamilton’s Federalists. Hamilton, who felt that Jefferson was constantly meddling in Treasury affairs, called him a “dangerous radical” and a “contemptible hypocrite,” for touting the ideals of democracy while enjoying a luxury lifestyle supported by enslaved labor.
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were both prosperous, well-respected Virginia planters, dedicated to establishing a stable American republic. Even so, these distant cousins sometimes clashed. Washington supported the new federal Constitution, which Jefferson felt entrusted too much power to the presidency. Jefferson supported the French Revolution, which Washington opposed, unilaterally committing America to a posture of neutrality when radical Jacobins seized power and declared war on England. When Jefferson returned from Europe, after serving as Washington’s secretary of state, he helped establish “Democratic Societies” to oppose Washington’s administration. By the time Washington died, their relations had deteriorated so much that when Jefferson paid his respects to his widow at Mount Vernon, Martha called it “the most painful” experience of her life—next to losing her husband.
Thomas Jefferson
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James Madison
Historian Adrienne Koch has described the partnership of these two Virginians as “the great collaboration,” an opinion that endures to this day. They worked together for 50 years—first in Virginia government, where they passed the Virginia Declaration for Religious Freedom, underscoring the separation of church and state, and established the University of Virginia.
Later, when helping to form the new nation, Madison served in Jefferson’s cabinet as secretary of state, before he himself rose to the White House. Tall and soft-spoken Jefferson and small, bookish Madison agreed on many things, but not all. Both opposed Alexander Hamilton’s eagerness to expand federal power over the nation’s economy—including his desire to create a national bank. But Madison did not share Jefferson’s principled opposition to federal power; Madison wanted to grant Congress the authority to veto state laws, which Jefferson quashed. Madison was troubled by Shay’s Rebellion, a grassroots armed uprising against state taxation, but Jefferson—who said “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing”—was not. Jefferson thought revisions to the U.S. Constitution would be a good thing; Madison felt such reworkings would be destabilizing.
Despite their many disagreements, in 1826, the year of his death, Jefferson referred in a letter Madison to “the friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources of constant happiness to me thro' that long period.”
John Marshall
Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835, John Marshall wrote nearly half of the Supreme Court’s majority decisions. Jefferson and this immensely important jurist—both descendants of one of Virginia’s first settlers—were distant cousins. Even so, they were political adversaries, and their disagreements led to personal animosities.
Appointed to the court by John Adams, the second U.S. president, Marshall was a Federalist, supporting a stronger national government than Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party did. During the presidential campaign of 1800, when Jefferson defeated Adams, Marshall called his fellow Virginian “totally unfit” for the presidency. Fearing that the judiciary would exercise undue power over the legislative branch of government—and over what he considered the sovereign states—Jefferson also believed Marshall to be morally deficient, calling him a man of “lax lounging manners” and “a profound hypocrisy.” When Marshall presided over the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr (Jefferson’s political rival and vice president until he killed Hamilton in a duel), Jefferson was outraged when it ended in acquittal. Saying there was “not a man in the U.S. who doubts [Burr’s] guilt,” Jefferson called, unsuccessfully, for Marshall’s impeachment.
John Adams
The relationship between the second and third presidents was a rocky one. They admired each other and, early on, were friends. The news that Congress was sending Jefferson to Paris in 1784, to join John Adams (and Benjamin Franklin) as ministers to France “gives me great pleasure,” Adams wrote—though his pleasure over time would give way to pain.
Their disagreements, while similar to those of Jefferson and Hamilton regarding the nature and scope of the national government, were personal as well. Adams could be “wonderfully neurotic,” as Carol Berkin, a historian of colonial and revolutionary history, puts it, and quick to take offense. He could be thin-skinned over policy differences, and there was no shortage of these as he and Jefferson and their respective allies wrangled over the country’s direction. Adams was a Federalist and Jefferson a Democratic-Republican, with different interests representing contrasting constituencies.
Adams, of Massachusetts, promoted policies favored by the emerging merchants of the Northern cities; Jefferson advocated a limited-government approach under which Southern agricultural interests would lead the nation. Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Jefferson considered an outrageous assault on civil liberties. In foreign policy, Jefferson, a supporter of the French Revolution, was a Francophile. Adams supported stronger ties—once independence had been won—with England.
As the years rolled by, however, they put their disagreements aside. When Abigail Adams died in 1818, Jefferson, a widower himself, wrote to console his old adversary, “mingling sincerely my tears with yours,” looking forward “to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved & lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.” Reconciled, Jefferson and Adams continued to correspond in their later years. Both died on July 4, 1826.
