At dinner with Abby and young Weston, a little while later, having told Hudson to break out a bottle of his best red wine, Master raised his glass in a toast.

“Well, Abby,” he said with considerable cheerfulness, “and you too, Weston, my dear grandson, the world that I knew is turned upside down. So let’s drink to the new one.”

The Capital

1790

JOHN MASTER GAZED at them all. The hot summer day made the air in the house close. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink. It was a pity that Abigail wasn’t here—she could always keep him in order. But with her first child due any day now, she was staying at her house up in Dutchess County. So he stared at them all—at his son James, graduate of Oxford, his grandson Weston, about to go to Harvard, and at their distinguished visitor, whose outrageous statement James and Weston seemed content to accept without a protest.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said to Thomas Jefferson, “you can go to Hell.”

Not that Thomas Jefferson believed in Hell, Master supposed, or Heaven for that matter.

Until now, John Master had found himself surprisingly content to be a citizen of the United States of America. For Washington himself he had a deep respect. At Washington’s inauguration in the nation’s capital of New York, he had stood in the crowd on Wall Street as the great man took the oath on the balcony of the Federal Hall, and he had taken pride in the fact that, when he walked down the street with James, the great men of the new state—Adams, Hamilton, Madison—would greet his son as a respected friend.

As for the new Constitution that the wise men of the nation had framed in Philadelphia, Master had been very impressed. It seemed to him that, with its admirable system of checks and balances, the document could hardly be bettered. When Madison and the Federalists had argued, against the Antifederalists, that the states must yield some of their independence, so that the republic could have a strong central government, he’d thought the Federalists were quite right.

“We should accept the Constitution as it is,” he had argued. But here, his natural conservatism had come into conflict with his son.

“I follow Jefferson,” James had declared. Jefferson was acting as the new state’s representative in Paris at that time and, while approving of the Constitution, he had raised one objection.