American Sphinx (26 page)

Since the members of the Hemings family were the front-and-center slaves at Monticello, most guests and visitors to the mountaintop experienced the Jeffersonian version of slavery primarily as a less black and less oppressive phenomenon than it actually was. As overseer Edmund Bacon recalled, “there were no Negro and other outhouses around the mansion, as you generally see on [other] plantations,” so the physical arrangement of appearances also disguised the full meaning of the slave experience. In short, Jefferson had so designed his slave community that his most frequent interactions occurred with African-Americans who were not treated like full-fledged slaves and who did not even look like full-blooded Africans because, in fact, they were not. In terms of daily encounters and routinized interactions, his sense of himself as less a slave master than a paternalistic employer and guardian received constant reinforcement.
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By the same token, if slavery was a doomed institution whose only practical justification was to preserve the separation of the races until the day of deliverance arrived at some unspecified time in the future, Jefferson was surrounded by dramatic evidence that it was failing miserably at that task. Miscegenation at Monticello was obviously a flourishing enterprise, much more so than his wheat fields. Several of Betty Hemings’s grandchildren looked almost completely white, graphic testimony that whatever had begun with John Wayles had certainly not stopped back then. Jefferson’s stated aversion to racial mixture had somehow to negotiate its visible examples all around him. In a sense what he saw only confirmed his deepest fears about an amalgamation of the races, though his code of silence dictated that no mention of the matter be permitted in public. Despite his remarkable powers of avoidance, this is one topic we can be sure he brooded about, even if he never talked about it for the record. The eloquence of his silence provides the best evidence of what Monticello was like as a real place rather than an imagined ideal. If literary allusions afford the best mode of description, we need to dispense with Virgil’s pastoral odes and begin to contemplate William Faulkner’s fiction.

MADISONIAN MINUET

J
AMES MADISON
probably knew Jefferson as well as or better than anyone else alive, and he recognized from the very start of the sequestration at Monticello that two Jeffersonian truths needed to coexist peacefully for at least the foreseeable future: First, his political mentor and partner regarded his retirement from public life as final; his recovery of some measure of serenity therefore depended on sustaining the illusion that he was done with politics forever. Second, as time passed and his political wounds healed, Jefferson would find it difficult to remain on the sidelines, especially if the cause that had compelled their collaboration appeared at risk. So as he set out for the fall session of Congress in October 1794, the alleged “General” wrote to the putative “Generalissimo” that he would “always receive your commands with pleasure, and shall continue to drop you a line as occasions turn up.”
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It was essentially a resumption of the old relationship of the Paris years, with Madison sending regular reports from the political cockpit in Philadelphia and Jefferson receiving them in a distant location that afforded him the tranquility to listen and respond in the meditative mode he preferred. For the first year Jefferson’s indifference to political news was nearly total. Madison’s detailed reports on the prospects for Republican candidates in various state elections produced only yawning silence from Monticello, along with the reminder that he did not really follow such matters anymore and had stopped subscribing to newspapers so as not to be bothered with the petty details. When Madison passed along diplomatic correspondence with queries about the proper course for American foreign policy, Jefferson expressed no interest: “Make any answer you please for me. If it had been on the rotation of my crops, I would have answered myself, lengthily perhaps, but certainly
con gusto.”
Or when Attorney General Edmund Randolph wrote asking if he might be willing to head up the American negotiating effort with Spain, Jefferson slammed the door defiantly: “No circumstances, my dear Sir, will ever more tempt me to engage in anything public. I thought myself perfectly fixed in this determination when I left Philadelphia, but every day and hour since has added to its inflexibility.” No matter what his friends in Philadelphia were secretly thinking, much less his enemies not so secretly saying, he was done with politics forever.
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The first tiny cracks in this adamant position began to appear in the winter of 1794–95. During the previous summer a popular insurgency in four counties of western Pennsylvania had prompted Washington to call out the militia. The rebels were protesting collection of an excise tax on whiskey that Hamilton had advocated in order to pay for the federal assumption of state debts in 1791. Western farmers considered the tax unfair because it fell disproportionately on their most exportable product—whiskey was the most convenient way to market their grain—and a self-proclaimed army of seven thousand whiskey rebels had marched through Pittsburgh in a massive display of frontier protest. An even more massive display of federal military power, nearly thirteen thousand troops, had put down the rebellion quickly and with a minimum of violence. Jefferson tended to view the entire affair as a shameful repetition of the Shays’s Rebellion fiasco, in which an essentially healthy and rather harmless expression of popular discontent by ordinary American farmers had prompted a military response by the government vastly more repressive than the situation required. Nevertheless, he refrained from making any comment throughout the fall of 1794, despite overtures from Madison to condemn what he regarded as the government’s overreaction.
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What drew him into the debate was a speech Washington delivered to Congress in the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion, denouncing “certain self-created societies” as subversive organizations that fomented discontent and defied the authority of the legitimate government. Washington’s attack on the so-called Democratic-Republican societies prompted Madison to sound an alarm designed to pierce the rural serenity surrounding his friend at Monticello. Washington’s speech was, Madison said, an “attack on the most sacred principle of our Constitution and Republicanism” and was artfully orchestrated, undoubtedly by Hamilton, to link the Republican critics of the Federalist government with whiskey and rebellion. Madison smelled a conspiracy of just the sort Jefferson had often warned against, the covert “monarchists” in the executive branch of the government scheming to subvert the liberties of “the people.” It was imperative that Jefferson rouse himself from his lair and join the fight: “If the people of America are so far degenerated as not to see . . . that the Citadel of their liberties is menaced by the precedent before their eyes, they require abler advocates than they now have, to save them from the consequences.”
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Jefferson in effect budged, but he did not move. Madison’s assessment of what was afoot was obviously correct. “The denunciation of the democratic societies,” Jefferson agreed, “is one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the faction of Monocrats.” Washington was just as obviously a prop for Hamilton’s political ambitions; the president’s speech reminded him of “shreds of stuff from Aesop’s fables and Tom Thumb,” clear evidence the president himself did not write it. But then came a sudden and, at least as far as Madison was concerned, an unexpected reversal:

Hold on then, my dear friend. . . . I do not see in the minds of those with whom I converse a greater affliction than the fear of your retirement; but this must not be, unless to a more splendid and efficacious post. There I should rejoice to see you. . . . But double delicacies have kept me silent. I ought perhaps to say, while I would not give up my own retirement for the empire of the Universe, how can I justify wishing one, whose happiness I have as much at heart as yours, to take the front of the battle which is fighting for my security.

This was an elegantly indirect way of refusing the invitation to end his own retirement, along with a clear invitation to Madison to assume complete command of the Republican cause and prepare himself for a run at the presidency. Though aroused by the news from Philadelphia, he wanted Madison to know that, like it or not, the torch had been passed to him.
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Although Jefferson meant what he said, the debate over the Democratic-Republican societies stirred up the old juices. His letters during the first half of 1795 contained periodic bursts of political invective in the midst of longer and more languid conversations about his wheat crop and the weather. He wrote William Branch Giles that the use of federal troops “to retain the liberty of our citizens meeting together” had signaled a decisive shift toward tyranny “a full century earlier than I expected.” Even Washington, who had been spared direct criticism on the questionable supposition that Hamilton was manipulating his words and decisions, now came in for attack: Washington had provided the Hamiltonians with “the sanction of a name which has done too much good not to be sufficient to cover harm also.” But these political outbursts, to repeat, usually occurred within the context of more temperate and philosophical musings in the bucolic mode and firm resolutions of pastoral contentment. Letters to Madison probably best reflected the mixed state of Jefferson’s mind at this time; requests for copies of his previous correspondence as secretary of state with Edmond Genêt coming right before requests for the most recent pamphlet on crop rotation, news on the elections to the House of Representatives from Virginia districts followed by a lengthy exegesis on the marvelous curative power of vetch as a fallow crop in his old tobacco fields. The happily retired farmer-philosopher was doing battle with the reluctant but ready leader of the Republican party at some subconscious level of Jefferson’s personality. But he preferred to keep the conflict below the surface, invisible even to himself, all the better to sustain what remained the dominant impression: that he was still immune to political temptation.
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If one were looking to find a precise moment when Jefferson’s political interests began to win the interior struggle, a good choice would be the day after Christmas 1795. On that date he mailed eight dollars to Benjamin Franklin Bache for a year’s subscription to Bache’s
Aurora,
a leading Republican newspaper. While not yet ready to enter the public debate, he had moved to the point of acknowledging that he wished to follow it.
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But of course Jefferson’s evolution toward a resumption of his public career was a process more than a moment. The pace of his commentary on politics quickened in his letters in late 1795 and early 1796, which was also the time when the demolition efforts at Monticello went forward at full speed, suggesting that he was fully capable of juggling several versions of his future life without any sense of contradiction. Hamilton was in the news at this time: He had announced his decision to resign from the cabinet; a congressional investigation of accounting irregularities in his office was proceeding apace. Anything involving a prospective exposure of Hamilton caught Jefferson’s attention—he utterly loathed the man—and the investigation seemed to sanction Jefferson’s own, albeit surreptitious, efforts to catch Hamilton cooking the books three years earlier: “I do not at all wonder at the condition in which the finances of the U.S. are found,” he wrote Madison. “Hamilton’s object from the beginning was to throw them into forms which would be utterly undecypherable. I even said he did not understand their condition himself.”
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Coming as they did from a man whose own meticulous accounting of his personal finances never seemed capable of producing a realistic rendering of the proverbial bottom line, Jefferson’s critical remarks on Hamilton’s financial confusion are richly ironic. They also call attention to yet another possible influence on Jefferson’s thinking about a return to the public arena, this time at a depth that not only eluded his conscious scrutiny but also puts a strain on our own limited knowledge about the irrational sources of human motivation in general.

For Jefferson’s congenital suspicion of Hamilton’s cavalier way with budgets merely hinted at his much deeper suspicion that Hamilton’s real intention was to increase the national debt in order to justify expanding federal power over the economy, including the power to tax, manipulate credit rates and establish all the accouterments of a modern nation-state along English lines. (On this score he was not entirely wrong.) Debt, then, was the key device that made the whole Hamiltonian scheme possible. So if Jefferson were to reenter the political arena, one of his highest priorities would be the reduction and elimination of the public debt. But his obsession with public debt rested cheek by jowl with his own cavalier way with his personal debt. Just how this intriguing disjunction between personal habit and public policy actually operated inside Jefferson’s character is difficult to capture confidently, though paradox is obviously at work. At the personal level Jefferson’s intricate record-keeping probably bolstered his false confidence that his own debt problem was under control. (It clearly was not, and the decision to rebuild Monticello helped assure that it never would be.) The looming decision to end his retirement and reenter politics could be seen, then, as a flight from the apparently intractable problem of his personal indebtedness; he would solve publicly what he could not solve privately. Whatever the interactive pattern might have been, it seems fair to say that the problem of debt haunted him at both levels, that his hatred of Hamilton was fueled by personal demons he did not fully understand himself and that the process of thinking about returning to public life involved a complex blend of emotional and ideological considerations.
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