American Sphinx (29 page)

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WASHINGTON,
D.C., 1801–04

We are all republicans—we are all federalists.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON
INAUGURAL ADDRESS, MARCH 4, 1801

I shall take no other revenge, than, by a steady pursuit of economy and peace, and by the steady establishment of republican principles, in substance and in form, to sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of it.

—JEFFERSON TO LEVI LINCOLN
OCTOBER 25, 1802

L
EGEND HAS IT
that he rode to his inauguration as president in splendid isolation and with becoming modesty. According to the apocryphal account, which was based on the fraudulent report of an English tourist, at just before noon on March 4, 1801, Jefferson proceeded down a dusty Pennsylvania Avenue in a scene that subsequent image makers ought to have entitled “Mr. Jefferson Comes to Washington”: “His dress was of plain cloth, and he rode on horseback to the Capitol without a single guard or even servant in his train, dismounted without assistance, and hitched the bridle of his horse to the palisades.” He then entered the Senate chamber, so the story goes, and gave his Inaugural Address in an unassuming style and in a voice that one witness, Margaret Bayard Smith, described as “almost femininely soft.” Indeed his delivery was so subdued that very few members of the audience could hear what he said. Then, after taking the oath of office, he left quickly and without fanfare and rode back alone to his lodgings at Conrad and McCunn’s boardinghouse. There he placed himself at the far end of the table away from the fireplace—his customary location—and looked to all the world like just another ordinary citizen of the American republic breaking bread with his equals.
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The democratic themes of individualism and equality come marching, or perhaps riding, right at us in this legendary rendering. And since Jefferson’s ascendance to the presidency is so closely associated with the emergence of a more democratic American society in the early years of the nineteenth century, it seems perfectly plausible to fit him into the trappings of democratic mythology. Jefferson himself inadvertently contributed to this interpretation when, several years after the event, he referred to his election as “the revolution of 1800,” then went on to explain that it was “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”
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But what Jefferson actually meant by these words, and what most of his contemporaries thought his election meant at the time, do not rest very comfortably within the mythical imperatives of a democratic culture. Perhaps the best way to dramatize the difference between the democratic legend and the more historically correct reality is to begin with a detached description of what we know about the actual events of March 4, 1801.

There is no horse in the picture. It was only a short distance from his rooms at Conrad and McCunn’s to Capitol Hill, only a few hundred yards, so he walked. But he was not walking alone. Ahead of him marched a detachment of militia officers from neighboring Alexandria with drawn swords, followed by a delegation of marshals from the District of Columbia. Behind him was a small parade of dignitaries led by a cadre of Republican congressmen and two members of the outgoing cabinet, whose presence was intended to illustrate continuity with the Adams presidency. Adams himself was conspicuously absent, having taken the four o’clock stage out of town that morning.

There was nearly unanimous recognition among witnesses that the relative simplicity of this “little parade” was intended to make a political statement. Most commentators emphasized the relative lack of pomp and pageantry and contrasted Jefferson’s modest entourage with the coach and sixes used by Washington and Adams at their respective inaugurations. But the operative word was “republican” rather than “democratic.” No one at the time was disposed to describe Jefferson’s election as the coming of the common man. The only observers willing to characterize him as a “democrat” were a few diehard Federalists; and they used the term as an epithet (i.e., “dangerous democrat”). Jefferson himself had seldom used the word “democracy” in his public statements or private letters prior to 1800, and he did not start doing so once elected. In a letter to Maria a few weeks before the inauguration, he adopted his most familiar formulation of the Jeffersonian sense of what was happening: “I feel a sincere wish, indeed, to see our Government brought back to its republican principles, to see that kind of government firmly fixed to which my whole life has been devoted.” He saw himself as the instrument for a recovery of “pure republicanism,” by which he meant the political principles forged in the crucible of the American Revolution, principles that had then been corrupted by the Federalists (i.e., “Anglomen,” “monarchists”) since 1776.
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In both his own mind and the minds of his supporters, then, Jefferson’s elevation to the presidency did not symbolize the ascendance of the ordinary so much as the restoration of revolutionary austerity. The studied simplicity of his clothing and the unassuming demeanor of his “little parade” as it marched up Capitol Hill was seen as a backward-looking statement about “the spirit of ’76.” In Jefferson’s mind great historical leaps forward were almost always the product of a purging, which freed societies from the accumulated debris of the past and thereby allowed the previously obstructed natural forces to flow forward into the future. Simplicity and austerity, not equality or individualism, were the messages of his inaugural march. It was a minimalist statement about a purging of excess and a recovery of essence.

REPUBLICAN CITY

I
F THIS WAS
what “pure republicanism” meant to Jefferson and his contemporaries, their intended message enjoyed a perfect natural habitat in the new national capital. For Washington, D.C., in 1801 was the ideal location in which to launch a crusade against excesses. It would have been impossible to imagine courtiers scheming in corridors or conspirators plotting behind locked palace doors, since there were no courts, no palaces, in truth very few buildings at all. Congressmen who tried to caucus in the corridors of the unfinished Capitol had to compete with the frequent sound of rifle fire from hunters shooting quail and wild turkeys within a hundred yards of Capitol Hill. Washington was the perfect republican city in the awkward sense that it was not really a city at all. The stumps still protruded in several spots up and down Pennsylvania Avenue (perhaps another reason why Jefferson was not conveyed to his inauguration in a coach), and several travelers who stopped to inquire where the new capital of America was located were informed that they were standing squarely in its center. It was doubly appropriate that the first president to take up residence was on record as believing that cities were sores on the body political, since Washington struck most observers as more bucolic than urban, an open wound bleeding into the Potomac River.
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Jefferson had long regretted “the dinner table bargain” that led to the southern location of the national capital on the banks of the Potomac; he called it the most misguided decision of his entire public career. But he was referring to Hamilton’s crafty diplomacy in seducing him to accept federal assumption of the state debts, not the unlikely placement of the capital in the Chesapeake marshland. Washington himself had made the key decisions about the swampy site and ungainly size of the place. He had selected a natural depression with saucerlike sides that efficiently captured and trapped heat and humidity while serving as an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. The surrounding hills were just high enough to impede the movement of air and just low enough to preclude the presence of vistas. Washington had also fused together both urban plans proposed to him, thereby expanding the borders of the city. As a result, instead of beginning with a concentrated population center and spreading out, the city that bore his name began as an expansive but almost empty space that only gradually filled in. European and American tourists were invariably confused upon entering the American capital because the city managers had published elaborate maps and prints showing the layout of the envisioned streets and buildings without explaining that it would take decades for reality to catch up with the vision. Washington’s last words on the project, eerily accurate as usual when it came to essential matters, predicted that the vacant spaces would allow the national capital to grow into greatness “in about a century.”
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That made Washington a model Jeffersonian city in yet another sense—namely, it was a bold, some would say preposterous, promise about the nation’s latent potential, as if a young man just starting out in life were to draw up a plan for his dream house and then wait confidently for the future to fulfill his expectations. Foreign visitors routinely recorded their disapproval of the presumptuous neoclassical style of the President’s House and the Capitol—the only public buildings standing in 1801—which were plopped down in the midst of a marshy field. “The streets are filled with mud in winter, and with dust in summer,” ran one comic account, “and instead of splendid edifices you can see nothing but cornfields, and plains, dry canals and dirty marshes, where frogs make love in a most sonorous and exquisite strain, and bellow forth their attachments as if they were determined to make no secret of it.” Renaming Goose Creek the Tiber served as a source of many jokes about the ridiculousness of an American Rome. A young Irish poet, Thomas Moore, captured the caustic mood in verse, even taking a swipe at Jefferson himself in the process:

This fam’d metropolis, where fancy sees

Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees.

Which second sighted seers e’en now adorn

With shrines unbuilt and heroes yet unborn.

Though now but woods and J—— they see,

Where streets should run and sages ought to be.
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Whatever deficiencies such doggerel displayed as poetry, it correctly called attention to the obvious disjunction between the physical reality of Washington as a motley collection of villages and the rather presumptuous claim, which over the long stretch of time miraculously turned out to be nearly true, that this pseudometropolis was the epicenter of a political earthquake destined to topple all the monarchs and despots on the planet. But at the time this remarkable paradox looked more like a simple contradiction. The unfinished state of the Capitol made the point graphically. What Jefferson saw as he completed his “little parade” was a construction site. The center of the Capitol was missing altogether, and the columns designed to support the front facade were lying flat on the lawn. The north wing, where the House of Representatives met, was still a shell with an unfinished roof; congressmen referred to it as “the oven.” Jefferson had chosen to be sworn in as president in the Senate chamber primarily because it was the only public building available.
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Of course urban and architectural symbolism can carry us only so far in recovering the original sense of Jefferson’s inauguration. Once inside the Senate chamber we enter an interior region in several senses of that term. All the seats on the Senate floor were filled, and the gallery was crowded to capacity. Reporters estimated the audience at about a thousand people. If we can be sure that they had not come to hear about the arrival of Jeffersonian Democracy but rather about the restoration of “pure republicanism,” it was by no means clear what that meant. Some sense of the drama and tension lying beneath the surface of the scene greeted Jefferson as he approached the small stage at the bottom of the well of the Senate floor. Waiting to meet him were Vice President Aaron Burr, who had been sworn in earlier that morning, and Chief Justice John Marshall, who was present to administer the oath to Jefferson.

Any gathering that included Burr possessed the potential to look like a conspiracy. He was, by the lights of his contemporaries, the most mysterious and mercurial member of the revolutionary generation. John Adams believed that Burr was the only man capable of edging out Hamilton in the race to become an American Napoleon. He was dashing and brilliant in the Hamiltonian style, and his singular advantage over Hamilton, and indeed all competitors, was a total disregard for any moral or political principle that obstructed his path to power. “As to Burr,” wrote Hamilton in December 1800, “his private character is not defended by his most partial friends,” adding that “Mr. Burr [is] the most unfit man in the United States for the office of President.” Hamilton seemed to sense in Burr a more virulent version of his own throbbing political ambition, just as Burr seemed to sense in Hamilton the only American statesman with the audacity to challenge his own pretensions. The very similarity of their respective temperaments defined their rivalry in life-and-death terms. If only in retrospect, it seemed eminently predictable that the two antagonists would face off with pistols on the plains of Weehawken three years later and that Burr, unburdened by any quaint code of honor, would coolly send a bullet into Hamilton’s spinal column.
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Why was such an un-Jeffersonian character standing there in the Senate chamber, greeting Jefferson as his second-in-command? The short answer is that Burr was primarily responsible for Jefferson’s election. In the presidential campaign of 1800 Jefferson had once again been matched against Adams. Although Republican candidates for Congress and state office won sweeping victories, Adams ran ahead of the other Federalist candidates at the top of the ticket. In all states except New York, Adams actually matched or exceeded his electoral votes in the 1796 contest, which he had won by a narrow margin. But New York had gone decisively for Jefferson, providing his slim margin of victory. And the man who had delivered the electors of New York to Jefferson’s camp was the irrepressible Aaron Burr, whose price for this important contribution was a place on the ballot alongside Jefferson.
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