American Sphinx (39 page)

But impeachment, as Jefferson readily acknowledged, was a clumsy instrument, requiring as it did evidence of “treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors.” Though the Republicans attempted to wrap themselves in the trappings of legality, the trial in the Senate had a distinctly partisan flavor that struck several observers as a Republican version of the Sedition Act. Jefferson followed the proceedings closely; he kept a running tabulation of the votes on each count for conviction but maintained official silence. Chase was eventually acquitted on all the charges. His Federalist defenders enjoyed the advantage of the narrow requirements imposed by the Constitution for removing judges; they could plausibly describe Chase as a political target and victim; and they particularly relished the opportunity to remind Jefferson that the principle of an independent judiciary had been a rallying cry in 1776 as well as one of the sacred truths that Jefferson had once accused George III of violating.
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Over the subsequent course of American history several presidents also attempted to take on the Supreme Court, and all came away with a similar sense of frustration as Jefferson. But these latter-day challenges to the judicial branch all occurred after the Supreme Court had achieved quasi-sacred status as the one American political institution that was presumed to receive its instructions directly from God rather than from the electorate. Jefferson’s campaign against the judiciary predated the public enshrinement of federal courts, most especially the Supreme Court, as the designated Olympian element in the government. Indeed Jefferson’s campaign was driven by the conviction that, as he put it, “independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government. . . .” What appears almost sacrilegious to us was then still in the process of carving out its place in American political theology.
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For Jefferson the religious wellspring that inspired his vision of the sacred remained the “pure republicanism” of the American Revolution. The federal judiciary had no prominent place in that vision, indeed no place at all, and Jefferson went to his grave believing that Marshall and his colleagues on the Supreme Court were an evil conclave, a gang of “sappers and miners” sabotaging the republican experiment from within. But if his ideological convictions were clear and unwavering, his reluctance to declare unlimited war on the federal judiciary stands out as the defining feature of the conflict. Perhaps at some level he recognized that a national government required some kind of national system of laws, that those moderate Republicans who regarded the Constitution and the constitutional settlement of 1787–88 as the sacred corollary to the revolutionary magic of 1776 had at least half a point. If so, he never acknowledged this concession publicly or privately. (It might have been one of those silent occasions when Madison’s invisible influence proved decisive.) Or perhaps Hamilton was right after all: that Jefferson’s aversion to conflict dictated a policy of caution for purely personal reasons, in spite of his moral certainty that the federal judiciary was a blot on the face of “pure republicanism.” Or perhaps his own belief in the inherent limitations that republicanism imposed on the executive branch—the unimperial presidency—made more decisive action impossible for him. One cannot be sure of the right answer here, or even be sure that Jefferson himself knew what it was, if it existed at all. For it was in this context, after all, that Henry Adams composed his most arresting portrait of Jefferson’s elusive character: “Almost every other American statesman might be described in a parenthesis,” Adams observed. “A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception . . . , but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transcendent shadows.”
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LISTS AND LOSSES

A
T SOME POINT
during the year before his elevation to the presidency Jefferson wrote an uncharacteristically personal note to himself under the title “Memorandum of Services.” “I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all,” he mused to himself. “I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.” He then went on to list a curious version of his public accomplishments, placing the dredging of the Rivanna River alongside the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, importing olive plants from France beside the efforts to end the slave trade. An updated version of the list composed at the end of his first term as president would surely have added appreciably to his achievements. The two presidential accomplishments that gave him the most satisfaction were the Louisiana Purchase and the retirement of a substantial portion of the national debt. Although pockets of Federalism held out in parts of New England, as a viable national party the Federalists were finished. Except for the ongoing naval action against the Barbary pirates, a limited affair, America was at peace with the world. And that symbol of government’s unwelcome reach into private lives, the tax collector, had been banished, along with the circuit court judges, much of the army and navy, a boatload of civil servants and several tribes of recalcitrant Indians. He had no way of knowing it, of course, but Jefferson’s first term was to go down as one of the two or three most uniformly successful in American presidential history in achieving its stated objectives.
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In more personal terms, the Federalist attacks on his character had taken an emotional toll. But he claimed that it was precisely “the unfounded calumnies of the federal party” that persuaded him to run for a second term. He had always presumed, he explained to Elbridge Gerry, that he would retire after four years, but the lingering presence of Federalist propaganda in the press, though like letters from the dead, needed to be silenced completely. “They force my continuance,” he claimed. “If I can keep the vessel of state as steadily on her course another four years, my earthly purposes will be accomplished, and I shall be free to enjoy”—then the familiar refrain—“my family, my farm, and my books.” His reelection, if he chose to run, was a foregone conclusion.
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But something had gone out of him even as he decided to prolong his presidency. The burdens of the office undoubtedly accumulated with time. The Federalist assaults on his personal honor also inflicted wounds that never completely healed. His physical constitution, though still remarkably robust for a sixty-one-year-old man, was now bedeviled by recurrent bouts of diarrhea that periodically sapped him of energy. The most devastating blow, however, came in April 1804, when Maria died from complications in childbirth, much as her mother had done. “Others may lose of their abundance,” he wrote to John Page, his lifelong soul mate, “but I of my want, have lost even the half of all I had.” His prospects, he believed, “now hang on the slender thread of a single life.” This was Martha, the only one left to populate the family circle from the original Jefferson dream, which he now described as “fearfully blighted.” He was never really the same after Maria’s death, less exuberant and more fatalistic, and history was already preparing a series of unpleasant surprises on the international scene that were destined to make his second term as president a headlong fall from grace.
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5

MONTICELLO, 1816–26

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

—JEFFERSON TO JOHN ADAMS
AUGUST 1, 1816

I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 . . . is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.

—JEFFERSON TO JOHN HOLMES
APRIL 22, 1820

V
ISITORS DURING
his last decade could catch a glimpse of the ex-president astride his favorite horse in the early afternoon of most days, when he rode Eagle for two or three hours through the fields and woods around Monticello. Time had taken its inevitable toll on his aging body in all the little ways that accumulate in the joints and arteries of formerly athletic young men past their prime. But the nagging disabilities that made rising from a chair or walking through his garden more difficult somehow disappeared once he was on horseback. (In 1809, when he was sixty-five, he had taken his final ride home from Washington to permanent retirement without assistance and had pressed on for the final eight hours through a driving snowstorm.) As Eagle aged along with him and became Old Eagle, the members of the family worried that these solitary rides each afternoon placed both man and mount at some risk. But Jefferson brushed aside such cautionary concerns, explaining that, while an old man on his own legs, he was still a young man in the saddle. Even after he broke his arm in a fall off the back steps of Monticello in 1822, he insisted on his daily ride. He had Old Eagle brought up to the terrace so that he could be mounted from the height of the porch, eased himself into the saddle with his good arm while the horse leaned patiently against the terrace wall, then assumed the bolt-straight posture of a born rider and trotted off like a natural aristocrat keeping his appointment with destiny.
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We know more about his physical appearance and daily regimen during his last decade than at any other period of his life. He was, after all, a prominent member of America’s founding generation, obviously destined to take his place in the history books, so visitors felt a special urge to record their impressions of the Sage of Monticello for posterity. The inexorable ravages of the aging process also forced Jefferson himself to chronicle the physical and medical realities as they encroached upon his earlier indifference to such matters. He remained to the end congenitally suspicious of all doctors, claiming that whenever he saw three physicians together, “he looked up to see if there was not a turkey-buzzard in the neighborhood.” But he also recognized, as he reported to Adams, that “our machines have been now running for 70 or 80 years, and we must expect that worn as they are; here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way.”
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The old argument over the color of his hair—was it red or blond?—was now displaced by the common description of family and friends that it was completely gray. He also cut it shorter, eliminating the tied queue in the back, in part because it was easier to care for, in part because the longer style was beginning to seem old-fashioned. When walking outside or riding, he tended to wear a large, round, broad-brimmed hat to shield his face from the sun. Despite this protection, his facial skin was blotchy and usually peeling from exposure; the capillaries just beneath the surface were easily ruptured, giving his face irregular coloration; biologically as well as psychologically, he was thin-skinned. Recurrent diarrhea and intestinal disorders sapped his energy—this was the ailment that eventually killed him—so he needed a cane much of the time he was on his feet, and his loyal black servant, Burwell, the successor to Jupiter and James Hemings, accompanied him at all times except during his afternoon ride. His posture remained remarkably erect despite the cane, though several visitors noted that his head and neck now inclined forward, as if he were always leaning into the wind.
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When guests joined him for a tour of the grounds, they tended to be surprised at his passionate and animated way of talking and the rapidity of his speech, which tended to come in bursts of varying length and was accompanied by an emphatic shrugging of his shoulders and gesturing with his long arms and large hands. An itinerant bookseller, clearly expecting a more sedate and stoic demeanor, described him as “less a philosopher than a partizan.” Jefferson’s preferred mode of dress also caught some visitors off guard because of its informality. He tended to wear a brightly colored (usually red) vest underneath a gray waistcoat and loosely fitting pantaloons or corduroy pants that were usually tucked into his riding boots. He dressed, in other words, less like a former statesman or aspiring national icon than a working Virginia planter. Despite the cane and the blotchy skin and the disjunction between his nonchalant demeanor and the godlike expectations, almost all observers commented on his relatively youthful appearance. At eighty he looked sixty.
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His diet and daily regimen continued to follow the old patterns. He ate very little red meat, preferring vegetables, poultry and shellfish, though regular fish did not agree with his digestive system. He drank coffee and tea at breakfast, malt liquor and cider at dinner. While he avoided all hard liquors, he enjoyed three or four glasses of wine each day. He rose with the sun regardless of the season, usually getting five to eight hours of sleep, the length contingent upon the retirement hour, which itself depended on the quality of conversation when there were guests in the house or his interest in the book he was reading that evening. He bathed his feet in cold water every morning, devoted the early part of each day to his correspondence and his garden, rode each afternoon, then made himself sociable with family and guests at dinner until dark. His hearing remained good except, as he put it, “when several voices cut across each other,” which meant that he could not always follow conversations over dinner. His eyesight was excellent at a distance, but he relied on glasses for reading, especially at night.
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Certain poignant scenes, like verbal tableaux, have been passed down in the reminiscences of his grandchildren. Like the description of his daily excursion aboard Old Eagle, they conjure up some of the most attractive and nearly idyllic moments, when his retirement years managed to capture the pastoral and domestic serenity he had been pursuing throughout his life. There is the scene in his garden just after breakfast, working beside Wormley, his gardener, who is tending the spade and hoe while Jefferson aligns the rows of flowers and vegetables with a measuring line or clips off excess buds and leaves with his pruning knife. Or there is the scene on the terrace after dinner, as Jefferson organizes footraces for his grandchildren around the house, dropping a white handkerchief for the start, then seeing to it that the younger and slower children receive pieces of fruit just like the winners.
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There were two minor but naggingly persistent intrusions into the domestic serenities on the mountaintop, and both were direct consequences of Jefferson’s stature as one of the last survivors of 1776. First, the steady flow of guests, tourists and self-proclaimed Jeffersonians made Monticello into a virtual hotel for at least eight months of the year. “I need not tell you what open doors he lives,” one visitor reported in 1815, “as you well know his mountain is made a sort of Mecca.” Members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, Indian agents, retired army and naval officers, Protestant missionaries, itinerant booksellers, aspiring Virginia politicians—all felt the obligation to make the pilgrimage to Monticello. Once there, a distressingly large number chose to regard Jefferson’s generic offer of hospitality as a personal invitation to stay for several days. Martha’s daughter, Ellen, recalled that her mother sometimes had to feed and entertain fifty overnight guests. Total strangers who were simply passing through seemed to believe that Monticello was a national shrine where they could declare sanctuary. They often peered through the windows when the family was seated at dinner, walked right into the front hallway, chipped off pieces of brick or wood as souvenirs, even joined the invited guests over tea or wine and struck up conversations with the patriarch himself, who was sometimes not sure whether he was addressing a guest or an interloper. By 1816, as this persistent stream of visitors became a virtual flood, Jefferson retreated three or four times a year to his estate in Bedford County about ninety miles from Monticello. He supervised the finishing touches on what became his Poplar Forest home away from home, a smaller but even more architecturally distinctive dwelling than Monticello (Poplar Forest was shaped as a perfect octagon) and used it as his personal refuge whenever Monticello became overoccupied.
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Second, his correspondence became a massive and time-consuming burden. Jefferson received more than 1,000 letters each year of his retirement. In 1820 he made a point of keeping an accurate record and counted 1,267 separate letters, most from people he did not know, many requesting long answers to historical questions. He spent three or four hours each morning trying to respond, then often returned to the writing desk before retiring at night. “Is this life?” he asked Adams, answering his own question by describing himself as “a mill-horse, who sees no end to his circle but in death.” Adams commiserated with what Jefferson had called his “epistolary corvée,” noting mischievously that he did not have Jefferson’s problem because he had been prescient enough to make himself unpopular. Moreover, as Adams explained, he simply neglected to answer the letters from cranks and well-intentioned strangers, so that he could devote his remaining energies to correspondents who counted, the chief one being Jefferson himself.
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But Adams’s sense of humor was lost on Jefferson, who somehow felt a relentless obligation to respond personally to everyone. Madison advised him to prepare a formulaic letter, “a standard response that the family can send out expressing thanks,” but he could not comply. Especially after arthritis in his wrist and fingers worsened with age, he complained that “the unceasing drudgery of writing keeps me in unceasing pain and peevishness.” Only a few months before his death he lamented that his rescue from the writing table rested “on the hitherto illusive hope that the discretion of those who have no claims upon me, will at length advert to the circumstances of my age and ill health, and feel the duty of sparing both.” But it was not meant to be. Neither the presumptuous pilgrims to Monticello nor the countless correspondents throughout the country could be made to respect his privacy and leave him alone. As a living legend he had become public property.
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He claimed that there was one shadowy acquaintance whom he was fully prepared to receive at Monticello at any time. The prospect of death did not unnerve him so much as the fear of what he called “a doting old age.” For more than twenty years he had been telling friends that his physical health was so good that he sometimes worried about living too long. The ultimate fear was senility, what Adams referred to as “dying at the top.” Almost as worrisome was a gradual physical degeneration that would deprive him of any semblance of autonomy and personal sovereignty. (One reason the daily ride on Old Eagle was so important to him was that it symbolized the survival of his independent spirit.) Finally there was the uniquely Jeffersonian sense that one should not linger beyond the allotted time of one’s generation, that one had almost a moral obligation to clear the ground for the next generation by placing oneself underneath it. “Mine is the next turn,” he wrote to his old love Maria Cosway in 1820, “and I shall meet it with good will; and after one’s friends are all gone before them, and our faculties leaving us, too, one by one, why wish to linger in mere vegetation, as a solitary trunk in a desolate field, from which all its former companions have disappeared.” This feeling of having outlived his time intensified with age. In the year before his death he claimed that looking back over his own life was “like looking over a field of battle. All, all dead! and ourselves left alone midst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.”
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Another memorable scene made the point with almost visual clarity. In 1824 Lafayette paid a final visit to America and naturally scheduled a rendezvous with the Sage of Monticello. An escort of 120 mounted men and a crowd of 200 onlookers accompanied Lafayette up the mountain to witness the reunion of the former comrades. Madison described the general as “in fine health and spirits but so much increased in bulk and changed in aspect that I should not have known him.” (Lafayette had spent several years in a Swiss dungeon, confined by the radicals for siding with the moderate faction in the French Revolution, then ballooned upon his release.) Meanwhile Lafayette described Jefferson as “feeble and much aged,” though “in full possession of all the vigor of his mind and heart.” As the two aging patriarchs tottered toward each other and embraced before the crowd, witnesses claimed they saw two ghosts from a bygone era materializing one final time for the benefit of the present generation. Given the urge to make Jefferson into a historical icon, it seemed almost awkward to realize that he was still alive.
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Or there was the highly symbolic but scary scene the following year, in 1825, when Jefferson consented to sit for a “life mask” that would allow posterity to possess a reliable likeness of the American hero, an iconographic rendering of the living icon based on a special technique designed to subordinate artistic interpretation to the actual shape and contours of his face. The American sculptor John Henri Browere poured successive coats of a mysterious plasterlike substance over Jefferson’s head, but the liquid dried and hardened more rapidly than anticipated, causing Jefferson considerable discomfort and forcing Browere, as Jefferson put it, to “use freely the mallet and chisel to break it into pieces” with a series of heavy blows that “would have been sensible almost to a loggerhead. . . .” The experience convinced Jefferson to “bid adieu for ever to busts and even portraits.” In addition to illustrating the dominant perception of Jefferson as a living relic of America’s glorious past, the Browere incident inadvertently signaled the subsequent problems that would afflict anyone intent upon establishing a close fit between Jefferson’s image and the man he really was. Even Browere’s plaster cast was based on the reassembled fragments of the fractured “life mask.” Like the man himself, even his face seemed to resist realistic renderings.
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