Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (18 page)

What was true in Virginia, Jefferson was to find, was also true in America more broadly. The search for the point of temperate power between competing elements of life—the national government and the states, the states and the people—was far from over.

I
n an evening's conversation on a rainy journey home to Orange, James Madison sounded fellow Virginian George Mason out on the questions of the day, discovering only one real example of “heterodoxy”: Mason, Madison told Jefferson, was “too little impressed with either the necessity or the proper means of preserving the confederacy.”

In two largely neglected pieces published anonymously in
The Pennsylvania Journal, or, Weekly Advertiser
in this period, Madison made an impassioned case for a strong national government—a case that, as Mason's views indicated, was failing to resonate broadly.

Madison was having problems of a personal nature, too. Kitty Floyd broke off their engagement, crushing him. Concerned about his friend, Jefferson rapidly replied with warmth and empathy: “I sincerely lament the misadventure which has happened from whatever cause it may have happened.… No event has been more contrary to my expectations, and these were founded on what I thought a good knowledge of the ground. But of all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable.”

Jefferson's words of consolation came from a good friend, one who knew sadness and who tried to take—as of old—a philosophical view of life's disappointments. He had experienced heartbreak and desolation, and he had—painfully and arduously—kept his own emotional machinery working well enough to propel him forward despite all. He believed Madison would, too.

Jefferson, meanwhile, could never know too much. Ten days after his election to the national Congress, he asked a delegate to the Virginia General Assembly at Richmond to keep him minutely informed about state politics. “Parliamentary news is interesting and I hear little or nothing of it,” he wrote the delegate on Tuesday, June 17, 1783. “What have you done? What are you doing? What are the maneuvers of your leaders? Who are they? What the dispositions of the two houses? etc.”

Information, as ever, was power.

SIXTEEN

A STRUGGLE FOR RESPECT

Foreign civil arrangement, and foreign treaties. Domestic civil arrangement. Domestic peace establishment of arsenals and posts. Western territory. Indian affairs. Money.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
, listing the issues facing postwar America

T
HE
C
ONGRES
S
WAS
HOMELESS
as well as largely powerless. Seated in Philadelphia, slated to move to Annapolis later in 1783, the lawmakers were driven out of Pennsylvania in the third week of June when four hundred Continental soldiers mutinied, storming the Congress to demand pay. Pennsylvania officials, who had jurisdiction over the city, refused to intercede, prompting the Congress to evacuate Philadelphia for Princeton, in New Jersey.

The national government, in other words, was on the run from its own people.

Appearances mattered much at this delicate hour. James Madison reported a strong inclination among the national lawmakers to leave Princeton and return to Philadelphia even at the risk of physical danger in order to “prevent any inferences abroad of disaffection in the mass of so important a state to the revolution or the federal Government.”

The Congress nevertheless remained at Princeton until it moved to Annapolis in November 1783. Though uncertain where the Congress would be sitting by the time his term began in the autumn, Jefferson had asked Madison to secure him a room—of any size—with Mrs. House if in Philadelphia, and he sought Mrs. Trist's counsel on schooling for Patsy, who was to stay in that city no matter where the legislature held its sessions.

J
efferson left Monticello on Thursday, October 16, 1783. Traveling through Philadelphia, he arrived in Princeton to take his seat on November 4. It was the briefest of stays. On the evening of Jefferson's arrival there, the Congress adjourned to Annapolis. Princeton had offered “scanty accommodations.” Madison dismissed it as a “village where the public business can neither be conveniently done, the members of Congress decently provided for, nor those connected with Congress provided for at all.”

To achieve order required authority, which the states wanted but the Congress needed. Neither a reflexive nationalist nor a states'-rights purist—categories that were already taking form—Jefferson was grappling with the distribution of power in a country of diverse interests.

His view of the role of the Confederation Congress in 1783–84 was in keeping with his thinking in the wake of his governorship. Whoever was in charge needed to be clearly and certainly in command. As “the United States in Congress assembled represent the sovereignty of the whole Union,” he wrote, “their body collectively and their President individually should on all occasions have precedence [over] all other bodies and persons.” Even if he were referring only to ceremonial occasions, the point was clear. To be effective, the Congress had to be granted pride of place.

A
nnapolis was quiet—too quiet, Jefferson believed, for the seat of the Congress of a victorious nation. “It is now above a fortnight since we should have met, and six states only appear,” he wrote Madison in December 1783. They needed nine to form a quorum and proceed. “We have some hopes of Rhode Island coming in today, but when two more will be added seems as insusceptible of calculation as when the next earthquake will happen.” Franklin, Adams, and Jay—the commissioners abroad—wrote that “the riot of Philadelphia and departure of Congress thence made the most serious impressions in Europe, and have excited great doubts of the stability of our confederacy, and in what we shall end,” Jefferson said.

The business at hand was momentous: The Congress had only a limited amount of time to ratify the Treaty of Paris, the pact ending the Revolutionary War and granting America recognition as an independent nation. On Saturday, December 13, 1783, Jefferson was appointed to a committee to consider the treaty.

There were ten major provisions, among them a generous grant of territory and a promise by the British to return confiscated property (including slaves). Critical, too, was article 10, concerning process: The treaty had to be ratified within six months of its signing, which had occurred in Paris on Wednesday, September 3, 1783.

Though Jefferson's committee moved the ratification of the treaty, there was still no quorum in the Congress. No quorum, no action. Jefferson hated the feeling of powerlessness.

It was a troubling Christmas Eve. He was not feeling well, and he was worried. “I cannot help expressing my extreme anxiety at our present critical situation,” Jefferson wrote a Virginia correspondent on Wednesday, December 24, 1783. There was now only “a little over two months” to ratify the treaty and return it to Paris. “All that can be said is that it is yet possible,” Jefferson wrote, hoping for action before Britain attempted to force new changes should the ratification not come in time.

On New Year's Day 1784 Jefferson was gloomy and sick. “I have had very ill health since I have been here and am getting rather lower than otherwise,” he told Madison.

If the Congress did not act quickly, the United States would humiliate itself abroad by failing to ratify and deliver the treaty in time. If it acted without the nine states, though, the national government risked the appearance of usurpation.

Jefferson sought a compromise, some means of preserving—establishing, actually—the nation's international reputation without exposing the Congress to charges of overreaching. With lawyerly precision, Jefferson drafted a motion that took advantage of an earlier vote and extended its authority to the finished treaty. The means of saving the day were secured. (In the end, Connecticut and New Jersey at length arrived, and the treaty was ratified by nine states.)

For the moment, the system had succeeded in ratifying the treaty that, in turn, ratified the Revolution. Jefferson drafted a proclamation to announce the news. In it he called on “all the good citizens of these states” to draw on “that good faith which is every man's surest guide” to respect, and to fulfill the articles of peace “entered into on their behalf under the authority of that federal bond by which their existence as an independent people is bound up together, and is known and acknowledged by the nations of the world.”

There was much work to be done. Jefferson thought “that were it certain we could be brought to act as one united nation” on trade policy, then Britain “would make extensive concessions.” As it was, however, “she is not afraid of retaliation.”

Still, the resolution of months of tension and uncertainty lifted Jefferson's spirits and may have improved his health. “I have been just able to attend my duty in the state house, but not to go out on any other occasion,” he told Patsy. The day after ratification, however, he said he was “considerably better.” The author of the Declaration of Independence had declared the peace, affirming anew the national—not sectional—identity of the country.

W
ith its attention to the occupation of forts, the treaty raised issues about the future of the American West, a longtime interest of Jefferson's. His was an obsession romantic, scientific, and practical. He loved the image of endless forests—in this vision he was like a Saxon of old, dwelling in primordial liberty—and he was fascinated by what he called “the different species of bones, teeth, and tusks of the Mammoth” and other natural specimens. The French naturalist the Comte de Buffon, who argued that animal and plant life in the New World was inferior, was always on Jefferson's mind. In Philadelphia in 1784 Jefferson would buy an “uncommonly large panther skin” to show Buffon.

He was also a patriot and a politician, and he worried, as he had during the years of the war, about the threat of a frontier beyond American control. “I find they have subscribed a very large sum of money in England for exploring the country from the Mississippi to California,” Jefferson wrote George Rogers Clark from Annapolis in December 1783. “They pretend it is only to promote knowledge. I am afraid they have thoughts of colonizing into that quarter. Some of us have been talking here in a feeble way of making the attempt to search that country.” He fretted, though, about finding the means to do it. “But I doubt whether we have enough of that kind of spirit to raise the money. How would you like to lead such a party?”

The man who saw America's story in terms of the march of “human events” was aware of the scale of the experiment in which he was participating. In the first week of December 1783, Jefferson made inquiries about purchasing a mechanical copying device through Samuel House, a brother of Eliza House Trist and a Philadelphia merchant. He wanted to ensure that his role was part of the saga of the age when the time came for the telling of tales and the weaving of history. Jefferson had been thinking in such terms since he began sending out his original version of the Declaration of Independence. Now he was taking steps to preserve the daily, even hourly, record of a life lived on the largest possible stage.

SEVENTEEN

LOST CITIES AND LIFE COUNSEL

The Governor is a most ingenuous naturalist and philosopher, a truly scientific and learned man, and every way excellent.

—E
ZRA
S
TILES
, the president of Yale College, on Jefferson

I
N
P
HILADELPHIA
all the talk was of balloons. “Congress imagined that when they removed to Annapolis to pout we should all be in deep distress and for every
pout
return a
sigh
—but the event is far otherwise,” Jefferson's friend Francis Hopkinson wrote him in March 1784. “The name of Congress is almost forgotten, and for one person that will mention that respectable body a hundred will talk of an air balloon.”

It was a season of grand ballooning experiments in Paris; word of the flights, including a manned one in November 1783, spread rapidly. Jefferson sensed the revolutionary possibilities of human control of the air. “What think you of these balloons? They really begin to assume a serious face,” he wrote. Reports had people flying six miles in twenty minutes at three thousand feet. He took a jocular tone, but his words were prescient. “This discovery seems to threaten the prostration of fortified works unless they can be closed above, the destruction of fleets and what not. The French may now run over their laces, wines etc. to England duty free. The whole system of British statutes made on the supposition of goods being brought into some port must be revised. Inland countries may now become
maritime
states unless you choose rather to call them
aerial
ones as their commerce is in [the] future to be carried on through that element. But jesting apart I think this discovery may lead to things useful.” Ten years later, in Philadelphia, Jefferson saw the first successful manned balloon flight in America.

His friend Hopkinson, a lawyer, writer, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, saw a witty connection between the political and the scientific. “A high-flying politician,” Hopkinson wrote, “is I think not unlike a balloon—he is full of inflammability, he is driven along by every current of wind, and those who will suffer themselves to be carried up by them run a great risk that the bubble may burst and let them fall from the height to which a principle of levity had raised them.”

Jefferson's scientific curiosity never abated. One day James Madison wrote with extraordinary news from abroad: He had been told “a subterraneous city has been discovered in Siberia, which appears to have been once populous and magnificent. Among other curiosities it contains an equestrian statue around the neck of which was a golden chain 200 feet in length, so exquisitely wrought that Buffon inferred from a specimen of 6 feet sent him by the Empress of Russia that no artist in Paris could equal the workmanship.”

The Reverend James Madison, the president of William and Mary and a cousin of Jefferson's political ally James Madison, wrote Jefferson about climate (he was annoyed that “the British robbed me of my thermometer and barometer”), about new scientific books, and about a comet. “You have no doubt observed the comet which made its appearance here last Friday evening for the first time.… I shall endeavor to trace its progress and will send you the result.”

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur contacted Jefferson with a curious scientific inquiry: whether there was truth to a rumor in France that “in some of the remotest settlements of Virginia or Carolina, brandy has been distilled from potatoes.” He was asking Jefferson, he said, because of the “respect with which I have heard your name mentioned as well as from your extensive knowledge and taste for the arts and sciences.”

Jefferson believed in trial and error, exploring Buffon's theory of heat and seeking breakthroughs in botany. “I have always thought that if in the experiments to introduce or to communicate new plants, one species in a hundred is found useful and succeeds, the ninety-nine found otherwise are more than paid for,” he remarked.

H
e wrote the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois to thank him for finding Patsy a French tutor in Philadelphia and for suggestions for her reading. Jefferson reported that he had given her a copy of
Gil Blas,
a French picaresque novel by Alain-René Lesage, and of Cervantes's
Don Quixote
—“which are among the best books of their class as far as I am acquainted with them.” His selections suggested a love of intellectual adventure that he hoped his daughter would come to share.

He was a generous father, but could be a stern one, too. “The acquirements which I hope you will make under the tutors I have provided for you will render you more worthy of my love, and if they cannot increase it they will prevent its diminution,” he wrote to his daughter. He had engaged Mrs. Thomas Hopkinson, Francis Hopkinson's mother, to watch over Patsy, and he invested Mrs. Hopkinson with the authority of his beloved late wife.

Consider the good lady who has taken you under her roof, who has undertaken to see that you perform all your exercises, and to admonish you in all those wanderings from what is right or what is clever to which your inexperience would expose you, consider her I say as your mother, as the only person to whom … you can now look up; and that her displeasure or disapprobation on any occasion will be an immense misfortune which should you be so unhappy as to incur by any unguarded act, think no concession too much to regain her good will.

The love of the woman he was putting in her mother's place, then, was to be contingent, not constant. Jefferson expected his daughter to apply herself to the work he prescribed with the same energy and effort he gave everything he did.

With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve:

From 8 to 10 o'clock, practice music.

From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another.

From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.

From 3 to 4, read French.

From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music.

From 5 till bed-time, read English, write, etc.

His tutelage was not limited to Patsy. “You are now old enough to know how very important to your future life will be the manner in which you employ your present time,” he wrote his nephew Peter Carr, son of his sister Martha and Dabney, in December 1783. “I hope therefore you will never waste a moment of it.” He entrusted Carr to James Maury, his old teacher.

Jefferson had large ambitions for Carr—ambitions that mirrored those he had for himself. Jefferson wished Carr to become “a man of learning and influence” and expected him to be preparing for “the public stage of life.” (He also advised Carr to learn Spanish. “Our future connection with Spain renders that the most necessary of the modern languages, after the French,” he told him. “When you become a public man you may have occasion for it, and the circumstance of your possessing that language may give you a preference over other candidates.”)

Later, he told his nephew that religion required careful thought, not reflexive acceptance. “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

J
efferson longed for order, control, affection. “Monroe is buying land almost adjoining me,” Jefferson wrote to Madison from Annapolis in February 1784. “[William] Short will do the same. What would I not give [i
f
] you could fall into the circle.… Think of it. To render it practicable only requires you to think it so. Life is of no value but as it brings us gratifications. Among the most valuable of these is rational society. It informs the mind, sweetens the temper, cheers our spirits, and promotes health.”

Jefferson was an attentive and good friend through the years. “Though the different walks of life into which we have been led do not bring us together, yet I inquire of your health, with anxious concern, from every one who comes from you,” he once wrote George Wythe. “I shall for ever cherish the remembrance of the many agreeable and useful days I have passed with you, and the infinite obligations I owe you for what good has fallen to me through life.” Jefferson's friend Alexander Donald, of Richmond, was hosting Warner Lewis at home when a letter from Jefferson arrived in late 1787. The note, Donald told Jefferson, “was so friendly, and so very flattering to my pride, that I could not resist the vanity of showing it to him. He added to my pride by declaring … that of all the men he ever knew in his life, he believed you to be the most sincere in your profession of friendship.… Some people in your high character would be very apt to forget their old acquaintance, but you are not, and I must be allowed to do myself the justice to declare, I never entertained an idea that you would.”

T
he Confederation Congress remained a mess seemingly beyond Jefferson's control; it was difficult even to gather a quorum. “Admonition after admonition has been sent to the states, to no effect,” he told Madison in February 1784. “I fear that our chance is at this time desperate.”

Reimbursement of the legislators' personal expenses was also a problem. “Among other legislative subjects our distresses ask notice,” Jefferson said. “I had been from home four months and had expended 1200 dollars before I received one farthing.” For a few of Jefferson's colleagues the money came too late. “In the meantime some of us had had the mortification to have our horses turned out of the livery stable for want of money. There is really no standing this.”

On a graver note, chatter about kings or a reassertion of British influence was frequent enough to inform Jefferson's thinking about politics through the decades. In late January 1784, Jefferson drafted a reply to a letter from a correspondent in Boston, who had written to warn of “encroachments … made on the territories of the state of Massachusetts by the subjects of his Britannic majesty from the government of Nova Scotia.”

After reading a report from Benjamin Franklin several weeks later, Jefferson warned George Washington that it

gives a picture of the disposition of England towards us; he observes that though they have made peace with us, they are not reconciled to us nor to the loss of us. He calls to our attention the numerous royal progeny to be provided for, the military education giving to some of them, the ideas in England of distraction among ourselves, that the people here are already fatigued with their new governments, the possibility of circumstances arising on the Continent of Europe which might countenance the wishes of Great Britain to recover us, and from thence inculcates a useful lesson to cement the friendships we possess in Europe.

As he fought “an attack of my periodical headache” in March 1784, he wrote Washington: “I suppose the crippled state of Congress is not new to you.… The consequence is that we are wasting our time and labor in vain efforts to do business.”

The British were dunning the Americans for prewar debts, and at least two elements of the Treaty of Paris were open issues: the British promise to abandon their forts in the West and their pledge to return captured and escaped slaves. Both, naturally, were of concern to Virginians, and the questions kept the two countries in a state of agitation for years.

T
he West let him dream big, and he proposed a trade route connecting the Ohio and Potomac rivers. “This is the moment … for seizing it if ever we mean to have it,” he said. “All the world is becoming commercial.” Jefferson was pushing Virginia to approve a special tax for the river project, but, as he told George Washington, “a most powerful objection always arises to propositions of this kind. It is that public undertakings are carelessly managed and much money spent to little purpose.”

Jefferson's plan for overcoming these obstacles: recruit Washington from retirement to head up the project. The idea had fascinated Washington for decades, but the general's reply was pragmatic. Though he agreed with Jefferson about the merits of the project, Washington said, “I have no expectation that the public will adopt the measure; for besides the jealousies which prevail, and the difficulty of proportioning such funds as may be allotted for the purposes you have mentioned, there are two others, which in my opinion, will be yet harder to surmount. These are (if I have not imbibed too unfavorable an opinion of my countrymen) the impracticability of bringing the great and truly wise policy of this measure to their view, and the difficulty of drawing money from them for such a purpose if you could do it.” Nevertheless, Jefferson's letter renewed Washington's interest. Their hope was to clear navigation on the Potomac to a point where a portage road could link it to the Ohio. Washington supervised improvements to the Potomac as head of a private company, but it would take decades before the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal came into being.

In April, Washington implicitly complimented Jefferson by writing for his “opinion of the Institution of the Society of Cincinnati,” an organization of Washington's officers that some feared was a nascent aristocratic order that could corrupt the republic.

Jefferson was happy that Washington had asked. The issue of the Cincinnati, he said, “is interesting, and, so far as you have stood connected with it, has been a matter of anxiety to me.… I have wished to see you stand on ground separated from it; and that the character which will be handed to future ages at the head of our revolution may in no instance be compromised in subordinate altercations.”

Jefferson knew his man. Nothing could be better calculated to win Washington's attention than the suggestion that his own reputation was at risk. Jefferson said that he was certain that Washington meant no harm. The “moderation and virtue of a single character”—Washington—“has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish,” but even he “is not immortal, and his successor or some one of his successors at the head of this institution may adopt a more mistaken road to glory.” Congress, Jefferson said, shared his views.