Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (20 page)

It was only when spring came that he began to recover. By early May he had made a significant personal decision: He wanted to bring his family together. He was now walking up to six or eight miles a day as he tried to keep the demons of his latest loss at bay. With Lucy gone, he was eager to have Polly to join him and Patsy in France. “I must have Polly,” Jefferson wrote Francis Eppes in May 1785. “As would not have her at sea but between 1st of April and September this will allow time for decision—is there any woman in Virginia [who] could be hired to come?”

R
elations between America and Britain were poor and growing poorer still. John and Abigail Adams moved from Paris to London, where John became minister to Great Britain. In London, Abigail missed Jefferson. “I think I have somewhere met with the observation that nobody ever leaves Paris but with a degree of tristeness,” she wrote to Jefferson in June 1785. “I own I was loath to leave my garden because I did not expect to find its place supplied. I was still more loath on account of the increasing pleasure and intimacy which a longer acquaintance with a respected friend promised, [and] to leave behind me the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom and unreserved: and whose place he had no reason to expect supplied in the land to which he is destined.”

Jefferson had been appointed America's sole minister to France. “Our country is getting into a ferment against yours, or rather have caught it from yours,” Jefferson wrote to an English correspondent. “God knows how this will end: but assuredly in one extreme or the other. There can be no medium between those who have loved so much.”

Jefferson sensed that, as with lovers and intimate friends, there can often be no middle ground between engagement and estrangement. In the presence of passion, or of former passions, acquaintance is impossible. It is all or nothing, for once affections have cooled it is very difficult to bring them back to a middling temperature. In such cases human nature tends to rekindle the flames to their old force, or consign them to perpetual chill. America and Britain would one day have to choose between permanent enmity or permanent affection.

There were constant fears about foreign designs in America. “We have intelligence (which though not entirely authentic is believed by many) that the British are enticing our people to settle lands within our lines under their government and protection by gratuitous supplies of provisions, implements of husbandry etc.,” John Jay wrote Jefferson in July 1785.

From South Carolina, Ralph Izard, a former diplomat who had also served in the Continental Congress, affirmed Jefferson's own anxieties about America. “It is said that Great Britain has encouraged the piratical states to attack our vessels. If this could be proved, I should prefer a war against her, rather than against Algiers,” wrote Izard. “But it is a melancholy fact that we are not in a condition to go to war with anybody.… The revenues of America, under the present management, do not appear to be adequate to the discharge of the public debt. Where then shall we find resources to carry on war?”

Izard took a comprehensive view, including the failure of American politicians to master the craft of governing. “Our governments tend too much to democracy. A handicraftsman thinks an apprenticeship necessary to make him acquainted with his business. But our back countrymen are of [the] opinion that a politician may be born such as well as a poet.”

Like poetry, politics was partly inspiration, but it was, as Izard said and Jefferson knew, a craft that required relentless practice. It was a lesson Jefferson had learned in Williamsburg, and which now served him well an ocean away.

NINETEEN

THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORLD

Will you take the trouble to procure for me the largest pair of bucks horns you can?

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
to Archibald Cary

J
EFFERSON
FOUND
TH
E
SHOPPING
in France wonderful. He bought silver and china and wine. Intrigued by a new innovation—“phosphoretic” matches—he purchased three dozen to send to friends in America. There were opera tickets and Italian comedy tickets and tickets to the occasional
concert spirituel,
musical performances in the Salle des Machines of the Palais des Tuileries. (Jefferson's first included a song of Handel's.) He acquired more than sixty paintings in his five years in Paris, many of them portraits or images of religious subjects or scenes. Particular purchases: a
Prodigal Son,
a
Democritus and Heraclitus,
a
St. Peter Weeping,
a
Magdalen Penitent,
and a
Salome Bearing the Head of St. John
.

Twice he attended masquerade balls at the Opéra—parties that began at eleven p.m. and ran until six in the morning. (Once he and William S. Smith, John Adams's son-in-law, were the targets of a forward baroness: “When Mr. Jefferson had made his escape,” Smith wrote, “she had fastened her talons on me.”) On Tuesdays he made his way to Versailles for Ambassadors' Day. He also visited Patsy at her convent school, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, which was run by Bernadine nuns—“a house of education altogether the best in France, and at which the best masters attend,” Jefferson wrote to one of his sisters in Virginia.

He tried to play chess with Parisians but found that they were too accomplished for him. When he arrived in Paris, he had accepted an invitation to join an elite chess club at the Palais Royal, the Salon des Échecs. “I have heard him say that when, on his arrival in Paris, he was introduced into a chess club, he was beaten at once, and that so rapidly and signally that he gave up all competition,” one of his granddaughters recalled. He was not a man who liked to lose.

He devoted his energies to the delights of the city's intellectual society. In June 1785, Jefferson called on the Comtesse d'Houdetot at Sannois, hoping that the trip “has opened a door of admission for me to the circle of literati with which she is environed.” There the party heard a nightingale's song, Jefferson said, “in all its perfection: and I do not hesitate to pronounce that in America it would be deemed a bird of the third rank only, our mocking-bird and fox-colored thrush being unquestionably superior to it.”

Jefferson remained ambivalent about the tension he found between the virtues and vices of European culture and politics. He was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home. Moving between the two worlds, translating the best of the old to the new and explaining the benefits of the new to the old, he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter. From ideas of political power to Lombardy poplars, from architectural style to pasta, Jefferson put himself at the heart of the transatlantic conversation—always in the service of his nation.

H
e scouted the finest artists. Officials in Virginia had asked Jefferson and Franklin to execute a sacred charge: the commissioning of a statue of Washington for the new state capitol in Richmond. Jefferson found the perfect artist, Jean-Antoine Houdon, the man Jefferson considered the finest sculptor of the age. Writing Washington, Jefferson said that Houdon would like to come to America “for the purpose of forming your bust from the life.”

Whatever Jefferson learned, he acted upon. “An improvement is made here in the construction of the musket which it may be interesting to Congress to know,” Jefferson wrote John Jay in August 1785. “It consists in the making [of] every part of them so exactly alike that what belongs to any one, may be used for every other musket in the magazine.” Jefferson also asked George Washington “to communicate to me what you can recollect of Bushnell's experiments in submarine navigation during the late war, and whether you think his method capable of being used successfully for the destruction of vessels of war.” Jefferson sent John Jay documents about French marines on the chance that establishing a marine corps “may become interesting to us.”

He took particular pains to convince the Comte de Buffon that American animals were not, as the count believed, inferior. Jefferson asked Archibald Cary to secure him the horns of a buck: He planned to demonstrate his point with a native example. Jefferson traveled to a school for the blind to learn what he could about its methods of teaching (he also owned a book on instructing deaf-mutes). With Malesherbes, a great French politician and botanist, he exchanged American nuts and berries for French grapevines. He also supported the plans of the American explorer John Ledyard, who was in Paris and called Jefferson “a brother to me.” Ledyard was planning a journey from Siberia to Kamchatka and thence to North America to the Atlantic.

Jefferson held a unique position. “It is certainly of great importance to us to know what is done in the philosophical world; but our means of information are confined almost entirely to you,” the Reverend James Madison wrote him from Williamsburg in April 1785. His home country's hunger for news was palpable. In a postscript, Madison wrote: “Has the Abbé Rochon published any thing upon his new discovery in optics? How is the effect produced? What is the specific gravity of the crystal? In what way does it differ from other rock crystals?” Jefferson was thrilled to be able to answer.

He also enjoyed shopping for John and Abigail Adams. He purchased a porcelain Mars to complete a set of Minerva, Diana, and Apollo for Abigail. “This will do, thinks I, for the table of the American Minister in London, where those whom it may concern may look and learn that though Wisdom is our guide, and Song and Chase our supreme delight, yet we offer adoration to that tutelar god also who rocked the cradle of our birth, who has accepted our infant offerings, and has shown himself the patron of our rights and avenger of our wrongs.” (The figurines were accidentally destroyed en route to London.) He once sent corsets—by request—to the Adamses' daughter Abigail Smith. “He wishes they may be suitable,” Jefferson wrote in the third person, “as Mrs. Smith omitted to send her measure.… Should they be too small however, she will be so good as to lay them by a while. There are ebbs as well as flows in this world.” In return, John and Abigail Adams supervised Jefferson's English tailoring and shoemaking needs.

I
have at length procured a house in a situation much more pleasing to me than my present,” he told Abigail Adams in September 1785. It was the Hôtel de Langeac, at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and the rue de Berri. “I cultivate in my own garden here Indian corn for the use of my own table, to eat green in our manner,” he wrote Nicholas Lewis in 1787.

Gardening kept him emotionally connected to home. “I am now of an age which does not easily accommodate itself to new manners and new modes of living: and I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital.”

He was not exactly a barbarous savage. “I observed that although Mr. Jefferson was the plainest man in the room, and the most destitute of ribbons, crosses and other insignia of rank that he was the most courted and most attended to (even by the courtiers themselves) of the whole diplomatic corps,” wrote Thomas Shippen, a young American studying law in London who visited Jefferson in Paris, in 1788.

His public life was going well. “He is everything that is good, upright, enlightened, and clever,” Lafayette wrote the Maryland physician and politician James McHenry from Paris in 1785, “and is respected and beloved by everyone that knows him.” In a sketch published two years later, Luigi Castiglioni, an Italian count, wrote: “Mr. Jefferson is a man of about 50 years of age, lean, of a serious and modest appearance. His uncommon talents are not readily visible at a first encounter, but as one talks with him about the various subjects in which he believes himself to be informed, he very quickly gives evident proof of his judgment and application.”

Jefferson's ability to absorb and assess the world around him, whether political, scientific, or social, was evident in a description of Parisian life he gave an American friend in his French years. Imaginatively offering a portrait of the daily routine amid the “empty bustle of Paris,” he wrote:

At eleven o'clock it is day chez Madame. The curtains are drawn. Propped on bolsters and pillows, and her head scratched into a little order, the bulletins of the sick are read, and the billets of the well. She writes to some of her acquaintance and receives the visits of others. If the morning is not very thronged, she is able to get out and hobble round the cage of the Palais royal: but she must hobble quickly, for the coiffeur's turn is come; and a tremendous turn it is! Happy, if he does not make her arrive when dinner is half over! The torpitude of digestion a little passed, she flutters half an hour through the streets by way of paying visits, and then to the Spectacles. These finished, another half hour is devoted to dodging in and out of the doors of her very sincere friends, and away to supper. After supper cards; and after cards bed, to rise at noon the next day, and to tread, like a mill-horse, the same trodden circle over again. Thus the days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment: ever flying from the ennui … eternally in pursuit of happiness which keeps eternally before us. If death or a bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.

This was Jefferson's cultural view of the French; politically, he worried, too, about how the French viewed America. “The politics of Europe render it indispensably necessary that with respect to everything external we be one nation only, firmly hooped together,” he wrote Madison in February 1786. “And it should ever be held in mind that insult and war are the consequences of a want of respectability in the national character.” (He also asked Madison for a “hundred or two nuts of the pecan. They would enable me to oblige some characters here whom I should be much gratified to oblige.”)

Madison was making some progress at home on his and Jefferson's mutual worry over the power of the central government. A convention to deal with issues of commerce was being called to convene in Annapolis. This meeting ultimately became the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Progress was slow, but real. First the states had to agree to send delegations; the delegations then had to settle on a plan; and finally the plan would face ratification in the states. “I almost despair of success,” Madison said.

W
hile in France, Jefferson mused about the relationship of the individual to the state. He had a stimulating companion with whom to discuss such questions: At midsummer 1787, Thomas Paine visited Jefferson in Paris.

The son of a corset maker, Paine was born in Thetford, a town in Norfolk, England, in 1737. He was raised in an unconventional climate of dissent. His father was a Quaker; his mother was the daughter of an Anglican lawyer. Young Paine was baptized in the Church of England but sometimes went to Quaker meetings.

His
Common Sense
had galvanized America in 1776, selling more than half a million copies. A powerful writer, Paine followed
Common Sense
with
The Rights of Man,
an assault on monarchy, in 1791, and, in 1794–95, with
The Age of Reason,
an equally epic assault on organized religion. Paine and Jefferson became friends and longtime correspondents; they shared a vision of a new, enlightened world—though Jefferson never forgot that it was foolhardy to sacrifice real progress, however compromised, to the dreams of the ideal.

J
ohn Adams wanted Jefferson to come to London. After a series of meetings with the ambassador from Tripoli—sessions that included large pipes of tobacco, turbans, and hot coffee—Adams believed there was an opening to come to an arrangement with the Mediterranean power. Without such a resolution, Adams feared, the American experiment itself might be at risk. “What has been already done and expended will be absolutely thrown away,” he told Jefferson, arguing that there could be a war in the region “which will continue for many years, unless more is done immediately.” In a letter dated Tuesday, February 21, 1786, he asked Jefferson to travel to England.

Jefferson accepted, telling Patsy that he would be back before a letter from her might reach him. “I shall defer engaging your drawing master till I return,” he told her. “I hope then to find you much advanced in your music. I need not tell you what pleasure it gives me to see you improve in everything agreeable and useful.”

At a London dinner hosted by Sir John Sinclair with members of the incumbent ministerial party, Jefferson was seated next to a General Clarke, a Scotsman. “He introduced the subject of American affairs, and in the course of the conversation told me that were America to petition Parliament to be again received on their former footing, the petition would be very generally rejected.”

Jefferson could not believe what he was hearing. “He was serious in this, and I think it was the sentiment of the company, and is the sentiment perhaps of the nation.” As Jefferson saw it, “the object of the present ministry [in London] is to buoy up the nation with flattering calculations of their present prosperity, and to make them believe they are better without us than with us. This they seriously believe; for what is it men cannot be made to believe!”

He showed neither anger nor puzzlement, which is often anger in disguise. Honed through long years in company in Virginia and beyond, it was a gift, this capacity to maintain a placid exterior no matter how much turmoil lurked beneath. He was usually a master of his emotions. “I know of no gentleman better qualified to pass over the disagreeables of life than Mr. Jefferson, as he makes his calculations for a certain quantity of imposition which must be admitted in his intercourse with the world,” said a friend of Jefferson's. “When it shows itself in high colors, he has only to count ten and he is prepared for the subject.”