Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (32 page)

After Jefferson was done, they reconvened in the House chamber on the ground floor of Congress Hall for the presidential inauguration of John Adams. As Adams recalled it, George Washington seemed cheerful—even relieved: “Methinks I heard him think ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.' ” Jefferson thought Washington a lucky man. “The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag,” he wrote Madison. Privately, Jefferson repeated his claims of satisfaction at the results of the election. “The second office of this government is honorable and easy,” Jefferson said. “The first is but a splendid misery.”

Two days after the inauguration, Adams and Jefferson dined with Washington. The new president and vice president left the table together. On the street, Jefferson told Adams that Madison would decline the appointment to France.

It was just as well. The new president had spent time with his cabinet that day and found opposition among the Federalists to his thought of sending Madison. “He immediately said that on consultation some objections to that nomination had been raised which he had not contemplated,” Jefferson recalled, “and was going on with excuses which evidently embarrassed him, when we came to 5th Street where our road separated, his being down Market street, mine off along 5th and we took leave: and he never after that said one word to me on the subject, or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.”

John Adams governed amid stress and strain. As president he fought to keep the peace, or at least a semblance of it, during what became known as the Quasi-War with France, a sustained series of expensive naval engagements. (Adams referred to it as “the half war with France.”) To see him through his years in office, he retained Washington's cabinet, including the Federalist secretary of state, Timothy Pickering. This proved problematic, for the cabinet officers tended to see themselves as autonomous, complicating Adams's administration by undercutting the president. And as vice president, Jefferson spent most of his time presiding over the Senate and tending—quietly—to the construction and nurture of the Republican opposition to Adams's Federalist government.

Reflecting on the evening conversation with Adams and on the events of Monday, March 6, 1797, Jefferson wrote: “The opinion I formed at the time on this transaction was that Mr. A. in the first moments of the enthusiasm of the occasion (his inauguration) forgot party sentiments, and as he never acted on any system, but was always governed by the feeling of the moment, he thought for a moment to steer impartially between the parties; that Monday the 6th of March being the first time he had met his cabinet, on expressing ideas of this kind he had been at once diverted from them, and returned to his former party views.”

The Adams presidential years were busy personal ones in Jefferson's domestic sphere. Patsy Randolph had three children between 1796 and 1801. In 1796 the Duc de la Rochefoucauld called at Monticello and found that Patsy's younger, beautiful sister Polly “constantly resides with her father; but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she will doubtless soon find that there are duties which it is sweeter to perform than those of a daughter.” The next year Polly married John Wayles Eppes, a cousin. They would have two children. And Jefferson himself arrived at Monticello for a visit on Tuesday, July 11, 1797. Nine months and two weeks later, Sally Hemings gave birth to a son. The baby was named William Beverley, called Beverley.

D
uring the vice presidential years Jefferson became more philosophical about criticism, seeing it as an inevitable feature of political life, something to be endured—like storm or fire—if one wished to prevail in the public arena. “I have been for some time used as the property of the newspapers, a fair mark for every man's dirt,” he wrote. “Some too have indulged themselves in this exercise who would not have done it, had they known me otherwise than thro' these impure and injurious channels. It is hard treatment, and for a singular kind of offense, that of having obtained by the labors of a life the indulgent opinions of a part of one's fellow citizens. However these moral evils must be submitted to, like the physical scourges of tempest, fire etc.” It was a more mature and measured view than he had held even while in France or at the beginning of his term as secretary of state—a sign that Jefferson had the capacity to grow and to learn. He did not have to like it, but he knew he had to put up with it.

He was thinking along the same lines in terms of partisanship. By the end of the 1790s he could even be contemptuous of politicians who held themselves above party. “A few individuals of no fixed system at all, governed by the panic or the prowess of the moment, flap as the breeze blows against the republican or the aristocratic bodies, and give to the one or the other a preponderance entirely accidental,” he wrote Burr in June 1797.

The Jefferson political style, though, remained smooth rather than rough, polite rather than confrontational. He was a ferocious warrior for the causes in which he believed, but he conducted his battles at a remove, tending to use friends and allies to write and publish and promulgate the messages he thought crucial to the public debate. Part of the reason for his largely genial mien lay in the Virginia culture of grace and hospitality; another factor was a calculated decision, based on his experience of men and of politics, that direct conflict was unproductive and ineffective.

Jefferson articulated this understanding of politics and the management of conflicting interests in a long, thoughtful letter to a grandson. “A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good humor, will go far towards securing to you the estimation of the world,” he wrote to Patsy's son Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Good humor, Jefferson added, “is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!” Jefferson went on:

When this is in return for a rude thing said by another, it brings him to his senses, it mortifies and corrects him in the most salutary way, and places him at the feet of your good nature in the eyes of the company. But in stating prudential rules for our government in society I must not omit the important one of never entering into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many of their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another. Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves dispassionately what we hear from others standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, “never to contradict anybody.”

T
he pro-English Jay Treaty had produced a cataclysmic reaction in France. The efforts to keep peace with Britain in part because of France now led to fears of war with France because of Britain. Such were the politics of the 1790s.

French ships began seizing American craft. “I anticipate the burning of our seaports, havoc of our frontiers, household insurgency, with a long train of etceteras which it is enough for a man to have met once in his life,” Jefferson wrote.

The perpetual threat of conflict—first with one European power, then with another—infused American politics with a sense of constant crisis. Both Federalists and Republicans believed the fate of the United States could turn on the confrontation of the hour. In the broad public discourse, driven by partisan editors publishing partisan newspapers, there seemed no middle ground, only extremes of opinion or of outcome.

Into this culture of entrenched division came the publication of a 1796 letter of Jefferson's that appeared to attack President Washington as a tool of the British interest.

It was May 1797 when Philip Mazzei publicized the Washington letter Jefferson had written him the year before. “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England,” Jefferson had written of the Jay Treaty controversy. “In short, we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.” The letter was taken as a Jeffersonian assault on Washington and the president's allegedly pro-British tendencies, which made it perfect fodder for the Federalist press. “The passions are too high at present to be cooled in our day,” Jefferson wrote an old friend.

About that, at least, both Republicans and Federalists might have agreed, for anecdotes suggesting the other side's extremism and unreasonableness were in substantial supply.

The Federalists had Jefferson's Mazzei letter, and Republicans heard plenty about their enemies, too. On Christmas Day, 1797, Madison repeated worries that Adams was using a new yellow fever epidemic to seize additional power by possibly postponing the meeting of Congress.

And word reached Jefferson that Adams, upset at Republican George Clinton's respectable showing in the 1792 balloting for vice president, had said: “Damn 'em, Damn 'em, you see that an elective government will not do,” and that Adams had reportedly recently remarked that “Republicanism must be disgraced, sir.”

Jefferson was intrigued by similar tales about Hamilton. In late 1797, Tench Coxe alleged that Hamilton had said “ ‘For my part … I avow myself a monarchist; I have no objection to a trial being made of this thing of a republic, but' etc.” Such stories did little to calm Jefferson's fears about his Federalist colleagues.

TWENTY
-
NINE

THE REIGN OF WITCHES

No, I think a party is necessary in a free state to preserve its freedom—the truly virtuous should firmly unite and form a party capable at all times of frustrating the wicked designs of the enemies of the doctrine of equality and the rights of man.

—Jefferson friend J
OHN
P
AGE

I
N
TH
E
NEW
YEAR
,
two of Jefferson's housemates at Francis's tavern—Congressmen Abraham Baldwin of Georgia and Thomson J. Skinner of Massachusetts—told Jefferson a disturbing story about 1787. As they described it, “a very extensive combination had taken place in N. York and the Eastern states among … people who were partly monarchical in principle or frightened with Shays's rebellion and the impotence of the old Congress.” Representatives, Jefferson was informed, “had actually had consultations on the subject of seizing on the powers of a government and establishing them by force, had corresponded with one another, and had sent a deputy to Genl. Washington to solicit his cooperation.”

Washington did not join the plot, and the Constitutional Convention proposed by Virginia had been called in the meantime. Still, the monarchists (in this account) had been—and
were
—counting on the failure of the new government. Monarchy would then step into the breach.

Jefferson's vice presidency, which ran from 1797 to 1801, unfolded in a fevered climate. One congressman, the Republican Matthew Lyon of Vermont, spat in the face of another, the Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut, after Griswold insulted Lyon's courage. An effort to expel Lyon, a ferociously partisan editor, failed. Frustrated, Griswold attacked Lyon with a cane. Fighting back, Lyon seized some fireplace tongs and the two brawled on the House floor.

The driving source of national fear was a potential war with France after the Jay Treaty. Then, in March 1798, Adams revealed that a diplomatic mission to France had failed when three French officials—known as X, Y, and Z in state papers—demanded bribes, a huge loan, and an American apology as the price of doing business in the wake of the treaty debacle. The political effect of the episode in the United States was electric. Americans felt insulted by the French, and talk of war intensified. The news of the attempted extortion, Jefferson said, “produced such a shock on the republican mind as has never been seen since our independence.”

John Adams issued a message calling on Americans to prepare for war. He ordered the country to “adopt with promptitude, decision, and unanimity” measures to protect “our seafaring and commercial citizens, for the defense of any exposed portions of our territory, for replenishing our arsenals, establishing foundries and military manufactures, and to provide such efficient revenue as will be necessary to defray extraordinary expenses and supply the deficiencies which may be occasioned by depredations on our commerce.” Such was the “Quasi-War,” a series of naval attacks that pitted the United States against its first and most important ally in a brutal if undeclared war.

The sulfurous events of the period cast Jefferson in a role for which he was well suited: that of the eloquent champion of individual rights against a John Adams–led campaign to quell dissent in America amid anxieties about French power and French agents. It was not the last time Americans would curb civil liberties for the sake of national security.

The main occasion for the tumult of the Adams administration was the four pieces of legislation popularly known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Passed in reaction to the war climate, the bills gave the president with extraordinary powers at the expense, Republicans argued, of the liberties of a free people. The alien laws collectively invested the president the authority to deport resident aliens he considered dangerous. The sedition bill criminalized free speech, forbidding anyone to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

So began a furiously divisive time of intensity and vitriol. Jefferson and the Republicans believed they were no longer expecting but were instead experiencing the end of American liberty. “Everyone has a right to explain himself,” John Taylor wrote, adding that the government was now “manufacturing a law which may even make it criminal to pray to God for better times.”

Some Republicans detected monarchical autocracy at work. John Dickinson, Jefferson's former colleague from the Continental Congress, drew on the history of the English Civil War to illustrate how far he believed President Adams had strayed: “How incredible was it once, and how astonishing is it now, that every measure and every pretense of the stupid and selfish Stuarts should be adopted by the posterity of those who fled from their madness and tyranny to the distant and dangerous wilds of America?”

Once sedition legislation passed and was signed by Adams, the speaking of one's mind—a foundational freedom—could result in fines up to $2,000 and up to two years in prison. “For my own part I consider these laws as merely an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution,” Jefferson said. “If this goes down, we shall immediately see attempted another act of Congress declaring that the President shall continue in office during life, reserving to another occasion the transfer of the succession to his heirs, and the establishment of the Senate for life.” It would, in other words, be the death of what Jefferson's generation had fought for.

Adams and the Federalists believed they were limiting liberty's excesses in order to preserve liberty itself. The danger of war was real, and war called for extraordinary measures. (And the Sedition Act was set to expire in 1801.) To Adams and his allies, the combination of foreign aliens within the United States and a brutal press calling into question the legitimacy of the administration was a possibly lethal one.

Madison described the state of play well in May 1798: “The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views.… Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.” Extreme measures seemed suited to extreme times.

O
n Thursday, February 15, 1798, Jefferson dined with Adams. The “company was large,” Jefferson wrote, but the two men found a moment afterward to talk. They spoke of rising prices (blaming Hamilton's “bank paper,” of course). “We then got on the Constitution and … he said that no republic could ever last which had not a Senate and a Senate deeply and strongly rooted, strong enough to bear up against all popular storms and passions.… That as to trusting to a popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties … it was the merest chimera imaginable.”

I
n Philadelphia, Adams took the long view while addressing a crowd of demonstrators. “Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity, or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that after the most industrious and impartial researches, the longest liver of you all, will find no principles, institutions, or systems of education more fit, in general, to be transmitted to your posterity, than those you have received from your ancestors.” This backward-looking point of Adams's was so anathema to Jefferson that it agitated his mind long afterward.

To Jefferson, the imperfections of life and the limits of politics were realities. So were the wonders and the possibilities of the human mind. “I am among those who think well of the human character generally,” he wrote twenty-one months before becoming president. “It is impossible for a man who takes a survey of what is already known, not to see what an immensity in every branch of science yet remains to be discovered.”

Astronomy, botany, chemistry, natural history, anatomy: These were “branches of science … worth the attention of every man,” Jefferson said, adding that “great fields are yet to be explored to which our faculties are equal, and that to an extent of which we cannot fix the limits.” It was “cowardly” to think “the human mind is incapable of further advances.”

Jefferson's vision for the United States was expansive. The work was never done, of course, however strong the performance of a particular era. “The generation which is going off the stage has deserved well of mankind for the struggles it has made, and for having arrested that course of despotism which had overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years,” Jefferson said. A course arrested, though, was not the same thing as a course extinguished.

I
n Philadelphia in May 1798, a parade of about 1,200 supporters of the alien bill presented Adams with a statement in favor of the administration's measures against France. Adams had proclaimed May 9 a fast day—as Jefferson knew from Virginia during the Revolution, such maneuvers had their uses—and violence broke out between the pro-Adams Federalists and the Republicans who had gathered. (In his diary, Nathaniel Ames, a New England Republican, drily noted “Adams' Fast, to engage Powers above against the French.”) The next day, Jefferson wrote, “a fray ensued and the light horse was called in. I write in the morning and therefore do not yet know the details. But it seems designed to drive the people into violence. This is becoming fast a scene of tumult and confusion.” Such scenes evoked the worst aspects of his time in Paris: the threat and the reality of riot and bloodshed.

Jefferson was in a conspiratorial frame of mind. “I know that all my motions at Philadelphia, here, and everywhere, are watched and recorded.” He feared his mail was being intercepted and read. It was a chaotic time. In July 1798, Virginia senator Henry Tazewell said he feared the sedition law would be “executed with unrelenting fury.” At the same time Jefferson anticipated the new arrival of an old foe: Alexander Hamilton was to become a senator from New York. (Hamilton ultimately declined to seek the Senate seat.)

The madness of the scene reminded Jefferson of an elemental force: heat. “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he wrote Patsy. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.”

J
efferson was pressed for cash, which left him with a feeling of powerlessness. “I have not at this moment more than 50 dollars in the world at my command, and these are my only resource for a considerable time to come,” he wrote in April 1798. He was learning, too, of the tragic nature of one of his sister's marriages. His sister Mary's husband, John Bolling, was apparently alcoholic and abusive. “Mr. B.'s habitual intoxication will destroy himself, his fortune and family,” he wrote to Polly. “Of all calamities this is the greatest.” Jefferson was practical, even cold, about the matter. “I wish my sister could bear his misconduct with more patience. It might lessen his attachment to the bottle, and at any rate would make her own time more tolerable. When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable.”

In a letter dated January 22, 1798, Patsy announced the death of Harriet Hemings, the two-year-old daughter of Jefferson and Sally Hemings; Patsy made no allusion to the little girl's parentage.

Later, in August 1799, Dolley Madison visited Monticello. Jefferson composed a letter for her to take to her husband. It spoke of many things—an order of nails from the Monticello factory, the art of plastering, the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson did not mention a significant piece of domestic news, for secrecy forbade it: Sally Hemings was pregnant with another child. The unnamed daughter, who was not to live long, was born in early December 1799.

P
olitics remained raw. “The X. Y. Z. fever has considerably abated through the country, as I am informed, and the Alien and Sedition laws are working hard,” he said in October 1798. “I fancy that some of the state legislatures will take strong ground on this occasion.… At least this may be the aim of the Oliverians, while Monck and the Cavaliers (who are perhaps the strongest) may be playing their game for the restoration of his most gracious majesty George the Third.”

In a contentious crisis, here again was the language of the English Civil War and its royalist outcome. The allusions were directly drawn from the seventeenth-century drama. Oliverians were republicans and Monck was a nobleman who backed the restoration of Charles II, as did the Cavaliers. Jefferson's point is explicitly made: He feared there were modern-day monarchists seeking to return an English king to power, in this case George III.

The prosecutions under the new laws were egregious. Republican editors were arrested, indicted, and tried for publishing pieces the Adams administration deemed seditious. Among the most notable cases were those of Benjamin Franklin Bache of the
Aurora
in Philadelphia and James Thomson Callender of the
Examiner
in Richmond.

Editors were not the only targets. Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon—that rare creature, a Republican from Federalist New England—was charged with sedition for a letter he had written to the
Vermont Journal
protesting the sedition law weeks before it was even signed. In strong but hardly traitorous terms, Lyon had denounced President Adams for the president's alleged “continual grasp for power … unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” Of Irish descent, Lyon was attacked by Federalists as “
a seditious foreigner
” who “may endanger us more than
a thousand Frenchmen
in the field.” Driven by Republican zeal, Lyon was indicted, tried, and convicted in a trial presided over by the Washington-appointed Federalist U.S. Supreme Court justice William Paterson, who sentenced Lyon to four months in jail and fined him $1,000 with these words: “Matthew Lyon, as a member of the federal legislature, you must be well acquainted with the mischiefs which flow from an unlicensed abuse of government.”