Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (38 page)

By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it.…

Behold the favorite, the first born of republicanism! The pinnacle of all that is good and great! In the open consummation of an act which tends to subvert the policy, the happiness, and even the existence of this country!

'Tis supposed that, at the time when Mr. Jefferson wrote so smartly concerning negroes, when he endeavored so much to
belittle
the African race, he had no expectation that the chief magistrate of the United States was to be the ringleader in showing that his opinion was erroneous; or, that he should choose an African stock whereupon he was to engraft his own descendants.…

We give it to the world under the firmest belief that such a refutation
never can be made
. The
AFRICAN
VENUS
is said to officiate, as housekeeper at Monticello. When Mr. Jefferson has read this article, he will find leisure to estimate how much has been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon J. T. C
ALLENDER
.

Callender had many of his facts right, and he corrected those he missed. (He later noted, for instance, that Hemings had traveled with Polly, alone, and not with Jefferson and Patsy.) “The license that has been indulged against the President has exhausted its violence in revealing some very old so-called liaisons between him and one of his slaves,” Pichon reported to Paris.

Jefferson never directly responded to the charge. Historians have long taken an 1805 letter as an implicit denial. In that note, he said that the allegations about his courtship of the married Betsy Walker was the “only” allegation against him that was true. It is possible, though, that Jefferson was not addressing the Hemings allegations at all in that letter, which included a now-lost enclosure, presumably a clipping or copy of Federalist attacks on Jefferson's character. Without the enclosure, we cannot know for certain that he was denying the Hemings story—only that the enclosure mentioned the Walker affair and some other alleged transgressions. In any event, the charges remained in wide circulation during his lifetime and afterward. “Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson as blots on his character,” John Adams wrote privately. “The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.” Soon Callender was found drowned in three feet of water in the James River on a day when he had been observed wandering drunkenly through Richmond. The inquest discovered no evidence of foul play; it was a pathetic end to a tragic life.

In 1806 Thomas Moore, an Irish poet, published verses mentioning the rumors about Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

The weary statesman for repose hath fled

From halls of council to his negro's shed,

Where blest he woos some black Aspasia's grace,

And dreams of freedom in his slave's embrace!

Patsy and a former Jefferson secretary, William A. Burwell, showed the “obnoxious passages” to Jefferson, who laughed them off, effectively ending a discussion before one could begin.

So far as we know, no one else in Jefferson's family or official circle ever raised the Sally Hemings question with him except to denounce any discussion of it in the public press as reprehensible. For Jefferson, the code of silence on the issue of sex across the color line appears to have been total.

I
n December 1801, Jefferson had obliquely confided in Benjamin Rush about something else entirely: his physical well-being. “My health has always been so uniformly firm, that I have for some years dreaded nothing so much as … living too long,” Jefferson wrote. “I think however that a flaw has appeared which ensures me against that.”

He went into no detail, adding only that secrecy about any such question was essential. “I have said as much to no mortal breathing,” Jefferson added, “and my florid health is calculated to keep my friends as well as foes quiet as they should be.”

After Rush pressed his friend for specifics, Jefferson provided them. The complaint was diarrhea, a serious illness of the day. In his
Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science,
Dr. Robley Dunglison, who was to attend Jefferson at the time of his death a quarter century later, described diarrhea as a “disease characterized by frequent liquid … evacuations and generally owing to inflammation or irritation of the mucous membrane of the intestines.” It could be “acute or chronic,” and in some cases fatal “because like hectic fever it seems to obtain habitual possession of the constitution to operate upon it with scarcely any perceptible intermission, and, in general, to defy the most powerful remedies.” The affliction would trouble Jefferson for the rest of his life.

H
is family came to Washington for Christmas 1802. Patsy and Polly were together; Margaret Bayard Smith spent a good deal of time with them both. “Mrs. Eppes is beautiful, simplicity and timidity personified when in company, but when alone with you of communicative and winning manners,” Mrs. Smith wrote. “Mrs. R[andolph] is rather homely, a delicate likeness of her father, but still more interesting than Mrs. E. She is really one of the most lovely women I have ever met with, her countenance beaming with intelligence, benevolence and sensibility, and her conversation fulfills all her countenance promises. Her manners, so frank and affectionate, that you know her at once, and feel perfectly at your ease with her.”

Patsy, Mrs. Smith continued, “gave me an account of all her children, of the character of her husband and many family anecdotes. She has that rare but charming egotism which can interest the listener in all one's concerns.”

It was a busy season. “I have only time to write a line to you My dearest husband, the incessant round of company we are in scarcely allowing time to dress to receive them,” Polly wrote her husband John Wayles Eppes. “I am at this moment writing whilst waiting for a gown to be smoothed, though the drawing room is full of ladies.”

The visitors from Virginia were struck by Jefferson's lonely accommodations. “Adieu once more,” Polly wrote to Jefferson in January 1803. “How much I think of you at the hours which we have been accustomed to be with you alone, my dear Papa, and how much pain it gives me to think of the unsafe and solitary manner in which you sleep upstairs.” (Jefferson set about acquiring the proper furniture to provide fitting bedrooms for his large family on future visits.)

He loved it when everyone was there. A caller once observed the president sitting on the drawing room floor in the midst of grandchildren, “so eagerly and noisily engaged in a game of romps” that the visitor went unnoticed for a moment. “I will catch you in bed on Sunday or Monday morning,” Jefferson jovially wrote to a granddaughter on an occasion when he was en route to Washington.

From Monticello, Patsy wrote about her control over the house with a firmness that must have pleased her father. “I have wrought an entire reformation on the … household,” she told Jefferson. “Nothing comes in or goes out without my knowledge and I believe there is as little waste as possible. I visit the kitchen smoke house and fowls when the weather permits and according to your desire saw the meat cut out.”

There was still some hope of Jefferson's having a small family with him in Washington: Both John Wayles Eppes and Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., were seeking congressional seats. If either or both won, they would come to live with Jefferson in the President's House.

D
espite all—the attacks from Callender, the inevitable toll of governing, the loneliness in the mansion—Jefferson liked being president. He was driven by a need to secure the Republic from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

He wanted America to be the way he thought it should be. Most leaders can only hope to shape their nation for a brief time. In the middle of 1803, a report from Paris would give Jefferson the power to transform his for all time.

THIRTY
-
FIVE

THE AIR OF ENCHANTMENT!

The news of the cession of Louisiana.…
forms an era in our history, and of itself must render the administration of Jefferson immortal.

—S
AMUEL
H
ARRISON
S
MITH

The fame of your political wisdom is now so permanently established, that it is past the power of a disappointed faction ever to diminish it.

—H
ORATIO
G
ATES
, on learning of the Louisiana Purchase

B
EFORE
HIS
FIRST
MONTH
as president was done, Jefferson received reports of rumors in London that Spain had signed a treaty giving France more than half of her North American colonies. Known as the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, the agreement had been reached in a glorious eighteenth-century palace north of Madrid favored as a hunting retreat by Castilian kings. The arrangement, negotiated in late 1800, gave France ownership of the Spanish territory of Louisiana in the New World. The cession, as it was called, “works most sorely on the U.S.,” Jefferson wrote in April 1802. “It completely reverses all the political relations of the U.S. and will form a new epoch in our political course.”

Napoleon now had a vast interest in (and on) the American continent. “I am willing to hope, as long as anybody will hope with me” that the reports were wrong, Jefferson said.

They were not wrong. Jefferson understood he needed to act, but act subtly. “I believe that the destinies of great countries depend on it,” he wrote the French economist Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours.

To Jefferson it was an existential matter. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.” In a conversation “of some length” with the British diplomat Edward Thornton in Washington, Jefferson said that “the occupation of this country by France gave an entirely new character to all American relations with her.” Jefferson was not sanguine: “The inevitable consequences of such a neighborhood,” Thornton recorded Jefferson saying, “must be jealousy, irritation, and finally hostilities.”

As frightening as the moment was, Jefferson approached it with confidence: The success of his first year in office buoyed him for the struggle with Napoleon. The crisis over Louisiana and the Floridas was as profound as any that had faced the country to date. It was commensurate in scope with Jefferson's worries about British political, economic, and military designs, for it was about a foreign power's ambitions on America.

The story of the Louisiana Purchase is one of strength, of Jefferson's resilience in the face of his opponents and, most important, his determination to secure the vast territory from France, thus doubling the size of the country and transforming the United States into a continental power. A slower or less courageous politician might have bungled the acquisition; an overly idealistic one might have lost it by insisting on strict constitutional scruples. Jefferson, however, was neither slow nor weak nor overly idealistic.

He drew on a lifetime of political experience, of victories and defeats, to manage the Louisiana crisis. He knew he needed to control the mechanics of decision as best he could (in this case by sending his own envoy, James Monroe, to Paris), a lesson learned in Williamsburg during the Stamp Act debates. He knew he needed to communicate in a way to rally the public, a lesson learned in 1774 when writing the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution and again in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Most important, he knew he needed to seize the initiative when he could, a lesson learned in his days as governor during the Revolution.

Now that Napoleon was in the picture, Jefferson understood what had to be done. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” With national interests at stake, Jefferson was willing to shift his sympathies from Paris to London—or at least be seen that way to improve America's negotiating power.

Jefferson was clear-eyed. The fading Spanish empire had been one thing; Napoleonic France was quite another. “France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance,” Jefferson said. “Spain might have retained it quietly for years.… Not so can it ever be in the hands of France. The impetuosity of her temper, the energy and restlessness of her character, placed in a point of eternal friction with us … render it impossible that France and the U.S. can continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position.” (The cession was rumored but not confirmed until the summer of 1801 in a copy of a subsequent treaty, of Aranjuez, sent to Washington by Rufus King, the American minister to Britain.)

I
n a letter written just before he left the United States for France, Pierre S. du Pont gave Jefferson a tutorial on the practicalities of power. Most important, America should not offend or threaten Napoleon. Among the issues for Europe was the fear that the United States had designs on Spanish-held Mexico. The question came to this: “How then do you intend to acquire Louisiana and persuade France to surrender its ownership in an amicable way? Alas, Mister President, contractual freedom and a natural taste for wealth in all nations and all individuals (poverty strikes all great powers and only second-rate powers escape it) leave you with only one alternative, since you have no land to trade: it is financed purchase.”

Jefferson could not go to France himself, and so he reached out to a trusted friend. The president and James Madison weighed the possibilities and, in what Dolley Madison called “a most important piece of political business,” decided to ask their fellow Virginian James Monroe to travel to France as a presidential envoy. “In this situation we are obliged to call on you for a temporary sacrifice of yourself, to prevent this greatest of evils in the present prosperous tide of our affairs,” Jefferson wrote Monroe, who agreed to the assignment.

A snowstorm and unfavorable winds delayed Monroe's departure, and he took advantage of the unexpected time on his hands to write Jefferson about the politics of his mission: “I hope the French govt. will have wisdom enough to see that we will never suffer France or any other power to tamper with our interior; if that is not the object there can be no reason for declining an accommodation to the whole of our demands.”

The incumbent minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, had meanwhile learned much in a drawing room gathering in Paris hosted by Joséphine Bonaparte. According to custom, Madame Bonaparte entered first, and Napoleon followed her, making conversation first with the ladies on hand and then with the men. “When the First Consul has gone the round of one room, he turned to me and made some of those common questions usual on such occasions,” Livingston told Jefferson. A moment later Napoleon moved toward Lord Whitworth, the British envoy, and, Livingston said, “accosted Lord Whitworth with some warmth, told him that there would probably be a storm.” It was a public declaration of what Lord Whitmore had been told in private two days earlier: “if you do not evacuate Malta there will be war.”

Napoleon then suddenly withdrew altogether after roiling European diplomacy in a drawing room. “You may easily surmise the sensation that this excited,” Livingston said. “Two expresses were dispatched to England that very night and I daresay to every court in Europe in the course of the next day.”

Livingston interpreted the incident in the same way everyone else did: as a sign of Napoleon's intention to go to war with England. And that possibility increased the chances that France might want to simplify its North American problems by putting Louisiana in the hands of the United States.

For France, holding and defending lands so far from Europe was growing too expensive and troublesome. The defeat at the hands of slave forces in St. Domingue was especially galling to Napoleon, who believed he needed to husband his resources for campaigns closer to home.

Napoleon was in his bath, soaking in cologne-scented water, when his brothers came in to protest the decision to sell Louisiana. “You will have no need to lead the opposition,” Napoleon told his brothers, “for I repeat there will be no debate, for the reason that the project … conceived by me, negotiated by me, shall be ratified and executed by me, alone. Do you comprehend me?”

“I renounce Louisiana,” Napoleon announced to finance minister Barbé-Marbois, in the early morning of April 11, 1803. Within hours, foreign minister Talleyrand was enquiring whether the United States would be interested in the entire territory. “It is not only New Orleans that I will cede, it is the whole colony without any reservation. I know the price of what I abandon.… I renounce it with the greatest regret. But to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.”

Livingston knew what he had to do. “The field open to us is infinitely larger than our instructions contemplated,” Livingston told Madison, and the chance “must not be missed.” He and Monroe, who had arrived in Paris, negotiated a treaty giving the United States the Louisiana Territory—a landmass so vast the borders were unclear even to the buyers and the sellers—for about $15 million, or three cents an acre.

Word reached Jefferson on Sunday evening, July 3, 1803. Rufus King had arrived in New York and dispatched a packet to Washington. The key document was a letter from Livingston and Monroe announcing that they had signed a treaty with France on April 30 “ceding to us the island of N. Orleans and all Louisiana as it had been held by Spain,” Jefferson wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., from Washington on Tuesday, July 5. “The price is not mentioned.”

Jefferson was stunned—happily stunned, but stunned nonetheless. Reading the correspondence in the President's House he slowly grasped the scope of the news. “It is something larger than the whole U.S., probably containing 500 millions of acres, the U.S. containing 434 millions,” he wrote, seemingly thinking aloud as his mind took in what had happened. “This removes from us the greatest source of danger to our peace.”

It was wondrous. “It must … strike the mind of every true friend to freedom in the United States, as the greatest and most beneficial event that has taken place since the Declaration of Independence,” wrote Horatio Gates on Thursday, July 7. “I am astonished when I see so great a business finished, which but a few months since we whispered to one another about; it has the air of enchantment!”

“Every face wears a smile, and every heart leaps with Joy,” Andrew Jackson wrote Jefferson from the West. “The thing is new in the annals of the world,” wrote Arthur Campbell. “The great matter now is to make the wonderful event a blessing to the human race.”

As Jefferson absorbed the news, he wrote Meriwether Lewis, who left Washington on that Tuesday, July 5, 1803, to begin the expedition Jefferson described as “the journey which you are about to undertake for the discovery of the course and source of the Mississippi, and of the most convenient water communication from thence to the Pacific.”

It was the letter of a president at once optimistic and realistic. He hoped Lewis would reach the Pacific and armed the party with the means necessary to return home, come what may, authorizing Lewis to draw on the credit of the United States if necessary.

Jefferson had now done all he could to control the largely uncontrollable nature of the mission that was to take Lewis, Clark, and their party of forty or so up the Missouri River, into the winter of present-day North Dakota, then along the Columbia River to the Pacific. Jefferson had written detailed instructions, offered counsel, and worried over details. At last it was in the hands of the explorers, and Jefferson waited, eagerly, for word from the fields he had long traveled in his mind.

T
he Fourth of July fell on Monday. The President's House was filled with festive callers. Samuel Harrison Smith thought there were more visitors than usual. The party was abuzz with the Louisiana news and “enlivened too by the presence of between 40 and 50 ladies clothed in their best attire, cakes, punch, wine, etc. in profusion,” Smith wrote.

In the flush of success, Jefferson was sanguine about everything—even the fate of the Union. “The future inhabitants of the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons,” Jefferson wrote John Breckinridge. “We leave them in distinct but bordering establishments. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove it otherwise; and if they see their interest in separation, why should we take side with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants? It is the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.”

To Joseph Priestley he boasted of his diplomatic subtlety. “I very early saw that Louisiana was indeed a speck in our horizon which was to burst in a tornado; and the public are unapprised how near this catastrophe was. Nothing but a frank and friendly development of causes and effects on our part, and good sense enough in Bonaparte to see that the train was unavoidable, and would change the face of the world, saved us from that storm.” He closed the letter with a scholarly query: “Have you seen the new work of Malthus on population? It is one of the ablest I have ever seen.”

How like Jefferson—amid the greatest of possible events affecting every aspect of American life and beyond, he was reading Malthus.

T
he treaty had to be ratified by Sunday, October 30, 1803. Jefferson consulted with the cabinet and called for Congress to meet on Monday, October 17, 1803, to consider what he called “great and weighty matters
.”