American Experiment (30 page)

C
ONRAD &
M
C
M
UNN’S
Boarding House, near Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, March 4, 1801.
President-elect Thomas Jefferson, surrounded by friends and fellow lodgers, prepares to leave for his Inaugural. Virginia militiamen are parading up and down the street, and somewhere artillerymen are firing off blank salvos, but everything is low-keyed. The President elect hardly cuts a heroic figure. A tall, lean, loosely framed man, “all ends and angles,” he feels ill at ease in a crowd, even though people are attracted by his freckled, open countenance and pleasing manner. He has no wish to be a hero. No coach-and-eight is waiting to carry him to the Capitol, nor even a white horse. Rather he will walk. Shortly before nine, accompanied by a motley throng of officials, members of Congress, and Republican politicos, he sets out for the north wing of the unfinished Capitol building.…

Thus began an epoch in American history that would come to be known as the “Jeffersonian Era” but was felt at the time—after the anxious days of February—to be a moment of relief, triumph, and hope.

Several hundred persons had crowded into the Senate chamber to witness the shift of authority from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. The President-elect’s old Virginia adversary, Chief Justice John Marshall, stood before him to administer the oath; Vice-President-elect Aaron Burr, a man Jefferson hardly knew, waited nearby. Conspicuously absent from the proceedings was John Adams, who had quietly left Washington before dawn. After the oath-taking, Jefferson turned to the audience.

“Friends & Fellow Citizens.” At this, some good Federalists in the crowd must have stirred. “Citizen”! This was the language of Paris revolutionaries.

The President proceeded in such a low, flat tone of voice that many in the audience could hot have made him out if the
National Intelligencer
had not scored a beat and published the address ahead of time. In any case, the speech held few surprises. After the usual modest disclaimers and tributes to a “rising nation spread over a wide & fruitful land,” he went on to lay out Republican positions: “Equal & exact justice to all men” … friendship with all nations, “entangling alliances with none”…
support for state governments as bulwarks of republicanism … “Economy in public expense, that labor may be lightly burdened” …the payment of public debts…“Encouragement of Agriculture, & of Commerce as it’s handmaiden…” These principles, he said, speaking from abbreviated notes, “form ye bright constlln wch hs gone before us, & guidd our steps, thro’ an age of Revoln and Reformn: The wisdom of our Sages, & blood of our Heroes, have been devoted to their attainment…”

Yet embedded in the address were words that doubtless stirred his audience more than did hallowed principles. These amounted to a powerful plea for conciliation.

“…every difference of opinion, is not a difference of principle. We have called, by different names, brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.

“If there be any among us who wish to dissolve this union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it….

“I know indeed that some honest men have feared that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic & visionary fear that the government, the world’s best hope may want energy to preserve itself?”

All would bear in mind, Jefferson had said earlier in the address, “the sacred principle that if the will of the Majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable: that the Minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, & to violate would be oppression.

“Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart & one mind; let us restore to social intercourse that harmony & affection, without which Liberty, & even Life itself, are but dreary things.…”

The celebration over, President Jefferson walked back to his lodgings at Conrad’s. He left behind him at the Capitol some puzzled politicians, Federalist and Republican alike. What kind of leadership did the Inaugural words portend?

Upon leaving for the Inaugural that day, John Marshall had been in the middle of a long letter to Charles Pinckney in Charleston. “Today the new political year commences, the new order of things begins,” he wrote. He hoped that public prosperity and happiness would not be diminished under democratic guidance. “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr.
Jefferson.…” If he was a terrorist, the country faced calamity, he added, but if not, the terrorists would become his enemies and calumniators. At this point Marshall laid down his pen and left his boardinghouse to administer the oath; he had promised Jefferson that he would be punctual. Returning later to his lodgings, he picked up his pen again. He had just administered the oath to Jefferson, he told Pinckney. The speech seemed conciliatory. “It is in direct terms giving the lie to the violent party declamation which has elected him, but it is strongly characteristic of the general cast of his political theory.”

The new President’s political theory—this was the puzzle. The election of this amiable and diffident patrician, and of a Republican Congress, had produced Federalist invective betraying a deep fear that he would inflict some alien and despotic creed on the people. A Republican regime would mean the “ascendancy of the worthless, the dishonest, the rapacious, the vile, the merciless and the ungodly,” said a letter in the
Gazette.
Fisher Ames foresaw the “loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice.” President Timothy Dwight of Yale prepared an oration in which he warned of a “country governed by blockheads and knaves…the ties of marriage…severed; our wives and daughters thrown into the stews.” Even John Adams, in his hurt and bitterness, said, “A group of foreign liars, encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen, have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues and the property of the country.” His Boston homeland seemed especially outraged. A Federalist newspaper there ran an epitaph within a black border:
“YESTERDAY EXPIRED
Deeply regretted by
MILLIONS
of grateful Americans And by
all
GOOD MEN,
The
FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION”
etc. Little old ladies in Boston, it was said, hid their Bibles under mattresses on the inauguration of the Virginia “atheist.”

Those who knew Jefferson best scoffed at the Federalist portrait of him as a Jacobin dogmatist—or radical ideologue. If criticize him they must, they would have pointed to just the opposite qualities. Jefferson’s mind seemed as loose and many-jointed as his big rambling frame. Although he had proudly belonged to the American Philosophical Society for many years after having helped to found it, and although he had the philosopher’s bent for reflective speculation, he had never been a systematic philosopher or written a comprehensive work that could compare with—say—John Adams’
Defense of the Constitution.
His interest in nature and in science was not that of the methodical investigator but of a man fascinated by rocks, birds, flowers, trees, vegetables, crops, inventions, household contrivances, gadgets. He wrote his daughter: “Not a sprig of grass shoots uninteresting to me.”

So quickly did Jefferson shift, in conversation and correspondence, from
politics to farming to law to flora to seeds to literature, that it was hard to discern any focus in the man. His more superficial beliefs had to be peeled off, like the layers of an artichoke, to find the core of conviction. He was accused of being deceptive, disingenuous, even dishonest, and to a degree he was, because he tried to protect his privacy, because he feared that his personal letters would fall into the hands of his adversaries, because he adapted to the person he was talking to and the situation confronting him. Beyond all this, a central ambivalence in him was evident to some.

There seemed to be at least two Jeffersons by 1801, his fifty-eighth year. One apotheosized harmony and conciliation; viewed the small rural property holder and agriculture in general as the foundation for the good society; believed in sharply limited government, especially at the federal level; feared a consolidated national government; saw cities in general and city mobs in particular as the “panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned”; loathed the prospect of urbanization, industrialization, centralized finance, a landless proletariat; warned against entangling alliances abroad; ultimately embraced states’ rights to such a degree that he could sponsor the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. This was Jefferson the ideologue.

Another Jefferson, however, saw conflict among men as inevitable and called for a rebellion every generation or so; enjoyed the splendor and intellectual brilliance of big cities like Paris and Philadelphia; easily fit into Washington’s administration, which began the “consolidation” and invigoration of the federal government; warned against secessionist tendencies of
Federalists
; and spent a good part of his life “entangling” America with foreign nations, especially France.

Jefferson was a practical philosopher; he was even more a philosophical practitioner, who saw the needs of the immediate situation and drew from his vast learning the ideas that were relevant to that situation. He had grown up in the Virginia tradition of public service; won a seat in the House of Burgesses at twenty-six; served none too happily as wartime governor of Virginia; represented the new nation in France; and served under the new federal government as Secretary of State, Vice-President and presiding officer in the Senate. Rarely had he allowed ideology to interfere with the practical requirements of office.

Thus the defender of revolution had, as Secretary of State, signed the proclamation against the Whiskey Rebels; the apostle of liberty had, as presiding officer of the Senate, signed the warrant for arrest of William Duane, for seditious contempt of that body. Apparent paradoxes in his views, Marshall Smelser has said, can be reconciled “by remembering that liberty was his navigating star, even though there were cloudy nights in his
career when he steered in another direction.” But he refused to elevate specific institutions, traditions, and practices into dogmas. All these would change, while certain principles were eternal. And now he was entering the highest office in the land, once held by his fellow Virginian George Washington, and the test again would be whether he could stand by those principles and at the same time meet the day-to-day demands of transactional leadership.

His friends had few doubts. They spent the inaugural days celebrating rather than cerebrating, although much of the festivity had a political edge. In Virginia an inaugural pageant depicted Liberty as a comely virgin, threatened by a king and a bishop and other assailants, until a trumpet sounded and a messenger proclaimed that Jefferson was President, whereupon the evil men took flight and sixteen beautiful women, one for each state, protected the virgin Liberty. Perhaps the most splendid inaugural festivity took place in Philadelphia. There sixteen horses, driven by a youth dressed in white, pulled a carriage bearing the resplendent schooner
Thomas Jefferson.
Toasts were drunk to Liberty and the Rights of Man. “Jefferson and Liberty,” termed “A Patriotic Song, for the Glorious Fourth of March, 1801,” and consisting of fourteen stanzas, began:

O’er vast Columbia’s varied clime;

Her cities, forests, shores and dales,

In shining majesty sublime,

Immortal Liberty prevails.

Rejoice. Columbia’s sons, rejoice!

To tyrants never bend the knee

But join with heart, and soul, and voice,

For
JEFFERSON
and
LIBERTY
.

His Republican friends might sing and toast and parade, but President Thomas Jefferson continued to shun grandiosity and rodomontade. Following the Inaugural, he settled back into the life of the boardinghouse, where he ate at table—and sometimes at the foot of it—with thirty or so other officials and politicos. For two weeks he transacted business in his small parlor there, before moving to the President’s house, but he stayed in the big new sandstone building less than two weeks before leaving for Monticello, where he remained almost a month. But even after that, presidential affairs seemed to go slowly. There were no balls in the mansion, no parades to Capitol Hill—all part of a consciously cultivated image of
republican simplicity. The President had decided to abandon Washington’s and Adams’s policy of addressing Congress in person; nine months passed before he sent his formal written message to the legislature.