American Experiment (32 page)

How could the new President unify a group of men so sovereign in outlook, so dependent on their state parties and local constituencies, so independent politically of
him
? Here again, Jefferson had carefully worked out his tactics: to gratify the self-esteem of legislators by deferring to the doctrine of legislative supremacy; in fact to insert himself in the life of legislators and the crucial phases of legislation and thus to become the real “chief legislator”; to do so not by seeking to influence Congress from the outside as chief executive but from inside as “chief of party” by involving himself centrally in the Republican leadership and loyalties of the two houses; and to do all this so quietly and adroitly, by working through congressional and party leaders and asking them to keep his involvement secret, that Federalists would not be aroused, nor Republicans feel threatened.

It was not hard for Jefferson to treat Congress and congressmen with exquisite courtesy and deference; it was his natural style. As a Republican
long pledged to the doctrine of the legislature as the “first among equals” in the tripartite balance, he found it easy to defer to Congress in his official posture. “Guided by the wisdom and patriotism of those to whom it belongs to express the legislative will of the nation,” he had said in response to the notification of his election, “I will give to that will a faithful execution.” He consulted with individual legislators at length, to gain their views and information as well as to influence them, and he cleared with them letters that came to the mansion from their districts. If he had few jobs to disburse, he had another means of pleasuring congressmen far from the comforts of home—his dinners. These were superb in cuisine and especially in wines, for the President had an excellent French chef, a large collection of French and Italian recipes, and a penchant for introducing new foods from Europe. But even more, the dinners were occasions for lively talk, for Jefferson planned them that way. He brought together officials, visitors from abroad, diplomats, scientists, and senators and representatives carefully chosen from different boardinghouses to create the most fruitful blend, politically and intellectually—though he did not mix Republicans and Federalists, and invited the latter strictly by boarding-house bloc.

Few enjoyed Jefferson’s dinners more than John Quincy Adams, the increasingly independent Federalist, or made better reports of them. “I had a good deal of conversation with the President,” he wrote after a dinner in 1804. “The French Minister just arrived had been this day first presented to him, and appears to have displeased him by the profusion of gold lace on his clothes. He says they must get him down to a plain frock coat, or the boys in the street will run after him as a sight.” Three years later Adams reported on “one of the
agreeable
dinners I have had at Mr. Jefferson’s,” among a company chiefly of congressmen. The talk ran from wines to philosophy to Fulton’s steamboat and torpedoes to “oils, grasses, beasts, birds, petrifactions, and incrustations.” “Mr. Jefferson said that the
Epicurean
philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy, but that it had been misunderstood and misrepresented. He wished the work of Gassendi concerning it had been translated.…I mentioned Lucretius. He said that was only a part—only the
natural
philosophy. But the
moral
philosophy was only to be found in Gassendi.”

The President’s involvement in congressional policy making was continuous and pervasive. He and his officials provided congressmen with “material” ranging from information to actual drafts of bills. Department heads testified before congressional committees and remained to help draft bills in executive sessions. And of course the President always had the right to
veto legislation, but the practice of a veto on purely policy grounds was not yet established, and Jefferson did not exercise it or—evidently—threaten to exercise it. More important, he worked closely with congressional and party leaders on the Hill, calling them into frequent conferences, helping them deal with obstacles, talking with other politicians who might help the congressional leaders and hence him. The President encouraged likely Republicans to run for Congress and to try for leadership positions. By no means did things always go smoothly, especially in the first year or two. But he achieved unsurpassed cooperation in Congress by throwing into the balance every ounce of his political skill, his personal charm, and his moral authority—authority all the greater because this was
Jefferson
who was asking for support.

The President covered his political hand by planning on secrecy and by insisting on it. His obsession with secrecy might have been considered pathological if he had not experienced serious political setbacks in earlier days when letters of his had been intercepted and exposed. Repeatedly he asked his political lieutenants not to trust the confidentiality of the post office and to keep his letters to themselves, or share them only with trusted persons. He concealed his interference in Congress mainly, however, by intervening indirectly through his leaders there. And those leaders well knew, from correspondence and conversations, what the President wanted.

To conclude that Jefferson dominated the legislative process largely because he dominated the Republican party in Congress—that he was chief legislator mainly because he was party chief—is to assume that the Republican party itself was strong and united in both House and Senate. Historians have long debated this question. In the last century, influenced by Federalist politicians and journalists who suspected that the President was marshaling his legislative troops like a Prussian drillmaster, chroniclers saw a powerful party caucus at work. More recent and more sophisticated analysis has challenged this conclusion, but may have overreacted to the previous Federalist bias. Certainly the party systems both in the nation and in Congress were primitive affairs compared to those that emerged later. The congressional party did not openly elect leaders and whips and other officials, or impose formal discipline, or choose policy or steering committees. But an informal congressional party has been identified, comprising Republican senators and representatives powerfully committed to certain values and policies, a group of congressional leaders in close touch with the rank and file in both houses and with the President, and a rudimentary but influential caucus system. Those caucuses were so informal, and they met so secretly because of the bias against “party machinations,” that evidence of their existence has been elusive and
scattered. But some kind of meeting was held—serving the function of a caucus without being labeled by that name—to unify the positions of Republican lawmakers before major legislative actions on the Hill. A formal flow chart is not necessary, as Johnstone says, for a group of persons to act as a cohesive and effective force. It was largely through this loosely organized but zealous and well-led majority of Republican senators and representatives that Jefferson exerted his legislative leadership. He was chief executive and chief legislator among a collective of executive and legislative chiefs.

Europe savored a moment of peace at the start of the new century. During the lull France and England, the great mobiles of European politics, swung in uneasy balance with each other. Surrounding these central mobiles were lesser ones, Spain, Holland, Naples, Prussia—suspended in arrays of alliances and animosities.

Each mobile was a cluster of satellite mobiles, a quivering balance of domestic politics embracing royal pride and ambition, party and leadership rivalries, military chieftains, religious establishments, parliamentary combat, economic interests. Conflict within satellite mobiles often set the parent mobile to trembling and pulsating, causing disturbances throughout the system. Usually the arching balances of the whole system righted themselves, but there was always the threat that the tempest of war would leave the balance of mobiles shattered.

A far-off mobile in this precarious array of balances was the land called Louisiana. In the very different perspective of Americans, Louisiana was their western borderland, nearby but mysterious, filled with endless forests and swamps, peopled by roving Indian tribes, and rich in fertile land for settlers moving west. Fronting this area was the legendary Mississippi, rising somewhere in the far north, swelling miles-wide and shallow as it approached the Gulf of Mexico, and providing a boulevard to the world for husbandmen and flatboatmen throughout the area. To Westerners, Madison said, the Mississippi was everything—“the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream.” And at the foot of the Mississippi lay New Orleans, a place of exotic peoples and erotic temptations, a commercial center vitally necessary to American traders for depositing their goods for transshipment abroad—and a city owned by the Spanish and ruled over by a formidable Spanish
intendant.

The vast area both to the east and the west of the Mississippi was
“Republican country.” As Virginia landowners bought and sold “Western” acres by the tens of thousands, as Virginia frontiersmen and settlers moved down the long valleys into Kentucky and Tennessee and western Georgia, Republican ideas and politics had moved with them. Virginia politicians had cultivated ties with the Kentuckians who were seeking political self-government and economic development. Jefferson had always had a “peculiar confidence in the men from the western side of the mountains,” in his words, as they had had in him. Kentucky had become a state in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796, but western Georgia was far behind. Not until 1802 would Georgia cede to the nation the whole region between its present western border and the Mississippi, thus creating most of the states of Alabama and Mississippi.

Virginia Republicans in 1801 were watching with hope the rising new empire to the west, watching with scorn the quarrelsome old empires to the east. But sometimes to see west they had to look east. In his Inaugural Address, Jefferson had expanded complacently on America’s favored situation: “Kindly separated by nature, and a wide ocean, from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.…Possessing a chosen country, with room enough for all descendants to the 100th
&
1000th generation.…” Within three weeks he was writing a friend, “It ought to be the very first object of our pursuits to have nothing to do with the European interests and politics.…we have nothing to fear from them in any form.” Within a few weeks the President was reading reports that Spain was ceding Louisiana and the Floridas to the French. Napoleon on our rear borders! The Atlantic suddenly did not seem so wide.

“It is a policy very unwise in both, and very ominous to us,” the President wrote Governor Monroe. A French reacquisition of Louisiana would make the area a pawn of the fiercest rivalry in the West—that between France and England. It would place French armies athwart America’s western frontier—French armies now under the control of a man Jefferson increasingly detested, Napoleon Bonaparte. It would enable the French to choke off American commerce in New Orleans or farther north.

Jefferson already had reason to fear Bonaparte’s imperial ambitions. The First Consul was organizing an expedition to Saint Domingue in order to overthrow the regime of General Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black leader who had seized power after a bloody slave rebellion. Jefferson did not object to the attempt to suppress Toussaint—he feared the implications of an independent black republic—but would Bonaparte stop there? If the French ruler could send 20,000 soldiers to the West Indies, could he not dispatch other armies to Louisiana, a far greater temptation? And if France regained Louisiana, would there be no reaction from England,
which had driven them out of the area years beforehand which still commanded the seas?

Federalists demanded that the President take aggressive action to forestall French and English imperial ambitions on the western frontier, but Jefferson preferred the methods of diplomacy. He had dispatched the seasoned New York Republican leader and diplomat Robert Livingston to Paris as Minister to France, with instructions to dissuade the French from acquiring Louisiana if the deal with Spain had not already gone through, or, if it had, to look into the possibility of American acquisition of Spanish Florida. Livingston found Talleyrand elusive and evasive. By April 1802, when the cession of Louisiana to France seemed definite, Jefferson instructed Livingston to warn the French government that the “day that France takes possession of N. Orleans” is “the moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” The President now was practicing diplomacy with a mailed fist. Never wholly captive to his pacifist yearnings, he was during this period quietly strengthening American outposts along the western borders.

Even so, Jefferson was hardly reckoning with the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte. Frustrated by the British in the east, the First Consul was turning west to redeem French territory lost by the Bourbons and not recovered by the bellicose revolutionaries of the 1790s. His expedition to Saint Domingue had met with initial success; even Toussaint was now in French hands, albeit as the result of trickery. With that island and other parts of the West Indies back under French control, Napoleon’s “New France would extend its sheltering arms round the whole Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, taking in not only the islands but also Louisiana and the Floridas,” in Oscar Handlin’s summation. “Resting on a fulcrum at New Orleans, the two great areas of the empire could balance one another.” During the summer of 1802 Napoleon organized in Holland an armada to carry a huge army and his ambitions into Louisiana. He was delayed, however, by machinations within the Spanish court; only after Napoleon had promised Italian lands to the Queen’s brother was Louisiana ceded by Spain and the expeditionary force told to prepare to depart.

In the autumn of 1802, while this fleet was mobilizing, word reached Washington of an event in New Orleans that catalyzed American fears about the future of Louisiana. The Spanish
intendant
there had suddenly revoked the right to deposit goods in the city while awaiting their sale or shipment. It could be a potentially fatal blow to American exports. Mississippi traders and boatmen were wrathful, and Washington politicians indignant—and curious. Why had the
intendant
acted at this moment? Obviously, it must be part of the French plot. Later it was learned that the
intendant
was acting on orders from Spain. According to one theory, Napoleon was stalling on his promises to the Spanish court, offering the Queen not the province she wanted but other Italian lands, and to be turned over not to her brother but to her nephew; and the Queen was happy to find a way to complicate Napoleon’s future in Louisiana. Another view is simpler: the
intendant
was furious at American smugglers. But such reasonable views had little standing at the time. If Napoleon was organizing an expedition in Holland, he certainly would not be above provocations in the territory he hoped soon to occupy.