American Sphinx (20 page)

But the debt he was running up in Paris was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For by the late 1780s he began to become aware that the debts he had inherited from his father-in-law’s estate were compounding at a rate that he might never be able to repay. It first began to dawn on him that despite owning thousands of acres and about two hundred slaves, he owed his creditors such vast amounts that he might go to his grave a debtor. This realization was almost as much a burden as the debts themselves. “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth,” he wrote his overseer at Monticello in 1787, “is such really as to render life of little value here.” He was, in effect, both intellectually and psychologically primed to appreciate what debt does to nations and to individuals and therefore open to ideas designed to limit the damage.
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Moreover, the doctrine of generational sovereignty was yet another version of his utopian radicalism. Madison was surely correct to declare the entire scheme wildly impractical and utterly incapable of implementation. But that was beside the point. For the vision of each generation starting from scratch, liberated from the accumulated legacies of past debts, laws, institutionalized obligations and regulations, allowed Jefferson to conjure up his fondest dream, a world where the primal meaning of independence could flourish without any restrictions, where innocence had not yet been corrupted. This was the world of the prefeudal Saxon settlers, the world of the prepolitical Indian tribes, the world of the independent yeoman farmer on the edge of the frontier, the world after a rightful rebellion has cleared the air. It was a wholly voluntary world, where coercion was unknown and government unnecessary. Though transient—history would begin to make its inevitable inroads almost immediately—the idyllic harmonies sustained themselves for that one brief, shining moment. It was therefore the proper place to house the memories of the affair with Maria Cosway (though not Cosway herself) and to preserve the feminine values she symbolized at the peak of their remembered perfection. The belief that “the earth belongs to the living,” in short, was another blow struck in behalf of Jefferson’s most cherished dream: a society devoid of contaminating institutions and laws; an effort to routinize their removal so that the deadening hand of history was regularly slapped away in order to make room for a pristine encounter with what he believed to be the natural order.

COMING HOME

J
EFFERSON HAD BEEN
anticipating his return to America throughout the winter and spring of 1789. Even before Washington’s election as president, which everyone considered a foregone conclusion, Jefferson’s name had been bandied about as a prospective member of the new administration. In May Madison reported these rumors, adding that “the most prominent figures” (who presumably included Washington himself) were taking him aside to ask whether an appointment in the new government would be agreeable to the current American minister to France. “Being
unacquainted with your mind,”
Madison wrote in coded language, “I have not
ventured on an answer.”
Jefferson did not receive Madison’s letter until August, but he responded crisply and immediately: “You ask me if I would accept my appointment on that side the water? You know the circumstances which led me from retirement, step by step from one nomination to the other, up to the present. My object is to return to the same retirement.” The answer, in short, was no. He did want to return to Virginia to deposit Patsy and Polly back in the safer surroundings of their native land. And he wanted to put his personal affairs at Monticello in order. But after a few months at home he expected to return to his post in Paris—there is no reason to doubt his sincerity on this score—and then retire from public service.
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His last letters from France are intriguingly contradictory on the question of the ongoing French political crisis. On the one hand, he reiterated his optimism. “Tranquillity is pretty generally restored in this country,” he explained, “and the National Assembly are going on well in forming their constitution. It will be difficult for them to form one which will appear the best possible to every mind but they will form a good one, in which liberty and property are placed on a surer footing than they are in England. I imagine they will be two or three months engaged in this business.” He was prepared to recognize the existence within the National Assembly of a mischievous faction “with very dangerous views.” But they should be easily overwhelmed because “the mass of the nation [is] so solidly united, that they seem to have abandoned all expectations of confusing the game.”
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On the other hand, to a few correspondents he was more circumspect. “The crisis of this country is not yet over,” he wrote to David Ramsay of South Carolina. “Should the want of bread begin a tumult, the consequences cannot be foreseen, because the leaven of other causes will rise with the fermentation.” The mood of his letters to Jay was simultaneously upbeat and cautious. He expected the Patriot Party to dominate the National Assembly, thereby exerting a moderating effect on the extremists and leading France to stability as a constitutional monarchy. But there were some less attractive scenarios. If bread riots began in Paris, or the fiscal crisis worsened, or the king lost his nerve and attempted to flee Versailles, it would “be the signal of a St. Barthelemi [i.e., a massacre] against the aristocrats in Paris. . . .” With Jay at least, his official superior in charge of American foreign affairs, he was hedging his bets.
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The long trek back to Monticello began on September 28, 1789. Bad weather trapped him at Le Havre for two weeks, long enough to attract the attention of one fellow traveler, who described an attractive scene in which Jefferson waited out the weather with Patsy and Polly gathered around him, reading out loud to their father while he helped Polly pronounce difficult words. As they waited for the ship that would carry them to England and eventual passage to America, three different correspondents were writing him with important news: Maria Cosway bade him farewell, saying a bad cold prevented a final rendezvous in England; William Short reported from Paris that bread riots had broken out there and a mob of five thousand women was marching on Versailles; and George Washington wrote to offer him the post of America’s first secretary of state.
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3

MONTICELLO: 1794–97

He built for himself at Monticello a château above contact with man. The rawness of political life was an incessant torture to him, and personal attacks made him keenly unhappy. . . . He shrank from whatever was rough or coarse, and his yearning for sympathy was almost feminine.

—HENRY ADAMS

History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson
(1889–91)

From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came here, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had on my own mind. . . . I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it. And it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

—JEFFERSON TO MARIA JEFFERSON EPPES
MARCH 3, 1802

M
ONTICELLO WAS ALWAYS
the preferred destination in Jefferson’s imagination, but the American Revolution intervened, then the diplomatic mission in Paris, then the secretary of state responsibilities in the Washington administration. But by January 1794, at long last, he was finally convinced that his public career was over. “I hope to spend the remainder of my days,” he declared, “in occupations infinitely more pleasing than those to which I have sacrificed 18 years of the prime of my life.” In truth, at fifty-one years of age, he believed that the prime of his life was over and that he was considerably closer to the end than the beginning. For more than a year he had been pleading with Washington to release him from political duties so that he might live out his time as a farmer: “I am every day convinced that neither my talents, tone of mind, nor time of life fit me for public life.”
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Incantations of virtuous retirement to rural solitude after a career of public service were familiar and even formulaic refrains within the leadership class of eighteenth-century America, none more so than within the Virginia dynasty. Everyone knew the classical models of latter-day seclusion represented by Cicero and Cincinnatus and the hymns to pastoral splendor in Virgil’s
Georgics.
Declarations of principled withdrawal from the hurly-burly of political life to the natural rhythms of one’s farm were so commonplace that John Adams, an aspiring Cicero himself, but also an inveterate skeptic about anyone else’s pronouncements of rural virtue, had begun to doubt the entire Ciceronian syndrome. “It seems the Mode of becoming great is to retire,” he wrote Abigail. “It is marvellous how political Plants grow in the shade.” Adams was not referring specifically to Jefferson, but other Federalist critics were letting out the word in Philadelphia that the outgoing secretary of state was merely going home to lick his wounds, storing up his energies for the inevitable assault on the presidency, posturing as the retired farmer.
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But Jefferson was not posing. He confided to the ever-discreet Madison—it was an uncharacteristically candid confession—that he had once felt “the little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days,” but these internal urgings “had long since evaporated, and I set still less store by a posthumous than present fame.” All he wanted in the time that remained to him, he told Angelica Church, was “to be liberated from the hated occupations of politics, and to remain in the bosom of my family, my farm, and my books.” Until now Monticello had been a mirage that kept receding into the middle distance of his life. Now he was suddenly there himself. “I have my house to build, my fields to farm, and”—an intriguingly dutiful way to put it—“to watch for the happiness of those who labor for mine.”

One of his black servants, this time Robert Hemings rather than Jupiter, was dutifully waiting at Fredericksburg with fresh horses on January 12, 1794, and the two rode together toward the foothills of the Blue Ridge and home. “The length of my tether is now fixed for life between Monticello and Richmond,” Jefferson announced two weeks later. Ensconced on his mountaintop, he apprised Adams that the rural rhythms were already taking hold: “I put off answering my letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day.” He claimed to have become “thoroughly weened from newspapers and politics” and was pleased to “find my mind totally absorbed in my rural occupations.”
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Perhaps the most palpable source of his resolution to retire was age. Having crossed over to the far side of the half century mark, he could not reasonably expect his good luck with health would continue that much longer. The biblical “three score and ten” left him only slightly more than a decade, and he had no way of knowing that, unlike his father and mother, he would defy the odds and make octogenarian. The first dents in his cast-iron constitution had in fact begun to appear in the form of soreness in his joints, which progressed to a severe case of rheumatism by the summer of 1794 and kept him on his back for two weeks. “I begin to feel the effects of age,” he noted the following year, adding that this body was sending him signals “which give me to believe I shall not have much to encounter of the
tedium vitae.”
The reddish blond hair was still full, though graying; the lean and somewhat long face still had the burnished glow of an outdoorsman, though it was now more weathered and creased at the edges of the eyes; the body was still taut and athletic in a slender way, still carried itself in that ramrod-straight posture, though the joints in his wrists and knees now tended to flare up in damp or cold weather. All in all, he still looked younger than his years, still could keep his seat on the largest and most spirited horses, still rose at dawn and worked sixteen-hour days without naps or rest periods, still projected in his regimen the vigorous image of a young country whose future lay before it. But his personal future—he now literally felt it in his bones—had a more limited duration. He wanted to spend the time that was left to him in his own private pursuits of happiness.
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All this would have been sufficient by itself to propel Jefferson out of public life, galloping with Robert Hemings down the road from Fredericksburg to Charlottesville and then up to his mountaintop. An essential part of him, as he himself acknowledged, never felt comfortable exercising political power or participating in the contentious debates that representative government seemed to require. Unlike Adams, who regarded an argument as the ideal form of a conversation, or Franklin, who had the capacity to float above the political infighting on the basis of seniority and wit, or Washington, who was already regarded as atop the American Olympus and therefore untouchable, Jefferson felt every criticism personally. Clashing opinions or arguments struck him as dissonant noise and therefore a crude refutation of the natural harmonies he believed in and heard inside himself. In a sense, his retirement to private life in 1794 was a long-delayed recognition that as a public figure he had always been miscast.

But no matter how sufficient these long-standing conditions might have been in theory, history had seen fit to double his dose of political anguish in practice by contriving to make the 1790s one of the most rancorous and disputatious decades in American history. From the time Jefferson assumed the duties of secretary of state in 1790 until he escaped Philadelphia in 1794, he was a central player in an ongoing political drama that proved to be more intense, almost to the point of paranoia, than any experience in his public life. He suffered psychic wounds during his time in the Washington administration that never completely healed. And he dispensed political invective of his own, or rather had surrogates do it in his behalf, that made him the chief symbol of opposition to the government in which he served. Whether the times changed him or merely marked him is an interesting question. But there is no question he emerged from the experience speaking a more distinctly partisan political language that was just beginning to be associated on a national level with his name. If we are to understand the heart and the head of the middle-aged man so eager to sequester himself at Monticello, we need to know a bit more about what had happened to him in the political world from which he was escaping.
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PASSIONS AND PARTIES

J
EFFERSON’S TENURE
as secretary of state coincided with the most uncharted era in American political history. Precisely because the new national government was new, every major decision set a precedent and every initiative in domestic or foreign policy threatened to establish a landmark principle. The distinguishing feature of the new Constitution was its purposeful ambiguity about the relationship between federal and state jurisdiction and about the overlapping authority of the respective branches of the federal government. The Constitution, in short, did not resolve the long-standing political disagreements that existed within the revolutionary generation so much as establish a fresh and more stable context within which they could be argued out.

As Jefferson and all the other major participants in that debate understood it, nothing less was at stake than the true meaning of the American Revolution. And since Jefferson had been serving in France throughout the latter half of the 1780s, when the first battles to define the positive powers of the federal government were waged, he entered the debates of the 1790s with his revolutionary values more intact than most of his colleagues, who had already concluded that securing the Revolution required compromises with political power at the national level that he was ideologically and psychologically unprepared to make.
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The most novel and wholly unforeseen development of the era was the emergence of political parties. Not that modern-day political parties, with their mechanisms for raising money, selecting candidates and waging election campaigns, were fully formed in the 1790s. (Full-scale political parties with all the institutional accouterments we associate with the term date from the 1830s and 1840s.) Nevertheless, what we might call the “makings” of political parties originated during Jefferson’s time as secretary of state, and he had a crucial role in their creation. The trouble was that the term “party,” and the very idea for which it stood, had yet to achieve any measure of respectability. A “party,” as the term was commonly understood, was nothing more than a “faction,” meaning an organized minority whose very purpose was to undercut the public will, usually by devious and corrupt means. To call someone a member of a political party was to accuse him of systematic selfishness and perhaps even outright treason. The modern notion of a legitimate organized opposition to the elected government did not exist. Indeed it would have struck most members of the revolutionary generation as a contradiction in terms.
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All this presented enormous intellectual and emotional problems for Jefferson, because along with Madison he established the rudiments of the Republican party between 1790 and 1794 and thereby created a discernible and organized alternative to the Federalists. To repeat, there were as yet no rules for what they were doing, no neutral vocabulary even for talking about it. In the eyes and minds of their Federalist critics, Jefferson and Madison were traitors, especially Jefferson, who actually served in the cabinet of the government he was opposing. This helps explain the vituperative and highly personal attacks on his character in the public press during those years; there was as yet no available language or mentality for a more detached interpretation of his behavior.

Sustaining this posture of organized but unofficial opposition required considerable confidence in one’s political vision of what the American Revolution meant. It also required another quality that Jefferson had developed during his French phase, what might be called a cultivated tolerance for inconsistency that others might perceive as deception or hypocrisy. For as a titular party leader in an age when political parties were still anathema, Jefferson was forced to mislead and conceal on several occasions, and his success at doing so depended on his psychological agility, his canny manipulation of different voices and personae, on his capacity to play hide-and-seek within himself.

Finally, during the early 1790s the long-standing relationship between Jefferson and Madison reached a new level of collaboration, so much so that it is sometimes impossible to know where the thoughts of one end and the other begins. John Quincy Adams put it nicely when he observed that “the mutual influence of these two mighty minds upon each other is a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world, and in which the sagacity of the future historian may discover the solution of much of our national history not otherwise easily accountable.” The habits of confidentiality and the experience at communicating in coded letters that the two men had established when Jefferson was in France served them well in the 1790s, when they teamed up to oppose the fiscal policies of Alexander Hamilton and began to develop the foundations for an opposition party. It is not quite fair to Madison’s intelligence and leadership skills to regard him as the junior partner or as Jefferson’s ever-willing surrogate in the political infighting that Jefferson found so offensive. In fact, during the early phases of the battle with Hamilton, from 1790 to 1792, Madison actually led the fight, especially against Hamilton’s funding scheme and proposal for a national bank.
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But in general it seems fair to concur with those Federalists who considered Madison the “General” and Jefferson the “Generalissimo” of the emergent Republican opposition. Jefferson was the psychological superior and senior member of the team. He orchestrated the strategy and Madison implemented the tactics. Jefferson could afford to emphasize the broadest contours of a political problem because Madison was silently handling the messier specifics. (If God was in the details, so the story went, Madison was usually there to greet Him upon arrival.) The advantages of this arrangement were obvious: It placed an extremely talented spokesman at the point of attack while allowing Jefferson to remain behind the scenes and above the fray.