Jefferson and Hamilton (31 page)

Jefferson had gone to France on a diplomatic mission, and he was a diligent, if not terribly successful, envoy. He had been sent abroad to join with Adams and Franklin in seeking commercial treaties with sixteen governments in Europe and another four in North Africa. After two years, their only real success was a pact with Prussia. The other European powers remained intransigent adherents of mercantilism, an age-old doctrine that spurned free trade and emphasized national self-sufficiency. But Jefferson also rapidly discovered that many European diplomats felt that America’s decentralized system, which left each state to formulate a commercial policy, posed such a barrier to trade that it was not worth their trouble to negotiate. The Barbary States of North Africa posed a different problem. Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli preyed on European and American commerce in the Mediterranean. They would suspend their marauding only if foreign nations paid them a tribute—or bribe—for the privilege of conducting commerce in the region. From the beginning, Jefferson thought there was little hope of success in dealing peacefully with these piratical entities, and he was correct. Rather quickly, Jefferson’s experiences reshaped some of his thinking. Within a year, he became an advocate of vesting Congress with supremacy in all matters concerning foreign commerce. In addition, the Barbary pirates convinced him of the necessity for a strong navy, which by “constant cruising and cutting them to pieces by piecemeal” would solve the problem.
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America’s greatest commercial problem, however, stemmed from recent
action taken by its late enemy, Great Britain. Shortly before the Treaty of Paris was signed, London had promulgated Orders in Council signaling that it would treat the United States as it did other foreign nations. Britain would sell to the United States, but it would permit only American tobacco and naval stores to enter ports in the home islands—and then only in British vessels—and it closed altogether the ports in its West Indian colonies to United States trade. Before the Revolution, most of the exports from the American colonies had gone to Great Britain or its Caribbean possessions. American merchants, farmers, and tradesmen had expected these markets to be reopened when hostilities ended. That they were shut tightly against American commerce was a staggering blow, especially in the middle Atlantic and New England states.

The United States had concluded a treaty of commerce with its ally France in 1778, and six years later, when Jefferson arrived in Europe, three-fourths of the goods exported from the northern states went to France. Even so, the volume of that trade was small in comparison with America’s prewar trade with Britain. London’s retaliatory commercial policies made it imperative that the American commissioners seek ways to expand trade with France, including fully opening the French West Indies to American commerce and persuading Versailles to end lingering restrictions that had originated generations before. All this made America’s minister to France the young nation’s most important diplomat, and in many ways its single most important official. In May 1785, nine months after he arrived in Paris, Jefferson learned that he had been named to succeed Franklin as minister plenipotentiary to France.

Franklin, who was pushing eighty and suffered so many afflictions that he could hardly stir from Passy, had asked to be recalled. Congress complied, sent Adams to London as the first United States minister to the Court of Saint James, and named Jefferson to succeed Franklin. Jefferson knew that he would never be held in the same esteem as Franklin, who he thought was the most respected man in France. Nevertheless, Frenchmen that Jefferson had met during the war spoke positively of him to the Foreign Ministry. Lafayette, in fact, praised Jefferson as the best ambassador that the United States could appoint, and characterized him as “good, upright, enlightened” and “respected and beloved by every one that knows him.”
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Lafayette’s judgment was borne out. Jefferson established an agreeable relationship with Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s foreign minister. Franklin had been rather passive and deferential, and Adams confrontational. Jefferson, who was always diligent and industrious, did his homework, interacted agreeably with Vergennes, and succeeded in winning the foreign minister’s respect. Privately, Jefferson
disparaged Vergennes’s devotion to “
pure despotism
” and criticized his lack of knowledge of American affairs, but he also believed that the foreign minister’s inordinate fear of Great Britain rendered him of great value to the United States.
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However, a good rapport did not mean success. When all was said and done, Jefferson achieved little that he had set out to accomplish.

Thomas Paine in
Common Sense
had been uncannily accurate in capturing the aspirations of the colonists. “Our plan is commerce,” he said of what was to be the United States, and he added that trade “will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America’s free port.”
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Jefferson could not have agreed more, and he worked tirelessly to persuade the French to move toward a free trade policy. The most enlightened French officials, perhaps including Vergennes, agreed with him. But Jefferson soon saw that he was swimming upstream. The French system consisted of ancient monopolies, Byzantine restrictions, cumbersome fees and duties, and antiquated means of collecting taxes. Besides, any French official so unwary as to attempt dramatic alterations risked not only political suicide but also upsetting the fragile economic system.

Jefferson had a second goal as well. Longing to break Great Britain’s neartotal monopoly of the American market, he wished that France would begin exporting its manufactured goods to the United States. He was no less eager to have the French open their ports to Chesapeake tobacco, rice, and naval stores from the Carolinas and Georgia, grains from the mid-Atlantic region, and fish and oil shipped from New England. In no time, the United States could enjoy a more satisfactory balance of trade, its merchants and planters could disentangle themselves from their long-standing bondage to British creditors, and the new American Union could be bolstered. It was a vision of greater American economic independence, which if realized would only aid its political independence.

Jefferson won the approval of Vergennes and other important French officials. Hamilton’s friend Gouverneur Morris, who came to France in 1789 to tend to Robert Morris’s business interests, found that Jefferson was “very much Respected” by the French. Morris added that the esteem in which the American minister was held was “merited by [his] good Sense and good Intentions.”
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But Jefferson could not move mountains. Nor did he have a magic wand. For instance, even though he persuaded France to permit imports of rice from the southern Low Country, the French spurned the American product as inferior to rice from northern Italy and the Levant. For all Jefferson’s work, after five years the volume of Franco-American trade had hardly changed. Not until deep into the next century would some of his dreams be realized.

Jefferson had spent thirty months in France, and his outlook regarding Franco-American relations and the security of the United States had gelled. This outlook changed little over the next quarter century. He persistently clung to the hope that, in time, the French might see their varied and ever-changing Continental trade as “of short duration” and commerce with the United States as “perpetual.” In addition, he saw France as the very rock of American safety. “Nothing should be spared on our part to attach this country to us,” he counseled. “It is the only one on which we can rely for support under every event. It’s inhabitants love us more I think than they do any other nation of earth.”
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In the spring of 1786, after a year’s separation, Jefferson was reunited with John and Abigail Adams, if only briefly. Adams, in London, believing his negotiations on commercial treaties with Portugal and Tripoli had reached the crucial stage, asked Jefferson to come and join the talks. Jefferson came quickly, as eager to see his old friends as to conduct diplomacy. The Adamses were delighted to see him too. When leaving Paris a year earlier, Abigail had confessed that her one “regreet [was] to leave Mr. Jefferson.” After moving to London, she remarked that the separation from the Virginian “left me in the dumps.”
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Jefferson remained in England for more than six weeks, in the course of which he and Adams set off on a seven-day, three-hundred-mile tour of the English countryside. They visited gardens, took in the architecture, climbed a 115-foot observation tower for a panoramic view of five counties, walked battlefields from the English Civil War, paid admission to see Shakespeare’s house—where, reprehensibly, they “Sat in the chair in which he used to Study, and cut a relic from it”—and looked over the college in Oxford.
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Back in London, their negotiations with Tripoli went nowhere, though the two concluded an accord with Portugal’s envoy, only to learn subsequently that it had been rejected in Lisbon. Jefferson had also crossed to England filled with the misguided hope that he and Adams might jointly persuade Great Britain to budge on its trade policies toward the United States. Instead, he soon discovered—as Adams put it—that opinion in England was “high against America.” Adams also remarked that the English treated him with “dry decency and cold civility.” Jefferson would have relished such treatment. Throughout his stay, he felt that he was looked on with contempt. When he was introduced to the monarch, George III responded with a noticeable lack of civility. An unconfirmed story later made the rounds that the king had turned his back on Jefferson. That account was probably embellished, as Jefferson never mentioned it. Later, Jefferson said that the king and queen had
been “ungracious.” He added that the English people disliked Americans and “their ministers hate us, and their king more than all other men.” He also remarked that the English “require to be kicked into common good manners.”
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For the most part, Jefferson was happy to leave England and return to France. England “fell short of my expectations,” he said, though in fact much that he said about England was complimentary. He thought the English were unrivaled as farmers and gardeners, and that England’s “labouring poor” were better off by “about a third” than their counterparts in France. He lauded the English for their adaptability to machines, and was especially taken by their “application of … the steam-engine to grist mills.” He even thought London was “handsomer” than Paris, though not so appealing as Philadelphia. Aside from their enmity toward Americans, the two things that he disliked most were British architecture—“the most wretched … I ever saw”—and the horrid “extravagance” with which the English aristocracy lived, though the British nobility hardly differed in that regard from aristocrats throughout Europe.
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Jefferson must also have been happy to resume his life as a diplomat, which he thoroughly enjoyed. On a day-in, day-out basis, he tended to the surprisingly large number of Americans who came to Paris, helping them as best he could. He sometimes entertained them, which he never thought an onerous part of his duties. Near the end of his mission, several Americans living in Paris paid tribute to his “particular kindness and attention to every American” who needed assistance, adding that Jefferson’s “noble and generous” behavior had won their “love and admiration.” Jefferson always seemed to have time to help others. When Gouverneur Morris came to Paris on business, he met with Jefferson thirteen times during his initial six weeks in the city, and on several occasions dined with him. Though they had “only a slight Acquaintance” beforehand, Jefferson showed Morris about Paris, making observations on Parisian architecture all the while, and even provided tips on shopping. Morris noted too that “Mr. Jefferson lives well, keeps a good Table and excellent Wines which he distributes freely and by his Hospitality to his Countrymen here he possesses very much their good Will.”
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When Jefferson returned from London in the spring of 1786, almost four years had passed since his wife’s death. He did not keep a diary, and in his correspondence with his closest friends Jefferson maintained a stony silence about his inner feelings. But it appears that the distractions of work and a spirited social life—and, above all, time—helped him through the canyons of anguish. Consciously or not, he was at last ready to move on with his life. All that remained was to meet the right person, and by accident, while sightseeing
on a warm summer afternoon in August or September, he met her. Her name was Maria Cosway. Jefferson and his companion, the young American artist John Trumbull, stumbled upon Maria and her husband at the Halle aux Bleds, the Parisian grain market. Trumbull knew the Cosways from his days in London and introduced them to Jefferson.

Jefferson was immediately bewitched by this attractive and accomplished twenty-six-year-old blonde. She was the daughter of English parents who owned an inn in Florence. After her four older siblings were murdered by an insane nurse, Maria was sent to a convent school, where she became fluent in six languages and blossomed into an accomplished painter and musician. When she was nineteen, her mother arranged her marriage to Richard Cosway, one of London’s better-known artists. He had money and the settlement was bountiful. But Cosway was nearly twice Maria’s age and decidedly unattractive, with simian features. (William Hogarth, the pictorial satirist, once depicted Cosway as a hairy baboon.) Maria was not ready to marry, and to be sure, she was not eager to have Cosway as a husband. But she dutifully married and went with him to live in a four-story, twenty-six-room mansion in London, a place that soon acquired a reputation for lusty evening parties at which “dangerous Connections may be formed.” That, at any rate, was the opinion of the bustling Gouverneur Morris, who met Maria in London in 1788, called on her often, and described her as “vastly pleasant.” She was, in fact, a modern career woman, as she was childless and exhibited and sold her paintings.
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