In Washington, Lewis was on the move much of every day, carrying messages and invitations, gathering information for his boss. He had the honor of copying and then delivering Jefferson’s first State of the Union Address to Congress. This broke the precedent set by Washington and Adams, who had delivered their speeches in person. Jefferson thought that practice a bit monarchical; besides, he disliked making public speeches.II
•
The summer of 1802 was marked by a juicy scandal full of invective and slander, leaks from men in high places, hush money, blackmail, and charges of immoral sexual conduct and miscegenation by Jefferson. Meriwether Lewis was involved, in his capacity as aide and messenger for the president.
The scandal had its origins in 1798, when Jefferson leaked some information on foreign affairs to a Richmond journalist named James Thomson Callender. It was not new or secret information, but it had received little publicity and Jefferson wanted it known, although he did not want his having supplied it to Callender to be known. He asked Callender to attribute what he had supplied to an unnamed source, which was done. Jefferson then read some of the page proof of a book Callender was writing, The Prospect Before Us, for the 1800 presidential campaign, and approved of what he saw. He wrote Callender, “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect. They inform the thinking part of the nation.”
But the work as a whole turned out to be full of such spleen and scurrility that Jefferson disapproved of it and feared its extreme language would help the Federalists and hurt the Republicans. For example, Callender called Washington “the grand lama of Federal adoration, the immaculate divinity of Mt. Vernon,” and described Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”22
Callender was arrested for his words, tried before Supreme Court Justice and arch-Federalist Samuel Chase on charges of violating the Sedition Act of 1798, found guilty, fined two hundred dollars, and thrown into prison. By the time Jefferson became president, Callender had paid his fine and served his nine-month sentence. Jefferson gave him a pardon. He could do no other, not so much because Callender had been his supporter in the election as because he and his party had denounced the Sedition Act—along with the Alien Act—as unconstitutional in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions.
When he granted the pardon, Jefferson also ordered the fine returned to Callender, who was pleading poverty and simultaneously demanding the postmaster position in Richmond. But a series of red-tape delays held up the repayment.
Callender came to Washington in May 1801 to demand his money. He accused Jefferson of going back on his word and said among other things that it would have been advantageous to Jefferson’s reputation if his head had been cut off five minutes before he began his inaugural address. In a letter of May 29 to James Monroe, the governor of Virginia who had suggested raising the two hundred dollars by private contributions in order to get Callender to shut up, Jefferson related what happened next: “Understanding he [Callender] was in distress I sent Captain Lewis to him with 50 D[ollars] to inform him we were making some inquiries as to his fine which would take a little time, and lest he should suffer in the meantime I had sent him, &c.”
But Callender wanted that postmastership, not a paltry fifty dollars. Jefferson’s report to Monroe continued, “His language to Captain Lewis was very high-toned. He intimated that he was in possession of things which he could and would make use of in a certain case: that he received the 50 D. not as a charity but a due, in fact as hush money; that I knew what he expected, viz. a certain office, and more to this effect. Such a misconstruction of my charities puts an end to them forever. . . . He knows nothing of me which I am not willing to declare to the world myself.”
Jefferson absolutely refused to make the appointment or have anything further to do with Callender. Monroe regretted that Lewis had handed the money over to the man, although it is not clear whether Lewis did so before or after Callender made his threats. Callender went back to Richmond, where he switched political sides and began publishing scurrilous attacks on Jefferson in the Richmond Recorder. These were picked up by Federalist papers around the country, including Hamilton’s organ, the New York Evening Post. In the summer of 1802, the vengeful campaign of the embittered Callender reached its crescendo. Jefferson was deeply hurt, not so much by what Callender charged as by the readiness of men he respected, including Hamilton, to believe the slanders. “With the aid of a lying renegade from Republicanism,” he wrote, “the Federalists have opened all their sluices of calumny.”23
The charges were: Jefferson had a slave mistress, “Black Sally,” who had borne him several children; Jefferson had approached another man’s wife when the man was away; Jefferson had cheated on a debt. The first charge lives on. The second charge was true and was later admitted to by Jefferson. The third was false.
Within a year, Callender had fallen into a three-foot pool of water, dead drunk, and drowned. The Federalists tried to pound Jefferson with the charges in the election of 1804, without effect. By that time, Lewis had left Washington.
•
Beyond vicious partisanship and vile political journalism, what had Meriwether Lewis learned in the first two years of his life in Washington? A great deal about practical politics, including the politics of the U.S. Army. He was an insider’s insider in Washington, privy to the president’s hopes, plans, ambitions, and secrets. He got to know and be known to the elite of Washington and Philadelphia. His biographer Richard Dillon wrote that the President’s House “served as an ideal finishing school for Lewis.”24
Further, he advanced his scientific education. He was introduced to new instruments of navigation; he listened to discussions of the geography of North America and the world, and of the Indians of the United States; he heard experts on the birds and animals and plant life of the eastern United States, and speculation on what lay beyond the Mississippi River.
In addition to the school of the practical and scientific, he greatly expanded his understanding of philosophy, literature, and history. He read extensively in Jefferson’s library. And somehow, from someone—who else could it have been but Jefferson?—he learned how to write.
A distinct difference is evident between Lewis’s writing before 1800 and after 1802. His sense of pace, his timing, his word choice, his rhythm, his similes and analogies all improved. He sharpened his descriptive powers. He learned how to catch a reader up in his own response to events and places, to express his emotions naturally and effectively.
Though his sentences remained convoluted and cried out for punctuation, he managed to carry them off by retaining a flow of narrative interspersed with personal observations and reactions, all held together by using the right phrase at the precise moment in an arrangement of words that stands the ultimate test of being read aloud and making perfect sense while catching the sights and sounds and drama and emotion of the moment in a way that can be compared to the stream of consciousness of James Joyce or William Faulkner, or the run-on style of Gertrude Stein—only better, because he was not making anything up, but describing what he saw, heard, said, and did.
Lewis was able, through his writing, to take us, two centuries later, to the unexplored Missouri River, Rocky Mountain, and Oregon wilderness country of 1804–6, to meet Indian tribes untouched by European influence, to paint their portraits in words that capture the economic, political, and social conditions of their lives, along with their vibrancy, savagery, beliefs, habits, manners, and customs in a way never since surpassed and seldom matched. The journals he wrote are among his greatest achievements and constitute a priceless gift to the American people, all thanks, apparently, to lessons learned from Mr. Jefferson during his two years of intimate contact with the president in his house.
* * *
I. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Not until after it had been burned by the British during the raid on Washington in the War of 1812 and was repainted was it called
the White House.
II. Jefferson’s precedent lasted until it was broken by another Virginian, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, a professor, could not resist a captive audience.
CHAPTER SIX
The Origins of the Expedition
1750–1802
Jefferson’s interest in exploring the country between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean ran back a full half-century. His father had been a member of the Loyal Land Company, which had been awarded by the crown some eight hundred thousand acres west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1750 one member of the company, Thomas Walker, founder of the town of Charlottesville, led a small party over the mountains to locate lands. In his travels, he crossed the Cumberland Gap.
Three years later, ten-year-old Thomas Jefferson’s teacher, the Reverend James Maury, made plans to explore farther west for the Loyal Company. In January 1756, Maury wrote, “Some persons were to be sent in search of that river Missouri in order to discover whether it had any communication with the Pacific Ocean; they were to follow the river if they found it, and exact reports of the country they passed through, the distances they traveled, what worth of navigation those rivers and lakes afforded, etc.” Thomas Walker was once again chosen to lead the expedition, but the French and Indian War intervened before he could get started. Nothing came of the plan after the war.1
In the decade following the winning of independence, there were four American plans to explore the West. Jefferson was the instigator of three of them. Within weeks of the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Jefferson wrote General George Rogers Clark, the man who had won the Old Northwest for the United States, to report that some British capitalists had subscribed a “very large sum of money for exploring the country from the Mississipi to California. They pretend it is only to promote knolege. I am afraid they have thoughts of colonising into that quarter. Some of us have been talking here in a feeble way of making the attempt to search that country. . . . How would you like to lead such a party?”2
General Clark replied, “It is what I think we ought to do.” Not, however, the way Jefferson proposed to do it. Clark warned that sending a large party, as Jefferson intended, would be a mistake. “Large parties will never answer the purpose. They will allarm the Indian Nations they pass through. Three or four young Men well qualified for the Task might perhaps compleat your wishes at a very Trifling Expence.” He thought it would take four or five years, and regretted that his own business affairs precluded his going.3 Again nothing happened.
Two years later, in 1785, Jefferson was in Paris as minister to France. There he learned that Louis XVI was sending out an expedition to the Pacific Northwest under the command of Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse. The French government said the objective was strictly scientific, but Jefferson knew at once that La Pérouse was looking for something more than the Northwest Passage. He wrote on August 14, “They [the French] give out that the object is merely for the improvement of our knowledge. . . . Their loading and some other circumstances appear to me to indicate some other design; perhaps that of colonising on the West coast of America, or perhaps to establish one or more factories there for the fur trade.” He added that the real question was whether the French were yet weaned from their desire to have colonies in North America. Admiral John Paul Jones reported to him that they had not, that the La Pérouse expedition was preparing the way for French fur trade and colonization on the northwestern coast.4
The following summer, 1786, Jefferson met John Ledyard, who had sailed with Captain Cook and as a consequence was the first American to set foot in the Pacific Northwest. A born wanderer, a great talker, intense, dynamic, he convinced Jefferson that he could travel by land from Moscow to easternmost Siberia, cross the Bering Sea on a Russian fur-trade vessel, then walk across the North American continent and eventually march into the Capitol to announce that he had arrived to report on the West. Ledyard proposed to do this with two dogs. Jefferson was supportive.
Ledyard set forth. He made it to Siberia, where the absurd idea died when Ledyard was arrested by Empress Catherine the Great and sent back to Poland.5
La Pérouse, meanwhile, had sailed around South America, come up to the northwestern coast, taken observations and scouted for trading posts, and set sail for home. In January 1788, he made port in Botany Bay, Australia. When he left Botany, he vanished. The wreckage of his vessels was found forty years later on an island north of the New Hebrides.
In 1790, United States Secretary of War Henry Knox tried to mount a secret Missouri River reconnaissance. In Knox’s view, “An enterprising Officer with a non commissioned Officer well acquainted with living in the woods, and perfectly capable of describing rivers and countries, accompanied by four or five hardy indians would in my opinion be the best mode of obtaining the information requested.” General Josiah Harmar nominated Lieutenant John Armstrong for the command of the expedition, but warned Knox that “it seems very much too adventrous.” The governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, was equally blunt. He told Knox, “It is, sir, I believe, at present, altogether impracticable.”
Lieutenant Armstrong gave it a try, but by the time he reached the Mississippi he was ready to admit, “This is a business much easier planned than executed.” Knox had said that the pocket compasses and pencils and papers would do for making maps and recording discoveries, a mark of how little he understood the problem. Armstrong, after reaching the Mississippi, made a list of items any exploring party would have to have, starting with oilcloth to secure the papers from the elements, and including proper writing instruments and scientific tools for measurements. A tent would also help. He sent in his expense account: “for himself & Servant, totaling one hundred and ten dollars and thirty nine ninetieths of a Dollar.”6 He never got to the west bank of the Mississippi.
In 1792, Jefferson had another idea on how to explore the West. On May 11 of that year, the American sea captain Robert Gray had sailed his Columbia into the estuary of the Columbia River. Later that month, he met and traded information with Captain George Vancouver, who was making an official voyage of discovery of the Pacific Coast for the British government. The discovery of the great river of the West established the mouth of the Columbia at 124 degrees of longitude, and the latitude at 46 degrees. From the results of James Cook’s third voyage in 1780, Jefferson had a rough idea of the extent of the continent; with the Gray and Vancouver information, the knowledge was exact. The continent was about three thousand miles wide.
Jefferson was spurred, not depressed, by the information. He proposed to the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia that a subscription be undertaken to engage an explorer to lead an overland expedition to the Pacific. Big donors, led by George Washington, Robert Morris, and Alexander Hamilton, came in on the subscription, ensuring its success. Washington’s pledge came with a matching challenge: “I readily add my mite to the [project] and do authorise you to place me among & upon a footing with the respectable sums which may be Subscribed.”7 With such help, by January 23, 1793, the American Philosophical Society was in a position to offer one thousand pounds to the explorer who could make it to the Pacific and back and report on what he saw.
As noted, eighteen-year-old Meriwether Lewis volunteered to lead the expedition, but Jefferson passed him off as obviously too young and insufficiently trained. He chose instead the French botanist André Michaux.
Jefferson wrote the instructions for Michaux and went over them with Washington. Since Hamilton and other officials were also involved, the instructions can be said to represent the motives, expectations, and hopes of the Founding Fathers toward the North American West, ten years after independence was recognized in the Treaty of Paris and at the beginning of the second term of the Washington administration.
The instructions were dated April 30, 1793. The first purpose, Jefferson wrote, was “to find the shortest & most convenient route of communication between the U.S. & the Pacific ocean, within the temperate latitudes.” Since
that was almost certain to be the Missouri River, “It has therefore been declared as a fundamental object of the subscription, (not to be dispensed with) that this river should be considered & explored.”
Because the country belonged to Spain, not the United States, Michaux should cross the Mississippi somewhere far enough north of the Spanish garrison in St. Louis to “avoid the risk of being stopped.” He should then march west until he struck the Missouri, follow it to the mountains, get over them, and descend the Columbia River to the Pacific.
Beyond the search for the all-water route across the continent, Jefferson told Michaux that as he proceeded he should “take notice of the country you pass through, it’s general face, soil, river, mountains, it’s productions animal, vegetable, & mineral so far as they may be new to us & may also be useful; the latitude of places . . . ; the names, numbers, & dwellings of the inhabitants, and such particularities as you can learn of them.”
Jefferson had selected Michaux because he was a trained scientist; botany, astronomy, mineralogy, and ethnology were among the subjects he had studied. Throughout, the instructions emphasized practical, useful knowledge. There was no hint of encouraging exploration for its own sake or merely to satisfy curiosity about what was out there. This was a true Enlightenment venture.
Geography was what most interested the subscribers. “Ignorance of the country thro’ which you are to pass and confidence in your judgment, zeal, & discretion,” Jefferson wrote, “prevent the society from attempting more minute instructions, and even from exacting rigorous observance of those already given, except indeed what is the first of all objects, that you seek for & pursue that route which shall form the shortest & most convenient communication between the higher parts of the Missouri & the Pacific ocean.”8
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