Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  The first, as all the world knows, was with that disdainful, aristocratic master of numbers (and motives) Alexander Hamilton. Conventional wisdom has it that Jefferson and Hamilton quarreled because they were such natural and mighty opposites. Hamilton was the bastard son of a West Indies shopkeeper, a dedicated monarchist and roué (whose conquests included his own sister-in-law), brilliant in oratory, brilliant in the army (no ignoble flight across Carter’s Mountain for him), absolutely savage and joyous in political combat: it would be hard to think of a person less like the Sage of Monticello. Down to their very difference in heights—Hamilton could not have been five feet, seven inches when he strutted—and their taste in clothes (Hamilton the fop incarnate), the two of them, everyone prophesied in retrospect, seemed born for confrontation.

  In the beginning, of course, it hardly seemed that way at all. There was a scene I never saw—I was still in France—but heard described: Jefferson the new secretary of state meeting Hamilton the new secretary of treasury outside Washington’s door on Broadway in the muggy New York spring of 1790; the two of them strolling arm-in-arm up and down that placid street for an hour, talking over the ways they might jointly resolve the Constitution’s first political crisis. The issue (then, now, forever) was money; specifically, whether or not the new government ought to pay back the states’ revolutionary debts at full value, thereby enriching the wealthy speculators of New York and Philadelphia (Hamilton’s people, as it turned out) at the expense of the poor and agrarian. Jefferson was disposed to compromise, and as always, his course of action had something to do with buildings and land. Swing your influence to establishing a new capital city along the Potomac, he told Hamilton; and you can fund your debts as you will.

  But even as they shook hands (and brought the District of Columbia into being), signs of discord could be seen. Hamilton was arrogant, monarchical, devoted to the forms of the British government. At the Constitutional Convention he had shocked poor James Madison by proposing a president-for-life. Jefferson was shocked even more by his love of power and contempt for the people (“Your people, sir, is a great beast,” Hamilton truly did say, smiling over his wine). One day when Jefferson was unpacking in his offices the crates I had sent him from Paris, Hamilton strolled in on some sort of errand and saw three small portraits on the wall.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced,” Jefferson told him. “I had them commissioned by John Trumbull in London. Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke.”

  Hamilton stared at the trio a moment longer. Then he said, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.”

  A few weeks later, his eyes opened about banks and debts, Jefferson wrote James Madison that Alexander Hamilton’s only philosophy was preparing the boots and spurs for the rich to ride on the backs of the poor.

  I saw Hamilton but a few times myself; Aaron Burr put a bullet through his heart long before I could know him. But even at a distance one thing was always clear to me—without President Washington there probably would have been no quarrel; with him, Jefferson and Hamilton were like rival sons, scrambling for the father-attentions of that great, cadaverous, remote, violent-tempered Colossus, who had no child of his own (but burst into tears once telling of his love for Lafayette). Childless father; fatherless sons. In their heart of hearts, brothers. I always liked it that Hamilton was also called out by the newspapers on charges of adultery (admitted); and that the woman’s name was, of all things, Maria.

  “But Hamilton had no sense of place,” John Adams told me once when I advanced my theory. The year was 1820, six years before he died, and the place (in that case) was Braintree, Massachusetts, that flint-gray, bone-hard section of New England coast where he and Abigail had retreated home many years earlier, licking their political wounds after his tumultuous presidency. I had come to pay my respects at his ancestral farm, the tag end of a useless two-day business trip to Boston. We sat all morning in the plain little front parlor. (He was allowed exclusive use of it till noon, he said, when Abigail would sweep in with her train of leaping grandchildren.)

  “The core about Jefferson,” Adams said, “is ground, soil; land. You think about it. Monticello. Virginia (awful state—I never saw it). That whole vast Louisiana Territory he couldn’t wait to grab. But Hamilton didn’t care a hoot where he lived. New York, West Indies, London, all the same to him. The man had no roots, no land loyalty.”

  Adams had changed a great deal in thirty-five years, but not his salt-plain habit of speaking.

  “I don’t like your theory,” he told me. “But it’s just as well Washington never had any children. Half the royal families of Europe would have tried to marry them, and we might have been right on our way to a monarchy, after all. Which was Jefferson’s greatest fear. Never mine.”

  “You correspond with Jefferson now.” I ventured onto dangerous ground.

  “I do. But I didn’t speak or write to the man for a dozen years, Mrs. Adams either.” Adams puffed on his pipe like Old King Cole and eyed me over the hump of his belly. When he was first elected vice president, I had been told, and was presiding over the Senate, he went into agonies over the proper titles for everybody. He seriously wanted to call Washington “His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” Behind his back the senators called Adams himself “His Rotundity.”

  “When Jefferson took the election of 1800 from me,” Adams said, “I was too mad to talk to him. Didn’t even wait to give him the keys of the mansion. Left at four in the morning so I wouldn’t see him.”

  “I was in Europe.”

  “I wasn’t. I was right there, a one-term President, while Jefferson and Burr tied for votes and ended up in the House of Representatives for the election. Thirty-six ballots they called, from Wednesday in a snow storm to Tuesday in the rain. Old Joseph Nicholson of Maryland was sleeping in the coatroom, burning up of a fever. Whenever there was a new ballot, his wife would wake him up, put a pencil in his hand, and he would scribble ‘Jefferson,’ then fall back in a faint. They said if Burr won, the country would be sold off to the banks, and if Jefferson won, the people would have to hide their Bibles under their beds. Hamilton finally decided that much as he hated Jefferson, he didn’t think the man could be corrupted (which nobody in his right mind ever said about Burr). So he threw the last ballot to Jefferson.”

  Adams disappeared behind a huge puff of smoke, emerged slowly like a pink moon in a cloud. “Maybe you are right, Short.”

  The third quarrel was with, inevitably, Washington. Adams and Jefferson had parted company over politics, and they had done it in a noisy, pamphlet-flinging kind of way; and when they were past politics and both of them retired, they took up (warily at first) their comfortable old-shoe friendship again. But Jefferson’s break with Washington was more … Jeffersonian. A slow freeze. A buildup of ice. Words behind backs. Washington’s great sin was that he failed to see Hamilton’s plans as sinister and therefore refused to denounce the Federalists. When Jefferson resigned as secretary of state in 1793, the two simply ceased to be colleagues; then allies; then friends. Once in my hearing in Paris, Jefferson lectured little nine-year-old Polly in a way I approved of then; shudder at now: “I hope you never suffer yourself to be angry. The way to be loved is never, never to quarrel or be angry with anybody.”

  “You never quarreled with him, did you?” John Adams demanded of me through his cloud of smoke.

  Toward the end of April 1789, John Paul Jones, with his usual mysterious efficiency, had managed to purchase eight plaster copies of his own Houdon-carved bust, which he intended to present as needed to admirers and friends; and since he was afloat somewhere on the Baltic Sea, he had naturally ordered them delivered to Jefferson’s house.

  James Hemings scowled at the eight neatly stacked crates—left in the basement kitchen because Jefferson had now started rebuilding the study—and squeezed awkwardly bet
ween them; then he grabbed his sister’s arm and hurried her up the outside stairs.

  On the street he made her walk quickly, keeping in front of the oncoming river of wagons and horses. At the rue de Surene somebody’s lackey shouted in French to clear the way, and a gilded carriage came tilting, speeding into sight, two huge sheepdogs bounding at full gallop ahead of the horses, a servant running on each side, people jumping, flying—the nearest dog bounced against a peddler, a blurred cannonball, knocking him flat. Sally screamed and pinned herself and James to a wall till the barking-rattling-cursing procession whizzed by in a high fan of water and straw and spinning wheels.

  “You not scared of dogs?” he said scornfully, shaking her off.

  “When they got teeth I am.” She showed her own white teeth in a nervous grin.

  James snorted. He looked at her as she straightened her dress at the hips, tugged at her front, looked right back at him. Without waiting he turned on his heel and pushed forward again through the crowd, and she caught up just past the Place Vendôme, where Jefferson’s banker lived, the man who watched Sally when she served the wine just like a flat-eared cat watching a bird. But then, men usually looked at Sally like that.

  “Where’s Petit?” She was pressing close enough behind him that he could smell both her French perfume and the tart brown soap Jefferson made them all use.

  “I told you twice, Petit takes his day off on the Left Bank, by Saint-Germain.”

  “Because of me,” Sally said. “He wouldn’t come with you because of me.”

  James knew the other servants disliked him; they said he was arrogant and quick-tempered and always angry with his sister. Well. He stopped to peer in a tinsmith’s shop. Dozens of gleaming pans and flat cooking dishes had been stacked, à la mode de Palais Royal, with their prices written on little cards beside them. “Petit,” he said, making an effort to speak slowly and not snap, “I told you, is an efféminé. He don’t like any woman except the old bitch who works in the kitchen.”

  “And she’s got a moustache.” Sally giggled.

  “And Petit likes to go to a club on the rue Buci where men all dress up like women and dance.”

  In the windowpanes of the tinsmith’s shop six separate Sallys clapped hand to mouth to stop from laughing. “Did he ever take you?” White teeth, bright as the tin.

  James glared at the window and set out again, faster, certain that whenever he stopped, there she would be, just like a shadow, just like a burn on the back of his neck. As a matter of fact—what he would never in his life admit—Petit had taken him once, very drunk, both of them very drunk, and James had slumped on a bench in a dark, slate-bottomed cave drinking brandy while the efféminés danced and dipped and swirled in and out of the candlelight, cackling like witches at a ball, and when he got drunk enough, he had danced too because they were actually beautiful-looking women, and then he had passed out and never gone back.

  “You making me scared,” Sally said. “People riot yesterday in the Saint-Antoine.”

  “Riots every day,” James told her, picking up his pace. And there were. The winter had been so fierce and cold—the river frozen solid for weeks, wagons camped on the ice—that most of the tradesmen had had no work since November. Ships and boats didn’t move, builders shut down, masons, carpenters, tanners, skinners, the flotteurs who pushed the timber rafts, everything east of the Louvre pulsed and rumbled with anger. Now he loved Paris, he thought, now Paris was just like him.

  “Réveillon,” Sally said.

  “You ask Le Trouveur. He tell you all about it. Whole point is for you to meet Le Trouveur.”

  “I already know. Réveillon owns a factory in the Saint-Antoine, and he wants to drop the pay to fifteen sous a day and they tried to burn his house down last night, that’s what I know.”

  But Le Trouveur, when they reached his door, had fled the quartier, and the neighbors were milling dangerously in the narrow street. James stood indecisively, gripping Sally’s wrist. Crowd on its way to a mob, he thought. He turned; turned. Sheer force of numbers began to drag them forward with a deep, tidal pull toward the rue de Charonne, where nobles were said to be passing on their way to the races.

  “I want to go home!” Sally cried.

  He snarled and shoved her away—the last he saw of her was her brown hair bobbing through the crowd like a cork—and elbowed his way down an alley, over a flattened wood fence. On the rue de Charonne a dozen carriages and coaches had come to a halt, surrounded by blue-shirted workmen. Somebody shouted slogans. A huge pregnant woman stood on a box making a fiery speech. In the first carriage James recognized Jefferson’s friend the Duc d’Orléans. He had climbed up beside his driver and spread his arms to the crowd.

  New voices snapped like whips: “Vive le duc! Vive le père d’Orléans!”

  Closer, scrambling, James could see that the carriages were blocked by soldiers and barricades. On the other side of the barricades stood a big three-story house, iron gates, dozens of straw figures dangling from ropes, a makeshift sign painted in blood red: MAISON RÉVEILLON.

  The duc had started to make himself heard. In furious, rhythmical counterpoint the pregnant woman pumped her fists—“Estates-General”—“Bread!”—“Patience!”—“Liberté!” The duc was looking back along the line of carriages. From one pocket of his splendid red coat he drew a fat purse, waved it over his head, then flung a dozen coins into the air.

  Instantly the crowd surged, the other carriages rocked on their wheels. The noble occupants were lowering their windows. More purses appeared. Gold and silver coins sailed overhead like wingless birds, birds’ heads. The crowd pushed and roared with every toss, and James’s ears rang with the noise. To his right, where he stumbled away in self-defense, the soldiers were now lifting the barricades in front of the horses.

  A shout rose and died in James’s throat. The barricades came apart and the soldiers saluted the duc’s carriage, the brilliant harnesses and plumes of the horses as they clattered through, but in the wake of the last wheels, too numerous and wild to be stopped, the still-furious center of the mob rushed forward like a wave. The barricades splintered, soldiers scattered. The iron gates of Réveillon’s house tilted, twisted, then disappeared under a flood of bodies.

  For an instant James resisted, clinging to a lamppost with both hands, a man in a rapids. Then he gave it up, shot forward, rising to the crest of the mob. Objects flew past—faces, arms, a torn brick wall, limbs from an uprooted tree. When he reached the door, Réveillon’s house was already starting to burn. A running man thrust an armload of bottles toward him; fragments of chairs, sofas, the wings of a huge mahogany table all passed from hand to hand, toward a great bonfire building in the first courtyard of the house. Wine from Réveillon’s cellar went from mouth to mouth. James drank greedily from one bottle, staggered with the force of the angry crowd as it shifted, drank again from another bottle, wiped his teeth and struggled for air. The sky was black with smoke; with amazing speed the house had begun to come apart in loud, nerve-shattering cracks and then—half-drunk, dazed, whirling—James understood that the cracks were muskets. The soldiers had re-formed their ranks, lined up across the street, and begun to fire at random.

  Pandemonium struck with the first bullets. Through the stinging smoke, through the breached walls, the crowd was running in blind, frenzied panic. James lurched for the rue de Charonne, saw sparks of gunfire and dropped to the ground. Crawled, clawed toward the sidewalk, over glass, boards, a bloody leg, a trampled body unrecognizable, male or female. He staggered to his feet and pressed forward, arms outstretched, driving toward a doorway shelter. From the rooftops of the houses, tiles and stones were flying. The soldiers had marched into the center of the street in a compact square, deadly muskets turned in four directions. At every new shower of tiles and stones some lifted their barrels and fired, others charged a few feet forward, jabbing wildly with red bayonets at whatever moved, yielded, bled, or cried out.

  The street had become a maze. T
hrough choking billows of smoke James recognized Le Trouveur’s building, the door where he had begun. With a desperate lunge he covered the last few yards of pavement, dodging, tumbling, coming to a halt by the tiny stairs in the rear. Moments later, curled into a ball by an upstairs window, he looked down at the scene. His ears went dead. No sound reached him. Soldiers and mob seemed to dance in eerie, crablike motions, backward and forward across a stage grown dark and slippery with corpses. Where the fires burned or the muskets flashed, the streets were the blood red image of hell.

  “What the country needs,” said Madame de Tessé with an emphatic, sparrowlike nod of her head, “is democracy. The people would never riot if they had a voice in the government.”

  “The people would never riot”—Gouverneur Morris bowed slightly toward her—“if they had bread. What this country needs is a government suited to its particular history and nature, and that is not a democracy. You are not ready for a democracy.”

  “You want to retain the monarchy.” Madame de Tessé faced Morris with the belligerent, hard-eyed stare of a bantam rooster. Short considered his simile, rejected it, and cleared his throat. If he could think of a witty, distracting remark, he would interpose himself between them.

  “I would, for this kingdom,” Morris said coolly, “retain a limited monarchy and a parliament chosen from the educated propertied classes. The peasants in the field and the squalid, drifting laborers of the cities have no experience whatever in making a government work.”

  “Hmmph.” Madame de Tessé glanced at her other guests. Jefferson was by the fire, talking to her protegee. Clérisseau had cornered two or three of the ladies. A knot of men with hats under their arms stood beside the nearest mullioned window, grimly studying the gray sky. “That is your theory, I suppose.”

  “Ah, my dear learned lady,” Morris said in the smoothest possible French. “Ma chère madame érudite. I subscribe to Dr. Johnson’s definition, ‘Theory is speculation by those unversed in practice.’ I have no theory.”