by John Ferling
A few weeks after Cornwallis’s surrender, Jefferson arrived in Richmond for the December meeting of the legislature. Nursing a broken wrist suffered in a recent fall from his horse, he nonetheless made the long, painful ride from Monticello. He was driven by a bitter loathing and he also wished to defend himself in the scheduled probe into his conduct as governor. Some men would have challenged their tormentors to a duel, but Jefferson was not given to violence and he kept a tight rein on his emotions. (What is more, he, together with the “valuable part of society,” condemned dueling as “knighterrantry” in defense of “imaginary honour.”)60
There was no inquiry. “I came … [but] found neither accuser nor accusation,” Jefferson raged.61 On the day set for the hearing, George Nicholas “withdrew from the house” and Henry sat mute. Neither they nor the assembly any longer had an ardor for going after a former official who had long served the colony and state, and the American Revolution, and who presumably would never again seek high office. Besides, after Yorktown, an investigation seemed pointless, and with America’s victory the corrosive bitterness of early summer vanished like snow under a bright, warm sun.
The lack of a hearing did not assuage Jefferson. Vexed and indignant, he wanted to clear his name. He obtained the floor and “did it myself,” he later said, in what must have been a tension-laced chamber. Standing erect, and mustering all the vocal force and strength he could bring to bear, Jefferson read each charge that Nicholas had presented against him the previous summer. He answered each allegation. When he was done, the legislature by a unanimous vote thanked Jefferson “in the strongest manner” for his service as governor, lauded his “impartial, upright, and attentive administration of the powers of the Executive,” and removed from the record “all former unmerited Censure.”62
Vindicated, Jefferson resigned and rode home, convinced that he would never again hold public office, and cherishing a future adorned with the “independence of private life.”63
Hamilton, who had obtained a furlough a week after Cornwallis’s surrender, had just completed an even longer ride, from Yorktown to Albany. He remained at Betsey’s side through the winter, and in January was present when she gave birth to a son, Philip, who was named after her father. A few weeks later, in March, Hamilton resigned from the army. He told Washington that he hoped his service had been useful, and added that should “unfortunate events” prolong the war, he would return and “renew my exertions in the common cause.”64
Hamilton’s Revolutionary War was over. His struggle to impede revolutionary change was about to begin.
Postwar America
Chapter 6
“The inefficacy of the present confederation”
Grief and Intrigue
Late in 1781, Jefferson returned to Monticello. Embittered with public life, he wanted no more of it. As Virginia’s chief executive, he had coped with baffling, irresolvable difficulties. For what he called his “constant sacrifice,” he had wanted nothing more than “the affection of my countrymen.” Instead, he had been “arraigned for treasons of the heart and not mere weaknesses of the head,” charges that had left an indelible “wound on [his] spirit.”1
Following Cornwallis’s surrender, Americans expected the war to wind down and to soon end altogether. Jefferson had never desired to be part of the team that negotiated peace, and weeks before the siege commenced at Yorktown, he had declined Congress’s request to sail for Europe. He said that Monticello required his management, as farm operations had “run into great disorder and ruin” during his two- year absence. Privately, he confessed his longing to be with Martha and his two young daughters, who needed his “attention and instruction.” He had reached a point when no office was alluring. His years of legislative service had convinced him that assemblymen spent hour after hour in “trifling [and] wordy debate,” often on “unimportant questions.” Much of it was “a waste and abuse of the time,” which was hardly unexpected, he said, of a body filled with lawyers “whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour.” When the voters in Albemarle County reelected him to the state assembly in the spring of 1782, he refused to serve. With more than a kernel of truth, Jefferson declared that he had been “cured of every principle of political ambition.” He was convinced that “public service and private misery [were] inseparably linked,” and he wished to spend the remainder of his life “in mental quiet.”2
Once at home, Jefferson returned to the contemplative life he had cherished before becoming governor, and he wrote his only book. Its genesis originated in a request by François de Barbé-Marbois, a member of the French legation in Philadelphia, for information about the thirteen American states. Jefferson began drafting his lengthy reply shortly before Arnold’s first despoiling raid, but the unrelenting crisis, and the inaccessibility of a good library, prevented him from completing his answers until he returned home. Finally, in December 1781, he sent his composition to Barbé-Marbois.3 By then, Jefferson had begun to think of expanding the manuscript into a book. He completed a first draft within two years, but made extensive revisions thereafter, some after the manuscript was critiqued by friends. However, one suggestion that he ignored was to conceive “a more dignified title.” He stuck with his first choice, and the book was published in Paris in 1785 with a less than lyrical appellation: Notes on the State of Virginia.4
Jefferson wrote about his state’s geography, boundaries, climate, plant and animal life, farming, towns and counties, schools, roads, economy, and Indians. He included a segment on the legal treatment of Loyalists and, in a separate section on the law, penned a discourse on race. Much of what he wrote about race was unworthy of one who fancied himself as committed to the enlightened reconsideration of conventional thought. By contrast, Hamilton—like Jefferson, a product of a slave society and the child of a slave owner—had reassessed accepted biases and emerged as strikingly ahead of his time in his thinking on race. Jefferson, on the other hand, was unable to overcome what he acknowledged were “Deep rooted prejudices.” What he wrote in the 1780s would have passed for orthodoxy among whites a century earlier in pre-Enlightenment Virginia. Jefferson contended that blacks perspired more and urinated less than whites, required less sleep, were more tolerant of heat but less of cold, and were less disciplined and reflective. Blacks, he went on, were artistically and intellectually inferior to whites, “more ardent” sexually, and physically less attractive.
Though Jefferson’s racism gushed out for all to see, he denounced slavery as a “moral evil” and a “blot” on the land. His solution was gradual emancipation. All slaves born after an undesignated date should be freed upon reaching adulthood, he said. Females should be educated at public expense until age eighteen, males until age twenty-one, but thereafter they were to be colonized in some remote territory, where they would be protected by the United States until capable of independence. Jefferson justified expulsion on the grounds that it would be impossible for the two races to ever live together in harmony. White prejudice and “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained,” would provoke interminable “convulsions” that would inevitably “end … in the extermination of one or the other race.”5 It was a hopelessly pessimistic view from which he never deviated.
Still, Jefferson had excoriated slavery and called for its end at a time when only an infinitesimal number of Americans—and, save for Quakers, virtually no Southerners—were taking such a stand. His argument was courageous, and it was seen in that light by friendly contemporaries. John Adams, for instance, exclaimed that the “Passages upon Slavery, are worth Diamonds.”6
Jefferson was bolder when it came to religion. He assailed the intolerance and barbarism of organized religion, writing that Christianity was responsible for having “burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned” millions of innocent people. He thought it an inexplicable paradox that his fellow countrymen had been prepared to die in the American Revolution for their “civil freedom” but were w
illing to remain under “religious slavery.” He argued passionately for freedom of religion, including the liberty to attend no church and, by implication, to be a nonbeliever. In what were to become perhaps the most-quoted sentences in the book, Jefferson asserted, “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”7
He also wrote with passion about government. Having initially been drawn to the protest against the mother country by the centralization sought by Britain’s rulers, Jefferson in time came to see the purpose of the American Revolution as a struggle to enable the people to govern themselves. By the time he wrote A Summary View in 1774, he believed that the abundance of land in Virginia would permit a transition to a society of truly self-governing citizens; by the time he authored the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was convinced that the American Revolution was an epic event that went far beyond the establishment of independence. For America, for the world, the American Revolution—captured in the vision he articulated in the Declaration of Independence—held the promise of democratization, the moment in history when humankind broke the chains of monarchical and aristocratic governance and people began to govern themselves. By 1783 he was calling for giving all free males the right to vote and basing the number of delegates allotted to each county “in proportion to the number of its qualified voters.” Under the latter reform, Tidewater Virginia—which at the time was home to roughly 40 percent of the state’s voters but held more than 50 percent of the assembly seats—would be stripped of its disproportionate power.8
Jefferson did not stop there. He pondered the relationship between governance and the socioeconomic nature of society. He had read deeply in Montesquieu and Hume, and though their views differed on many things, what he took from their writings set him to thinking. Later, he said that they had taught him how the propertyless in Europe were forced into exploitive manufacturing jobs that left them with a “want of food and clothing necessary to sustain life.” Their desperate circumstances begat “a depravity of morals, a dependence and corruption, which renders them an undesirable accession to a country whose morals are sound.”9 Jefferson may also have feared an inexorable march toward a manufacturing society, as he thought it a rare individual who could resist the temptation of every “gewgaw held out to him,” even if it led to indebtedness, or what he called “the keys of a prison.”10 It is possible, too, that he may already have seen trouble ahead for the American Union, given the economic dissimilarities between the more urban and commercial northern states and the agrarian south.
In Notes, Jefferson condemned manufacturing states as the basest of societies for the greatest number of citizens. Jefferson believed that an inevitable “Corruption of morals” occurred in a manufacturing state. Manufacturers were ensnared in the demeaning vortex of a never-slackening chase after wealth. Their unquenchable thirst for money, and their dependence on the vagaries of the marketplace, drove them inescapably to vice and venality. Moreover, all who were dependent on the success of the manufacturers—merchants, shopkeepers, tradesmen, laborers—were compromised and shaped into “fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Cities would inevitably become manufacturing centers, he said, and just as assuredly most urban dwellers would be fated to live in squalid surroundings. He painted a stark picture: “great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
In manufacturing societies, only those at the top of the economic structure were truly independent and more or less in control of their destiny. The political system likely to evolve in such societies would be little different from those in monarchical kingdoms. In both, a “heavy-handed” executive would manage affairs on behalf of the oligarchy. The ruling elite would harbor an “unfeeling” fear and scorn for the great mass of the citizenry, “rendered desperate by poverty and wretchedness.” The lifeblood of the realm would be the generation of fortunes for those at the top. Among other things, this dynamic in the course of time would transform the polity into a military state. As in ancient Rome, when Caesar said, “With money we will get men … and with men we shall get money,” the manufacturing state would grow ever more pugnacious and expansive. No barriers to the pursuit of riches—most assuredly not the welfare and happiness of the great preponderance of the people—could be tolerated.
But a rural society in which the freemen were property-owning farmers stood in stark contrast to the “degeneracy” and “canker” of a manufacturing society. Whereas freedom could not long exist in a manufacturing world, not only did liberty survive among yeomen, but farming in fact kept “alive that sacred fire” of individualism, personal independence, and liberty. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God,” Jefferson wrote, for republicanism resided in the “spirit” of humankind. The “manners and spirit” of a free, property-owning yeomanry would preserve republicanism. He was convinced that a society composed of property-owing farmers, each in possession of roughly the same amount of land, would have a vested interest both in sustaining the “equal rights” of freemen and in perpetuating the republic that had made possible their good fortune and happiness.11
For Jefferson, the American Revolution had been about resisting the expansive, exploitive encroachments of a degenerate monarchical and oligarchical Great Britain, and erecting in independent America a republican system that safeguarded against those things that led to “corruption and tyranny.” He was convinced that the best means of preserving republicanism—of “keep[ing] the wolf out of the fold”—was through nearly universal property ownership within an agrarian state.12
In April 1782, while he worked on his manuscript, Jefferson had a visitor. François-Jean de Beauvoir, Chevalier de Chastellux, a French soldier and acclaimed author, dropped in at Monticello for four days. Chastellux had come to America with the French army two years earlier, and like all of Rochambeau’s men, he remained in Virginia for months after the events at Yorktown. He described Jefferson as “tall and with a mild and pleasing countenance,” and he added that his host was “never spoken of here [in Virginia] without respect.” Chastellux at first found Jefferson “grave and even cold,” but within two hours the strangers felt as though they had “spent [their] whole lives together.” Chastellux found Jefferson’s conversation “always varied, always interesting,” and he was somewhat astounded by the breadth of Jefferson’s interests and knowledge. They conversed incessantly, and deep into the night on myriad topics, as “no object has escaped Mr. Jefferson.” Jefferson lovingly showed off Monticello, leading Chastellux to conclude that the house was like no other in America, for his host had “consulted the Fine Arts” in its design. A warrior accustomed to mayhem, Chastellux nevertheless was impressed that Jefferson was not a hunter, and even more by his discovery that the estate abounded in tame deer that ate from Jefferson’s hand. When Chastellux departed, Jefferson rode with him for sixteen miles, turning back only because Martha was eight months pregnant and he did not want to be away from home for even one night.13
Three weeks after Chastellux departed, Martha gave birth for the seventh time. The baby was named Lucy Elizabeth, the same name that had been bestowed on the little girl who had died thirteen months before—a naming practice not uncommon in eighteenth-century America. If Martha’s pregnancy had been planned, it was a terribly unwise decision. She had experienced difficulties with earlier pregnancies, and she does not appear to have been in robust health since the spring of 1780. She had not only curtailed her management of household operations but also, in the summer of 1780, had begged off participating in a drive to raise and make clothing for soldiers. Little is known of Martha’s health after the birth of the first Lucy Elizabeth, but the six months that followed had been harrowing: On three occasions she and her daughters had been compelled to flee approaching enemy armies. Above all else, perhaps, Martha had been pregnant about half the time that she had been married to Jefferson, rarely experiencing more than ei
ght months between the birth of one child and the conception of the next. All knew that childbirth was fraught with risks, and no one knew this better than Martha, whose own mother had perished as a result of childbirth.
Only Thomas and Martha Jefferson knew what went into the decision to have Lucy Elizabeth. Two weeks after her birth on May 2, Jefferson said that his wife had been “dangerously ill” since the child’s arrival. Martha lived until September 6, and she appears to have remained bedfast the entire time. According to one of their daughters, Jefferson supposedly stayed with her continuously and nursed her with “tenderness.” By July, if not earlier, Martha’s recovery was thought unlikely, and weeks before the end she seems to have known that she faced death. She was only thirty-three, and she had been Jefferson’s wife for eleven years. Jefferson himself said that he was a “state of dreadful suspense” for weeks. Joined by his widowed sister, a sister-in-law, and six household slaves, Jefferson kept vigil through the last moments of what his daughter called the “closing scene.”
A quarter century later, Jefferson’s overseer claimed to have been told by several who were present that toward the end, Martha expressed the wish that her husband would never remarry, and that Jefferson pledged that he would not. The story seems implausible, if for no other reason than that Martha herself had remarried following the demise of her first husband. But given the emotion-laden situation, and the possibility that pain or pain medication might have dulled Martha’s lucidity, it cannot be ruled out.
Just before Martha died—what Jefferson called “the catastrophe”—he “was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility.” With “great difficulty,” his sister “got him into his library where he fainted and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would survive.” In speaking of his “long fainting fit,” his daughter mentioned the “violence of his emotion,” and Edmund Randolph, a relative and friend who visited him a few days later, said that Jefferson’s “grief … [was] so violent” that he believed the “circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.” His despair was so enveloping that Jefferson did not leave his room for three weeks, and he “walked almost incessantly night and day only lying down occasionally when … completely exhausted.” After a month, he spent nearly all day every day riding about his estate, past cultivated fields and through thick forests, often seeing and talking to no one, though each day he circled back by the mansion at some point and gathered up Martha, his ten-year-old daughter, who accompanied him on horseback for a few miles. She later recollected these “melancholy rambles” as a time when she was “a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief” by her father.14