by Jon Meacham
For Jefferson, Friday, May 7, 1784, was long and consequential. Through the morning and into the afternoon, he wrote more than a dozen letters and papers on subjects ranging from Continental bills of credit to western territory commercial resolutions to the Society of the Cincinnati to the lost Siberian city that Madison had spoken of to family matters with Polly and the Eppeses and the Carrs.
At five p.m., after the regular post had left Annapolis, the Confederation Congress added Jefferson to its mission to Europe. He was to join Franklin and Adams in establishing alliances for the new nation. Hurrying to write William Short, a young lawyer and kinsman by marriage who he hoped would come to Paris with him as his private secretary, Jefferson also sent for James Hemings, whom Jefferson wanted trained as a French cook.
“I am now to take my leave of the justlings of states and to repair to a field where the divisions will be fewer but on a larger scale,” Jefferson wrote Madison on the day after the appointment was official. He would be guided, he said, by the broad principles that had brought him to this point in his public life: “I shall pursue there the line I have pursued here, convinced that it can never be the interest of any party to do what is unjust, or to ask what is unequal.”
At the same time, he asked Madison to keep him in the know. “At the close of every session of assembly a state of the general measures and dispositions, as well as of the subordinate politics of parties or individuals will be entertaining and useful.” He could not imagine life without such news. It was his daily bread.
His love for and trust in Madison had deepened, and he left what he called “a tender legacy” to his friend: the education of Peter Carr. Peter’s father, the late Dabney Carr, remained as real to Jefferson in 1784 as he had in their youths. “I will not say it is the son of my sister, though her worth would justify my resting it on that ground; but it is the son of my friend, the dearest friend I knew, who, had fate reversed our lots, would have been a father to my children,” Jefferson wrote Madison. At fourteen, Peter was “nearly master of the Latin, and has read some Greek.… I would wish him to be employed till 16 in completing himself in Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Anglo-Saxon. At that age I mean him to go to the college” at Williamsburg.
On Tuesday, May 11, 1784, Jefferson wrote a farewell to the Virginia House. In it he underscored anew his central political concern: the strength of the too-shaky confederation. He had, he said, “made the just rights of my country and the cement of that union in which her happiness and security is bound up, the leading objects of my conduct.” With that he ended his six months of service as one of Virginia’s delegates in the Congress—a time in which he had seen firsthand the price of loose affiliations and feeble national authority.
The prospect of Paris was both enticing and intimidating. In writing Jefferson about the politics of place, William Short noted that appearances and subtleties mattered enormously. The “foolish World in Paris … [is] a formidable Monster which must be obeyed,” Short said.
As Jefferson awaited passage from Boston, he gathered intelligence on the commerce of the northern states, taking copious notes. His goal: to learn enough that “might in some degree enable me to answer the purposes of my mission.”
On the evening of Sunday, July 4, 1784, Jefferson finished his congressional business. It had been eight years since he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the nation defined in that summer of 1776 faced serious doubts about its viability.
At four o’clock on the Monday morning of July 5, 1784, Jefferson, with Patsy and James Hemings, left Boston harbor on the Ceres, a man of the New World bound for the Old.
EIGHTEEN
THE VAUNTED SCENE OF EUROPE
A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
THE VOYAGE ACROSS THE ATLANTIC was swift and largely pleasant; Patsy always remembered the “good company, and … excellent table” of the Ceres. “The winds were so favorable through the whole passage that we never deviated from the direct course more than was necessary to avoid shoals, etc.,” Jefferson recalled.
He was in love with France before he even reached Paris. Jefferson’s work in Europe offered him a new battlefield in the war for American union and national authority that he had begun in the Congress. His sojourn in France is often seen as a revolutionary swoon during which he fell too hard for the foes of monarchy, growing overly attached to—and unhealthily admiring of—the French Revolution and its excesses. Some of his most enduring radical quotations, usually considered on their own with less appreciation of the larger context of Jefferson’s decades-long political, diplomatic, and philosophical careers, date from this era.
His relationship to France and to the French, however, should be seen for what it was: a political undertaking in which Jefferson put the interests of America first. He was determined to create a balance of global power in which France would help the United States resist commercial and possible military threats from the British. From the ancien régime of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to the French Revolution to the Age of Napoleon, Jefferson viewed France in the context of how it could help America on the world stage.
Much of Jefferson’s energy was spent striving to create international respect for the United States and to negotiate commercial treaties to build and expand American commerce and wealth. His mind wandered and roamed and soared, but in his main work—the advancement of America’s security and economic interests—he was focused and clear-headed. Countries earned respect by appearing strong and unified. Jefferson wanted America to be respected. He, therefore, took care to project strength and a sense of unity. The cause of national power required it, and he was as devoted to the marshaling of American power in Paris as he had been in Annapolis.
En route across the Atlantic, Jefferson arranged for the captain of the Ceres to transport hares, rabbits, and partridges back to friends in Virginia “to raise and turn out breeders”; Jefferson also ordered Stilton cheeses and porter to be sent to his brothers-in-law.
After nineteen days, the Ceres encountered what he called “very thick weather” off the French coast. A fever struck Patsy in the last days at sea, and Jefferson stopped with her at the Isle of Wight for about a week before they crossed the English Channel to France. The Jeffersons arrived at Le Havre on Saturday, July 31, 1784, and the journey from the port to the capital had been entrancing. They rode, Jefferson said, “through a country than which nothing can be more fertile, better cultivated or more elegantly improved.” By the time he arrived in Paris on Friday, August 6, he was in the opening moments of what became a lifelong romance with a nation he thought “the most agreeable country on earth.”
While in France, Jefferson negotiated treaties on whale oil and tobacco, fighting for American producers. He kept a wary eye on a French expedition to the South Seas, worrying that perhaps the voyage was really about establishing influence on the Pacific coast. When the French Revolution came in 1789, he hoped the upheaval would lead to the purchase of American exports, particularly foodstuffs, and to the opening of St. Domingue for American trade. Above all, he worked to maintain a relationship with Paris that would keep London in some kind of check. Amid the high fashion and the high-flown talk, Jefferson remembered his chief task was the protection and promotion of a republican United States in a world of competing imperial powers.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur advised Jefferson on the places to be. “I beg you’d put Mr. Franklin in mind of introducing you to the good duke of La Rochefoucauld. He is the pearl of all the dukes, a good man, and a most able chemist. His house is the center of … reunion where men of genius and abilities often meet.” The Italian polymath Philip Mazzei added a chatty, detailed memorandum on a few of the key figures in France. (An example: “The Duke de la Vauguyon is entitled to the gratitude of the Americans; and it will be proper to make him sensible that it is well kno
wn in America.”) One friend Jefferson was to make, the Marquis de Condorcet, believed the destinies of America and of France were bound up with each other. He wrote a pamphlet, De l’influence de la révolution de l’Amérique sur l’Europe, and held Paine-like visions of the possibilities of the hour. “Everything tells us that we are bordering the period of one of the greatest revolutions of the human race. The present state of enlightenment guarantees that it will be happy.”
Jefferson took up residence first in lodgings in the rue de Richelieu, then in the Hôtel d’Orléans in the rue des Petits-Augustins. He saw that Patsy was appropriately and fashionably outfitted for the city and for her new school at the convent Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, where she boarded. In the middle of October Jefferson moved again, taking a house for 4,000 livres a year called the Hôtel Lândron in the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout. Wine, furniture, music, horses, and linen consumed Jefferson’s resources. “For the articles of household furniture, clothes, and a carriage … I have been obliged to anticipate my salary from which however I shall never be able to repay it,” Jefferson wrote to Monroe. “I will pray you to touch this string, which I know to be a tender one with Congress, with the utmost delicacy. I’d rather be ruined in my fortune, than in their esteem.”
He joined fellow American commissioner John Adams in Paris, where Abigail Adams had come to live with her husband in a lovely house in Auteuil. Abigail found Jefferson charming. “Mr. Adams’s colleague Mr. Jefferson is an excellent man,” she wrote. The Adamses’ daughter Nabby thought Jefferson “a most agreeable man,” and Jefferson grew so close to the Adamses’ son John Quincy that John Adams later remarked that the young man in those days had seemed “as much your boy as mine.”
The Paris in which Jefferson lived and worked was in the midst of enormous growth; it was, he said, “every day enlarging and beautifying.” There were houses, theaters, the wall of the farmers-general—a barrier to ensure the collection of taxes on goods coming into Paris—and nearly fifty neoclassical customs houses. The Palais Royal, a kind of urban shopping mall filled with cafés, gaming parlors, bookstalls, and (at night) more than a few prostitutes, opened in 1784, the year of Jefferson’s arrival, and its festive chaos fascinated him. He considered it one of the “principal ornaments of the city” and said he thought Richmond could use such a marketplace.
Across the capital and later in the intoxicatingly beautiful south of France, Jefferson learned all he could about the architecture, the art, the theater, the music, the literature, the food, the wine, and the people of this “great and good” country. “So ask the travelled inhabitant of any nation,” he wrote later in his autobiography, “in what country on earth would you rather live?” The first answer, he said, would be in one’s own. But the second? France, of course, always France.
As Jefferson worked to make it clear that the United States was mature enough to hold its own against the European nations in terms of foreign and commercial policy, he faced a crisis in the Mediterranean in which he would advocate American action—up to and including war.
The Barbary States—Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—threatened American commerce. They were seen as a collection of renegade Muslim states that demanded payments from Western nations in exchange for protection from pirates. (A book of the era entitled Geography: Or, A Description of the World, said: “These States are noted for their hostility to the Christian name, and for their piracies exercised chiefly in the Mediterranean sea, against all those Christian powers which do not purchase their forbearance by a disgraceful tribute.”) The danger was real enough for many European countries to pay annual tribute to the Barbary States to keep ships safe from harm.
Jefferson had been subtly investigating how much the other countries gave “to purchase their peace.” No one wanted to tell him, he wrote to James Monroe, “yet from some glimmerings it appears to be very considerable”—somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 a year. “Surely our people will not give this,” he continued. “Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty? If they refuse, why not go to war with them? … We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honorable occasion or with a weaker foe?”
In the wake of the capture of a Virginia ship by the emperor of Morocco, Jefferson pressed again for a warlike response. “Be assured that the present disrespect of the nations of Europe for us will inevitably bring on insults which must involve us in war,” he told Monroe. He also saw English intrigue at work in reports of the Barbary States’ hostility toward America: “These are framed in London to justify their demands of high insurance on our vessels.”
Jefferson was known to believe Britain a perpetual threat. “He has a principle that it is for the happiness and welfare of the United States to hold itself aloof from England,” wrote Luzerne, and “that as a consequence of this system it becomes them to attach themselves particularly to France.”
Worried about how adept the British were at using newspapers to undermine America in the theater of European public opinion, Jefferson took matters into his own hands. In a series of articles for a Dutch publication, he invented a fictitious French officer in whose mouth Jefferson put a pro-American argument designed to counter the British propaganda. “I have fought and bled for [America] because I thought its cause just,” Jefferson wrote in the officer’s voice. Once home, however, “the Frenchman” found his friends offering “condolences … on the bitter fruits of so prosperous a war.” How could such good people, Jefferson’s officer wondered, be so misinformed?
Because, he wrote, answering his own rhetorical question, they have been reading the English newspapers. “Nothing is known in Europe of the situation of the U.S. since the acknowledgement of their independence but through the channel of these papers,” he said. “But these papers have been under the influence of two ruling motives 1. Deep-rooted hatred, springing from an unsuccessful attempt to injure; 2. A fear that their island will be depopulated by the emigration of its inhabitants to America.”
The article was published in two installments in December 1784 in the Leyden Gazette. Jefferson understood the mechanics of the media of his age, and his 1784 letter was calculated to change public opinion by engaging the enemy on his terms.
Jefferson told Francis Eppes he was dispatching barrels of brandy—for Eppes and for another brother-in-law, Henry Skipwith, who had married a sister of his late wife—and planned to order claret for Eppes from Bordeaux. He had his own cravings, too: “Send me a dozen or two hams from Monticello if any vessel [travels] from James River to Havre.”
In January 1785, distressing news arrived from Eppington. Jefferson’s daughter Lucy, age two, was dead, a victim of the whooping cough. The affliction was described as a “convulsive strangulating cough … returning by fits that are usually terminated by a vomiting, and being contagious.” The Eppes had lost a daughter of their own, too. “It’s impossible to paint the anguish of my heart on this melancholy occasion,” Elizabeth Eppes wrote. “A most unfortunate whooping cough has deprived you, and us of two sweet Lucys, within a week. Ours was the first.… She was thrown into violent convulsions, lingered a week and then expired. Your dear angel was confined a week to her bed, her sufferings were great though nothing like a fit. She retained her senses perfectly, called me a few moments before she died, and asked distinctly for water.… Life is scarcely supportable under such severe afflictions.”
Her husband, Francis Eppes, gave Jefferson the brutal truth. The two Lucys, he said, “both suffered as much pain, indeed more than ever I saw two of their ages experience.… They were beyond the reach of medicine.” Jefferson’s depth of feeling was evident in his valedictory to his middle daughter, Polly: “Present me affectionately to Mrs. Eppes, who will kiss my dear, dear Polly for me. Oh! Could I do it myself!”
Lucy’s death made a difficult season even worse. “Mr. J. is a man of great sensibility, and parental affection,�
� Abigail and John Adams’s daughter Nabby Adams wrote in her journal. “His wife died when this child [Lucy] was born, and he was in a confirmed state of melancholy; confined himself from the world, and even from his friends, for a long time; and this news has greatly affected him.”
Now it was winter. He hated the damp of Paris. “Behold me at length on the vaunted scene of Europe!” Jefferson wrote in 1785. “I find the general fate of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil.” As much as Jefferson loved France, residence abroad gave him a greater appreciation for his own nation. “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy,” Jefferson wrote Monroe. “I confess I had no idea of it myself.” This was the voice of the republican Jefferson, the political philosopher who recoiled at the idea that the United States might one day meet the same fate that led so many nations of the Old World into monarchy, priestly authority, and corruption.
It was only when spring came that he began to recover. By early May he had made a significant personal decision: He wanted to bring his family together. He was now walking up to six or eight miles a day as he tried to keep the demons of his latest loss at bay. With Lucy gone, he was eager to have Polly to join him and Patsy in France. “I must have Polly,” Jefferson wrote Francis Eppes in May 1785. “As would not have her at sea but between 1st of April and September this will allow time for decision—is there any woman in Virginia [who] could be hired to come?”
Relations between America and Britain were poor and growing poorer still. John and Abigail Adams moved from Paris to London, where John became minister to Great Britain. In London, Abigail missed Jefferson. “I think I have somewhere met with the observation that nobody ever leaves Paris but with a degree of tristeness,” she wrote to Jefferson in June 1785. “I own I was loath to leave my garden because I did not expect to find its place supplied. I was still more loath on account of the increasing pleasure and intimacy which a longer acquaintance with a respected friend promised, [and] to leave behind me the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom and unreserved: and whose place he had no reason to expect supplied in the land to which he is destined.”