American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Thus began an epoch in American history that would come to be known as the “Jeffersonian Era” but was felt at the time—after the anxious days of February—to be a moment of relief, triumph, and hope.

  Several hundred persons had crowded into the Senate chamber to witness the shift of authority from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. The President-elect’s old Virginia adversary, Chief Justice John Marshall, stood before him to administer the oath; Vice-President-elect Aaron Burr, a man Jefferson hardly knew, waited nearby. Conspicuously absent from the proceedings was John Adams, who had quietly left Washington before dawn. After the oath-taking, Jefferson turned to the audience.

  “Friends & Fellow Citizens.” At this, some good Federalists in the crowd must have stirred. “Citizen”! This was the language of Paris revolutionaries.

  The President proceeded in such a low, flat tone of voice that many in the audience could hot have made him out if the National Intelligencer had not scored a beat and published the address ahead of time. In any case, the speech held few surprises. After the usual modest disclaimers and tributes to a “rising nation spread over a wide & fruitful land,” he went on to lay out Republican positions: “Equal & exact justice to all men” … friendship with all nations, “entangling alliances with none”… support for state governments as bulwarks of republicanism … “Economy in public expense, that labor may be lightly burdened” …the payment of public debts…“Encouragement of Agriculture, & of Commerce as it’s handmaiden…” These principles, he said, speaking from abbreviated notes, “form ye bright constlln wch hs gone before us, & guidd our steps, thro’ an age of Revoln and Reformn: The wisdom of our Sages, & blood of our Heroes, have been devoted to their attainment…”

  Yet embedded in the address were words that doubtless stirred his audience more than did hallowed principles. These amounted to a powerful plea for conciliation.

  “…every difference of opinion, is not a difference of principle. We have called, by different names, brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.

  “If there be any among us who wish to dissolve this union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it….

  “I know indeed that some honest men have feared that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic & visionary fear that the government, the world’s best hope may want energy to preserve itself?”

  All would bear in mind, Jefferson had said earlier in the address, “the sacred principle that if the will of the Majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable: that the Minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, & to violate would be oppression.

  “Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart & one mind; let us restore to social intercourse that harmony & affection, without which Liberty, & even Life itself, are but dreary things.…”

  The celebration over, President Jefferson walked back to his lodgings at Conrad’s. He left behind him at the Capitol some puzzled politicians, Federalist and Republican alike. What kind of leadership did the Inaugural words portend?

  Upon leaving for the Inaugural that day, John Marshall had been in the middle of a long letter to Charles Pinckney in Charleston. “Today the new political year commences, the new order of things begins,” he wrote. He hoped that public prosperity and happiness would not be diminished under democratic guidance. “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.…” If he was a terrorist, the country faced calamity, he added, but if not, the terrorists would become his enemies and calumniators. At this point Marshall laid down his pen and left his boardinghouse to administer the oath; he had promised Jefferson that he would be punctual. Returning later to his lodgings, he picked up his pen again. He had just administered the oath to Jefferson, he told Pinckney. The speech seemed conciliatory. “It is in direct terms giving the lie to the violent party declamation which has elected him, but it is strongly characteristic of the general cast of his political theory.”

  The new President’s political theory—this was the puzzle. The election of this amiable and diffident patrician, and of a Republican Congress, had produced Federalist invective betraying a deep fear that he would inflict some alien and despotic creed on the people. A Republican regime would mean the “ascendancy of the worthless, the dishonest, the rapacious, the vile, the merciless and the ungodly,” said a letter in the Gazette. Fisher Ames foresaw the “loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice.” President Timothy Dwight of Yale prepared an oration in which he warned of a “country governed by blockheads and knaves…the ties of marriage…severed; our wives and daughters thrown into the stews.” Even John Adams, in his hurt and bitterness, said, “A group of foreign liars, encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen, have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues and the property of the country.” His Boston homeland seemed especially outraged. A Federalist newspaper there ran an epitaph within a black border: “YESTERDAY EXPIRED Deeply regretted by MILLIONS of grateful Americans And by all GOOD MEN, The FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION” etc. Little old ladies in Boston, it was said, hid their Bibles under mattresses on the inauguration of the Virginia “atheist.”

  Those who knew Jefferson best scoffed at the Federalist portrait of him as a Jacobin dogmatist—or radical ideologue. If criticize him they must, they would have pointed to just the opposite qualities. Jefferson’s mind seemed as loose and many-jointed as his big rambling frame. Although he had proudly belonged to the American Philosophical Society for many years after having helped to found it, and although he had the philosopher’s bent for reflective speculation, he had never been a systematic philosopher or written a comprehensive work that could compare with—say—John Adams’ Defense of the Constitution. His interest in nature and in science was not that of the methodical investigator but of a man fascinated by rocks, birds, flowers, trees, vegetables, crops, inventions, household contrivances, gadgets. He wrote his daughter: “Not a sprig of grass shoots uninteresting to me.”

  So quickly did Jefferson shift, in conversation and correspondence, from politics to farming to law to flora to seeds to literature, that it was hard to discern any focus in the man. His more superficial beliefs had to be peeled off, like the layers of an artichoke, to find the core of conviction. He was accused of being deceptive, disingenuous, even dishonest, and to a degree he was, because he tried to protect his privacy, because he feared that his personal letters would fall into the hands of his adversaries, because he adapted to the person he was talking to and the situation confronting him. Beyond all this, a central ambivalence in him was evident to some.

  There seemed to be at least two Jeffersons by 1801, his fifty-eighth year. One apotheosized harmony and conciliation; viewed the small rural property holder and agriculture in general as the foundation for the good society; believed in sharply limited government, especially at the federal level; feared a consolidated national government; saw cities in general and city mobs in particular as the “panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned”; loathed the prospect of urbanization, industrialization, centralized finance, a landless proletariat; warned against entangling alliances abroad; ultimately embraced states’ rights to such a degree that he could sponsor the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. This was Jefferson the ideologue.

  Another Jefferson, however, saw conflict among men as inevitable and called for a rebellion every generation or so; enjoyed the splendor and intellectual brilliance of big cities like Paris and Philadelphia; easily fit into Washington’s administration, which began the “consolidation” and invigoration of the federal g
overnment; warned against secessionist tendencies of Federalists; and spent a good part of his life “entangling” America with foreign nations, especially France.

  Jefferson was a practical philosopher; he was even more a philosophical practitioner, who saw the needs of the immediate situation and drew from his vast learning the ideas that were relevant to that situation. He had grown up in the Virginia tradition of public service; won a seat in the House of Burgesses at twenty-six; served none too happily as wartime governor of Virginia; represented the new nation in France; and served under the new federal government as Secretary of State, Vice-President and presiding officer in the Senate. Rarely had he allowed ideology to interfere with the practical requirements of office.

  Thus the defender of revolution had, as Secretary of State, signed the proclamation against the Whiskey Rebels; the apostle of liberty had, as presiding officer of the Senate, signed the warrant for arrest of William Duane, for seditious contempt of that body. Apparent paradoxes in his views, Marshall Smelser has said, can be reconciled “by remembering that liberty was his navigating star, even though there were cloudy nights in his career when he steered in another direction.” But he refused to elevate specific institutions, traditions, and practices into dogmas. All these would change, while certain principles were eternal. And now he was entering the highest office in the land, once held by his fellow Virginian George Washington, and the test again would be whether he could stand by those principles and at the same time meet the day-to-day demands of transactional leadership.

  His friends had few doubts. They spent the inaugural days celebrating rather than cerebrating, although much of the festivity had a political edge. In Virginia an inaugural pageant depicted Liberty as a comely virgin, threatened by a king and a bishop and other assailants, until a trumpet sounded and a messenger proclaimed that Jefferson was President, whereupon the evil men took flight and sixteen beautiful women, one for each state, protected the virgin Liberty. Perhaps the most splendid inaugural festivity took place in Philadelphia. There sixteen horses, driven by a youth dressed in white, pulled a carriage bearing the resplendent schooner Thomas Jefferson. Toasts were drunk to Liberty and the Rights of Man. “Jefferson and Liberty,” termed “A Patriotic Song, for the Glorious Fourth of March, 1801,” and consisting of fourteen stanzas, began:

  O’er vast Columbia’s varied clime;

  Her cities, forests, shores and dales,

  In shining majesty sublime,

  Immortal Liberty prevails.

  Rejoice. Columbia’s sons, rejoice!

  To tyrants never bend the knee

  But join with heart, and soul, and voice,

  For JEFFERSON and LIBERTY.

  “THE EYES OF HUMANITY ARE FIXED ON US”

  His Republican friends might sing and toast and parade, but President Thomas Jefferson continued to shun grandiosity and rodomontade. Following the Inaugural, he settled back into the life of the boardinghouse, where he ate at table—and sometimes at the foot of it—with thirty or so other officials and politicos. For two weeks he transacted business in his small parlor there, before moving to the President’s house, but he stayed in the big new sandstone building less than two weeks before leaving for Monticello, where he remained almost a month. But even after that, presidential affairs seemed to go slowly. There were no balls in the mansion, no parades to Capitol Hill—all part of a consciously cultivated image of republican simplicity. The President had decided to abandon Washington’s and Adams’s policy of addressing Congress in person; nine months passed before he sent his formal written message to the legislature.

  All this was just what some of his Federalist critics expected of Jefferson—an easygoing, haphazard, aimless, even careless approach to the business of the federal government, in sad contrast to the activism and purposiveness of the two Federalist administrations. In fact, from the day of his Inaugural the new President acted according to a carefully conceived “grand political strategy” that dominated his handling of administrative, legislative, and party affairs.

  In shaping this grand strategy Jefferson enjoyed the sense of writing on a clean slate. “This whole chapter in the history of man is new,” he wrote his revered friend Dr. Priestley. “The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new.” He continued to view the American experiment as the supreme human venture. “The storm through which we have passed,” he wrote another friend, “has been tremendous indeed. The tough sides of our Argosie have been thoroughly tried. Her strength has stood the waves into which she was steered, with a view to sink her. We shall put her on her republican tack, & she will now show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.” Nor were they acting alone, he wrote later to a governor, “but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to shew whether man can be trusted with self-government. The eyes of suffering humanity are fixed on us with anxiety as their only hope.”

  Jefferson’s grand political strategy was simple though daring in conception: to separate moderate Federalists from their “monarchical leaders”; to draw those Federalists into a new and broadened Republican majority; meanwhile to keep his own Republican following content and united through a judicious application of loaves and fishes; to forge a new party majority coalition that would sustain his policies; to kill off the high Federalists as a political power; to expect—and to try to tolerate—a new opposition rising from within the ranks of his consolidated majority party. This strategy was not simply fabricated later by Jefferson or rationalized by Republican historians post hoc; it was shaped by the President before he took office and was expressed time and again in communications to his friends. Thus despite his conciliatory statements in his Inaugural Address, which were cited ever after as a lofty expression of nonpartisanship, he did not design to unite all Federalists with Republicans—only those he felt he could win over to his purposes.

  Noble sentiments alone did not impel Thomas Jefferson. He acted partly out of a deep and abiding anger toward the Hamiltonian and other high Federalists. It was hard for Jefferson to hate anyone, but even after attaining the psychological and political security of the presidency, he began referring to his old enemies as a “ravenous crew,” as witch burners, gross liars and slanderers, “tyrannical.” Granted that Jefferson designed some of these words to gratify Republican correspondents more extreme than he; still, they reveal that he had been seared by Adamsites and Hamiltonians far more deeply than he had admitted to others, or perhaps to himself.

  To a somewhat smaller circle Jefferson confided his plan to detach moderate Federalists from their “monarchical” leaders and consolidate them in a new Republican party coalition. A week before his inauguration he was noting that “patriotic” Federalists, alarmed by the specter of dissolution during the election crisis of February 1801, “separated from their congressional leaders, and came over to us.” But his purpose was clear. “If we can but avoid shocking their feelings by unnecessary acts of severity against their late friends, they will in a little time cement & form one mass with us, & by these means harmony & union be restored to our country…,” he wrote a friend three weeks after the inauguration. In midsummer he was advising a Massachusetts lieutenant that the “Essex junto, & their associate monocrats in every part of the Union” must be stripped of all the means of influence.

  His determination only rose as the high Federalist chorus swelled against him. By early the next year he was telling Du Pont de Nemours that the session of Congress had indeed consolidated the “great body of well meaning citizens together, whether federal or republican, heretofore called.” But, he added, “I do not mean to include royalists or priests. Their opposition is immovable. But they will be vox et preterea nihil, leaders without followers.”

  Did Jefferson, then, want the Federalist party to die? He not only wanted it, he expected it and planned for it. He predicted that by the end of his second year in office the “federal candi
date would not get the vote of a single elector in the U.S.” in a straight party fight. He even feared that the Senate would become too Republican in the next election, for “a respectable minority is useful as censors.” He did not want this to be a Federalist opposition, “being the bitterest cup of the remains of Federalism rendered desperate and furious by despair.” But it was not clear just how the new opposition would come into being.

  Jefferson was as skillful and hardheaded in carrying out his grand strategy as he was brilliant and determined in conceiving it. That strategy dominated his first executive action, the choice of a Cabinet. Picking James Madison for Secretary of State was inescapable: the two men had worked together in marvelous and creative harmony for decades. Madison was pre-eminently a moderate Republican, the kind Jefferson liked; as commanding in intellect as he was unimpressive in bearing and appearance, he had an understanding of legal and constitutional nuances, and perhaps of diplomacy, that Jefferson lacked.

  Apart from this Virginian, the President was determined to bring to his Cabinet Republican leaders from the middle and eastern states. The choice of Albert Gallatin for Secretary of the Treasury seemed almost as obvious as that of Madison: the Pennsylvanian had effectively marshaled Republican support in the House after Madison’s departure; he took a proper Republican approach of frugality and prudence to spending and other fiscal matters; he was only forty and energetic; and the “Frenchified” aspect of the man—his Geneva birth, pronounced accent, and “Gallic features”—that provoked his enemies was no deterrent to the President. But for his other two cabinet appointments Jefferson was determined to reach into the Federalist heartland of New England, even at the expense of choosing less notable men, so that he might achieve political and geographical balance and also attract moderate Federalists to his cause. He picked Levi Lincoln of Worcester, Massachusetts, an experienced Republican politician, for Attorney General, and Henry Dearborn, an old Revolutionary soldier of Maine (still part of Massachusetts), for Secretary of War. The President had such trouble finding a Secretary of the Navy—who would want to head a navy destined for Republican shrinkage?—that the post remained unfilled for some time.