October 11th, 1771.
It is agreed between John Randolph, esq., of the city of Williamsburg, and Thomas Jefferson of the County of Albemarle, that in case the said John shall survive the said Thomas, that the Exr’s or Adm’rs of the said Thomas shall deliver to the said John 800 pounds sterling of the books of the said Thomas, to be chosen by the said John, or if not books sufficient, the deficiency to be made up in money: And in case the said Thomas should survive the said John, that the Executors of the said John shall deliver to the said Thomas the violin which the said John brought with him into Virginia, together with all his music composed for the violin, or in lieu thereof if destroyed by any accident, 60 pounds sterling worth of books of the said John, to be chosen by the said Thomas. In witness whereof the said John and Thomas have hereunto subscribed their names and affixed their seals the day and year above written.
John Randolph (L.S.)
Th. Jefferson (L.S.)
Sealed and delivered in fresence of
G. Wythe,
Will. Drew,
Tho’s. Everand,
Richard Starke,
P. Henry, Jr.,
Wm. Johnson,
Ja. Steptoe.
Death seemed far off, however, and the said Thomas was impatient to get his itching fingers on the fiddle. He appears not to have pressed the matter on John Randolph, but neither does he seem ever to have lost sight of it. After four years—whether by force of being temporarily hard up, or wearied by Mr. Jefferson’s quiet pertinacity, or for whatever reason—John Randolph finally weakened. Mr. Jefferson’s pocket account-book carries the entry, under date of the seventeenth of August, “Delivered to Carter Braxton an order on the Treasurer in favour of J. Randolph, Att’y-General, for £13, the purchase-money for his violin. This dissolves our bargin recorded in the General Court, and revokes a legacy of £100 sterling to him now standing in my will, which was made in consequence of that bargain.”
So, with his little daughter and his violin, Mr. Jefferson set out. His journey up from his home to Boston, where his ship lay, was a matter of nearly two months, because he wished to get acquainted with the principal interests of the Eastern States, “informing myself of the state of commerce of each.” Heretofore he had only a hearsay acquaintance with these matters, no more than would come in the way of any intelligent Virginian planter. He made a leisurely progress through New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, wrestling valiantly with the different State currencies as he went along. His pocket account-book shows a reasonable ground for gratitude that in all his wide range of early studies, mathematics was “ever my favorite one.” With “New York currency, Dollars 8/” and “Connecticut, Dollars 6/” and “Rhode Island State” currency at still another rate of sterling exchange, paying for a dinner or a night’s lodging was an appalling business. He reached Boston on the eighteenth of June, deposited his heavy luggage, and then left for a side trip of two weeks in New Hampshire and Vermont.
The voyage from Boston to the English port of Cowes was uncommonly fast—twenty-one days. Mr. Jefferson made his usual thrifty use of it by studying navigation. He had nothing else to do, and one can never know by what off-chance new learning will some day come handy. He calculated courses, read charts, took the sun, and kept a workmanlike log, becoming a pretty fair theoretical navigator by the end of the voyage. On landing at Cowes, he got on as far as Portsmouth, where his poor little daughter, seasick and bored, having had no special interest in navigation to sustain her against ship’s fare, discomfort and tedium, took to her bed. After looking out for her as best he could for three days, Mr. Jefferson capitulated to the distrusted profession by calling in a physician, a Dr. Meek, who charged him two guineas sterling for two visits. Towards the end of July, Patsy had picked herself up enough to face the last leg of her journey, and on the thirtieth she and her father set out on the wretched crossing from Portsmouth to Havre.
Like all green travellers, Mr. Jefferson learned by experience as he went along. Practically a vegetarian, fond of fruit and nuts, he invested heavily in these luxuries during his first few days on land, welcoming the change from the restricted diet of the ship. He bought a couple of shillings worth of nuts and a good deal of fruit as soon as he landed in England, and he did the same at Havre. Then, in about the time it would normally take for a brisk run of tourist’s summer-complaint to set in, these entries in his account-book abruptly cease, and he seems hardly to have eaten another nut or piece of fruit for five years.
The entries for charity run a like course. Mr. Jefferson was always so open-handed that, in Philadelphia especially, his easiness became known and he was greatly pestered by beggars. When he had no money with him, he would borrow for the purpose. An item put down in 1784, for instance, records a joint investment with Monroe in an opportunity of this kind, which probably turned up as they were walking together on the street. “March 7. Borrowed Colo. Monroe 4/2—gave in charity 4/2, remember to credit him half.” But although American cities spawned a measure of distress in those days, there was hardly such a thing known as hopeless involuntary poverty. In 1782, when Mr. Jefferson had already seen a good deal of American town life, he wrote in reply to the queries of the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, “From Savannah to Portsmouth you will seldom meet a beggar. In the larger towns, indeed, they sometimes present themselves. These are usually foreigners who have never obtained a settlement in any parish. I never yet saw a native American begging in the streets or highways.” There was always the land for them to turn to, and with a little temporary tiding-over they would soon be on their own feet. “We have no paupers,” Mr. Jefferson wrote Thomas Cooper as late as 1814, “the old and crippled among us who possess nothing and have no families to take care of them, being too few to merit notice as a separate section of society or to affect a general estimate.”
But as soon as he set foot in France, Mr. Jefferson faced the real thing in involuntary poverty. After a year, he writes despondently to an American correspondent that “of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of the opinion there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States.” The people had been expropriated from the land, and huddled into vast exploitable masses. “The property [i.e., the land] of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million guineas a year downward”; and the consequence was that the majority lived merely on sufferance. Involuntary poverty, one might say, was so highly integrated as to erect mendicancy into an institution. This was new to Mr. Jefferson. “I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands,” and his conclusion was that “whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural rights. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.”
However, this was France’s problem, not his and not America’s—thank Heaven. He writes in a fervent strain to Monroe, “My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy. I confess I had no idea of it myself.” America had no end of land, and hence no problem of poverty. Nevertheless, he was just now in France, and France’s swarming paupers were nagging him at every turn. What could one do? Out of habit, he did for a while as he had always done; he gave away small amounts here and there on the moment, without question, as he happened to be importuned. This worked well in America; it really did some good, and at worst it was only an occasional matter. But here it did no good and was a matter of every hour in the day. Aside from its doing no good, moreover, one was so often swindled. The economic system that bred mendicancy also bred roguery, and there were many rogues among the mendicants. They too were very much to be pitied, no doubt, but to be
taken in by them only encouraged them, and they were an incessant pest. The “hackneyed rascals” of France were even waiting at the wharf at Havre; the account-book takes note of the demands of a swindling commissionaire: “Broker attendg me to Commandant 6 f.” The upshot was that after a couple of weeks of indiscriminate giving, he shut down on charity, save where he knew something about the applicant, as when he records giving “the poor woman at Têtebout 12 f.”
III
He found much to please him, however, in his new surroundings; he was especially attracted by the people’s natural sense, so much in accord with his own, of social life and manners. “The roughnesses of the human mind are so thoroughly rubbed off with them that it seems as if one might glide through a whole life among them without a jostle.” He had little trouble, even, with the degeneration of this quality into the official politesse sterile et rampante, the defensive formalism of the diplomat and statesman. The case-hardened old Foreign Minister, Vergennes, infirm and tired but clear-headed, could still match protective coloration with any diplomat put up against him. The diplomatic corps warned Mr. Jefferson that he was a formidable old fellow, “wary and slippery in his diplomatic intercourse.” All this might be true, no doubt, when he was playing the game by the rules “with those whom he knew to be slippery and double-faced themselves.” But Mr. Jefferson had no axe to grind, in the diplomatic sense. He was not a propagandist, as Franklin had been; he was an honest broker, not in crowns, colonies and protectorates, but in sound commodities like salt codfish, tobacco and potash. As soon therefore as Vergennes “saw that I had no indirect views, practiced no subtleties, meddled in no intrigues, pursued no concealed object, I found him as frank, as honourable, as easy of access to reason, as any man with whom I had ever done business; and I must say the same of his successor, Montmorin, one of the most honest and worthy of human beings.”
His enthusiasm was kindled at once by the contemplation of French proficiency in the arts and sciences. The music of Paris, which at that time was perhaps at the height of an unmusical people’s possibilities, was so much better than anything he had ever heard that he was delighted by it as “an enjoyment the deprivation of which with us [he writes this to an American correspondent] cannot be calculated. I am almost ready to say it is the only thing which from my heart I envy them, and which in spite of all the authority of the Decalogue I do covet.” He is without words to tell how much he enjoys their architecture, sculpture and painting. In science, he discovers that their literati “are half a dozen years before us. Books, really good, acquire just reputation in that time, and so become known to us and communicate to us all their advances in knowledge.” America, however, really misses nothing by being behindhand. Having few publishers and presses, American intelligence is saved the chance of suffocation under huge masses of garbage, such as are shot from the many presses of France. “Is not this delay compensated to us by our being placed out of reach of that swarm of nonsensical publications which issues daily from a thousand presses and perishes almost in issuing?”
Yet, making the most of all that was good in French life, admiring its virtues, delighting oneself in its amenities, one could not feel oneself properly compensated for the missing sense of freedom. There was no freedom in France, and therefore there was no real happiness. The immense majority was in bondage to its masters; the masters were in bondage to vices which were the natural fruit of irresponsibility, and which kept them in a condition really worse and more hopeless than that of those whom they exploited. “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.” Even the sense of taste and manners, so admirable, so interesting and prepossessing, is superficial and ineffectual in the absence of liberty. It controlled polite usages; it made imperative “all those little sacrifices of self which really render European manners amiable and relieve society from the disagreeable scenes to which rudeness often subjects it.” It held the minor routine of life in a generally agreeable course. “In the pleasures of the table they are far before us,” temperate, fastidious, discriminating. “I have never yet seen a man drunk in France, even among the lowest of the people.” All this was much to the good, and “a savage of the mountains of America” might well look on it with the keenest envy, perceiving how profoundly the fresh and simple charms of his native society might be enhanced by even this limited play of the sense of taste and manners.
But it was not enough. Good taste did not see eye to eye with justice in viewing the social structure of France as “a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see God and his angels in splendour, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet.” Such a civilization was not only iniquitous, but essentially low. Good taste did not ennoble the pursuits of the privileged minority. “Intrigues of love occupy the younger, and those of ambition the elder part of the great.” This was not only vicious, but vulgar. To a man for whom conduct was three-fourths of life and good taste nine-tenths of conduct, this failure in the primary sanctions of taste was peculiarly repulsive. The rough society of America was more hopeful. “I would wish my countrymen to adopt just as much of European politeness” as might sweeten and temper their whole-someness, and mould them into a nation of Fauquiers. But however far from realization that millennial dream might be, “I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds and the independence of Monticello to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital. I shall therefore rejoin myself to my native country with new attachments and with exaggerated esteem for its advantages.”
Europe, especially, was no place for young Americans; they were sure to go bad under its influence. Sending a youth to Europe for an education was utter futility. “If he goes to England, he learns drinking, horse-racing and boxing. These are the peculiarities of English education. . . . He is fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, and sees with abhorrence the lovely equality which the poor enjoy with the rich in his own country. . . . He recollects the voluptuary dress and arts of the European women, and pities and despises the chaste affections and simplicity of those of his own country.” Summing up a long and earnest disquisition on this topic, he declares that “the consequences of foreign education are alarming to me as an American.” Thinking of the Wythes, Franklins, Rittenhouses, Adamses, Pendletons and Madisons of his acquaintance, urging his correspondent to cast an eye over America to see “who are the men of most learning, of most eloquence, most beloved by their countrymen, and most trusted and promoted by them,” he assures him that they are “those who have been educated among them, and whose manners, morals and habits are perfectly homogeneous with those of the country.”
IV
Mr. Jefferson regarded with profound distrust and disfavour the phenomenon of the political woman, which he here confronted for the first time. After four years’ experience he writes to President Washington that without the evidence of one’s own eyes one could hardly “believe in the desperate state to which things are reduced in this country from the omnipotence of an influence which, fortunately for the happiness of the sex itself, does not endeavour to extend itself in our country beyond the domestic line.” He was continually shocked by the coarseness and vulgarity, let alone the scandalousness, of the custom which permitted women in search of favours not only to visit public officials, but to visit them alone, without the presence of a third person to guard the proprieties; and he was outraged to observe that “their solicitations bid defiance to laws and regulations.” The easy-going Franklin had been enough of an opportunist to accept this custom and turn it to the profit of his country. In a good cause he was not above doing some things that neither John Adams nor Mr. Jefferson would do; Adams, as a result of a “process of moral reasoning,” and Mr. Jefferson out of sheer repugnance. Mr. Jefferson was little tempted; he was not the type that women set their cap for. Besides, even a riggish French noblewoman could ha
rdly throw a glamour of romance over so prosaic an interest as the Franco-American trade in fish-oil and salt cod. Still, he could not quite avoid these women; he owed them civility, and he punctiliously paid the debt. He disliked Mme. de Staël, but having been kind to him she was not to be snubbed; nor yet was she to be courted for her youthful charms—she was then twenty-one—or for being the daughter of Neckar. He moved in her social circle with the high step and arched back of feline circumspection, and it does not appear that she ever took his attitude as a challenge to her hankering for conquest. After his return to America he wrote a kind of bread-and-butter letter to several French ladies who had made something of him in a social way; and in these, at the safe distance of three thousand miles, he risks a few ceremonious compliments. He assures Mme. de Corny, whom he really liked, that her civilities were “greatly more than I had a right to expect, and they have excited in me a warmth of esteem which it was imprudent in me to have given way to for a person whom I was one day to be separated from.” In the Duchesse d’Auville’s character “I saw but one error; it was that of treating me with a degree of favour I did not merit.” Corking down his effervescent horror of the bas-bleu, he declares to the Duchesse de la Rochefoucault, with a touch of irony, that if her system of ethics and of government were generally adopted, “we should have no occasion for government at all”; and he expresses to the Comtesse d’Houdetot his rather attenuated gratitude for lionizing him in her salon, and begs her to accept “the homage of those sentiments of respect and attachment with which I have the honour to be, Madame la Comtesse, your most obedient and most humble servant.” This was all very well; the language of compliment and ceremony was always acceptable at its face value. It was good, one might say, for this day and train only. His reservations were well understood. Still, if French women must go in for politics, it was at least something that the younger ones coming on after Calonne’s régime were beginning to go in on the right side. “All the handsome young women of Paris are for the Tiers Etat,” he writes David Humphreys in 1789, on the outbreak of the revolution, “and this is an army more powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the King.” In an emergency any stick will do to beat a dog; and a reflective American might hold his nose and survey the prospect with equanimity, since it concerned another country than his own.
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