But for his own countrywomen such a prospect was wholly impracticable and impossible. “Our good ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics,” he writes anxiously to the dazzling and skittish queen of Philadelphia’s society, Mrs. William Bingham, “They are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate.” Mrs. Bingham had ventured to suggest that even if the French upper classes were a loose lot and had no domestic virtues worth speaking of, an American woman might yet not find Paris utterly unbearable; indeed, she might manage to have rather a good time there. Mr. Jefferson gravely assures her that she is mistaken about this. “Recollect the women of this capital, some on foot, some on horses and some in carriages, hunting pleasure in the streets, in routs and assemblies, and forgetting that they have left it behind them in their nurseries; compare them with our own countrywomen occupied in the tender and tranquil amusements of domestic life, and confess that it is a comparison of Americans and angels.” On its social side, the Jeffersonian system took little account of the individuality of women, and on its political side, it made no place for them. Assume, Mr. Jefferson wrote, that the republican principle were carried out in practice as far as it will go; assume such an extension of the town-meeting as would settle all public business in popular assembly, “there would yet be excluded from their deliberations: (1) Infants, until arrived at years of discretion. (2) Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men. (3) Slaves.” Women, again, like infants and slaves, being devoid of rights both of will and property, were not only incompetent to an exercise of will in a popular assembly, but “of course could delegate none to the agent in a representative assembly.” Woman’s only chance at getting an interest represented would be through the attorneyship or brokerage of some male middleman, acting for her as a “qualified citizen.”
But why should it be otherwise? What individual interest could a woman have that she should prefer to maintain for herself, rather than trust a father or husband to maintain for her? “It is an honourable circumstance for man that the first moment he is at his ease, he allots the internal employments to his female partner and takes the external on himself.” Women have all the best of it under this arrangement, because their duties are so simple. They might be a little trying sometimes, but there is never any trouble about understanding them. “The happiness of your life now depends on the continuing to please a single person,” Mr. Jefferson wrote his daughter Martha at the time of her marriage. “To this all other objects must be secondary, even your love for me.” To his daughter Maria, on her marriage to John Eppes, he wrote, “Nothing can preserve affections uninterrupted but a firm resolution never to differ in will. . . . How light in fact is the sacrifice of any other wish when weighed against the affections of one with whom we are to pass our whole life.” It was all plain and straightforward. A woman should please the particular middleman who happened to be standing for the moment as her attorney to the world; her father first, then her husband or brother or guardian. She should bend her will to his. In return, all her relations to society would be attentively prescribed for her, and she would be adjusted to them considerately, affectionately, comfortably. No reasonable woman could ask more. “American women have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all other”; they are not like the forward Frenchwomen who dangle about minister’s cabinets unattended, and piddle at visionary schemes of ethics and government. If now and then a renegade type turns up, she must be sent to the right-about. In the last year of his Presidency, Mr. Jefferson writes magisterially to Gallatin, his Secretary of the Treasury, “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”
Woman’s duty being so incomplex, and the grasp of it needing so little brains, the education of women was correspondingly simple; so simple, indeed, that one would not think much about it. Mr. Jefferson bent his mind to the theory and practice of education for nearly fifty years; yet at the age of seventy, he says that “a plan of female education has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me. It has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters occasionally required.” Seeing that his girls were likely to live in a sparsely-settled agricultural country, he thought that for vocational reasons they ought to have a solid education “which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost or incapable or inattentive.” Such few general thoughts as ever took rise from this experience are put down in a letter to a neighbour in Virginia. He finds that a great obstacle to good education for women is their inordinate passion for novels. In those who seek this release for the pent desire for romance, “the result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.” Some novels of a historical type, however, are well enough. “For a like reason, much poetry should not be indulged. Some is useful for forming taste and style”; Dryden and Pope, for example, and Thomson! French is indispensable. Music is “invaluable where a person has an ear.” Drawing is an innocent and engaging amusement, often useful, and “a qualification not to be neglected in one who is to become a mother and an instructor.” Dancing is a healthy and elegant exercise, a specific against social awkwardness, but an accomplishment of short use, “for the French rule is wise, that no lady dances after marriage . . . gestation and nursing leaving little time to a married lady when this exercise can be either safe or innocent.” Women must be taught to dress neatly at all hours, for vocational reasons. “A lady who has been seen as a sloven or slut in the morning,” he tells Martha, “will never efface the impression she has made, with all the dress and pageantry she can afterwards involve herself in. . . . I hope therefore, the moment you rise from bed, your first work will be to dress yourself in such style as that you may be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss.” Finally, always for vocational reasons, women must be taught to wash themselves; it is the acme of impracticality for them to go dirty, since “nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.”
Mr. Jefferson did his best by his daughters. He put Patsy in a convent school in Paris, where he bombarded her with letters in which the expression of a larvated love was, as usual, inhibited into a diffident formalism by the combination of natural reticence and a more or less puzzled sense of responsibility. “I rest the happiness of my life in seeing you beloved by all the world, which you will be sure to be if to a good heart you join those accomplishments so peculiarly pleasing in your sex.” That is about the best he can do, except by way of suggesting occupations for her leisure hours, and in this his fertility is endless. To be sure, her leisure hours were not many; they never had been many, even when she was at home. The year before she went abroad, her father had laid out the following schedule of her time;
From 8 to 10, practice music.
From 10 to 1, dance one day, and draw another.
From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.
From 3 to 4, read French.
From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music.
From 5 till bed-time, read English, write, etc.
In Paris he is continually anxious about her not having enough to do, and about a certain listlessness towards her duties, a kind of boredom. He has a harpsichord sent her from London; he tries to get her interested in the note of the nightingale, so that when she returns to Virginia she may compare it with that of the mocking-bird; he informs her all about the literary and historical associations of certain places in Italy and the South of France; he redoubles his solicitations towards the industrious life, urging her to remember that “a mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity. The idle are the only wretched.” How could one doubt it? He him
self had never been idle for an aggregate of twelve hours in his whole life, and in the large sense, he had always been happy; when Satan had approached him with the proverbial wares of mischief, they found a closed market. But while Martha did her best to realize upon her prescribed pursuits, they seemed for some reason to pass their dividends. She was interested in her father’s stories of the fountain of Vaucluse, the tomb of Laura and the château of Petrarch, but her interest was sentimental rather than antiquarian; they seemed to generate, if not “a sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life,” at least a disturbing half-heartedness and irresolution about facing them. She tried to do everything in reason for the nightingales, but here again she did not find her father’s exhortations as animating as they should be. Presently, after looking over the prospects which the future seemed to hold in store for an amiable dreamy wench in her teens, Patsy decided that she would probably do well to dedicate the rest of her life to the service of God. She accordingly wrote her father for permission to enter the holy sisterhood. Two days afterward, he appeared at the convent and took her away, with no intimation either by word or manner that she had expressed any such wish; and as long as he lived he never once alluded to her request, nor did she. Thenceforth he kept her with him, mothering her younger sister, Maria; both returned to America with him; both fulfilled their destiny as their father’s daughters by becoming dutiful and assiduous wives, mothers, housekeepers; and they continued in the joy of these occupations as long as their strength held out.
V
Throughout the period of his ambassadorship, Mr. Jefferson found little doing in the way of business. Vergennes was polite, considerate, straightforward. They discussed one article of commerce after another, but could never come to much more than nominal terms. In the matter of rice, flour, fish, and “provisions of all sorts,” the French were doing quite well as they were. Their own colonies supplied them with indigo, and “they thought it better than ours.” They could make a good market for American peltry and furs, but the English were holding all the northwestern American posts, and therefore the supply of these commodities was effectively shut off. The only market that really amounted to anything was for tobacco. France was then buying two million livres’ worth of American tobacco every year; but most of it was bought in London, and “for what they bought in the United States, the money was still remitted to London by bills of exchange.” Mr. Jefferson suggested to Vergennes that this was not good business; that “if they would permit our merchants to sell this article freely, they would bring it here and take the returns on the spot, in merchandise, not money.” Vergennes had no trouble about seeing the point; he “observed that my proposition contained what doubtless was useful”; but political considerations stood in the way. In plain words, he could not admit American tobacco to the French ports without incurring a head-on collision with the Farmers-General.
The French crown had, some time before, turned over the business of tax-collection to private enterprise. The private company called the Farmers-General paid the King twenty-eight million livres flat revenue on tobacco, and assumed all the trouble and expense of reimbursing themselves out of the consumer. They had a similar monopoly on salt, and on certain tolls collected on agricultural products at the gates of French cities. As a rule, they collected what the traffic would bear; and hence in almost no time at all they grew up into the richest and most powerful institution in France—far too powerful for any minister to tackle with a proposition to give up one of their best monopolies. Vergennes put it gently “that it was always hazardous to alter arrangements of long standing and of such infinite combinations with the fiscal system.” He himself was quite for Mr. Jefferson’s proposals, but they would have to take their chances with Calonne, the Comptroller-General; and Calonne, as an honourable official, was properly scandalized at the suggestion that the good faith of the nation, pledged by implication to the Farmers-General, should in any way be tarnished. Later on, perhaps, when the Farmers-General had had time to turn around, it was not impossible that the royal understanding with them might be modified by some kind of compromise; but at present nothing could be done. Calonne knew which side his bread was buttered on. Mr. Jefferson remarked in reporting this matter to Congress, that “the influence of the Farmers-General has been heretofore found sufficient to shake a minister in his office,” and that if Calonne opposed the tobacco-monopoly, “the joint interests of France and America would be insufficient counterpoise in his favour,” and he would lose his place.
After a year and a half of this kind of shilly-shallying, Mr. Jefferson writes mournfully, “What a cruel reflection, that a rich country can not long be a free one!” Wherever his eyes rested, he saw the French producer labouring under “all the oppressions which result from the nature of the general government, and from that of their particular tenures, and of the seignorial government to which they are subject.” Government, in short, was, as Voltaire said, a mere device for taking money out of one man’s pocket and putting it into another’s. The European governments, he writes to Rutledge, are “governments of wolves over sheep.” All he saw confirmed him in the view which he had laid down at the age of thirty, in his paper on The Rights of British America, saying that “the whole art of government consists in the art of being honest”; and in the Declaration of Independence, saying that governments are instituted among men to secure certain inherent and inalienable rights, and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”
A visit to England during this year stiffened his convictions. In February, 1786, John Adams sent for him to come over to London to assist in the negotiation of treaties with Portugal and Tripoli. Here he saw a population expropriated from the land, and existing at the mercy of industrial employers, with the enormous exactions of monopoly standing as a fixed charge upon the producer, though not so heavy as in France—the French producers “pay about one-half their produce in rent; the English, in general, about a third.” The British governmental system was steadfastly on the side of the landmonopolists who expropriated the people and of the industrialists who exploited them; it was really their agent. “The aristocracy of England, which comprehends the nobility, the wealthy commoners, the high grades of priesthood and the officers of government, have the laws and government in their hands [and] have so managed them as to reduce the eleemosynary class, or paupers, below the means of supporting life, even by labour. [They] have forced the labouring class, whether employed in agriculture or the arts, to the maximum of labour which the construction of the human body can endure, and to the minimum of food, and of the meanest kind, which will preserve it in life and in strength sufficient to perform its functions.” As for the paupers, they “are used as tools to maintain their own wretchedness, and to keep down the labouring portion by shooting them whenever the desperation produced by the cravings of their stomachs drives them into riots.” Over and above these patriotic duties, the paupers also “furnish materials for armies and navies to defend their country, exercise piracy on the ocean, and carry conflagration, plunder and devastation to the shores of all those who endeavour to withstand their aggressions. Such,” he concludes bitterly, “is the happiness of scientific England.”
Having this view of the English and French governments, Mr. Jefferson was always prompt to differentiate their character from that of their victims. The individuals of the English nation are “as faithful to their private engagements and duties, as honourable, as worthy, as those of any nation of earth,” and therefore the country “presents a singular phenomenon of an honest people whose constitution, from its nature, must render their government forever dishonest.” He had already remarked a similar distinction in favour of the French people, as bearing “the most benevolent, the most gay and amiable character of which the human form is susceptible,” and yet as “loaded with misery by kings, nobles and priests, and by them alone.” France is “the worst-governed country
on earth,” and the British government “the most flagitious which has existed since the days of Philip of Macedon. . . . It is not only founded in corruption itself, but insinuates the same poison into the bowels of every other, corrupts its councils, nourishes factions, stirs up revolutions, and places its own happiness in fomenting commotions and civil wars among others, thus rendering itself truly the hostis humani generis.” The practical upshot of this state of things is, as he writes John Adams, that “as for France and England, with all their progress in science, the one is a den of robbers, and the other of pirates.”
Still, as an honest broker with goods to sell, Mr. Jefferson was disposed to lay aside his private opinions and deal with these people if he could. After all, nations must live, and to do so they must seek their advantage where they can find it. He asked no favours of the French ministry; he represented merely the enlightened self-interest of America, and was trying to elicit a response from theirs. He had no prejudices against the English Government that would stand out against being polite and pleasant about matters of reciprocal advantage. He was aware, as he said late in life, that “no two nations can be so helpful to each other as friends nor so hurtful as enemies”; and, indeed, if the English Government could only bring itself to “treat us with justice and equity, I should myself feel with great strength the ties which bind us together, of origin, language, laws and manners.” He had come late and reluctantly into the movement for American independence, believing, as most of the colonists did, that if they could get a working measure of economic independence, political independence was not worth the cost of a quarrel. “If I could permit myself to have national partialities,” he writes in 1812, “and if the conduct of England would have permitted them to be directed towards her, they would have been so.” And now, in his present capacity, as a peaceable commercial representative holding out the olive branch of profitable trade, he could clearly see that “a friendly, a just and a reasonable conduct on the part of the British might make us the main pillar of their prosperity and existence.” Why might not the British see it too? At all events, he would not be found at fault in the matter, now or ever, for the best of reasons. “As a political man, the English shall never find any passion in me either for or against them. Whenever their avarice of commerce will let them meet us fairly half way, I should meet them with satisfaction, because it would be for our benefit.”
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