Jefferson

by Albert Jay Nock

  But he could not do a hand’s turn in London; he was rebuffed everywhere. A witty saying has it that there is no such thing as good manners in England, but only the right and wrong kind of bad manners; and Mr. Jefferson was treated to a liberal display of both. He was presented to the King, as a matter of routine, and “it was impossible for anything to be more ungracious” than the sullen old maniac’s attitude. As for the Foreign Minister, who was then the Marquis of Caermarthen, to whom he was officially introduced by Adams, “the distance and disinclination which he betrayed in his conversation, the vagueness and evasions of his answers to us, confirmed me in the belief of their aversion to have anything to do with us.” The two ambassadors, however, delivered a memorandum of their proposals, “Mr. Adams not despairing as much as I did of its effect.” They never got within the gracious presence of the Foreign Minister again, though “we afterwards, by one or more notes, requested his appointment of an interview and conference, which, without directly declining, he evaded by pretences of other pressing occupations for the moment.” This went on for seven weeks, and then Mr. Jefferson gave his mission up as hopeless and left England, insula inhospitabilis, as Tacitus had tersely styled it two thousand years before; all he ever got out of Caermarthen being a stiff note in acknowledgment of his pour prendre congé, “wishing me a pleasant journey” back to Paris.

  In the course of this experience, Mr. Jefferson became aware that the English were not merely biting off their nose to spite their face. Far otherwise; “the English think we can not prevent our countrymen from bringing our trade into their laps,” he wrote his old friend John Page. “A conviction of this determines them to make no terms of commerce with us. They say they will pocket our carrying trade as well as their own.” There was something in this. There is little sentiment of any kind in the course of trade, and no nationalism. “Merchants have no country,” Mr. Jefferson said. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” American trade was drawn back into English channels after the Revolution by the irresistible attractions of price, quality and credit-facilities. The stupidity of the English Government lay in their refusal to recognize this tendency handsomely and lay down an enlightened doctrine of free trade with America, as John Adams kept trying to persuade them to do. Instead, they gruffly slapped their pockets, and treated Adams’s proposals with a porcine indifference that was a sure runner-up of economic war. “Ever since the accession of the present King of England,” Mr. Jefferson observes to Carmichael in 1787, “that court has done what common sense would have dictated not to do”; and he writes at the same time to John Adams, that “I never yet found any general rule for foretelling what the British will do, but that of examining what they ought not to do.” Moreover, the British Ministry had been keeping its press-agents busy throughout the decade since the war, in fomenting popular hatred of America. “You know well that that Government always kept a kind of standing army of news-writers, who, without any regard to truth or what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. . . . No paper, therefore, comes out without a dose of paragraphs against America.” Nothing could be done about it; if the British Government did not know which side their bread was buttered on, they must learn by experience. An economic war would cost the United States something; it would be regrettable and silly and all that, but apparently it must come. “Nothing will bring the British to reason but physical obstruction applied to their bodily senses. We must show that we are capable of foregoing commerce with them before they will be capable of consenting to an equal commerce. We have all the world besides open to supply us with gewgaws, and all the world to buy our tobacco.” Mr. Jefferson put it even more explicitly to Colonel Smith that “of all nations on earth, the British require to be treated with the most hauteur. They require to be kicked into common good manners.” Even John Adams, who had some misgivings about Mr. Jefferson’s despondent estimate of the situation, finally came around to the same way of thinking. After the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 had rubbed a sense of reality into his fine old head, he wrote Mr. Jefferson that “Britain will never be our friend until we are her master.”

  VI

  The European ensemble, and the progress of Constitution-building in America during the years 1786-1787, turned Mr. Jefferson’s mind towards some speculations on the general theory and practice of government. The trouble with government in Europe as he saw it, was its complete centralization in the hands of the relatively few non-producers; the symbol of this centralization was monarchy. Those who actually applied labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, had no voice in government. Just before Mr. Jefferson set sail for Europe, he remarked to General Washington that “the hereditary branches of modern government are the patrons of privilege and prerogative, and not of the natural rights of the people, whose oppressors they generally are”; and one of his last letters from Paris, written to Edward Carrington, contained the observation that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Because this tendency is wholly natural, there was no point to getting up a great sweat of moral indignation against it. One of the most profound preferences in human nature is for satisfying one’s needs and desires with the least possible exertion; for appropriating wealth produced by the labour of others, rather than producing it by one’s own labour. Any Frenchman, for example, would rather worm his way into the membership of the Farmers-General and levy on the wealth produced by French labour and capital, than employ his own labour and capital to produce wealth for himself. Any Englishman would rather live by appropriating the economic rent of land-holdings than by working. Obviously, the stronger and more centralized the government, the safer would be the guarantee of such monopolies; in other words, the stronger the government, the weaker the producer, the less consideration need be given him and the more might be taken away from him. A deep instinct of human nature being for these reasons always in favour of strong government, nothing could be a more natural progress of things than “for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” In England and France, government had gained all the ground there was, and liberty had yielded all. That was the whole story.

  For America, Mr. Jefferson was convinced that republicanism was a better system because it lent itself less easily to centralization. It gave the producer some kind of voice in the direction of affairs, and since the producer was greatly in the majority in any society, he had—if he were interested and intelligent enough to profit by it—a fair chance of keeping his interests uppermost. Republicanism was not the ideal system. The Indians, as Mr. Jefferson points out to Madison, lived in a distinct and quite highly organized type of society, and got on very well without any government at all. While “it is a problem not clear in my mind that [this] condition is not the best,” he believed it to be “inconsistent with any great degree of population,” though he seems never to have asked himself just why this should be so. Republicanism, “wherein the will of every one has a just influence,” was the best system attainable; the spirit of the times had not disclosed anything better. It “has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness.”

  But republicanism is no fetish; he is perfectly clear-sighted about this. Republicanism gives the producing classes their chance; but it does not protect them automatically if they are not for ever alive to their chance. “If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs,” he writes austerely from Paris to Edward Carrington, “you and I and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.” The most that can be said for republicanism is that intrinsically “the republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind”; but most of the republics of the world, he yet reminds Madison, have degenerat
ed into governments of force; and in his draft of the Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, eight years before, he had incorporated the warning that while “certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shown that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

  He was aware, again, that America was far from free to work out, in isolation and on pure theory, a system of its own. Aside from, collisions of domestic interests, which were shortly to furnish him most disagreeable surprises, external circumstances counted heavily. If the United States were to exist at all, and not be swallowed piecemeal by the predacious military powers of Europe, it must become, for some purposes, a nation; it must have, for instance, a central body of authority for its foreign affairs. His efforts abroad in behalf of trade had taught him that the Articles of Confederation would not answer. As long as he could not make clear whether the legal regulation of trade was a Federal or a State function, he could get no trade. But he was sure that the purposes for which the United States should be a nation must be as few as possible, otherwise the history of European exploitation would be repeated on the grand scale. The utmost concession that it would be proper to make, as he wrote to his old preceptor, George Wythe, was that “the States should severally preserve their sovereignty in whatever concerns themselves alone, and whatever may concern another State, or any foreign nation, should be made a part of the Federal sovereignty.” After all, the domestic functions of an honest Federal sovereignty were few, and their character purely administrative and non-political—carrying the mails, coining money, regulating transportation, and the like—and for the rest, speaking generally, “the States should be left to do whatever acts they can do as well as the General Government.” In short, the United States should be a nation abroad, and a confederacy at home.

  This arrangement, he thought, would be workable and satisfactory. The producer could not be exploited unless he were first driven off the land, and this he could not be but by a much greater strengthening of the central government. If this were attempted, he thought that the producer, being so vastly in the majority, might be counted on for effective resistance, thus keeping both State and Federal governments, as he called it, “virtuous.” Referring to the proposed Constitution, he therefore writes Madison in 1787 that on principle he is for the will of the majority, and that if a majority approve of the forthcoming Constitution, “I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes they will amend it whenever they find it works wrong. This reliance can not deceive us as long as we remain virtuous; and I think we shall be so as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case while there remains vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as in Europe.” His own private view went far beyond the idea of the State as the self-governing unit; he was for making the smallest political unit self-governing, in order to keep the producer alert and interested. He admitted to John Adams in 1813 that his Diffusion of Knowledge Bill had a joker in it for this ulterior purpose, by dividing the county into “wards” or towns, and “confiding to them the care of their poor, their roads, police, elections, the nomination of jurors . . . in short, to have made them little republics with a warden at the head of each, for all those concerns which, being under their eye, they would manage better than the larger republics of the county or State.” But it was better to concede something and get enough, than to insist on all and get nothing; and the establishment of the State as the domestic self-governing unit, he thought, would probably be enough to keep the producer’s head above water.

  VII

  As the French Revolution drew on, Mr. Jefferson was frankly pleased with the prospect. He saw in it the chance of emancipation, not only for the French producer, but for the producing interests everywhere in Europe. The successful reformation of government in France would insure “a general reformation through Europe, and the resurrection to a new life of their people, now ground to dust by the abuses of the governing powers.” Where his class-interest was concerned, he was always a staunch friend of the revolutionary principle, and he made no bones of saying so. Revolutions served a double purpose. They kept the Government’s ear open to its master’s voice, and they also sharpened popular attention to what the Government was doing. On this account he was not inclined to be over-particular about the merits of a revolutionary cause; the attitude traditionally ascribed to the southern Irish, of being more or less against the Government under any and all circumstances, was one that he thought, on the whole, rather salutary. When he got news of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, late in 1786, he picked, out of all unlikely people in New England, the president of Yale College and the redoubtable and forthright Mrs. John Adams, as candidates for a good round piece of his mind. “I like a little rebellion now and then,” he wrote Mrs. Adams, “. . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” Yale College had just given Mr. Jefferson an honorary degree, and in acknowledging the compliment, the newly made Doctor of Laws took occasion to remark that the commotions in America “are a proof that the people have liberty enough, and I could not wish them less than they have. If the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then, or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase. Malo libertatem periculosam quam quietem servitutem.”

  Shays’s Rebellion, however, had more than an academic interest for him. “These people are not entirely without excuse,” he wrote Carmichael. Theirs seemed to him an uprising against an unfair pressure of debt and taxation, applied by collusion among a minority of exploiting interests—the rich merchant-enterprisers or “factors” of Boston, whom he almost begrudged the right to live; the judges and lawyers, whom he would not trust as far as he would a dog with his dinner; and the horde of speculators, bankers, “stock-jobbers and king-jobbers,” whom he regarded as mere vermin. He suspected that the agonized invocation of law and order that went up against Shays’s demonstration was organized by these interests, for the people were on the other side—so much so, it turned out, that although the ringleaders were condemned, they were never punished. He thought that the prompt turning of this incident to account as the basis of demand for a stronger and more stable central government represented what he later called “the interested clamours and sophistry of speculating, shaving and banking institutions.” The Federal Congress had not dared come to the assistance of Massachusetts in putting down the rebellion, but it did, later in the year, make provision for a Federal army, under plea of danger from the Indians; and in its secret journals it made the astonishing entry of its confidence in “the most liberal exertions of the money-holders in the State of Massachusetts and the other States in filling the loans authorized by the resolve of this date,” to pay the troops! While Washington was writing in bewilderment from Mount Vernon of his acute distress at “the disorders that have arisen in these States,” and of his fear that “there are combustibles in every State which a spark might set fire to”; while General Knox was announcing his discovery that Americans were “men possessing all the turbulent passions belonging to that animal, and that we must have a government proper and adequate for him”—Mr. Jefferson, in Paris, with a revolution of the first magnitude on the point of breaking about his ears, was scanning the latest accounts of Shays’s uprising, and writing earnestly to W. S. Smith, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all and always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to th
e public liberty.”

  VIII

  The leaders of the French Revolution in its first phase, being new at the business, were inclined to profit by Mr. Jefferson’s experience. “Being from a country which had successfully passed through a similar reformation, they were disposed to my acquaintance, and had some confidence in me.” The committee of the Assembly, appointed to draft a Constitution, asked him to meet with them and assist them. He declined to do this, but, chiefly through his old and good friend Lafayette, he managed to contribute some first-rate advice without getting himself into trouble; although on one occasion, friendship manoeuvred him into the appearance, at least, of a pretty serious diplomatic indiscretion, and if he had not had as sensible and sympathetic a person as the French Foreign Minister to deal with, he might have found his position invidious. Lafayette invited himself and half a dozen friends to dine at Mr. Jefferson’s house one evening, and when dinner was over, the company resolved itself into a spirited caucus, finally producing, after six hours’ discussion, the concordat upon which the Republicans and moderate Royalists in the Assembly subsequently united. It was the measure which “decided the fate of the Constitution.” Although Mr. Jefferson was but “a silent witness” to this notable performance, it was hardly the kind of thing to be going on in the residence of the American Minister. He accordingly lost no time in looking up Montmorin next morning, and making what amends he could for his apparent breach of etiquette, telling him “with truth and candour how it had happened that my house had been made the scene of conferences of such a character.” But Montmorin, who saw well enough which way the wind was blowing, had no prejudices; indeed, “he earnestly wished I would habitually assist at such conferences, being sure I should be useful in moderating the warmer spirits and promoting a wholesome and practicable reformation only.”