Montmorin’s trust was based on sound evidence of Mr. Jefferson’s attitude and disposition. He had his own sources of information about him, and knew him to be neither a doctrinaire revolutionist nor a doctrinaire Republican, but the spokesman of an out-and-out class-interest, with which Montmorin himself had a certain amount of cautious sympathy. Revolution was not an end in itself, but the means to an end; its end was the economic emancipation of the producing class, and the less trouble and disturbance about approaching this end, the less likelihood that the end would be obscured and the line of approach deflected. Mr. Jefferson saw the chance that usually shines out of such circumstances for one golden moment, and then, if unimproved, disappears for ever—the chance of what his great contemporary, the Duke of Wellington, called “a revolution by due course of law.” The Government was ready to yield, as it afterwards did yield, quite enough for the Revolution to go on with and consolidate its gains in peace—the King’s speech at the City Hall, his acceptance of a popular escort headed by the Bourgeois Guards under Lafayette, his assumption of the popular cockade, were “such an amende honorable as no sovereign ever made and no people ever received.” Perceiving at the outset that the Government was in a state of wholesome fear, particularly because of the lukewarmness of many of the younger aristocrats and disaffection in the army, Mr. Jefferson, “painfully anxious lest despotism, after an unaccepted offer to bind its own hands, should seize you again with tenfold fury,” earnestly besought the revolutionists to give play to the spirit of compromise. Everything gained in this way would be a clear gain, while everything gained by admitting the spirit of violence and passion must in the long run have the extravagances of violence and passion charged off against it. “I urged most strenuously an immediate compromise; to secure what the Government was now ready to yield, and trust to future occasions for what might still be wanting.” He drew up the terms of what he thought a proper compromise, and gave the draft to Lafayette and St. Etienne; but the revolutionary leaders rejected it as too moderate, and took no action, thus permitting the one opportunity for peaceful adjustment to slip away.
“Events have proved their lamentable error,” Mr. Jefferson wrote thirty years later, after the Revolution had degenerated through the course of its own enormities, and made way for those of Napoleon. The revolutionists could not foresee “the melancholy sequel of their well-meant perseverance; that their physical force would be usurped by a first tyrant to trample on the independence and even the existence of other nations.” Worst of all, they could not foresee the ensuing defensive freemasonry of the Russian Emperor Alexander’s league of nations called the Holy Alliance, set up to make international common cause among the exploiting classes and unite them against the revolutionary spirit, wherever found. They could not foresee that their error “would afford a fatal example for the atrocious conspiracy of kings against their people; would generate their unholy and homicide alliance to make common cause among themselves, and to crush by the power of the whole the efforts of any part to moderate their abuses and oppressions.”
Mr. Jefferson believed that the republican spirit also, like the revolutionary spirit, was going hand over head. Republicanism, he thought, in the words of an acute critic, tried to do too much and did it. He was uncompromisingly for republicanism in America, as affording the producer the best fulcrum or purchase for maintaining his political ascendancy. But France, unlike America which had no great transition to make and no binding force of political tradition to overcome, was not in shape to employ it, and would make a mess of it. Mr. Jefferson saw nothing more certain than that France would finally become republican, if let alone, and in none too long time for safety. “This whole chapter in the history of man is new”; if the American experiment succeeded, which one could hardly doubt, republicanism in France, as in all the world, would catch the contagion quickly enough. The, thing to be avoided meanwhile was the hazard of win-all, lose-all. “The King was now become a passive machine in the hands of the National Assembly, and had he been left to himself, he would have willingly acquiesced in whatever they should devise as best for the nation.” The wisest move would be to constitutionalize the monarchy, and leave Louis XVI at the head of it, “with powers so large as to enable him to do all the good of his station, and so limited as to restrain him from its abuse.” Remembering the great reforms projected by Turgot in the early years of the king’s reign, and ended only by the opposition of the nobles and clergy, whose claws were now effectively clipped, Mr. Jefferson believed that the King would faithfully administer a sound constitutional policy, and “more than this I do not believe he ever wished.” Something should certainly be done about the wretched, dissipated, slippery, half-witted little queen. “I have ever believed that had there been no queen, there would have been no Revolution”; but with all his wrath at her follies, Mr. Jefferson was not for bringing her under the law of treason. “I should have shut up the queen in a convent, putting harm out of her power, and placed the King in his station, investing him with limited powers which I verily believe he would have honestly exercised according to the measure of his understanding. In this way no void would have been created, courting the usurpation of a military adventurer, nor occasion given for those enormities which demoralized the nations of the world.” It was in the void that he saw danger.
Still, one could appreciate the popular point of view; one could even respect the spirit of the popular judgment. The nation had suffered horribly at the hands of these people, and the thought of vengeance was not unnatural. “Of those who judged the King, many thought him wilfully criminal.” Again, if the King lived and if the nation kept up an ever-thinning shade of monarchy, would there not be continual dynastic plottings and graspings after its lost substance? Again, if the nation kept the trappings of monarchy and at the same time made an end of the economic exploitation of which monarchy was the symbol, would it not live “in perpetual conflict with the horde of kings who would war against a generation which might come home to themselves”? Had not the Allied Powers indeed already put a counter-revolutionary army into France, under the Duke of Brunswick? Finally, might it not be well to have the new political formulas applied as widely as possible and tried out as quickly as possible, in behalf of clearing their theory?
Chance made Mr. Jefferson an eye-witness of the first bloodshed of the French Revolution. Just as a casual mob made ready to stone a handful of cavalry drawn up in the Place Louis Quinze, his carriage came by. They could hardly have known who he was, but he was a stranger and that was enough. This fracas was their own affair; it was nothing for a stranger to be mixed up in. There was a deep unconscious significance in the action of the mob, which, with stones in their uplifted hands, paused a moment to let the great libertarian pass through their midst in safety. “But the moment after I had passed, the people attacked the cavalry with stones. . . . This was the signal for universal insurrection. . . . ”
Chapter IV
1784-1789 (Continued)
I
ALTHOUGH business on the whole was dull, the American representative finally got a few concessions on minor lines of trade, such as fish-oil, potash, ship-timber and hides. He could do little about tobacco. His efforts to loosen the tobacco-monopoly, indeed, were not wholly well thought of even at home. Robert Morris of Philadelphia had got an exclusive contract with the Farmers-General, which had had the disastrous effect of cutting down the American planter’s price by nearly fifty per cent, and had “thrown the commerce of that article in agonies”; and in December, 1786, Mr. Jefferson confides to Monroe a suspicion that “my proceedings to redress the abusive administration of tobacco by the Farmers-General have indisposed towards me a powerful person in Philadelphia who was profiting from that abuse.” He had not suggested an annulment of the contract, however, chiefly because if the contract were broken, the price of tobacco in the French market would break with it. He merely sought that “after the expiration of this contract, no similar one should be made, and that meanwhi
le the Farmers-General should be obliged to purchase annually about fifteen thousand hogsheads of American tobacco, imported directly from the United States in French or American vessels, at the same price or on the same conditions which have been stipulated by the contract with Mr. Morris.” This arrangement was effected—at least on paper—and it was probably the thing that first brought Mr. Jefferson in for the unfavourable attention of the alert and growing brood of American speculative interests outside his native State. With his customary dislike of explaining any course of conduct that he deemed proper to follow, he told Monroe that while he had not actually gone to the lengths that Morris might suspect from a certain paragraph which Calonne had written on the subject of the tobacco-contract, he had done what he conceived to be the right thing all round, “and I will not so far wound my privilege of doing that, without regard to any man’s interest, as to enter into any explanations of this paragraph with him. Yet I esteem him highly, and suppose that hitherto he had esteemed me.”
The King of Prussia, who hated England, alone was prompt and business-like towards the American commercial envoys. “Old Frederic of Prussia met us cordially and without hesitation, and, appointing the Baron de Thulemeyer, his Minister at the Hague, to negotiate with us, we communicated to him our projet which, with little alteration by the King, was soon concluded.” Denmark and Tuscany also nibbled at the bait. But “other Powers appearing indifferent, we did not think it proper to press them. They seemed in fact to know little about us but as rebels who had been successful in throwing off the yoke of the mother country.” In the general field of diplomacy, Mr. Jefferson found little to do. The Barbary States were at the time making such a success with piracy on the Mediterranean that they had brought it up to something like the dimensions of a national industry; and Mr. Jefferson had not been long at his post before a Moroccan cruiser captured and confiscated an American ship and held her crew for ransom. The maritime Powers of Europe were finding it cheaper to pay tribute than to fight, and were getting along comfortably on that basis; but under the Articles of Confederation the United States had little money for tribute or for fighting or for anything. Disliking the idea of tribute, Mr. Jefferson organized a provisional combination of the smaller maritime Powers with the United States to police the North African coast with a dozen men-of-war, having first made sure that the French Government would not interfere, or permit England to interfere, with this joint enterprise. Congress, however, could not see its way to supply the American quota of one frigate, so nothing was done.
His only other diplomatic concern of importance was in international finance; and his principal achievement in that line was to head off his impetuous colleague, John Adams, who had been elected Vice-President, from going off home, incontinently leaving the dead and malodorous albatross of American credit hung to his neck. Adams, while at the Hague, before his transfer to London, had a general authority to deal with the Dutch bankers as best he could, in pursuance of a hand-to-mouth national policy of borrowing oneself out of debt. “Interest on the public debt, and the maintenance of the diplomatic establishment in Europe, had been habitually provided in this way.” The ice was getting thin under this policy, however, and Adams, with his vigorous single-track mind full of the Vice-Presidency, was hastening his preparations homeward, telling the bankers that they should see Mr. Jefferson in case anything came up. “I was daily dunned by a company who had formerly made a small loan to the United States, the principal of which was now become due; and our bankers in Amsterdam had notified me that the interest on our general debt would be expected in June; that if we failed to pay it, it would be deemed an act of bankruptcy, and would effectually destroy the credit of the United States and all future prospect of obtaining money there.” This was serious. “I had no powers, no instructions, no means and no familiarity with the subject,” he wrote, pathetically. “It had always been exclusively under his [Adams’s] management.” Fortunately, Adams’s preoccupied brain had somehow made room for the idea that before sailing he ought to take time for a farewell visit of courtesy at the Dutch court, to which he had been formerly accredited; and by a fortunate coincidence, Mrs. Adams communicated the tidings of his departure in a pour prendre congé which Mr. Jefferson “received on the very day on which he [Adams] would arrive at the Hague.” Mr. Jefferson accordingly set out at once by the shortest way, through Brussels, Antwerp and Rotterdam. There was no time to lose; “a consultation with him, and some provision for the future, was indispensable while we could yet avail ourselves of his powers; for when they would be gone, we should be without resource.” He paused long enough at the Hague to pull John Adams’s head down from the clouds and stow him aboard his carriage for Amsterdam, where by some marvel of persuasion they managed to peg the nondescript young republic’s finances for another period.
Aside from these matters, and from writing official reports on the state of European politics, his duties were of a minor and routine character. The impecunious American turned up pretty regularly in his day’s work. “Gave Alexr Learmouth, a poor American, 36 f,” “Gave Hicks, an American, 12 f”—such entries occur in his account-books about as often as one would expect. Then there were the private creditors of the United States, largely French officers who had served in the American war and who had not been paid—the United States not having been in shape at the time to pay even its own soldiers in anything better than paper. These creditors were a great pest, the worst of it being that their claims were valid, that almost without exception they needed the money, and that the poor American representative was utterly unable to give them anything more substantial than sympathy. Then there were the American sailors whom the Farmers-General caught in a prohibited port with a cargo of tobacco, and promptly jailed. They said they had been driven into port by a storm; the Farmers-General said they were smugglers; perhaps both were right. Mr. Jefferson did what he could to soften the rigours of a French prison, and worked long and hard for their release. Then there were the travellers—and then there were the young, the ingenuous, the sentimental travellers! He did his best by them in unfailing equanimity, like that other “dainty and high-bred Stoic,” as Walter Pater calls Marcus Aurelius, “who still thought manners a true part of morals, according to the old sense of the term, and who regrets now and then that he can not control his thoughts equally well with his countenance.” Gouverneur Morris, whom Robert Morris had sent over to Paris to keep an eye on the tobacco contract with the Farmers-General, left this significant observation in his diary:
May 30th—Call on Mr. Jefferson and sit a good while. General conversation on character and politics. I think he does not form very just estimates of character, but rather assigns too many to the humble rank of fools, whereas in life the gradations are infinite and each individual has his peculiarities of fort and feeble.
Then there was Ledyard. John Ledyard, of Connecticut, had been with Captain Cook on the Pacific, had given an excellent account of himself, and had published details of the voyage, putting Cook’s treatment of the natives in an unfavourable light; thereby, Mr. Jefferson said, “lessening our regrets at his fate.” When Mr. Jefferson reached Paris, Ledyard was there, trying to form a company to engage in the fur trade on the Pacific coast. This was not wholly a rattle brained idea, for the French were then inclined to look with interest in that direction, and the expedition of la Pérouse, in 1785, was thought to have among its objects the examination of the northern American coast-region with a view to establishing trading posts. Like Patrick Henry, Ledyard seems to have exercised a curious fascination upon Mr. Jefferson, by virtue of his great natural powers; and besides, Mr. Jefferson had been for years interested in geographical exploration, especially of the trans-Mississippi regions of American. Seeing Ledyard then “out of business and of a roaming, restless character, I suggested the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent by passing through St. Petersburg to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound, whence he
might make his way across the continent.” Mr. Jefferson undertook to interest Catherine II in this extraordinary project, to the extent at least of permitting Ledyard to pass through her domains unmolested. He seems to have counted too much on the complaisance of Catherine’s representatives in Paris, for there is record of his having given Ledyard “600 f. on account Empress of Russia.” Catherine, however, put the enterprise down at once as sheer insanity, and refused to have anything to do with it or to allow Ledyard within her frontiers. To her way of thinking, apparently, Russia had lunatics enough of her own, without importing any. Nevertheless Ledyard started, and “pursued his course to within two hundred miles of Kamchatka, where he was overtaken by an arrest from the Empress, brought back to Poland and there dismissed.” Poor Ledyard was a man of humour as well as pertinacity. In 1787, Mr. Jefferson writes, “I had a letter from Ledyard lately, dated at St. Petersburg. He had but two shirts, and yet more shirts than shillings. Still, he was determined to obtain the palm of the first circumambulator of the earth. He says that having no money, they kick him from place to place, and thus he expects to be kicked around the globe.”
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