Jefferson

by Albert Jay Nock

  The informal confiscation of moral, religious and patriotic sentiment, in fact, had yielded excellent returns during the Presidential canvass, and was still producing a good steady revenue. Mr. Jefferson’s early efforts for the establishment of religious freedom in Virginia, and his long immersion in the suppositious atheism and impurity of French social life, furnished the basis for an endless playing-up of his ungodliness and immorality. One clergyman compared him to Rehoboam; another gave warning of his “solicitude for wresting the Bible from the hands of their [i.e., the congregation’s] children.” Another set forth that he had “obtained his property by fraud and robbery; that in one instance he had defrauded and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate to which he was executor, of ten thousand pounds sterling.”

  The clergy of Connecticut in particular, under the leadership of Dr. Timothy Dwight, organized a kind of jehad. Dr. Dwight had a threefold responsibility to bear. He was a clergyman, president of Yale College, and related by blood or marriage to nearly the whole of the little politico-economic oligarchy that had controlled Connecticut from its Colonial beginnings. Some person of a genealogical turn tabulated this connexion, and published it during the campaign.

  The Family Compact of Connecticut

  1. Dr. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, generally known as the Pope.

  2. James Hillhouse, United States Senator. He and Dwight married sisters.

  3. Theodore Dwight, candidate for Congress. A brother to the Pope.

  4. Mr. Morris, the extraordinary chairman of Sedgwick in Congress. Married Pope Dwight’s sister.

  5. Mr. Hosmer, member of Congress. Related to Hillhouse by marriage.

  6. Chauncy Goodrich, member of Congress. Married Oliver Wolcott’s sister.

  7. Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of Treasury.

  8. Elizur Goodrich, brother of Chauncy.

  9. Long John Allen, brother-in-law of Elizur Goodrich.

  10. Mr. Austin, collector of customs at New Haven, is the stepfather of Long John Allen.

  11. Son of Gov. Trumbull married the daughter of

  12. Jeremiah Wadsworth.

  13. Roger Griswold, candidate for Congress, a cousin of Hillhouse.

  Dr. Dwight dictates the policy and prayers of the Illuminati; Mr. Hillhouse holds the purse, as Treasurer.

  With all this moral momentum behind him, Dr. Dwight prophesied faithfully the terrible consequences of permitting the ungodly Virginian and his desperadoes to seize the reins of political power. In a single “discourse preached on the Fourth of July,” he managed to get them all in, even to the nationalization of women.1 “For what end shall we be connected with men of whom this is the character and the conduct? . . . Is it that we may change our holy worship into a dance of Jacobin frenzy, and that we may behold a strumpet personating a goddess on the altars of Jehovah? Is it that we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire, the vessels of the sacramental supper borne by an ass in public procession, and our children, either wheedled or terrified, uniting in chanting mockeries against God, and hailing in the sounds of Ça ira the ruin of their religion and the loss of their souls? Is it that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured; speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, the loathing of God and man? . . . Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?”

  Such efforts in behalf of righteousness could not fail to have a great effect; and in fact, when Mr. Jefferson became President, certain pious women in New England buried their Bibles in their gardens, for fear that he would at once send out janizaries to confiscate them. The interesting thing about all this, however, is that John Adams had always let his mind play as freely on religious matters as Mr. Jefferson’s; he had always said a far more piquant say than Mr. Jefferson’s about the vices and hypocrisies of organized Christianity, and about the pernicious influence of its authoritarianism. But his economics were orthodox, at least in the main, and this made him a fit subject for the exercise of Christian tolerance, as much so as the erring brethren who made up the “corrupt squadron” in Congress. A sharp-witted pamphleteer of the period put it that “while our legislative majorities continue to serve an apprenticeship in the Hamiltonian academy of morals, it is of very small consequence whether they are atheists, Anabaptists, profess any religion or none.”

  Meanwhile, the object of these attentions was tranquilly looking after his husbandry at Monticello, and baking brick for an addition to his house. He took no notice of either slander or abuse. It was really impracticable to notice them, even if one cared to do so, for “while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented.” Besides, his experience of human nature was such as to make it seem little worth while to upset one’s equanimity to so slight purpose. “Dost thou wish to be praised by a man who curses himself thrice every hour?” asked Marcus Aurelius, searchingly. What really distressed Mr. Jefferson was that these people did not look at political differences disinterestedly and objectively. “It has been a source of great pain to me,” he wrote to Richard Johnson, “to have met with so many among our opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” He felt as he did when he wrote to the British officer, Phillips, in 1779, in the matter of the prisoners of Burgoyne’s army, that “the great cause which divides our countries is not to be decided by individual animosities,” or when, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, he declared that “the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.” Opinions are determined by the general sum of experience and knowledge, and there is a childish failure in dignity in permitting them to act as a divisive force between individuals. He had never permitted himself to bear this mark of immaturity, even in his disagreements with Hamilton; they always got on well in a social way, and Mr. Jefferson gave his great political opponent all possible evidence of personal esteem.

  Curiously, it was this very failure on the part of Hamilton to draw a firm line between personal and political opposition, that had most to do with seating Mr. Jefferson in the Presidential chair. Hamilton had had a sharp collision with Aaron Burr in the spring election in New York State, in which Burr had outgeneraled him at every point, insuring the electoral vote of New York for the anti-Federalist ticket. When the national election came on, the popular vote for Mr. Jefferson was so large as to admit no doubt of the will of the country; but the vote in the electoral college resulted in a tie between Mr. Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who was not even a candidate for the Presidency. This threw the election into the House of Representatives, where the Federalists were strong enough to hold the matter at a deadlock. Thus Hamilton was confronted by a sorry choice among evils. He had tried hard at the outset to dislodge Adams and elect Thomas Pinckney, whom the Federalists had chosen to go on the ticket as a running-mate with Adams, but it could not be done. His resentment against Burr was no less than against Adams. Both of them had mightily dynamited his prestige, and he could not bring himself to support either. When Adams was eliminated, and the issue reduced to a miserable option between Aaron Burr and Mr. Jefferson, the more case-hardened of the Federalist leaders were rather in favour of Burr. Things were looking pretty dark, and there was a bare chance that Burr would be fairly corruptible; perhaps the Federalists might come to some kind of satisfactory pre-election understanding with him.

  BUST OF THOMAS JEFFERSON BY R. I. AITKEN

  In the Hall of Fame, New York

  This was intolerable to Hamilton, and he threw himself with frantic energy into compassing the defeat of Burr. After all, Hamilton was a good patriot; it was not out of character that he should expect Burr to treat the country as cavalierly as he had treated him, Alexander Hamilton—l’Etat, c’est moi. All Hamilton’s differences with Mr. Jefferson had been above the plane of polit
ical sharp practice, and Mr. Jefferson had always been scrupulous; all the personalities injected into them had been injected by himself. Of the two calamities, therefore, Mr. Jefferson’s election was preferable. “Upon every virtuous and prudent calculation,” Hamilton wrote Wolcott, “Jefferson is to be preferred. He is by far not so dangerous a man; and he has pretentions to character.”

  Hamilton’s authority had by this time so far weakened, however, that if Burr had done a hand’s turn for himself, he would no doubt have got enough Federalist support to carry him through. But he had said he would not contest the election with Mr. Jefferson, and he kept his word, behaving, according to Mr. Jefferson’s testimony, in an “honourable and decisive” way. One may say without the least disparagement of Burr, that this was wise. The country was in an ugly and dangerous mood, exasperated by the obstructionist tactics displayed at the election, and quite up to the mark of violence, if need be, in behalf of seeing the popular mandate carried out. Burr would not treat, would not put in an appearance; he remained in seclusion at Albany. Mr. Jefferson was warily approached for an understanding. If he would not disturb the fiscal system, not lean too far to the French side, not shut off development of the navy and not sweep out all the Federalist officeholders, there would be no trouble about electing him. He declared unequivocally “that I would not receive the government on capitulation, that I would not go into it with my hands tied.” On these terms he stood, and on these terms he was finally elected, after protracted obstructionism by the “circle of cabal, intrigue and hatred” had brought the country to the verge of general insurrection.

  II

  What was needed was peace. In his first month of office, Mr. Jefferson wrote his old friend John Page that he was “very much in hopes we shall be able to restore union to our country. Not indeed that the Federal leaders can be brought over. They are invincibles; but I really hope their followers may. The bulk of these last were real republicans, carried over from us by French excesses. ... A moderate conduct throughout, which may not revolt our new friends and may give them tenets with us, must be observed.” In the same month he made similar professions to Gerry and Gates of his hopes of “uniting a great mass of confidence.” In fact, the opposition party was pretty well disintegrated, and its flotsam and jetsam was in an approachable mood. The thing now was to soften asperities and let them melt out of minds already tired of them, to cultivate confidence and good temper.

  Hamilton’s general system, he saw, was a fixture. “We can pay off his debts in fifteen years,” he said, mournfully, “but we can never get rid of his financial system.” If the government had only started differently—but a ship can not turn around in its own length. “When the government was first established, it was possible to have kept it going on true principles, but the contracted, English, half-lettered ideas of Hamilton destroyed that hope in the bud.” This was a characteristically sanguine view, and hardly tenable, underestimating as it does so grotesquely the lure of “public plunder.” Hamilton’s achievement could not be seriously meddled with; one must trust to time and a wider-spread enlightenment for that. “It mortifies me to be strengthening principles which I deem radically vicious, but this vice is entailed on us by the first error. . . . What is practicable must often control what is pure theory.” To be a Strafford and go in for a policy of “thorough,” ended disastrously, even under a monarchy; and the end of the Federalists showed what would happen in a republic.

  Nevertheless a great deal could be done for the producer. Deflation of the public debt was out of the question, but the debt could be paid, thus drying up one contaminating stream at its source. On the eve of taking office, Mr. Jefferson wrote Samuel Adams of the “portentous aspect” presented by “a debt of a hundred millions, growing by usurious interest, and an artificial paper phalanx overruling the agricultural mass of our country.” To get rid of this, he was for “applying all the possible savings of the public revenue.” The Administration began its programme of economy, which Mr. Jefferson placed “among the first and most important of republican virtues,” with the appropriations for military purposes. The army was cut down to a skeleton, and naval construction stopped—and thus perished the Federalists’ covert plans for summary dealing with proletarian insurrection at home and contested markets abroad. The newly-created courts were abolished, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Gallatin, was set at work to rat-proof every avenue of access to public money. The law was laid down to him by an exacting and realistic master. Mr. Jefferson was ready to acknowledge always that the technique of finance was “foreign to his nature,” but he knew well enough what general results he wanted, and, in a general way, how to get them. He had told Madison four years before, that “the accounts of the United States ought to be, and may be, made as simple as those of a common farmer, and capable of being understood by common farmers.” He now served notice on Gallatin of his desire to see “the finances of the Union as clear and intelligible as a merchant’s books, so that every member of Congress and every man of any mind in the Union, should be able to comprehend them, to investigate abuses and consequently to control them.” He was severe upon the esoteric methods pursued by Gallatin’s predecessors, especially by Hamilton—methods which came under particular suspicion by reason of the outbreak of unaccountable fires among the Treasury records on the eve of Gallatin’s accession to office. “Alexander Hamilton,” Mr. Jefferson wrote in a memorandum to Gallatin,

  in order that he might have the entire government of his [political] machine, determined so to complicate it that neither the President nor Congress should be able to understand it or to control him. He succeeded in doing this, not only beyond their reach, but so that at length he could not unravel it himself. He gave to the debt in the first instance, in funding it, the most artificial and mysterious form he could devise. He then moulded up his appropriations of a number of scraps and remnants, many of which were nothing at all, and applied them to different objects in reversion and remainder, until the whole system was involved in impenetrable fog; and while he was giving himself the airs of providing for the payment of the debt, he left himself free to add to it continually, as he did in fact, instead of paying it.

  Plain going was to be the rule. Along with the enormous reduction in governmental expenditure, went a considerable lightening of taxes on production. The excise was abolished, to the great relief of a multitude of small remote farmers, especially in Pennsylvania, who could neither transport their corn nor find a market for it until they had converted it into whisky. Direct taxes of various kinds, projected in the war-fever of 1798, all went. At the end of his first term, Mr. Jefferson was able to proclaim that “it may be the pleasure and pride of an American to ask what farmer, what mechanic, what labourer, ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States.” This was literally true; yet there were taxes remaining on certain articles of ordinary use, like salt, sugar, tea and coffee, which the consumer paid indirectly, beside a tariff on foreign goods, which had the inevitable stiffening effect upon general prices. Mr. Jefferson’s imperfect acquaintance with economics comes out in a suggestion to Gallatin about the tax on sugar and salt, which worried him a little, but which he could hardly see a way to get rid of without too much loss of revenue. In the strange belief that a tariff-tax stays where it is put, he wrote Gallatin that he wished “it were possible to increase the impost on any articles affecting the rich chiefly, to the amount of the sugar-tax, so that we might relinquish that at our next session.” Nor did he foresee the most unwholesome social consequence of the immense impetus that would be given to unlimited private land-monopoly by his cherished plan to clear off the public debt by the sale of Western lands.

  He was able to do another great service to the producing interests, as he thought, by the purchase of the territory known as Louisiana—comprising, roughly, everything between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains—which had lately been ceded to France by Spain. There was also good politics in the purchase. The Mississippi was the avenue
of transportation for all the products of the West, and with its outlet at New Orleans in possession of an energetic marauding foreign Power, there was bound to be trouble. The contingency that he foresaw while ambassador at Paris had come to pass. “Spain might have retained [New Orleans] quietly for years,” he wrote Robert Livingston. “Her pacific dispositions, her feeble state, would induce her to increase our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would hardly be felt by us. . . . Not so can it ever be in the hands of France.” What Mr. Jefferson chiefly dreaded in the event of a brush with France, was the inevitable political rapprochement with the other great predatory Power, England. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans . . . seals the union of two nations who in conjunction can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation. We must turn all our attention to a maritime force . . . and . . . make the first cannon which shall be fired in Europe the signal . . . for holding the two continents of America in sequestration for the common purposes of the united British and American nations.”

  This was a detestable prospect, for English influence had already far too strong a foothold in America to suit him. Curiously, however, it was always the external and superficial aspects of this influence that mostly concerned him. He continually mistook these for its underlying reality, and hence his exertions against it were robbed of a good deal of force. Three years before, for example, he wrote Gates that he wished “any events could induce us to cease to copy [the British governmental] model, and to assume the dignity of being original. They had their paper system, stockjobbing, speculations, public debt, moneyed interest, etc., and all this was contrived for us. They raised their cry against Jacobinism and revolutionists, we against democratic societies and anti-Federalists.” It was never thoroughly clear to Mr. Jefferson that this fiscal apparatus was contrived for America, by no means because it was British, but because there was money in it—because it was the most effective engine of exploitation by the “rich and well-born.” The only essential difference between government by the “rich and well-born” in a hereditary aristocracy, as in the France of Mr. Jefferson’s day, and in a republic, is that the former is a closed corporation, while the latter, by an indefinite extension of the cohesive power of public plunder, admits a steady accession of outsiders. In these respects Britain, being so largely an industrial and trading nation, most nearly resembled a republic, and her institutional safeguards of exploitation were most appropriate to republican conditions.