Mr. Jefferson sometimes caught glimpses of the rootvice of British influence in America, but his mind quickly reverted to its superficial appearances in matters of mere mode, fashion, predilection. Thus after the war of 1812, he wrote Cæsar Rodney that “their merchants established among us, the bonds by which our own are chained to their feet, and the banking combinations interwoven with the whole, have shown the extent of their control.” But he is chiefly worried by externalities that by comparison appear insignificant, by “the mimicry I found established of royal forms and ceremonies” under Washington; by “monarchism which has been so falsely miscalled Federalism”; by those who have “covered their devotion to monarchism under the mantle of Federalism.” There is great unconscious humour in his fine-spun analysis written to John Mellish as late as 1813. “Anglomany, monarchy and separation [i.e., secession] then, are the principles of the Essex Federalists, Anglomany and monarchy those of the Hamiltonians”—when, as the most obscure pamphleteer of the period knew, what really animated and held these people together was a predatory economic interest.
The purchase of Louisiana, then, would keep the country politically independent of England. It would also close the possibility of capture by British forces. In one of Mr. Jefferson’s first official opinions as Secretary of State, he committed himself unreservedly upon this peril. “I am so impressed with the magnitude of the dangers which will attend our government if Louisiana and the Floridas be added to the British Empire, that in my opinion we ought to make ourselves parties in the general war expected to take place, should this be the only means of preventing the calamity.” Mr. Jefferson had long contemplated buying the territory, but did not imagine at the moment, apparently, that Bonaparte would let it go. He gave large discretionary powers to Monroe, but opened negotiations only for New Orleans and the adjacent Floridan regions. Bonaparte backed and filled awhile, and ended by abruptly offering to close out the entire French possession. This was good business on both sides. Bonaparte needed the money, and he had too many military engagements on his hands to take care of pregnable holdings so far away. On the American side, there were Constitutional difficulties in the way of incorporating foreign territory into the United States, but the Administration went ahead on its own, and the bargain was closed.
In themselves, these difficulties did not worry Mr. Jefferson greatly. He had no doubt about the sentiment of the country. “It is the case of a guardian,” he wrote Breckenridge, “investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory, and saying to him when of age, I did this for your own good; I pretend to no right to bind you; you may disavow me and I must get out of the scrape as I can.” What worried him was that any play of fast and loose with the Constitution “presents a handle to the malcontents among us,” and might offset the overtures he had been making to the rank and file of the Opposition. But as it turned out, he had little to fear. The “invincibles,” especially those of the Essex Junto, had an uncommonly keen business sense. They did not like the prospective attenuation of New England’s hegemony through the admission of Western States; yet Louisiana was a dazzling vision for the land-monopolist—if it was a boon to the agrarian producer, it was a godsend to the speculator. So, after some formal objection and a vote of record in the Senate, the question of Constitutionality was quietly allowed to lapse. On the popular side, too, the purchase rather let the wind out of current gossip about Mr. Jefferson’s pro-French predilections. Apprehensions of objection from the British Government likewise turned out to be groundless. When the news of the sale reached the British Foreign Office, Lord Hawkesbury said graciously that he was very glad to hear it. There seems no reason why not. Loose British capital could, as it so abundantly did, find a safe investment there, and wax fat indefinitely on the rise in land-values produced by the continuous increase of population. American labour and capital would do all the work of development, and the British monopolist would appropriate the increment of value; and this, naturally, from the point of view of the British Foreign Office, would be a fair and laudable division of responsibility.
The industrial and commercial interests fared better under Mr. Jefferson than they expected. He did not harry them, and his views on the tariff and his unconcern with land-monopoly helped them. At the end of a year, Hamilton congratulated him and praised the impartiality of his Administration; and so did his old colleague in Washington’s Cabinet, General Henry Knox, who had lately gone into bankruptcy for $400,000, and was in a chastened frame of mind. Mr. Jefferson had an extremely low opinion of Knox in his public capacity, leaving record that he thought him a fool and a blabber; but he replied politely, though rather dryly, that “union is already effected from New York southward almost completely. In the New England States it will be slower than elsewhere, from peculiar circumstances better known to yourself than to me. But we will go on attending with the utmost solicitude to their interests and doing them impartial justice, and I have no doubt they will in time do justice to us.” In his dealings with the banks, he showed that two could play the game of building up capitalist support by the use of public money. “It is certainly for the public good,” he wrote Gallatin in 1802, “to keep all the banks competitors for our favours by a judicious distribution of [public funds in deposit] and thus to engage the individuals who belong to them in support of the reformed order of things, or at least in an acquiescence under it.” Some months later he wrote him again that “I am decidedly in favour of making all the banks Republican by sharing deposits among them in proportion to the dispositions they show. . . . It is material to the safety of Republicanism to detach the mercantile interest from its enemies and incorporate them into the body of its friends.”
This little transaction with the banks, however, was about all he attempted to do by power of the loaves and fishes. By cutting down the number of Federal offices about one-half, he made an astonishing and spectacular voluntary reduction in his resources of patronage; nor, except in one instance, did he employ the remainder for partisan purposes. On the personal side, he saw as clearly as any one the practicability of a strong political machine, and he was well aware that no ruler on earth had such enormous machine-power as the Constitution permitted a President to develop and use. “A person who wishes to make [patronage] an engine of self-elevation may do wonders with it,” he wrote James Sullivan in 1808, and as he surveyed the “madness and extravagance” of the Federalists in 1798, he wrote John Taylor that “those who have once got the ascendency and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.” This was part of the Constitutional system devised in behalf of the “rich and well-born”; the Constitution was meant to work that way, and it did. But he was not disposed to take advantage of this. “The elective principle becomes nothing,” he said, “if it may be smothered by the enormous patronage of the General Government.” He made few removals, and those only “who had signalized themselves by their own intolerance in office”—about fifteen, in all—with some who were removed “for such delinquencies as removed the Republicans equally.” All this wretched peddling business of office-mongering was gall and wormwood to him. “The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience,” he wrote Sullivan plaintively, “but the gift of office is the dreadful burthen that oppresses him.” Republican officeseekers were like any other; they came to Washington hungry, and, when disappointed, were ready to fry the President alive for breakfast. “Every office becoming vacant, every appointment made, me donne un ingrat et cent ennemis” In 1799, before he had practical experience of the fact, he remarked to Tench Coxe the great truth that “whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct”; and now he found that “the task of appointment is a heavy one indeed. He on whom it falls may envy the lot of a Sisyphus or Ixion. Their agonies were of the body; this of the mind. Yet, like the office of hangman, it must be executed by some one. It has bee
n assigned to me and made my duty. I make up my mind to it therefore, and abandon all regard to consequences.”
The one exception to his impartial use of patronage was in the case of the implacable State of Connecticut. At the outset he served notice on his Attorney-General, Levi Lincoln, a Massachusetts man, as explicitly as he did on Gallatin, that the hard-shelled irreconcilables of the Federalist group should be fed on the bread of affliction until they brought forth works meet for repentance. Sedgwick, Cabot, Gore, Higginson, Pickering and the Family Compact of Connecticut, were fair prey; the game-law was out on them. “While we associate with us in affairs, to a certain degree, the Federal sect of Republicans, we must strip of all the means of influence the Essex Junto and their associate monocrats in every part of the Union.” Connecticut stood out stiffly; no Republican need apply for a State office in Connecticut. Mr. Jefferson noted this with disapproval, and put his back up. “Our gradual reformations seem to produce good effects everywhere except in Connecticut. Their late session of Legislature has been more intolerant than all others. We must meet them with equal intolerance. When they will give a share in the State offices, they shall be replaced in a share of the general offices. Till then, we must follow their example.”
Economy furnished Mr. Jefferson a good pretext for indulging his inveterate dislike of ceremonial formalities. “We have suppressed all those public forms and ceremonies which tended to familiarize the public eye to the harbingers of another form of government,” he wrote Kosciusko in 1802. When the House cut down Washington’s official title to a bare designation of office, Mr. Jefferson wrote Carmichael that he hoped “the terms of Excellency, Honour, Worship and Esquire, forever disappear from among us from that moment. I wish that of Mr. would follow them.” All his life, when writing formally in the third person, he rarely applied this last title to himself, except when not using it would have been at the price of ostentation; but on the other hand, he was invariably punctilious about the formal title of address to others. As President, he made a clean sweep of levees, parades, reviews, and public functions of a decorative character. These things cost money. Rules of precedence were superseded by the simple arrangements established by general good taste in ordinary unofficial society. Mr. Jefferson’s associates in office were men of dignity and good manners, so the plan worked well and produced a good effect at large. Thomas Moore, the poet, did not relish it; he was highly critical of the undistinguished treatment he received at the White House. The British Minister, too, an odd kind of fussbudget who bore the ill-assorted name of Merry, and who, as Mr. Jefferson remarked, had learned nothing of diplomacy but its suspicions, most unhumorously worked himself up into a great tantrum over a dinner at the White House, because Mr. Jefferson, who had asked Mrs. Madison to preside at his table, offered his arm to her instead of to Mrs. Merry. Poor Mr. Merry’s confidence in republican institutions was still further undermined when, calling at the White House on business at an irregular hour, he was received by Mr. Jefferson in slippers and a dressing-gown. Mr. Merry seems to have made these incidents the basis of a report to his Government, and to one of them is probably due the persistent tradition, otherwise quite devoid of foundation, that Mr. Jefferson was habitually careless and slipshod in his dress. According to Mr. Jefferson, however, the grey mare was so much the best horse in Mr. Merry’s stable that Mr. Merry had to trot to her gait, though otherwise “personally as desirable a character as could have been sent us,” and Mr. Jefferson would be sorry to lose him “as long as there remains a possibility of reclaiming him to the exercise of his own dispositions.” Every concession, every allowance should be made to the wretchedness of a henpecked man, and “if his wife perseveres, she must eat her soup at home, and we shall endeavour to draw him into society as if she did not exist.”
At the beginning of his Administration, Mr. Jefferson wrote a friend that “the path we have to pursue is so quiet that we have nothing scarcely to propose to our Legislature. A noiseless course, not meddling with the affairs of others, unattractive of notice, is a mark that society is going on in happiness.” At the end of his first term, he recapitulated the achievements of his Administration during four years of strict sticking to this noiseless course. “To do without a land tax, excise, stamp tax and the other internal taxes, to supply their place by economies so as still to support the government properly and to apply $7,300,000 a year steadily to the payment of the public debt; to discontinue a great portion of the expenses on armies and navies, yet protect our country and its commerce with what remains; to purchase a country as large and more fertile than the one we possessed before, yet ask neither a new tax nor another soldier to be added, but to provide that that country shall by its own income pay for itself before the purchase-money is due; to preserve peace with all nations, and particularly an equal friendship to the two great rival Powers, France and England, and to maintain the credit and character of the nation in as high a degree as it has ever enjoyed; are measures which I think must reconcile the great body of those who thought themselves our enemies.”
Indeed, they commanded the praise even of the unreconciled, for never since the time of the Antonines, if then, was seen anything comparable to the disinterestedness of this Administration. Erasmus made it a mark of true Christians that “they should be so blameless as to force infidels to speak well of them.” In 1828, after years spent in vitriolic hatred of Mr. Jefferson, John Randolph of Roanoke said in a public speech, “Sir, I have never seen but one Administration which seriously and in good faith was disposed to give up its patronage, and was willing to go farther than Congress, or even the people themselves, so far as Congress represents their feelings, desired; and that was the first Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He, sir, was the only man I knew or ever heard of, who really, truly, and honestly, not only said Nolo episcopari, but actually refused the mitre.”
III
In the full tide of a popularity as great as Mr. Jefferson’s, at about the same age, and from a far more exalted eminence in life—a solitary stylite, indeed, upon the august and unapproachable pinnacle of Roman rulership—Marcus Aurelius looked back upon the fate of famous men, “Camillus, Cæso, Valesus, Leonatus, and a little after also Scipio and Cato, then Augustus, then also Hadrian and Antoninus,” his own fosterfather and predecessor. Even their names seemed now in a manner antiquated. “And this I say of those who have shone in a wondrous way. For the rest, as soon as they have breathed out their breath, they are gone and no man speaks of them. And, to conclude the matter, what is even an eternal remembrance? A mere nothing.” As his first term in the Presidency ended, Mr. Jefferson’s mind took the same turn. Great men had lately gone—Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Pendleton, S. T. Mason—and some less eminent but as much beloved, Mann Page, Bellini, Parson Andrews. “To these I have the inexpressible grief of adding the name of my youngest daughter”; for Maria too had gone, as her mother had gone, a sacrifice to the social expectations put upon wifehood in her day. “This loss has increased my anxiety to retire, while it has dreadfully lessened the comfort of doing it.” But he had no serious thought of retiring. Midway of his policies, he felt obliged “to appeal once more to my country for a justification. I have no fear but that I shall receive honourable testimony by their verdict.”
He kept the line clear between official and personal popularity, in the face of extraordinary temptations to further the one by use of the other. Even to the last days of his Presidency he returned insignificant presents made him by admiring friends. Four months before his final retirement, he sent back to Samuel Hawkins an ivory cane, with a courteous letter of thanks, mentioning the rule that he had laid down for himself, and pleading his wish “to retain that consciousness of a disinterested administration of the public trusts which is essential to perfect tranquillity of mind.” When citizens of Boston proposed to make his birthday a holiday, he wrote them that he did not approve of “transferring the honours and veneration for the great birthday of our Republic to any indivi
dual, or of dividing them with individuals,” and that therefore he declined letting the date of his birth be known; and it remained unknown until some time after his death. He declined to make any public appearances. Sullivan suggested a swing around the circle, to let the people, particularly in the North, have a look at their popular President and see what he was like. He replied austerely that he was “not reconciled to the idea of a chief magistrate parading himself through the several States as an object of public gaze and in quest of an applause which, to be valuable, should be purely voluntary. I had rather acquire silent good will by a faithful discharge of my duties than owe expressions of it to my putting myself in the way of receiving them.” After leaving the White House, his inveterate indisposition to placing himself in any personal way “at the bar of the public” became invincible. He never again went outside his native State; indeed, it may almost be said that he never again set foot off his own property.
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