Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  We have a much clearer sense of how he looked because his ascending fame made him the subject of several portraits, engravings and busts during his five years in France. The skin on his face was now taut and tight, with a permanently reddish hue that made him always appear as if he had just finished exercising. His hair was now more sandy than red, but just as thick and full as ever, cut so that it covered his ears, then tied in the back so as to fall just below his collar. His frame remained angular but was now more muscled and less gangly, the product of daily four-mile walks and a vigorous regimen that included soaking his feet in cold water each morning.

  In general, he had grown more handsome with age, like one of those gawky and slightly awkward young men who eventually inhabit their features more comfortably with the years. Time had also allowed him to occupy his height in more proper proportions and carry it with more natural grace. He remained a very tall man for his time. We know that when he made his first official appearance with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin at the French court at Versailles, the physical contrast struck several observers as almost comical, like watching a cannonball, a teapot and a candlestick announce themselves as the American trinity.3

  If aging had served him well physically—perhaps here was an underlying reason why Jefferson always thought that the future was on his side—it had also seasoned him psychologically. Many American lives had been caught up in the turmoil of the war for independence, then deposited on the other side of the historic conflict with scars and wounds that never went away. Though Jefferson never commanded troops or fired a shot in anger, his personal experience during and immediately following the war included two traumatic episodes that toughened him on the inside even more than his marathon walks and cold-water baths toughened his body.

  The first incident occurred during his two-year term as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781. It was the worst possible time for a man who preferred the rarefied atmosphere of scholarship and the study to assume the duties of governor, since wartime exigencies generated massive economic, logistical and political problems that even the most adroit executive would have found daunting. Despite his best efforts, Virginia’s economy became a shambles and the state failed to meet its quota of men for the Continental Army. Then Jefferson approved an expedition that carried off Virginia’s best troops to a futile campaign against Detroit, just before a British invasion force under the command of Benedict Arnold swept in from the Chesapeake Bay and burned the capital at Richmond to the ground. To make matters worse, cavalry detachments from General Cornwallis’s army moved against Charlottesville and nearly captured Jefferson himself at Monticello.4

  Stories spread throughout the state of Jefferson’s ignominious last-minute escape on horseback, implying rather unfairly that he had behaved in a cowardly fashion or that he was derelict in his duty by allowing the state to become so vulnerable to British military occupation. The Virginia Assembly even passed a resolution calling for an investigation into his conduct. This was eventually dropped; a final resolution officially absolved him of any wrongdoing. But even though the wartime mishaps were probably beyond his or anybody’s control, they had happened on his watch. The stain of failure as an executive never wholly disappeared—all the stories resurfaced when he ran for the presidency in 1796 and again in 1800—and Jefferson himself learned that his refined sensibility was ill suited for the rigors of leadership during times of crisis. As for the emotional effects, Jefferson confided to a friend that the experience had “inflicted a wound on my spirit that will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”5

  The second incident came straight on the heels of the first and unquestionably constituted the most traumatic experience of his entire life. In May 1782 his wife Martha gave birth for the seventh time in their ten-year marriage. The daughter, named Lucy Elizabeth, was only the third child to survive, and Martha herself fell desperately ill after the delivery. Her delicate disposition had obviously been destroyed by the never-ending pregnancies. She lingered on through the summer, with Jefferson at her bedside nearly around the clock. Family lore, reinforced by reminiscences within the slave community at Monticello, described a melodramatic deathbed scene in which Martha extracted a promise from Jefferson that he would never marry again, allegedly because she did not want her surviving children raised by a stepmother. He never did. She died on September 6, 1782.6

  Jefferson was inconsolable for six weeks, sobbing throughout the nights, breaking down whenever he tried to talk. Word of his extended grieving leaked out from Monticello and caused some friends to worry that he was losing his mind. “I ever thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief good,” wrote Edmund Randolph, “but scarcely supposed that his grief would be so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.” When he eventually emerged from seclusion to take long rides through the local woods, Patsy became his constant companion in what she later called “those melancholy rambles.”7

  He agreed to accept the diplomatic post in Paris as part of the effort to move past this tragedy and to escape from his memories of Martha at Monticello. But he was scarred in a place that never completely healed. God had seen fit to reach down into the domestic utopia that he had constructed so carefully and snatch away its centerpiece. (Jefferson did not seem to possess any sense of complicity in causing her pregnancies or any sense of warning as her health deteriorated after each new miscarriage or birth.) We cannot know for sure whether, as family tradition tells the story, he promised his dying wife that he would never remarry. The promise he made to himself undoubtedly had the same effect: He would never expose his soul to such pain again; he would rather be lonely than vulnerable.

  If this, then, was how he looked and—as much as we can ever know—how he felt upon his arrival in Paris in the late summer of 1784, there remains the question of what he thought. His reputation as a political thinker, which did not yet benefit from his authorship of the Declaration of Independence since that achievement was not yet widely known, was based primarily on his legislative work in the Virginia Assembly and the federal Congress. From 1776 to 1779 he had almost single-handedly attempted the root-and-branch reform of the Virginia legal code, calling for the abolition of primogeniture and entail as the last vestiges of English feudalism, the reform of the criminal law so as to limit the use of the death penalty, the expansion of the suffrage to include more of the independent yeomen from the western counties, the expansion of the public school system of the state and, most important, the elimination of the Anglican establishment in favor of a complete separation of church and state.

  This phenomenal effort at legislative reform proved too visionary for his colleagues in the Virginia Assembly, who defeated all his proposals save the abolition of primogeniture and entail, which was on the verge of dying a natural death anyway. But the thrust of his political thinking was clear: to remove all legal and political barriers to individual initiative and thereby create what he called “an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent.” It was in effect an attempt to implement the ideals articulated in the natural rights section of the Declaration. Just as clearly, his favorite ideas were several steps ahead of public opinion. He was more a prophet than a politician.8

  The same pattern held true in the federal Congress at Philadelphia. Throughout the winter and spring of 1784 he threw himself into the reform of the coinage system, successfully urging the dollar and decimal units in lieu of the English pound and shilling. He also tried but failed to replace the English system of weights and measures with metric standards. He wrote the Ordinance of 1784, which established the principles on which all new states would be admitted to the Union on an equal basis with existing states. The final provision required the end of slavery in all newly created states by 1800. But it lost by one vote, prompting Jefferson to remark later that “the fate of millions unborn [was] hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!” It was the most far-rea
ching proposal to end slavery that Jefferson ever wrote but also the high-water mark of his antislavery efforts, which receded afterward to lower levels of caution and procrastination.9

  Throughout the spring of 1784 he expressed frustration with the paralyzing combination of indolence and garrulousness that afflicted the Congress. (It was barely possible to muster a quorum to approve the peace treaty ending the war with England.) Given his subsequent hostility to consolidated federal power in virtually every form, his impatience at this time with what he called “the petty justlings of states” stands out as an indication of his temporary willingness to accept federal power as a corrective to local and regional bickering. He confided to friends his conviction that the Articles of Confederation, in giving the federal government power over foreign affairs, had implicitly given it power over all trade and commerce. (This endorsement of the doctrine of implied powers came back to haunt him a decade later.) He wanted to see treaties of amity and commerce negotiated with European nations, in part for the economic benefits they would generate but mostly because, as he put it, “the moment these treaties are concluded the jurisdiction of Congress over the commerce of the states springs into existence, and that of the particular states is superseded… .”10

  To sum up, then, the man riding into Paris as America’s minister plenipotentiary was not the same young Virginian who had drafted the Declaration of Independence. He was more famous, more physically impressive, a more confident carrier of his natural assets and abilities. He was more seasoned as a legislator, though still and always an idealist with greater talent at envisioning what ought to be than skill at leading others toward the future he imagined. He was also more seasoned as a man, less vulnerable and sensitive because more adroit at protecting his interior regions from intruders by layering his internal defenses in ways that denied access at all check points. (This psychological dexterity was to serve him well as a diplomat.) Finally, he had managed to combine his utopian vision of an American society of liberated individuals, freely pursuing happiness once the burden of English corruption and European feudalism had been removed, with a more practical recognition that an independent America required some kind of federal government to coordinate its burgeoning energies and excesses. Without surrendering his youthful radicalism, he had also become a dedicated nationalist.

  FRIENDS AND PIRATES

  SETTLING HIMSELF and his entourage took much longer than he had expected. First there was the problem of his health, which, except for his recurrent migraine headaches, had always been excellent. But within a few weeks he came down with a severe cold that he could not shake for six months. “I have had a very bad winter,” he explained to his friend James Monroe back in Virginia, “having been confined the greatest part of it. A seasoning as they call it is the lot of most strangers: and none I believe have experienced a more severe one than myself. The air is extremely damp, and the waters very unwholesome. We have had for three weeks past a warm visit from the Sun (my almighty physician) and I find myself almost reestablished.” Though he eventually fell in love with the people, the wine and the architecture of France, the weather was another matter, causing him to speculate that there was a nearly permanent cloud bank over this section of western Europe that produced pale and anemic human constitutions.11

  Then there was the problem of the language. Jefferson was justifiably renowned for his facility with foreign languages, which included Latin, Greek, French and Italian. He even claimed that he had taught himself Spanish on the voyage to France by reading Don Quixote with the aid of a grammar book. (Years later, when he was president, Jefferson recalled the incident over dinner. John Quincy Adams, who was present at the dinner party with the president, recorded the claim in his memoirs, then added: “But Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.”) The truth seems to be that Jefferson was adept at learning how to read foreign languages but not to speak or write them. Even after five years in France his spoken French never reached a sufficient level of fluency to permit comfortable conversation, and he never trusted his written French sufficiently to dispense with a translator for his formal correspondence.12

  Finally there was the problem of where to live. He shuttled among a series of hotels for the first few months, then, in October 1784, signed a lease for a villa at Cul-de-sac Taitbout on the Right Bank. But this proved inadequate and inconvenient, so he moved the following year to the Hôtel de Langeac on the Champs-Élysées near the present-day Arc de Triomphe, then on the outskirts of the city. He rented the entire building, a fashionable and spacious three-story dwelling originally built for the mistress of a French nobleman. This became his Parisian Monticello, complete with several salons, three separate suites, stables, a garden and a full staff of servants, maids, cooks, plus a coachman and gardener. It was lavish and expensive—the rent and furniture exceeded his annual salary of nine thousand dollars—but what he required to feel at home abroad.13

  When all the arrangements were finally completed, Jefferson had constructed an extensive support system of servants, secretaries and acolytes that afforded him the same kind of physical and emotional protection that he had enjoyed on his Virginia plantation. At the center of the household stood Jefferson himself. (Patsy had been placed in a convent school, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, which Jefferson was assured—and frequently felt the need to reassure himself—was renowned for its liberal attitude toward non-Catholic students. She was home only on special weekends.) The inner circle of defense was manned by James Hemings, who was Jefferson’s personal servant when not attending culinary classes, and Adrien Petit, the supremely competent overseer of all household affairs and employees. The next ring of protection handled political and diplomatic issues. It was managed by two secretaries: David Humphreys, the thirty-two-year-old Connecticut poet who had served on George Washington’s staff during the war and had now attached himself to Jefferson as the fastest-rising star in American statecraft, and William Short, a twenty-five-year-old law student, a graduate of William and Mary, Jefferson’s in-law, protégé and all-purpose political handyman.14

  The outer perimeter of counsel and comfort lay back in America, in effect a series of listening posts in Virginia and the Congress at Philadelphia from which James Madison and James Monroe delivered regular reports, often using a ciphered code to conceal sensitive information. Taken together, Madison, Monroe and Short represented that segment of the younger generation of political talent in Virginia that had come to regard Jefferson as its titular leader; each was almost old enough to be his younger brother and almost young enough to be his son. The correspondence with Madison proved to be the start of a fifty-year partnership, perhaps unique in American history, in which Madison was the ever-loyal junior member. (Madison succeeded Jefferson in the presidency; then Monroe succeeded Madison, thereby occupying the office with Jeffersonians for the first twenty-four years of the nineteenth century.) Jefferson cultivated all three of these young Virginians as his protégés, even envisioning the day when they would live next to him at Monticello. In February 1784 he shared the dream with Madison: “Monroe is buying land almost adjoining me. Short will do the same. What would I not give you could fall into the circle. With such a society I could once more venture home and lay myself up for the residue of life, quitting all contentions which grow daily more and more insupportable. Think of it. To render it practicable only requires you to think it so.” Part praetorian guard, part quasi-members of his extended family, these younger Virginians had already identified Jefferson as the heir apparent to Washington in the line of succession to state and national leadership. Much of Jefferson’s first year in France was spent establishing the communications network of this looming Virginia dynasty.15

  The settling process during that first year included one final variable of long-term historical significance, Jefferson’s relationship with the Adams family. When news reached John Adams of Jefferson’s appointment, he let out word that he was pleased: “Jefferson is an excellent hand,” he noted to friends bac
k in New England. “You could not have sent better.” When some members of Congress expressed concern about Jefferson’s excessive idealism, Adams would have none of it: “My Fellow Labourer in Congress, eight or nine years ago, upon many arduous Tryals, particularly in the draught of our Declaration of Independence… , I have found him uniformily the same wise and prudent Man and Steady Patriot.” Adams’s wife, Abigail, and their daughter, called Nabby, had joined him and their son John Quincy the same week that Jefferson had arrived in France. For nine months, until Adams was dispatched to London as America’s first ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the Adams quarters at Auteuil became Jefferson’s second home.16

  More than fifty years later, and after a phase of bitter political disagreements that seriously frayed their friendship, Adams still recalled this time with fondness. Upon John Quincy’s election as president in 1824, for example, Adams reminded Jefferson that “our John” had won. “I call him our John,” he explained, “because when you was at Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to be almost as much your boy as mine.” The special relationship between Adams and Jefferson had its origins in their political partnership of 1776, but the deep emotional bonding between the two men occurred in France in 1784–85.17

  Abigail Adams played a crucial role. Jefferson’s first winter in Paris was one long and nearly debilitating illness. His recovery during the spring occurred under her watchful eye and then with the whole Adams family in their parlor, swapping anecdotes and opinions about the whole range of diplomatic and domestic subjects. Abigail was the link between questions of foreign policy and family priorities, probably the first woman Jefferson came to know well who combined the traditional virtues of a wife and mother with the sharp mind and tongue of a fully empowered accomplice in her husband’s career. Jefferson had always regarded these different assets as inhabiting distinct and separate spheres that God or nature had somehow seen fit to keep apart. In Abigail, however, they came together. She was Martha with a mind of her own. Transcripts of those afternoon conversations, needless to say, do not exist. But the character and quality of the free-flowing banter survive in the playful letters exchanged after the Adams family moved to London.