For the next six weeks Jefferson and Cosway were together almost daily, touring every garden, viewing every distinctive building, statue, painting or ancient ruin in Paris and its environs. For Jefferson, the luxuriant beauty of a work of art activated the same deep pool of passion that a beautiful woman also tapped—aesthetic appreciation and femininity were closely associated primal urges within his soul—and the commingling of Parisian art and architecture with the seductive attractions of a beautiful young woman (Cosway was twenty-seven) generated an explosive combination that left him utterly infatuated. He ignored his diplomatic chores, often dispatching Petit to make his excuses for missed appointments.
The rhapsodic adventure reached a climax on September 18, 1786, when Jefferson, still very much under the spell of emotional exuberance, broke his right wrist while trying to vault over a large kettle or fountain—there is disagreement over which it was. Just where the accident occurred and whether Cosway was even with him at the time are not known. Jefferson’s most revealing comment on the incident came a month later: “How the right hand became disabled would be a long story for the left to tell,” he wrote to William Stephens Smith. “It was by one of those follies from which good cannot come, but ill may.” The injury incapacitated Jefferson for several weeks and put an effective end to the romantic frolics with Cosway. “It is with infinite regret,” he wrote her with his left hand, “that I must relinquish your charming company for that of the surgeon.” But two different French physicians botched the treatment—the wrist gave him trouble for the rest of his life—and Cosway left for London with her husband before another rendezvous could be arranged. He did manage to see her off, claiming that he turned away as she disappeared on the horizon, feeling “more dead than alive.”60
We can never know with any certainty what transpired between Jefferson and Cosway during the fall of 1786. Historians, biographers and even filmmakers have lingered over the episode in loving detail and reached different answers to the “did-they-or-didn’t-they?” question. What is indisputable is that Jefferson spent several months in a romantic haze, which he described in terms reminiscent of the young lover in The Sorrows of Young Werther: “Living from day to day, without a plan for four and twenty hours to come,” he confessed to another woman friend, “I form no catalogue of impossible events. Laid up in port, for life as I thought myself at one time, I am thrown out to sea, and an unknown one to me.” Indeed, the Cosway affair is significant not because of the titillating questions it poses about a sexual liaison with a gorgeous young married woman but because of the window it opens into Jefferson’s deeply sentimental soul and the highly romantic role he assigned to women who touched him there.61
The most self-revealing letter he ever wrote was sent to Cosway in October 1786, while he was still under the spell of their whirlwind infatuation and still recovering from the injured wrist, which itself served as a perfect metaphor for his wounded condition. Twelve pages and more than four thousand words long, Jefferson labored over the letter with the same intensity he had brought to the Declaration of Independence. The famous letter—it has been endlessly interpreted by several generations of scholars—takes the classic if somewhat contrived form of “a dialogue between the Head and the Heart.” Though the announced intention of the letter is to offer Cosway a problematic picture of the internal battle within Jefferson between reason and emotion, it is a love letter, and therefore the powers of the heart are privileged. The heart has the last word as well as the best lines (i.e., “Had they [philosophers] ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives…”). Jefferson even enlists the American Revolution in behalf of the heart’s side of the argument, claiming that victory in the war for independence was a matter of “enthusiasm against numbers” because it defied any rational measure of probability. So at one level the heart is the unequivocal winner of the debate. Despite the agony he felt at Cosway’s departure, the ecstasy of their time together was worth the pain. But at another level it is Jefferson’s head that is orchestrating the arguments and words of the dialogue. The act of crafting the letter allowed him to recover control over the powerful emotions that the relationship with Cosway had released. He kept a letterpress copy of the letter to record the emotions of the moment for posterity. In the long run the head prevails.62
Jefferson’s subsequent correspondence with Cosway charts the gradual and perhaps inevitable cooling of the infatuation. It also bears witness to his urge to transport his palpable feelings for a real woman to a more imaginary region where perfect love could be more easily and safely experienced. In December 1786, still suffering from the wrist injury and the pain of separation, he recalled a magic cap he had read about as a child that enabled its wearer to fly wherever he wished. “I should wish myself with you, and not wish myself away again,” he wrote. “If I cannot be with you in reality, I will in imagination.” He reported his dream of the two of them in Virginia, visiting the Natural Bridge: “I shall meet you there, and visit with you all the grand scenes. I had rather be deceived than live without hope. It is so sweet! It makes us ride so smoothly over the roughness of life.”63
In her early letters Cosway was able to match him with her own romantic imaginings. “Are you to be painted in future ages,” she wrote in February 1787, “sitting solitary and sad, on the beautiful Monticello tormented by the shadow of a woman who will present you a deform’d rod [presumably his wrist], twisted and broken, instead of the emblematic instrument belonging to the Muses… .”64
But by the summer of 1787 Jefferson’s letters had become less frequent. Cosway fell back on her pouting and petulant poses, complaining about his lack of attention and threatening to cease writing until the number of Jefferson’s letters matched hers. She was now, however, locked into a war of words with one of the virtuoso prose stylists of the age. His long silence, he explained, was the result of a trip to southern France and northern Italy, where he “took a peep into Elysium” and realized that “I am born to lose everything I loved.” But the references were not to Cosway, at least explicitly; they were to the architecture of Italy and his failure to see Rome. “Your long silence is unpardonable,” she replied, then admitted that she did not know what else to say: “My war against you is of such a Nature that I cannot even find terms to express it… . But I begin to run on and my intention was only to say nothing; send a blank paper… .”65
Jefferson’s response to Cosway’s impatience only increased her frustration: “I do not think I was in arrears in my epistolary account when I left Paris. In affection I am sure you were greatly my debtor. I often determined during my journey to write you; but sometimes the fatigue of exercise and sometimes a fatigued attention hindered me.” She had by now become a lovely memory that he could summon up and appreciate in the privacy of his imagination: “At Heidelberg I wished for you too. In fact I led you by the hand thro’ the whole garden… . At Strasbourg I sat down to write you. But for my soul I could think of nothing at Strasbourg but the promontory of noses… . Had I written to you from thence it would have been a continuation of Sterne upon noses… .” This last reference was to a passage in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy that describes an elongating nose, an unmistakable piece of sexual innuendo intended to be provocative. But the reference eluded Cosway, who was accustomed to leaving her male admirers in various European capitals wondering and wandering in her wake. (No less than James Boswell said she treated men like dogs.) Now, however, she herself was dangling, the femme fatale who had more than met her match. She was incensed: “At last I receive a letter from you, am I to be angry or not… . lett me tell you I am not your debtor in the least… . how could you lead me by the hand all the way, think of me, have Many things to say, and not find One word to write, but on Noses?” 66
During Cosway’s return visit to Paris the two former lovers managed to see each other only briefly and always in large social gatherings. During Jefferson’s re
turn trip to America, he lay over in England for ten days while waiting for a ship but chose not to make the effort to visit her before sailing. She reciprocated by claiming that a bad cold made a trip to him impossible. In one of her last letters she acknowledged defeat in the verbal jousting match, along with a pervasive sense of personal inadequacy: “I wish always to converse with you longer. But when I read your letters they are so well wrote, so full of a thousand pretty things that it is not possible for me to answer such charming letters. I could say many things if my pen could write exactly My sentiments and feelings, but my letters must appear sad scrawls to you.” Jefferson, for his part, said good-bye in terms that recognized how the sizzling infatuation and then quarrelsome coquetry had now congealed into a cooler but more comfortable friendship. The more unmanageable emotions had long since been consigned to a cherished and safely insulated chamber of his soul. “Adieu my very dear friend,” he wrote. “Be our affections unchangeable, and if our little history is to last beyond the grave, be the longest chapter in it that which shall record their purity, warmth and duration.” While his customary discretion makes it impossible to know whether the affair with Cosway had an active and not just a suggestive sexual dimension, the abiding character of their lengthy correspondence makes it abundantly clear that Jefferson preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than the physical world of his bedchamber.67
MADISONIAN ADVICE
BY THE MID-POINT of his time in France, then, Paris had come to mean many things to Jefferson: It was the diplomatic capital of Europe in which the political and commercial stature of the new American nation he represented remained marginal at best; the epitome of the Old World’s civilized seductions, as well as its urban corruptions; and the perfect place to fall in love. Paris also proved to be the ideal perch from which to observe two of the most significant political events in Western history. From afar it afforded Jefferson a conveniently detached perspective on the debate surrounding the creation and ratification of the new Constitution of the United States, a debate in which the combination of his distance and the quality of his chief source—James Madison—allowed him to accommodate himself to political ideas that violated his deepest ideological instincts. From close up it provided him with the unique opportunity to witness the coming of the French Revolution and, in the crucible of conversations with several of its staunchest supporters and ultimate victims, to work out the full implications of his truly radical vision of politics. As both a bird’s-eye observer of American developments and a ringside witness of French convulsions, in short, he fashioned what were to become enduringly Jeffersonian convictions about mankind’s tenuous relationship with government.
His ongoing correspondence with Madison and Monroe had kept him abreast of the growing dissatisfaction with the inherent weakness of the federal Congress in Philadelphia. “The politics of Europe render it indispensably necessary that with respect to every thing external we be one nation only, firmly held together,” he informed Madison, adding, “Interior government is what each state should keep to himself.” He wanted it known back home in Virginia and in Philadelphia that he favored reform of the Articles of Confederation to enlarge federal jurisdiction over foreign trade and foreign policy but preferred leaving control over all domestic concerns, including taxation, to the particular states. “To make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in Domestic ones,” he wrote to Madison, “gives the outline of the proper division of powers between the general and particular governments.”68
By 1786 Madison was already contemplating much more drastic changes in the structure of the federal government. Jefferson had inadvertently contributed to such thoughts by sending over two trunks of books, including the collected works of David Hume, which Madison then proceeded to study in preparation for the Constitutional Convention. (The historian Douglass Adair has called Madison’s intensive reading of Hume perhaps the most productive and consequential act of scholarship in American history.) But Madison did not initially share his more critical assessment of the American government with Jefferson. The established pattern of their political alliance was for Madison or Monroe to provide the information about congressional debates and for Jefferson then to dictate the directions to be taken. For example, when Monroe reported a congressional proposal to move the national capital from Philadelphia to New York, Jefferson told him to join with Madison to block the move since the interest of Virginia demanded a location on the Potomac. “It is evident that when a sufficient number of the Western states come in,” he apprised Monroe, “they will move it to George town. In the meantime it is our interest that it should remain where it is, and give no new pretensions to any other place.” Given the deference that Madison customarily displayed toward Jefferson’s commands, it is not surprising that Jefferson remained unaware of the root-and-branch reforms Madison believed essential until after the Constitutional Convention had completed its work. In this one all-important instance their roles were reversed; Madison was in the lead.69
Meanwhile Jefferson was receiving reports from other quarters about an insurrection in western Massachusetts led by a veteran of the American Revolution named Daniel Shays to protest new taxes imposed by Boston. In the grand scheme of things Shays’s Rebellion was a tempest in a teapot, but prominent figures throughout the country interpreted it as a harbinger of incipient anarchy and a clarion call for a more vigorous and fully empowered federal government: “In short, my Dr. Sir,” John Jay wrote from Philadelphia, “we are in a very unpleasant Situation. Changes are Necessary, but what they Ought to be, what they will be, and how and when to be produced, are arduous questions.” From London Abigail Adams summoned up the scene of a looming apocalypse. “Ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principles,” she informed Jefferson, “have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretence of grievances which have no existence but in their own immaginations.”70
In retrospect it is clear that both the Shaysites’ fear of tyranny and the corresponding fear of observers like Jay and Abigail Adams that America was on the verge of social disintegration were mutually reinforcing overreactions of near-paranoid proportions. Jefferson’s response to the entire display was especially revealing both for its clearsighted and even serene endorsement of popular resistance to government in almost any form and for its eventually famous phrasing: “I hope they pardoned them [i.e., the Shaysites],” he told Abigail. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive… . I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.” He had first proposed a similar formulation of the problem two months earlier in a letter to Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. “If the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then,” he had written Stiles, “or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase.” A month later he had written Madison in language almost identical to his message to Abigail. His boldest formulation came more months later, in November 1787, when he told William Stephens Smith that Shays’s Rebellion was actually a symptom of America’s political health: “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” he observed. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Moreover, those alleged statesmen who wished to use Shays’s Rebellion as an occasion to justify more coercive political institutions, he warned, “are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order.”71
These were extremely radical statements, which, taken literally—or, for that matter, taken at all seriously—placed Jefferson far to the left of any responsible political leader of the revolutionary generation. For his remarks suggested that his deepest allegiances were not to the preservation of political stability but to its direct opposite. Given the radical and even anarchistic consequences of the ideas he seemed to be advocating in response to the Shays scare, one is tempted to put the
m down as hyperbolic occasions, or perhaps as momentary excesses prompted by his genuine aversion to the overreaction of those condemning the Shays insurrection, an aversion rendered more plausible and comfortable by his distant and safe location in Paris.
But there is reason to believe that Jefferson meant what he said, indeed that his entire way of thinking about government was different from that of any other prominent American leader of the time. In January 1787, while Madison was studying the classic texts of Hume and Montesquieu in preparation for the Constitutional Convention later that spring, Jefferson wrote him to share his own thoughts on the appropriate political models for American society. While Madison was grappling with questions about political architecture—how to configure federal and state power; how to design institutions so as to balance interest groups without replicating the gridlock of the current government under the Articles of Confederation—Jefferson was thinking much more grandly, about the very ground on which any and all political structures must be constructed. While Madison was struggling with arrangements of authority in three branches of the government, Jefferson was identifying three kinds of society in which human beings might arrange themselves.
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