Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  So much history happened in prerevolutionary France during the last two years of Jefferson’s ministry that it is not easy to summarize his shifting political positions, except perhaps to say that he presumed that France would emerge from the ferment as some kind of constitutional monarchy. Despite his earlier characterizations of the French king as a drunken sot, completely out of touch with the needs and frustrations of the French people, by the summer of 1788 he had come to regard Louis as an enlightened ruler who was anxious to play a crucial role in forging political alliances between the nobility and the members of the Third Estate. (In the end Louis XVI turned out to be like George III, fated to do precisely the wrong thing at just the right time, what Jefferson called “a machine for making revolutions.”) But his fondest hopes for the recovery of political stability rested with the group of moderate and enlightened aristocrats, led by his good friend Lafayette, called the Patriots or the Patriot Party. Although he was prepared to acknowledge that the situations were fundamentally different, Jefferson seemed to regard the Patriots in France as counterparts to the Federalists in America; they were “sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, longed for occasions of reforming it” and were dedicated to “the establishment of a constitution which shall assure… a good degree of liberty.” Lafayette was cast in the role of a French Madison, orchestrating the essential compromises among the different factions and thereby consolidating the energies of the revolution within a political framework that institutionalized the maximum gains that historical circumstances would allow.86

  Jefferson was prepared to recognize that those circumstances were not ideal. The deeply rooted class divisions of French society were on display during the debates within the Estates-General that he attended in May and June 1789, as were the still-powerful legacies of feudalism, which had all but vanished in America but in Versailles took on the highly virulent and visible form of costumed lords and courtly processions. Given these entrenched impediments to a fully flowered revolution along American lines, Jefferson advised his friends in the Patriot Party to settle for the English constitutional model, supplemented by one important American addition—that is, he recommended the retention of the French monarchy, though with vastly reduced powers, the creation of a bicameral legislature with the upper chamber reserved for the clergy and nobility and—the American contribution—the insistence on a declaration of rights that protected basic liberties from violation by kings, lords or even elected legislators. Characteristically, he devoted most of his time and energy to drafting the Charter of Rights, which called for the abolition of all pecuniary privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the nobility, civilian rule over the military, equal treatment under the law and a modified version of freedom of the press. With France as with America, his fondest political topic was not the artful arrangement of government power but rather the cordoning off of a region where no government power could exist. He conveyed his draft to Lafayette in June 1789; it served as the basis for the Declaration of Rights that Lafayette presented to the National Assembly the following month.87

  By that time Jefferson was confident that the danger of disintegration and violent revolution had been averted. “The great crisis being now over,” he wrote to Jay, “I shall not have a matter interesting enough to trouble you with as often as I have lately.” The Estates-General had not taken his advice and established a separate chamber for the clergy and nobility, but enough of the privileged classes had gone over to the Third Estate to make the newly established National Assembly a representative, if somewhat unwieldy, body. Nevertheless, as he explained to Tom Paine on July 11, 1789, the French Revolution was effectively over. “The National assembly (for that is the name they take) . . . are now in complete and undisputed possession of sovereignty. The executive and the aristocracy are now at their feet. The mass of the nation, the mass of the clergy, and the army are with them. They have prostrated the old government, and are now beginning to build one from the foundation.”88

  The following day Paris exploded in a series of riots and mob actions that have been memorialized in countless histories, novels and films on the French Revolution: the assault on the Customs House; the stoning and eventual massacre of the royal cavalry; the storming of the Bastille and subsequent beheading and dismemberment of its garrison. After five days of random violence and massive demonstrations, Jefferson described to Jay the scene as Louis XVI returned to the capital, with Lafayette at his side, to be greeted by “about 60,000 citizens of all forms and conditions armed with the muskets of the Bastille and… pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, sythes, etc.” and all shouting “vive la nation.”89

  If one were to conjure up a scene designed to weaken Jefferson’s faith in the inherent benevolence of popular movements or to shake his apparent serenity toward popular rebellions, one could hardly do better. Therefore it is worth noting that, though shocked at first by the random and savage character of the mob violence, he never questioned his belief in the essential rightness of the cause or the ultimate triumph of its progressive principles. His letters to Jay and Madison described the carnage of July 1789 as an unfortunate but temporary aberration that in no way called into question the prospect for an enduring and peaceful political settlement. He seemed to regard the spasm of violence as the product of a misguided decision by the king or his ministers to increase the troop strength in the city rather than as ominous evidence of deep and irreconcilable class resentments. By early August, in fact, he was convinced that the storm (shades of Shays’s Rebellion) had passed and the future looked clear and bright: “Quiet is so well established here that I think there is nothing further to be apprehended. The harvest is so near that there is nothing to fear from the want of bread. The National assembly are wise, firm and moderate. They will establish the English constitution, purged of its numerous and capital defects.”90

  It was in this brave and buoyant mood that Jefferson sat down on September 6, 1789, to write what has subsequently proved to be one of the most famous letters in his vast correspondence. “The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society,” he explained to Madison, “has presented the question to my mind.” The question itself was not entirely new. It was “Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another,” which Jefferson claimed had implications that had not been sufficiently appreciated in either Europe or America. His answer to the question had the kind of unequivocal ring that he normally reserved for documents like the Declaration of Independence. “I set out on this ground,” he announced, “which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”

  Exactly what Jefferson meant by this proposition has been the subject of endless debate among historians for some time. In the letter itself Jefferson seemed to be advocating some version of generational sovereignty. “We seem not to perceive,” as he put it to Madison, “that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.” He produced elaborate calculations based on Buffon’s demographic tables to show that, on average, a generation lasted about nineteen years. It therefore followed from the principle—“the earth belongs always to the living generations”—that all personal and national debts, all laws, even all constitutions, should expire after that time.91

  Madison, always the gentle critic of Jeffersonian ideas, complimented Jefferson on his “interesting reflections,” then proceeded to demolish the idea of generational sovereignty, which was not really an idea at all, he suggested, but rather a dangerous fantasy. In the course of presenting his argument, Jefferson had asked Madison to imagine “a whole generation of men to be born on the same day, to attain mature age on the same day, and to die on the same day.” Here, Madison observed not so diplomatically, was the chief clue that Jefferson was engaged in magic more than political philosophy. For there is not, and never can be, a generation in Jefferson’s pure sense of the term. Generational cohorts simply do not come into the world as d
iscrete units. There is instead a seamless web of arrivals and departures, along with an analogous web of obligatory connections between past and present generations. These connections are not only unavoidable but absolutely essential for the continuation of civilized society.92

  Madison did not say it, but the whole tenor of his response implied that Jefferson’s letter was an inadvertent repudiation of all the painstaking work that he and his Federalist colleagues had been doing for the past two years. For Jefferson’s idea (or, if you will, fantasy) struck at the very stability and long-term legality that the new Constitution was designed to assure. The notion that all laws, contractual obligations and hard-won constitutional precedents would lapse every nineteen or twenty years was a recipe for anarchy. Like Jefferson’s earlier remark about wanting to see “a little rebellion now and then,” which it seemed to echo, the generational argument struck Madison as an utterly irresponsible and positively dangerous example of indulged speculation and just the kind of abstract reasoning that gave French political thinkers a reputation for building castles in the air.93

  As usual, Jefferson listened to Madison’s advice. He never put forward his generational argument as a serious legislative proposal, and he refrained from ever mentioning the matter to Madison again. But whatever practical problems the idea posed, whatever its inadequacies as a realistic rationale for legal reform, he clung to it tenaciously, introducing it in conversations and letters for the rest of his life. If, as Madison had suggested, the core of the idea was incompatible with the way the world actually worked, it was compatible with the way Jefferson’s mind worked. Indeed, there is no single statement in the vast literature by and about Jefferson that provides as clear and deep a look into his thinking about the way the world ought to work. The notion that “the earth belongs to the living” is in fact a many-faceted product of his political imagination that brings together in one place his essential obsessions and core convictions.

  It therefore behooves us to ask when and how Jefferson acquired the idea. One can detect the first inkling in an earlier letter to Madison, describing his impressions of the French countryside around Fontainebleau in 1785. His encounter with a peasant woman led him, he told Madison, “into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe.” These reflections then led him to the conclusion that “the earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.” What seems to be driving Jefferson’s thinking here is a fresh appreciation of the entrenched poverty afflicting Europe’s peasant class and the discrepancy between that near-hopeless condition and “the fundamental right to labour the earth.” What seems to be the culprit are the accumulated inequities and inherited inadequacies, the dead hand of the Europeans past—in a word, feudalism.94

  The next installment of the idea appears in Jefferson’s correspondence with Lafayette between January and July 1789. The correspondence itself is an elliptical and elusive source per se, but its major topic, the drafting of a Declaration of Rights, prompted both men to think about what Lafayette called “the right of succeeding generations” (le droit des générations qui se succèdent), a phrase included in the proposed Declaration of Rights that Lafayette submitted to the National Assembly in July. At one level the phrase was designed to assure subsequent constitutional reform, in the form of either amendments or conventions of the sort pioneered by the new American states. At a deeper level the thinking behind the language suggested the need to anticipate posterity’s independent appraisal of its own best interests. After all, the current French political crisis had been prompted by fiscal problems that now required the present generation to assume the accumulated debts of its predecessors. Inherent in the French political situation, in other words, was a heightened sensitivity toward the burdens the past imposed on the present, especially in the form of debt but also in the form of legacies like clerical and aristocratic privileges. Jefferson and Lafayette seemed to be groping toward built-in constitutional mechanisms that would relieve future generations from the same burdens.95

  The final sighting of the idea—that is before it took its enduring form in the letter to Madison—occurs in August and early September 1789. On August 26, responding to Lafayette’s request, Jefferson hosted a working dinner for eight leading members of the Patriot Party, who gathered to debate a looming vote in the National Assembly over whether the king should have a veto over acts of the legislature. It was a far-ranging discussion, which Jefferson described as “truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogue of antiquity, as handed to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and Cicero.” While there is no direct evidence that the subject of generational sovereignty came up, the gathering conveniently symbolizes the informal and ultimately untraceable way in which new ideas were circulating in revolutionary Paris. And though neither Tom Paine nor the Marquis de Condorcet was present at the dinner, both men were members of the Patriot Party and had proposed their own versions of the generational argument. Condorcet, France’s premier mathematician as well as an outspoken republican, advocated a version of the generational argument strikingly similar to Jefferson’s, complete with demographic tables and the same calculations about the life span of a generation. What’s more, Condorcet was friends with and a patient of Dr. Richard Gem, a physician who treated Jefferson for one of his recurrent migraine headaches during the first week of September. We know that Gem and Jefferson discussed the question of posterity’s rights and that Gem handed Jefferson a written statement on the matter that asserted the principle “that one generation of men in civil society have no right to make acts to bind another, is a truth that cannot be contested.”96

  Rather than become entangled in an endless argument about intellectual originality and primacy, it seems more sensible to bypass such unanswerable questions and conclude that Jefferson’s thinking about the present generation’s obligations to the future developed in revolutionary France, that his formulation of the idea was probably influenced by the specific dilemmas faced by the French government at the time and that the notion of generational sovereignty was “in the air” within the French salon culture, in much the same way that the core ideas of the natural rights section of the Declaration of Independence were “in the air” in the summer of 1776. The question then becomes: Why did Jefferson pluck this particular idea out of the air in 1789 and give it the exalted status of a newly discovered self-evident truth?

  Two different but overlapping answers suggest themselves. First, Jefferson’s enhanced apprehensions about the destructive potential of inherited debt had both a public and a private dimension that converged in his mind about this time. The outstanding debt of the United States had undercut his best efforts as minister to France and blocked his diplomatic initiative to negotiate treaties with other European powers. And the volatile political situation in revolutionary France had been triggered by a fiscal crisis created by a massive national debt. Moreover, his personal finances—the cost of his accommodations, clothing, furniture, horses and carriage, what he called his “outfit”—had far outdistanced his allotted salary and forced him into embarrassing exchanges with his superiors back in Philadelphia about the gap between his living costs and his ministerial stipend.

  But the debt he was running up in Paris was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For by the late 1780s he began to become aware that the debts he had inherited from his father-in-law’s estate were compounding at a rate that he might never be able to repay. It first began to dawn on him that despite owning thousands of acres and about two hundred slaves, he owed his creditors such vast amounts that he might go to his grave a debtor. This realization was almost as much a burden as the debts themselves
. “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth,” he wrote his overseer at Monticello in 1787, “is such really as to render life of little value here.” He was, in effect, both intellectually and psychologically primed to appreciate what debt does to nations and to individuals and therefore open to ideas designed to limit the damage.97

  Moreover, the doctrine of generational sovereignty was yet another version of his utopian radicalism. Madison was surely correct to declare the entire scheme wildly impractical and utterly incapable of implementation. But that was beside the point. For the vision of each generation starting from scratch, liberated from the accumulated legacies of past debts, laws, institutionalized obligations and regulations, allowed Jefferson to conjure up his fondest dream, a world where the primal meaning of independence could flourish without any restrictions, where innocence had not yet been corrupted. This was the world of the prefeudal Saxon settlers, the world of the prepolitical Indian tribes, the world of the independent yeoman farmer on the edge of the frontier, the world after a rightful rebellion has cleared the air. It was a wholly voluntary world, where coercion was unknown and government unnecessary. Though transient—history would begin to make its inevitable inroads almost immediately—the idyllic harmonies sustained themselves for that one brief, shining moment. It was therefore the proper place to house the memories of the affair with Maria Cosway (though not Cosway herself) and to preserve the feminine values she symbolized at the peak of their remembered perfection. The belief that “the earth belongs to the living,” in short, was another blow struck in behalf of Jefferson’s most cherished dream: a society devoid of contaminating institutions and laws; an effort to routinize their removal so that the deadening hand of history was regularly slapped away in order to make room for a pristine encounter with what he believed to be the natural order.