Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  So were his priorities and policies as secretary of state. In the wake of Jefferson’s retirement James Monroe sent him a consoling letter, assuring his mentor that “notwithstanding the important and even turbulent scenes you have passed through [you have] not only the approbation of your own heart, and of your countrymen generally, but the silence and of course the constrained approbation of your enemies.” This seems a plausible if somewhat partisan appraisal.10

  Jefferson helped launch American foreign policy in a direction that served national purposes tolerably well throughout the next century. He shared with the other major figures, especially Washington, Adams and Hamilton, the fundamental recognition that the chief task facing the young republic was internal and domestic, stabilizing the freshly created political institutions and consolidating control over the North American continent. This meant steering clear of European conflicts at almost any cost and providing time and space for the emergent American national economy to develop its still-nascent potential. Despite bitter partisan fights over how to implement these foreign policy principles, not to mention the complete collapse of agreement over the relative threats posed by English or French challenges to American neutrality, the principles themselves remained a matter of consensus throughout the top reaches of the government. Jefferson was frequently accused, for good reason, of harboring pro-French sympathies that distorted his version of American neutrality. But the French minister, Pierre Adet, offered the most perceptive appraisal of Jefferson’s deepest sympathies. “Mr. Jefferson likes us,” wrote Adet, “because he detests England… , but he might change his opinion of us tomorrow, if tomorrow Great Britain should cease to inspire his fears… . Jefferson, I say, is American and, as such, he cannot be sincerely our friend. An American is the born enemy of all the European peoples.” This shrewdly accurate assessment provides the fairest gloss on his overall goals as secretary of state, which were to negotiate American interests forcefully while avoiding any version of partisanship that might lead to war.11

  That said, Adet’s observation that Jefferson truly detested England was also demonstrably true. Indeed Jefferson’s palpable hatred of all things English (except perhaps their gardens) colored his entire performance as secretary of state and on several occasions came perilously close to causing a breakdown in Anglo-American relations. In the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790, for example, when an incidental flare-up between England and Spain near present-day Vancouver threatened to provoke war throughout the entire trans-Mississippi West, Jefferson took an especially belligerent stand toward English designs on the region that risked war with England until the crisis fizzled away. In his negotiations with George Hammond, the British minister charged with resolving the long-standing differences over the terms of the Treaty of Paris, Jefferson was particularly wooden and unbending, almost constitutionally incapable of the kind of diplomatic demeanor that came so naturally to him in other contexts. And in 1793 his exhaustive report on American trade policy as a neutral nation recommended retaliatory tariffs against England that were economically suicidal and depended on a belief in American economic prowess vis-à-vis England that verged on sheer hallucination. The mere mention of England, it was clear, tapped some reservoir of hatred buried within the deeper folds of his personality that made diplomatic detachment almost impossible.12

  The deepest sources of that hatred must remain a matter of speculation. It is worth recalling, for example, that he had launched his national career by drafting a bill of indictment against George III and added a wholesale condemnation of the English people; these were so vitriolic that his colleagues on the Continental Congress had seen fit to tone down the former and wholly delete the latter. (What others regarded as justifiable propaganda had always seemed to him the literal, indeed self-evident truth.) Had not George III confirmed that the loathing was mutual by ceremoniously turning his back on him and Adams before the entire English court? Before that Cornwallis’s soldiers had burned his crops, carried off his livestock and slit the throats of those animals they could not take with them. During his Paris years he had also been exposed to the routinized arrogance of the English press, which seemed incapable of digesting the awkward fact that the American colonies had actually won their war for independence.

  But English delusions were also symptomatic of what Jefferson saw as a palpable threat—namely, England’s willingness to use its formidable economic and military power to thwart and perhaps even reverse the larger process set in motion by the American Revolution. Were not those English troops still stationed on America’s western frontier an explicit statement of harmful intentions and England’s prevailing hope that its former colonies might one day be reconquered? Was not English commercial policy, so implacably resistant to Jeffersonian pleas for free trade and so smugly confident of its hegemony in the world markets, evidence of a blatant English attempt to recolonize their former American empire? Finally, to top it off and make it deeply personal, did not he, along with a sizable portion of Virginia’s planter class, still find himself deeply in debt to English and Scottish creditors, who were busy compounding the interest on those debts at rates that made personal independence increasingly problematic? It was a galling thought, but in fact was it not the case that he, Thomas Jefferson, who had done so much to make and shape the American Revolution, remained maddeningly subservient to British authority?13

  Any effort to disentangle the personal from the public reasons for his Anglophobia, or perhaps his psychological from his ideological motives, would be a frustrating and ultimately futile task. Perhaps the best way to put it is that England was one subject on which his head and his heart saw no reason for debate. At the level of foreign policy, history eventually proved him wrong, as the Anglo-American alliance and the protection of the British fleet substantially assisted the maturation of the fledgling American nation throughout the nineteenth century. And his presumption that England was already on the downslope of history took a decisive blow in the unparalleled projection of English values during the Victorian era. But his instinctive sense that there was still unfinished business between England and America was shrewd; it was confirmed by the War of 1812. And his fear that England still contemplated the recovery of its lost American empire, while exaggerated, was a plausible apprehension that appears less credible to us now only because we have the advantage of knowing it did not happen.

  A similar mixture of personal and public reasons shaped his affection for France and frequently gave his definition of American neutrality a decidedly French accent. What Jefferson called “fair neutrality” meant an American foreign policy that recognized the crucial role France had played as America’s European ally during the American Revolution and the abiding obligations incurred in the Franco-American Treaty of 1778. He was successful in persuading Washington that American treaty obligations were made with the French nation, not with any particular government or individual, so that the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, then the bloody procession of shifting political factions that assumed power in revolutionary France, must not be used as an excuse to abandon the alliance. Though controversial at the time, and actively opposed by Hamilton and the so-called High Federalists, Jefferson’s judgment appears sound in retrospect. But his posture toward the French minister, Edmond Genêt, was the mirror image of his attitude toward England’s George Hammond, almost endlessly patient and infinitely forgiving, willing to tolerate Genêt’s brazen meddling in American domestic politics and his apparent delusion that he was actually empowered to overrule the president of the United States. Even when Jefferson eventually decided to break with Genêt in August 1793, his motives were explicitly political and domestic. “I saw the necessity of quitting a wreck,” he informed Madison, “which could not but sink all who would cling to it.”14

  Even Genêt’s hopelessly arrogant behavior failed to destroy Jefferson’s deep-rooted Gallic sympathies, which had their foundation in much more than his famous fondness for French cooking and Parisian architecture. These s
ympathies manifested themselves most tellingly in his almost casual endorsement of the horrific excesses then sweeping the French Revolution toward Jacobin rule and the Terror. “The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain,” he apprised William Short, who had written from Paris about the murderous behavior of the mobs and the complete breakdown of social order. Jefferson then delivered a lecture on the human cost that sometimes must be paid when history is on the march: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.”15 Such an extreme version of what might be called revolutionary realism, which conjures up comparisons to the twentieth-century radicals in the Lenin or Mao mold, exposes a chilling side of Jefferson’s character that seems so thoroughly incongruous with his temperament and so resolutely ideological. But his casual response to the atrocities of the French Revolution was in fact an integral part of a rather rarefied but deeply felt sense of where history was headed.

  The main outlines of the picture he carried about in his mind’s eye had been congealing ever since his Paris years. It envisioned the American Revolution as merely the opening shot in a global struggle that was eventually destined to sweep over the world. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously,” he informed one correspondent in a typical formulation, “is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe.” American independence from England was only the initial political manifestation of a much broader and more thoroughgoing process of liberation that would follow naturally, though obviously not without violent opposition, as the last vestiges of feudalism and monarchy were destroyed and swept into the dustbin of history. The book that best captured the essence of the Jeffersonian vision was Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791), which Jefferson had enthusiastically endorsed in its American edition and which created a sensation for its verbal flair in describing “the spirit of ’76” and “the spirit of ’89” as twin expressions of the same liberal impulse. From Jefferson’s perspective, therefore, the rather striking differences between the American and French revolutions were insignificant incidentals—on this score Adams thought he was either blissfully ignorant or temporarily insane—when compared with their common purpose. Likewise, he believed that the random violence and careening course of the French Revolution were part of a lamentable but passing chapter in a larger story of triumphant global revolution. All specific decisions about American foreign policy needed to be informed by this overarching, almost cosmic pattern. In practice this meant, as it usually did for Jefferson, fitting the intricate complexities of foreign policy into a simple moral dichotomy. This one cast England in the role of counterrevolutionary villain and France in the role of revolutionary hero.16

  Meanwhile his international vision had a discernible domestic analogue. After about a year of reasonably congenial political cooperation within Washington’s cabinet, Jefferson began to articulate a view of American politics that was also moralistic in tone and populated with clearly delineated villains and heroes. The immediate cause of this change was Alexander Hamilton, or rather the combination of his offensive policies as secretary of the treasury and irritatingly imperial personality. Jefferson and Hamilton had quickly emerged as the dominant figures in Washington’s cabinet. (John Adams, who might have been expected to carry equivalent weight, was shuttled to the side because of his vice presidential duties in the Senate, prompting him to observe that he occupied “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” the first in a litany of colorful complaints by subsequent occupants of the post.) In what became known as “the dinner table bargain,” Jefferson and Hamilton joined together in June 1790—Madison was present too and actually the chief negotiator—in order to forge a compromise that gave Hamilton sufficient votes in the Congress for passage of his proposal to have the federal government assume all outstanding state debts. This policy operated against the interests of Virginia, which had already retired the bulk of its debt, so Hamilton offered his support for a commitment to locate the national capital on the Potomac ten years hence. But the dinner table bargain proved to be the last bipartisan agreement between the two cabinet leaders. Jefferson was soon confessing that he had been “duped” by Hamilton and “made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret.” Throughout the remainder of their time in the government Jefferson and Hamilton were engaged in a bitter fight for the ear and mind of Washington and for what each man regarded as the very soul of the American republic.17

  Although the deeper sources of the conflict were profoundly ideological, it also had a decidedly personal edge. Hamilton was the kind of man who might have been put on earth by God to refute all the Jeffersonian values. Dashing and direct in his demeanor, Hamilton possessed all the confidence of a military leader accustomed to command, just the kind of explicit exercise of authority Jefferson found so irritating. While perhaps rooted in Hamilton’s military exploits as an officer on Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War (another heroic experience Jefferson could not claim), this palpable projection of authority called attention to its own brilliance in a style that was reminiscent of Patrick Henry’s oratory, which Jefferson also mistrusted for its ostentation. Like Henry, Hamilton was a youthful prodigy of impoverished origins—John Adams later called him “a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar”—whose visible craving for greatness violated the understated code of the true Virginia aristocrat. To make matters worse, Hamilton as an opponent was equally formidable on his feet and in print. Jefferson recalled his clashes with Hamilton in cabinet meetings as a form of martyrdom and warned Madison to draft all newspaper attacks against Hamilton personally, claiming that Hamilton was “a host within himself… .” Capable of mastering massive amounts of detail and tossing off sophisticated political essays against a tight deadline, Hamilton’s mind projected relentless energy rather than Jeffersonian serenity. It also tended to begin with a palpable and practical problem—how to assault a British position, ratify a constitution or develop a national economy—then reason toward the overarching principles that provided the solution. Jefferson’s mind moved along the same arc but in the opposite direction, from principled ideals to specific contexts or problems. This meant that Jefferson’s disappointments occurred when reality failed to measure up to his expectations; Hamilton’s occurred when his realistic proposals struck others as totally devoid of principle. Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.18

  These mutual and highly personal animosities became matters of public record starting in 1792, when Hamilton and his followers, writing under several pseudonyms (i.e., Catullus and Scourge), attacked Jefferson in the press for his pro-French sympathies, his shifting position on the Constitution and the elusive core of his character: “Cautious and shy,” wrote Hamilton, “wrapped up in impenetrable silence and mystery, he [Jefferson] reserves his abhorrence for the arcana of a certain snug sanctuary, where seated on his pivot chair, and involved in all the obscurity of political mystery and deception… he circulates his poison thro’ the medium of the National Gazette.” The final reference was to an anti-Hamilton newspaper edited by Philip Freneau, whom Jefferson had hired as a translator at the State Department in order to subsidize his editorial efforts against the government, all the while claiming that the arrangement violated no conflict of interest principles known to him. Meanwhile the Hamiltonians kept blazing away at the so-called Generalissimo of the opposition party, in the process providing the most scathing attack on Jefferson’s career and character ever put before the public: “Had an inquisitive mind in those days sought for eviden
ce of his Abilities as a Statesman, he would have been referred to the confusions in France, the offspring of certain political dogmas fostered by the American Minister, and to certain theoretical principles fit only for Utopia. As a Warrior, to his Exploits at Monticelli; as a Philosopher, to his discovery of the inferiority of Blacks to Whites, because they are more unsavory and secrete more by the kidnies; as a Mathematician, to his whirligig Chair.”19

  Apart from Freneau, Jefferson’s chief defenders were all Virginians: the ever-loyal Madison and Monroe, plus the young congressman William Branch Giles, whom Jefferson encouraged to launch an official, though trumped-up, investigation of Hamilton’s financial improprieties as secretary of the treasury. Jefferson himself never entered the public debate, always preferring to work through surrogates, and he was so skillful at covering his tracks that the extent of his involvement in the Giles investigation was not discovered for almost two hundred years.20