Joseph J. Ellis
Page 19
Beneath the purely personal animus between the two different-minded and temperamentally incompatible cabinet members, Jefferson and Hamilton had become convenient symbols for a more fundamental ideological division. By 1792 Jefferson was referring to the Federalist leadership as “monarchists,” “tories,” “anti-republicans” and the supporters of Hamilton’s fiscal policies as “monocrats,” “stock-jobbers” and “paper men.” The story that was taking shape in Jefferson’s mind assumed the contours of a plot to reverse the course of the American Revolution, with the chief characters on the other side cast as villainous conspirators covertly commanded by the diabolical secretary of the treasury, whom he described to Washington as “a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has… heaped its honors on his head.” The hatred was palpable.21
Historians who have studied this volatile moment in Jefferson’s career and in the political history of the early republic, searching for a way to render plausible what to the modern ear sounds obsessive and almost paranoid, have described it as a fresh application of the same Whig ideology he had brandished so successfully against the English ministry in the 1760s and 1770s. There is much to be said for this interpretation, which has the virtue of linking his earlier obsessions with English political corruption to his equally obsessive hatred of Hamilton’s financial program and the Hamiltonian vision of a proactive national government, which Jefferson purportedly regarded as the latter-day apparition of a political dragon he thought he had slain in 1776. This way of understanding Jefferson’s hyperbolic rhetoric in the 1790s—as a recurrence of the Country Party fears of the American Revolution—also has the virtue of undercutting criticism of his apparent extremism in the political crusade against Hamilton. For if one is going to question Jefferson’s sanity in the 1790s, does that not then cast aspersions on his equivalently polemical assaults on George III during the most gloriously patriotic moment in American history?22
Jefferson was not—let us be clear and emphatic on this point—a mentally unstable person or a man with latent paranoid tendencies. The conspiratorial character of his political thinking in the 1790s, as all scholars of the Whig ideology have reminded us, was a common feature of the political literature of the time, and substantial traces of the same feverish mentality can be found in the private correspondence of the entire political leadership, including Adams, Madison and Hamilton. (Only Washington seems to have remained immune, but then he was immune to everything.) Unless one is prepared to make sweeping psychiatric charges against the vanguard members of the entire revolutionary generation, which is generally credited with being the most intellectually gifted group of political leaders in American history, then psychiatric appraisals of Jefferson himself should be recognized as both misleading and unfair. The leading scholar of the revolutionary era has also reminded us that conspiracy theories not only were prevalent ways of thinking and talking about political events by mainstream as well as marginal figures but also provided a secular way of explaining baffling social changes in terms that improved upon previous resorts to fate, providence or God’s will.23
That said, Jefferson’s simplistic and highly moralistic rendering of what the Federalists and especially the Hamiltonians were doing merits a moment of meditation, if for no other reason than the Country Party interpretation does not do full justice to the way Jefferson’s mind actually worked. Perhaps the best way to put it is that because he began with a purer and more intensely idealistic conception of the levels of individual freedom possible in this world, especially after the final vestiges of kingly and clerical power had been blown away, Jefferson harbored a more acute sensitivity toward the explicit exercise of government power than any other member of the revolutionary generation. Because the primary colors of his political imagination were black and white, there were no shaded hues, no middle-range way stations where his apprehensions about the oppressive effects of political power could rest more comfortably once threats to his utopian goals materialized. Hamilton’s plans for a proactive federal government empowered to shape markets and set both the financial and political agendas were certainly not monarchical in character—if anything, they were more a precocious precursor of twentieth-century New Deal values than an archaic attempt to resuscitate the arbitrary authority of medieval kings and courts—but in Jefferson’s mind these distinctions made no appreciable difference. Energetic governmental power of any sort was intolerable because it originated outside the individual; it therefore violated his romantic ideal of personal autonomy. George III’s edicts and Parliament’s taxation policies, it is true, elicited the same fears back in the 1760s and 1770s. But Hamilton did not just conjure up bad memories of English oppression; he directly threatened the primal core of Jefferson’s wistful world.24
In addition, Jefferson’s emerging sense of himself as the leader of the Country Party assumed a distinctively Jeffersonian flavor that was different from the original English meaning of the term, for the rather obvious reason that “Country” meant different things for him than for a resident of Walpolian England. When he was asked to describe the social composition of the two parties, for example, his list of “anti-republicans” consisted of former loyalists and tories, American merchants trading with England, stock speculators and banking officials, federal employees and other office seekers and—an all-purpose psychological category—“nervous persons, whose languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than active state of things.” The list of “republicans,” on the other hand, was much shorter but included the vast majority of American voters. It was comprised of “the entire body of landholders throughout the United States” as well as “the body of labourers, not being landholders, whether in husbanding or the arts.” Jefferson estimated that “the latter is to the aggregate of the former party probably as 500 to one.”25
Here one gets an early whiff of the distinctively democratic odor with which Jefferson’s name would eventually be associated. In the traditional Whig formulation the Country Party was an elite group of landowners who opposed the policies of the Court Party, and the two competing elites offered different prescriptions for what was in the best interest of the public. But Jefferson had come to see himself as the leader of a popular majority doing political battle against an elite minority. This was a new way of thinking about politics in the late eighteenth century. True, it drew upon traditional notions of conspiracy long associated with Whig ideology. The “anti-republican” supporters of Hamilton’s policies, for example, though a mere minority, enjoyed “circumstances which give them an appearance of strength and numbers.” Their chief advantage, Jefferson thought, was that “they all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times,” whereas his constituency was “dispersed over a great extent of country, [and] have little means of intercommunication with each other.” (The chief disadvantage facing the Country Party, in other words, was that it lived in the country.) But the novel feature of Jefferson’s formulation of American political life was that it was essentially a matter of numbers. He regarded himself as the spokesman for a latent majority of Americans who, if they could ever be mobilized, would assume their rightful place as true heirs to “the spirit of ’76.” And instead of talking about them as “the public,” he began in the 1790s to speak in the more democratic idiom of “the people.” These were prophetic tendencies.26
DREAMS AND DEBTS
VERY FEW LETTERS went out from Monticello during Jefferson’s first year of retirement, and the ones that did conveyed the impression that the former secretary of state had successfully completed the long-awaited odyssey from the purgatory of politics to his own pastoral paradise. He wrote to Washington not as the president but as a fellow farmer, recalling that both men were familiar with a scheme to manufacture “an essence of dung, one pint of which could manure an acre,” and that if any ingenious inventor could render it portable, Jefferson was now prepared
to purchase a huge supply. To James Monroe, who was serving as the American minister in Paris, he apologized for the infrequency of his letters, blaming the long silence on “that sort of procrastination which so often takes place when no circumstance fixes a business to a particular time.” When word reached him that his old Parisian infatuation, Maria Cosway, had left her husband, abandoned her young child and sequestered herself in an Italian convent, he wrote her in the old sentimental style of times past: “I regret the distance which separates us and will not permit myself to believe that we are no more to meet till you meet me where time and distance are nothing.” But she was wrong to bury herself in a cloistered room where “the sun [is] ever excluded, the balmy breeze never felt… .” He had chosen the opposite direction for himself, spending his days out of doors like “a real farmer, measuring fields, following my ploughs, helping the haymakers, and never knowing a day which has not done something for futurity.” He assured his friends that his serenity, like a field of planted flowers, had germinated and was now bursting out inside his soul. It was the lifelong Jeffersonian domestic ideal, now at midlife and in the proper rural context: to be “living like an Antedeluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil.”27
Certain features in this idyllic scene, especially the family dimension, apparently did come together for Jefferson at least momentarily in the mid-1790s. Patsy, now a full-grown woman whom Jefferson addressed as Martha, had married Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., in 1790, soon after her return from France. When she was a young girl studying in Paris, Jefferson had worried out loud about the chances “that in marriage she will draw a blockhead,” but Randolph put those worries to rest. A Virginia gentleman of the finest pedigree, Randolph had been educated at Edinburgh and in fact modeled himself after his new father-in-law. Tall, sinewy, like Jefferson, but with black hair and a dark complexion, he was a splendid horseman, one of the few Virginians who could outride Jefferson; as a young man he possessed the dashing charm and beguiling eccentricities associated with other male members of the Randolph clan, like saluting nonchalantly as his horse cleared a formidable fence. By 1795 he and Martha had already produced two grandchildren for Jefferson. Nine more were on the way. In addition to substantial holdings at Varina on the James River below Richmond, in 1792 Randolph purchased Edgehill, a fifteen-hundred-acre estate only two miles from Monticello, so he and Martha could be regular presences in Jefferson’s domestic circle and full-fledged residents of Monticello throughout the summers.28
In June of 1796 a visiting French nobleman, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who was one of the aristocratic refugees from the current bloodbath in France, described Jefferson supervising his wheat harvest in the fields with Randolph alongside him, commenting that “from, the affection he [Jefferson] bears him,” Randolph “seems to be his son rather than his son-in-law.” La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt then went on to describe the other member of Jefferson’s family unit at Monticello, the former Polly, now old enough to turn heads among all the eligible bachelors of Albemarle County and be referred to by her proper name: “Miss Maria constantly resides with her father; but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she will, doubtless, soon find that there are duties which it is still sweeter to perform than those of a daughter.” A year later Maria fulfilled this prediction by becoming engaged to John Wayles Eppes, whom Jefferson described as just the young man he would have chosen for his stunningly beautiful daughter “if I had had the whole earth free to have chosen a partner for her.” Jefferson then explained to Martha how Maria’s looming marriage provided the final ingredient for his long-standing plan of domestic harmony: “I now see our fireside formed in a group, no one member has a fibre in their composition which can ever produce any jarring or jealousies among us. No irregular passions, no dangerous bias, which may render problematic the future fortunes and happiness of our descendants. We are quieted as to their condition for at least one generation more.”29
Like many of Jefferson’s fondest and most heartfelt visions, this one proved too good to be true. Despite her father’s wedding gift of eight hundred acres within sight of Monticello, designed to keep her close, Maria preferred to live on her husband’s family lands at Eppington. And like her mother, she died prematurely during childbirth in 1804. Meanwhile Thomas Mann Randolph became afflicted with a mysterious nervous disorder soon after Jefferson took up residence as paterfamilias. Neither a tour through the cooler climate of New England nor several visits to the hot springs of Virginia produced the desired cure, leaving Jefferson himself to wonder what ailed his beloved son-in-law. Alcoholism became a problem in the ensuing years, and rumors began to circulate that young Randolph had inherited a streak of the eccentric behavior—enemies called it outright lunacy—that stalked the Randolph line. By 1802 he was confessing his feelings of inadequacy as a member of the Jefferson family, “like something extraneous, fallen in by accident and destroying the homogeneity,” the self-declared “silly bird” who could never feel at ease among the swans.30
Indeed the only persevering portion of Jefferson’s domestic dream was Martha, who devoted herself to her father and her children in the selfless fashion in which she had been reared, never talked about her husband’s mounting emotional problems, in fact acknowledged in 1798 that her love for her husband had never really displaced “the first and best of nature,” meaning her feelings for her father. Whether this rather extreme version of daughterly affection had something to do with Thomas Mann Randolph’s slide into despair and eventual destitution is not clear. What is clear is that despite what must have been many idyllic moments soon after Jefferson’s retirement, expectations of an abiding form of domestic bliss on his mountaintop were forced to adjust themselves to the emotional rivalries that had infiltrated his domestic circle.31
Jefferson’s attitude toward whatever psychological conflicts were steadily eroding those dreams was self-conscious silence. When Maria once mentioned the dilemma posed by the persistent alcoholism of a distant relative, Jefferson advised her to avoid discussing the subject. “What is the use of rectifying him if the thing be unimportant,” he asked rhetorically, “and if important, let it pass for the present… . It is wonderful how many persons are rendered unhappy by inattention to these little rules of prudence.” Such acts of prudent obliviousness also had the decided advantage of sustaining the imaginary ideal. In the Jeffersonian family code, one not only kept secrets from outsiders; one kept secrets from oneself.32
Much like his domestic ideal, Jefferson’s agrarian ideal was utterly sincere, an honest expression of how he wished to see himself but set so far from the messy and mundane realities of plantation life in postrevolutionary Virginia that collisions between interior preferences and exterior limitations were unavoidable, in the end tragically so. One of his most famous utterances, trailing only his classic statement on human rights in the Declaration of Independence as an eloquent contribution to American prose history, is the following passage from Notes on Virginia: “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit of genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.” As one modern-day scholar and farmer has observed, American agriculture has never quite recovered from this resounding compliment. Indeed the entire history of farming in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America can be written as a clash between the mythical status of the Jeffersonian tiller of the soil and the harsh realities of capricious weather and equally capricious markets. That long and often paradoxical story, it turns out, actually had its origins in the experience of Jefferson himself.33
Reality came at Jefferson in several overlapping waves, but the most elemental fact was that he was not an independent yeoman farmer but an indebted Virginia planter. By the time of his retirement as secretary of state he owed about forty-five hundred pounds to English creditors in Bristol and anothe
r two thousand pounds to a Glasgow firm. The bulk of this debt had been incurred in the 1770s, when he inherited the burdened estate of his father-in-law, John Wayles. But what he called his “thralldom of debt” had been further complicated by the wartime inflation that rendered his efforts at payment valueless, by the declining productivity of his lands during his long absences from Monticello from 1784 to 1794, as well as by his apparently constitutional inability to live within a budget or deny himself books, fine furnishings, expensive wines or other essentials of the good life. During the latter phase of his ministry in France he had become increasingly aware of the growing gap between his income and his expenses, indeed almost obsessively aware that the interest on his debts was compounding at a faster rate than his payments on the principal. When he left public office in 1794, while he had sounded the familiar Ciceronian note about his craving for bucolic simplicity, he apprised Washington, more practically, that he had retired in order to rescue himself from debt and his lands from “the ravages of overseers [which] has brought on them a degree of degredation far beyond what I had expected.”34
His financial predicament was serious. Comparisons in modern-day terms are notoriously tricky to calculate, but can conservatively be estimated in the range of several hundred thousand dollars. But they were also fairly typical for the planter class of postrevolutionary Virginia. In 1790 residents of the Old Dominion owed £2.3 million to English and Scottish creditors, and the most prominent families of Virginia were also the most prominent names on the list of more than thirty thousand delinquent debtors kept by British merchants. Jefferson was profoundly aware of the massive indebtedness afflicting his friends and neighbors, once even explaining to a French admirer that the debts of Virginia’s planters were “hereditary from father to son for so many generations, so that the planters were a species of property, annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.” He said pretty much the same thing to his younger daughter: “The unprofitable condition of Virginia estates in general leaves it next to impossible for the holder of one to avoid ruin. And this condition will continue until some change takes place in the mode of working them. In the mean time, nothing can save us and our children from beggary but a determination to get a year beforehand, and restrain ourselves vigorously to the clear profits of the last. If a debt is once contracted by a farmer, it is never paid but by a sale [of the estate.]” Given his own indulged habits of consumption and the eventual fate of his beloved Monticello, this proved to be a highly ironic statement. But in the middle years of the 1790s he could neither foresee the future nor appreciate irony. What he could do, or at least try mightily to do, was make his lands more productive and pay off his debts. Farming, then, meant making money.35