Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  Washington’s example certainly loomed large for Jefferson, but it is more correct to understand his executive style as a projection of his own experience and personality. After all, the symbolic significance of Jefferson’s inauguration was intended as a republican repudiation of courtly pomp and monarchial affectations, which were all a piece of the Washington model. And the military framework that Washington carried over from his experience as commander of the Continental Army was too explicitly authoritarian to fit with Jefferson’s temperament, which preferred a more indirect expression of authority and attempted to create a consensual context within which all decisions had at least the appearance of being voluntary. He had in effect been practicing this more indirect leadership style in different ways throughout his mature life. It was the diplomatic style of the elegantly elusive American in Paris. It was the political style of the invisible but effective party leader who honestly claimed to despise political parties. It was the paternalistic style of the plantation master who had designed Monticello so as to make slavery almost invisible. It was the domestic style of the benevolent patriarch surrounded by an extended family bonded together in seemingly perfect harmony by unalloyed affection. It was, finally, the republican style of the president-elect, declaring that his chief duty was to render the federal government over which he was to assume control unobtrusive and politically impotent. The common ingredient in all these contexts was Jefferson’s urge to cloak his exercise of power from others and from himself.

  His own characterization of cabinet meetings, for example, emphasized the harmonious atmosphere; it borrowed from the sentimental language he customarily used to describe family gatherings. “There never arose, during the whole time,” he recalled in 1811, “an instance of an unpleasant thought or word between the members. We sometimes met under differences of opinion, but scarcely ever failed… to produce an unanimous result.” The consensual character of Jefferson’s cabinet meetings was real enough, in great part deriving from the fact that Jefferson had selected men who shared his views. But he also orchestrated events to prevent conflict. One reason he kept full meetings of the cabinet to a minimum was to avoid argumentative debates. “The method of separate consultations,” he explained, “prevents disagreeable collisions.” When a heated exchange occurred in one meeting, he asked Madison to maneuver behind the scenes and let his colleagues know that such unbecoming conduct would not be tolerated in the future: “Will you be so good as to endeavor, in an unsuspected way, to observe to the other gentlemen the advantages of sometimes resorting to separate consultation? To Mr. Gallatin may be remarked the incipient indisposition which we noted in two of our brethren on a late consultation; and to the others may be suggested the other important considerations in its favor.” Full-throated debate within the cabinet struck him as uncivil. He wanted his department heads to work out their disagreements in private so as not to contaminate cabinet meetings with a contentious spirit. If the democratic ethos welcomed a wide-open, deuces-wild brand of political jostling, Jefferson’s version of republican serenity was incompatible with it.35

  He seemed to want the operation of the federal government to be noiseless, invisible and completely collegial. Soon after he formed his cabinet he instituted the practice of scheduling three dinner parties each week at the presidential mansion in order to bring together members of Congress and their wives with representatives of the executive branch and foreign diplomats stationed in Washington. Some of the most vivid physical descriptions of President Jefferson come from personal reminiscences of guests at these intimate (twelve to twenty people) social occasions. Edward Thornton, the British chargé, was struck by Jefferson’s almost theatrical effort “to inculcate upon the people his attachment to a republican simplicity of manners and his unwillingness to admit the smallest distinction, that may separate him from the mass of his fellow citizens.” Margaret Bayard Smith read his spare and unassuming social style as a mark of true humility. Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of John Quincy, saw it as an aristocrat’s clumsy effort to affect ordinariness. The most talked-about incident occurred in 1803, when the newly arrived British minister, Anthony Merry, raised a huge fuss about the awkward evening he and his wife spent at a presidential dinner. In his famous History Henry Adams made the episode into a delectably malicious set piece in which the courtly expectations and insufferable affectations of Mrs. Merry run hilariously into the Jeffersonian “pêle mêle” rules of etiquette, which struck her as a barbaric free-for-all for seating.36

  But the contrasting descriptions of Jefferson’s social demeanor were merely another measure of how richly enigmatic Jefferson’s self-conscious republican style appeared to observers with different political agenda. The truly significant fact about the dinners was their underlying purpose. They imposed a huge social obligation on Jefferson, especially during the months when Congress was in session. He continued them throughout his presidency because they enhanced the prospects for creating personal bonds and emotional attachments that might help override political disagreements. If people sat down to dinner together and were obliged to observe the customary civilities, they were less likely to be at one another’s throats on the floor of Congress the next day. But the laudable intentions behind the presidential dinners were greatly diluted by the very motives that inspired them. Early on Jefferson established the rule, which must have struck some congressmen as bizarre, that explicitly political conversations were prohibited at the table. And after attempting to mix Federalist and Republican guests for a short while, he abandoned the experiment in order to avoid the threat of volatile exchanges or politically edged jokes about his French wine. Thereafter invitations were sent out strictly according to party affiliations. Even more than the cabinet meetings, the much-desired harmony of the dinner parties was highly orchestrated.37

  The dinners served another purpose that needs noticing, especially because our modern-day assumptions about instant access to the images and sounds of our elected officials impedes a faithful recovery of the way it was back then. To put it simply, the dinners represented the primary occasion for seeing President Jefferson. (This was the chief reason why so many of the visual descriptions of Jefferson that survive came from dinner guests.) Apart from his daily horseback rides through the woods and on the bridle paths of semirural Washington, Jefferson made no public appearances whatsoever. This constituted a break with precedent, since both Washington and Adams had delivered periodic public addresses before crowds and had appeared before Congress at least once a year to deliver their annual messages. Jefferson discontinued the practice of presenting his Annual Message as a speech, claiming that a written version was more efficient. It also eliminated the spectacle of the presidential entourage parading up Capitol Hill in conspicuous imitation of European royalty, then placing the members of Congress in the position of subjects passively listening to his proclamation. Jefferson believed that a republican president should be inconspicuous. He wanted to institutionalize a self-consciously nonimperial presidency. As far as we know, the only two public speeches he delivered throughout his eight years in office were his two inaugural addresses.38

  The chief business of the executive branch under Jefferson was done almost entirely in writing. Indeed, if we wish to conjure up a historically correct picture of Jefferson as president, he would not be riding or walking toward Capitol Hill for his inauguration but would be seated at his writing table about ten hours a day. He usually rose before daybreak, around five o’clock, worked at his desk alone until nine, when cabinet officers and congressmen were permitted to visit. He went riding in the early afternoon, returning in time for dinner at three-thirty. He was back at his desk between six and seven o’clock and in bed by ten. As he explained to a friend, he was “in the habit, from considerations of health, of never going out in the evening.” Apart from the months of August and September, when the heat and humidity of Washington drove him back to his mountaintop at Monticello, he was desk-bound. In his first year as president he rece
ived 1,881 letters, not including internal correspondence from his cabinet, and sent out 677 letters of his own. This reclusive regimen made him practically invisible to the public. He even seemed determined to obliterate any traces of his written record as president, insisting that all his public correspondence be filed under one of the other executive departments “so that I shall never add a single paper to those constituting the records of the President’s office.”39

  It was all of a piece. A minimalist federal government required a minimalist presidency. Political power, to fit the republican model, needed to be exercised unobtrusively, needed neither to feel nor to look like power at all. Jefferson’s notoriously inadequate oratorical skills were conveniently rendered irrelevant or perhaps made into a virtuous liability. The real work of the job played right into that remarkable hand, which could craft words more deftly than any public figure of his time, and into Jefferson’s preference for splendid isolation, where improvisational skills were unnecessary, control over ideas was nearly total and making public policy was essentially a textual problem.

  Indeed one might most aptly describe Jefferson’s self-consciously unimperial executive style as the textual presidency. The art of making decisions was synonymous with the art of drafting and revising texts. Policy debates within the cabinet took the form of editorial exchanges about word choice and syntax. When Jefferson prepared his first Annual Message to Congress, for example, all the department heads were asked to submit memoranda suggesting items for inclusion. He composed a draft based on their written advice and then submitted that draft for their comments. He asked Madison to pay special attention to language: “Will you give this enclosed a revisal, not only as to matter, but diction. Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to in complaisance to the purists of New England. But where by small grammatical negligences the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.”

  Gallatin tended to make more editorial suggestions than any other cabinet member, often writing out revisions more than twice as lengthy as the original Jeffersonian draft and infusing his remarks with a critical edge that would have been unacceptably argumentative in a full cabinet meeting but became palatable when offered in the privacy of written prose. “As to style,” he wrote in 1802, “I am a bad judge, but I do not like, in the first paragraph, the idea of limiting the quantum of thankfulness due to the supreme being; and there is also, it seems, too much said of the Indians in the enumeration of our blessings in the next sentence.”40

  This extraordinary reliance on the written word had some ironic consequences. On the one hand, it allowed Jefferson to remain one of the most secluded and publicly invisible presidents in American history. On the other hand, it produced a paper trail that has made the decision-making process of his presidency more accessible and visible to historians than any other—that is, until the installation of electronic recordings under John Kennedy and the sensational revelations produced by the White House tapes of Richard Nixon. And because Jefferson’s annual messages were polished documents designed to be read for content—and because his mastery of language was unmatched by any subsequent American president save Lincoln—they present a remarkably cogent and peerlessly concise statement of what, in fact and not just in theory, he thought “pure republicanism” meant.

  DEBTS, FEDERALISTS, INDIANS

  ABOVE ALL, it meant eliminating the national debt. During the nerve-racking days when the electoral vote tie between Jefferson and Burr was thrown into the House of Representatives, several Federalists had tried to elicit a promise from Jefferson that he would honor the obligation to retire the federal debt, implying that the Jeffersonian version of republicanism was incompatible with fiscal responsibility. Little did they know how unnecessary such worries were. As Jefferson later explained to Gallatin, “I consider the fortunes of our republic as depending, in an eminent degree, on the extinguishment of the public debt… ,” adding that failure to discharge the debt would send America careening down “the English career of debt, corruption and rottenness, closing with revolution.” Redeeming the national debt, for Jefferson, was truly a matter of national redemption, a matter “vital to the destinies of our government… .” He informed Gallatin that it was the highest priority of his presidency and that it was unlikely that America would “ever see another President and Secretary of Treasury making all other objects subordinate to this.”41

  He was not exaggerating. In 1801 the national debt stood at $112 million, most of which had accrued as a result of Hamilton’s program to assume the state debts. (Jefferson always regarded this decision as a political version of America’s original sin, for which he was forever doing penance because of his own complicity.) Following Jefferson’s instructions, Gallatin came up with a plan to retire the debt within sixteen years at the rate of $7 million a year. Since the annual income of the federal government, mostly from customs duties and the sale of public lands, was about $9 million, this left only slightly more than $2 million to fund the annual expenses of the entire government. But that was precisely what Jefferson proposed to do.42

  In an ironic sense, both Jefferson and Hamilton regarded the national debt as the cornerstone of national policy. For Hamilton it was a national blessing because it created the need for taxes, banks and federal fiscal policies that amplified the powers of the national government. For Jefferson it was a national curse; it conjured up all the demonic images associated with European monarchies, especially the layered levels of consolidated corruption represented by the political juggernaut that was the English government. It was also, however, a blessing in disguise, because it defined and disciplined the core mission of his administration. The central impulse of Whig ideology, as we have noted earlier, was oppositional; it required a “clear and present danger” to focus its energies. The debt gave Jefferson his essential enemy. Gallatin’s program to retire the debt required reductions in the size of the number of federal employees, shrinking the army and significant cuts in the navy. The debt, in this sense, was a godsend because it became the budgetary tool for enforcing austerity and reducing the size of the government. It defined, in an eminently practical way, how a president used executive power to limit governmental power.

  It is difficult for us in present-day America to appreciate, for that matter to understand at all, Jefferson’s obsession with a national debt that looks so comparatively small. The number of federal employees in Washington in 1801 totaled 130, and the national debt of $17 million is considerably less than the hourly interest payments that accrue on the current national debt of several trillion dollars. Moreover, the accumulated wisdom of economists and economic historians has taught us to realize that we ought not to think about the national debt in the same straightforward way we regard personal and family debt, as an unalloyed burden to be eliminated with as much deliberate speed as possible. Hindsight also suggests that even for those disposed to reject the Hamiltonian vision of an integrated and expansive commercial republic, the national debt Jefferson inherited should have been viewed as a wholly plausible investment in America’s future development, a prudent loan, if you will, more than covered by the collateral of prospective economic growth. In all these present-minded ways Jefferson’s fixation on the national debt looks simplistic and silly.43

  In a certain sense it was, even in its own time. The single-minded passion he brought to the subject was extreme. Several of his more moderate Republican colleagues and a good many Federalists thought his debt-driven fiscal policy was excessively austere. Adams sequestered in Quincy and licking his political wounds while preparing to settle scores in his autobiography, worried most about the dismantling of the navy, which might one day prove shortsighted. (The War of 1812 proved him right.) But Jefferson’s attitude toward the debt must be comprehended on its own Jeffersonian terms. This means recognizing the deep pools of ideological and psychological conviction from which it drew its nonnegotiable character.44


  Public debt was the unmistakable engine of government corruption according to “the antient Whig principles.” It set off all the trip wires and blew all the fuses of the Jeffersonian ideological circuitry, which then exploded in a flashing vision of Anglomen, monarchists and scheming bankers conspiring among the ruins of the American republic. This, it is true, was a conspiratorial mentality; it was misguided in its pathological association of debt with corruption and with its virulent version of Anglophobia. But it had been hallowed as a central article of the republican faith during the American Revolution, and Jefferson embraced it with all the heartfelt intensity of a true believer.

  Psychologically, debt set off another kind of chain reaction inside Jefferson. Not only had he watched a disarming number of Virginia’s planter class spend and borrow themselves into bankruptcy, but he knew personally what it felt like to remain one short step ahead of his creditors, even to experience the sickening sense that they would eventually hunt him down too. In his personal life, of course, we know that the looming specter of crushing debt had no discernible effect on his indulgent habits of consumption. (The wine bill alone for his first term as president approached ten thousand dollars, and the expensive and apparently eternal renovations of Monticello continued apace throughout his presidency.) Perhaps the soundest way to put it is that just as an extended exposure to slavery seemed to give Jefferson a particularly intense appreciation of individual freedom, so his private habits of indulgence gave him a peculiarly powerful appreciation of government austerity. In both cases his public fervor grew directly out of his experience of private failure.45

  In Jefferson’s personal life as an indebted planter the elaborate plans for financial recovery never quite worked; the numbers never added up. As president, however, the flow of history (as well as the managerial competence of Gallatin) was on his side. The exponential growth in American exports increased federal revenues even faster than Gallatin had predicted, allowing for an even more rapid retirement of the debt. The chief opposition to the austerity budget came from Federalists in the Senate, who warned that cuts in the military put American security at risk. But the Republican majority easily overrode the dissenting Federalists, and the extended European peace made Jefferson’s gamble on a reduced navy look prescient. In his first Annual Message to Congress in December of 1801 Jefferson felt sufficiently confident to recommend the abolition of all internal taxes. He made the classic republican analysis: “Sound principles will not justify our taxing the industry of our fellow citizens to accumulate treasure for wars to happen we know not when, and which might not perhaps happen but from the temptations offered by that treasure.” Armies and navies did not deter wars; they usually caused them. Meanwhile the elimination of internal taxes further reduced the public visibility of the federal government in the most sensitive area of popular opinion, tax collection. By the end of his first term Jefferson was able to ask the rhetorical question: “What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?”46