Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  But Adams’s sense of humor was lost on Jefferson, who somehow felt a relentless obligation to respond personally to everyone. Madison advised him to prepare a formulaic letter, “a standard response that the family can send out expressing thanks,” but he could not comply. Especially after arthritis in his wrist and fingers worsened with age, he complained that “the unceasing drudgery of writing keeps me in unceasing pain and peevishness.” Only a few months before his death he lamented that his rescue from the writing table rested “on the hitherto illusive hope that the discretion of those who have no claims upon me, will at length advert to the circumstances of my age and ill health, and feel the duty of sparing both.” But it was not meant to be. Neither the presumptuous pilgrims to Monticello nor the countless correspondents throughout the country could be made to respect his privacy and leave him alone. As a living legend he had become public property.9

  He claimed that there was one shadowy acquaintance whom he was fully prepared to receive at Monticello at any time. The prospect of death did not unnerve him so much as the fear of what he called “a doting old age.” For more than twenty years he had been telling friends that his physical health was so good that he sometimes worried about living too long. The ultimate fear was senility, what Adams referred to as “dying at the top.” Almost as worrisome was a gradual physical degeneration that would deprive him of any semblance of autonomy and personal sovereignty. (One reason the daily ride on Old Eagle was so important to him was that it symbolized the survival of his independent spirit.) Finally there was the uniquely Jeffersonian sense that one should not linger beyond the allotted time of one’s generation, that one had almost a moral obligation to clear the ground for the next generation by placing oneself underneath it. “Mine is the next turn,” he wrote to his old love Maria Cosway in 1820, “and I shall meet it with good will; and after one’s friends are all gone before them, and our faculties leaving us, too, one by one, why wish to linger in mere vegetation, as a solitary trunk in a desolate field, from which all its former companions have disappeared.” This feeling of having outlived his time intensified with age. In the year before his death he claimed that looking back over his own life was “like looking over a field of battle. All, all dead! and ourselves left alone midst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.”10

  Another memorable scene made the point with almost visual clarity. In 1824 Lafayette paid a final visit to America and naturally scheduled a rendezvous with the Sage of Monticello. An escort of 120 mounted men and a crowd of 200 onlookers accompanied Lafayette up the mountain to witness the reunion of the former comrades. Madison described the general as “in fine health and spirits but so much increased in bulk and changed in aspect that I should not have known him.” (Lafayette had spent several years in a Swiss dungeon, confined by the radicals for siding with the moderate faction in the French Revolution, then ballooned upon his release.) Meanwhile Lafayette described Jefferson as “feeble and much aged,” though “in full possession of all the vigor of his mind and heart.” As the two aging patriarchs tottered toward each other and embraced before the crowd, witnesses claimed they saw two ghosts from a bygone era materializing one final time for the benefit of the present generation. Given the urge to make Jefferson into a historical icon, it seemed almost awkward to realize that he was still alive.11

  Or there was the highly symbolic but scary scene the following year, in 1825, when Jefferson consented to sit for a “life mask” that would allow posterity to possess a reliable likeness of the American hero, an iconographic rendering of the living icon based on a special technique designed to subordinate artistic interpretation to the actual shape and contours of his face. The American sculptor John Henri Browere poured successive coats of a mysterious plasterlike substance over Jefferson’s head, but the liquid dried and hardened more rapidly than anticipated, causing Jefferson considerable discomfort and forcing Browere, as Jefferson put it, to “use freely the mallet and chisel to break it into pieces” with a series of heavy blows that “would have been sensible almost to a loggerhead… .” The experience convinced Jefferson to “bid adieu for ever to busts and even portraits.” In addition to illustrating the dominant perception of Jefferson as a living relic of America’s glorious past, the Browere incident inadvertently signaled the subsequent problems that would afflict anyone intent upon establishing a close fit between Jefferson’s image and the man he really was. Even Browere’s plaster cast was based on the reassembled fragments of the fractured “life mask.” Like the man himself, even his face seemed to resist realistic renderings.12

  But the faithful recovery of revealing moments—riding Old Eagle, greeting Lafayette, enduring the preservative techniques of Browere—provides us with only glimpses of the real person who was Jefferson in his most patriarchal phase. Such scenes also telescope, and therefore distort in their well-intentioned way, Jefferson’s own final stage of evolution during a ten-year period when, despite the nagging intrusions of visitors and the equally nagging afflictions of age, he enjoyed the opportunity to meditate more freely and fully about his legacy than any other time in his life. One last scene, though only another momentary glimpse, offers what is probably the best angle from which to catch the main drift of Jefferson’s mentality throughout his final decade by providing a thematic clue to the abiding concerns that were on his mind and in his heart.

  It was the last morning of his life, which, as if orchestrated by providence, happened to be July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary to the day of the publication of the Declaration of Independence. He had fallen into coma the preceding evening and awoken to ask the physician and family gathered around the bedside, “Is it the Fourth?” It was obvious to all, including himself, that this was his final illness, and for several days visitors and family had been paying their respects, noting the persistence of his independent spirit; he insisted on sleeping at night with only the trusted Burwell in the room and on flicking away the flies during the day himself. The prayer of the family that he would make it to the Fourth was answered, though he was unconscious for most of the final hours. He stirred briefly, mumbling something that the doctor and family could not understand, until Burwell, the only one to comprehend what his master was asking, stepped forward to adjust the pillows. His last request, in effect, was answered by a slave, just as first memory, at least as legend has it, was of being carried on a pillow as a young child by a slave. His last sounds were semiconscious ramblings, apparently based on his dreams. He was back in the 1770s, giving instructions about the Committees of Safety and the need to stand firm against British tyranny. He went to his maker shortly after noon on July 4, reliving the tumultuous early years of the American Revolution. This was both poignant and symptomatic. For the meaning of the American Revolution—his personal role in it and his abiding sense of what it meant for posterity—was also his central obsession throughout the final decade of his retirement.13

  WORDS AND MUSIC

  ALTHOUGH AN OBSESSION, by definition, does not need any urging, in Jefferson’s case a good deal of looking back occurred at the urging, one might even say at the frantic insistence of John Adams. The resumption of correspondence between the two patriarchs seems, in retrospect, almost inevitable. “You and I ought not to die,” as Adams so eloquently put it, “before We have explained ourselves to each other.” But for many years what now appears inevitable and almost elegiac looked utterly impossible. Jefferson’s narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 had sent Adams into retirement at Quincy, where he spent nearly twelve years groveling and grimacing and twitching away in barely suppressed resentment, then firing away in his best Adams style, sending a salvo of words toward all his political enemies, Jefferson among them. “Mr. Jefferson has reason to reflect upon himself,” Adams observed grudgingly upon Jefferson’s retirement from the presidency. “How he will get rid of his remorse in his retirement, I know not. He must know that he leaves the government infinitely worse than he found it, and that from h
is own error or ignorance. I wish his telescopes and mathematical instruments, however, may secure his felicity.” Adams had a way of exposing his deep-seated anger toward Jefferson in the same breath that he tried to deny its existence. “I have no resentments against him,” he explained to Benjamin Rush, “though he has honoured and salaried almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.”14

  This last reference was to the Republican propaganda campaign against Adams during his presidency, chiefly the libelous accusations of James Callender in The Prospect Before Us, which Jefferson had in fact subsidized and approved. It described Adams as a vain (true), dangerously unbalanced (exaggerated distortion of the truth) and covertly monarchical (mostly untrue) instrument of Federalist corruption (completely untrue). Jefferson had made a concerted effort to reopen the lines of communication with the Sage of Quincy in 1804, trying the indirect route through Abigail. But he made the double mistake of mentioning his own anger at Adams for the appointment of the midnight judges and then claiming complete ignorance of the whole Callender business. Abigail responded like a lioness protecting her pride. Jefferson had once been a trusted friend, she explained, and some residue of affection “still resides in the Bosom, even after esteem has taken its flight.” But she no longer respected or trusted a man so capable of either hypocrisy or self-deception, and she acknowledged a personal sense of poetic justice when “the serpent you cherished and warmed [i.e., Callender], bit the hand that nourished him,” a reference to the Sally Hemings accusations. “Faithful are the wounds of a Friend,” she observed caustically, then declared any subsequent correspondence unnecessary. (Adams himself did not see any of these letters until a few months later, when Abigail showed them to him, and he jotted in the margins: “I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and place.”) No more words were exchanged between Quincy and Monticello for another eight years.15

  If Adams spent much of that time licking his political wounds, Jefferson was having a whole new series of political wounds inflicted on him. Adams’s harsh appraisal of Jefferson’s latter years as president was only a more intense version of the generally negative verdict. Everything that had flowed together so serenely during his first term seemed to collapse in disastrous heaps of misfortune in his second. The root cause of the later failures, it turns out, was located in the same place as the earlier successes—namely, the European conflict between England and France. The temporary peace between these two perpetual combatants had permitted American commerce to flourish between 1800 and 1803; this in turn had allowed Jefferson, with Gallatin’s able assistance, to perform the political magic of retiring the debt while also cutting taxes. Even as the Anglo-French war had resumed in 1803, Jefferson and his administration were the immediate beneficiaries when Napoleon decided to cut his losses in North America by selling the Louisiana Territory for a mere pittance. But the resumption of full-scale war on the Continent in 1803, then the imposition of naval blockades in the Atlantic and Caribbean, threw the American economic engine into reverse. And since Jefferson’s dedication to fiscal austerity had required the dry docking or destruction of America’s infant navy, there was really very little strategic room in which Jefferson could maneuver as American commercial vessels were scooped up by English or French frigates on the high seas.16

  Jefferson’s answer to these multiple challenges was the Embargo Act of 1807, which essentially closed American ports to all foreign trade. The idea for the embargo originated with Madison, who had convinced himself that closing down American exports and domestic markets would eventually force England and France to alter their policies. This was always an illusion, but it blended nicely with Jefferson’s more moralistic vision, which was simply to sever all connections with the corrupt, belligerent nations of Europe. The result was an unadulterated calamity that virtually wrecked the American economy, had no discernible effect on either the policies or economies of England or France and required the federal government to exercise coercive powers to enforce the embargo, thereby contradicting the Jeffersonian principle of limited government. To make matters worse, just as the international crisis was intensifying, Jefferson had to deal with a domestic crisis with equivalently catastrophic potential when Aaron Burr, his former vice president, was caught conspiring to launch a fabulously ambitious scheme—even today Burr’s bizarre goals are murky—to detach a substantial chunk of the American Southwest and set up an independent nation-state with himself as the benevolent despot. Burr’s capture and eventual trial produced only more trouble for Jefferson, who was so eager to see Burr convicted of treason that he was willing to violate basic constitutional principles to get his way, but once again found that way blocked by that high priest of Federalist defiance, the irrepressible John Marshall, who found Burr not guilty.17

  All in all, then, Jefferson’s second term had proved just as disastrous as his first term had been glorious. He announced his decision to observe Washington’s precedent and retire after two terms in December 1807, just as the Embargo Act was approved by the Congress. From that time forward, for more than a year, he surrendered all essential decisions to Madison and Gallatin, thereby creating a sense of drift in American policy at the very moment that the unpopular and cumbersome embargo required executive leadership. There was loose talk, even in Republican circles, of Pontius Pilate washing his hands of unpleasant responsibilities. Among the Federalists there were gleefully mischievous comparisons to his infamous flight from British soldiers during his final days as governor in revolutionary Virginia. He was clearly played out as president. “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains,” he observed the day before Madison’s inauguration, “feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.”18

  It was a rather awkward and somewhat hollow end to more than forty years of almost uninterrupted public service. As he himself had predicted in his First Inaugural Address, no man was likely to leave the office of president with the same high reputation that he had when he entered it. With all the advantages of hindsight it is now easy to see that the failures of his second term had root causes in the Napoleonic Wars that were beyond his or, for that matter, anyone’s control. His earlier presidential luck had simply run out. Nevertheless, the somber character of the end cast a pall over his entire presidency; it helps explain why he did not choose to list this phase of his public career on his tombstone. Up in Quincy, Adams, writing to Benjamin Rush the day after Jefferson’s term ended, claimed to know all about disappointing conclusions. But at least his own end as president, Adams noted, had the clear and crisp character of an electoral defeat. Anyone attempting to deliver a benediction on Jefferson’s presidency would be hard pressed to know what to say. “Jefferson expired and Madison came to life last night at twelve o’clock,” Adams joked to Rush. “Will you be so good to take a Nap and dream for my instruction and Edification a character of Jefferson and his administration?” The safe thing to say of course was that “only posterity could judge.”19

  Both Adams and Jefferson had their sights set on posterity’s judgment, so perhaps the first thing to keep in mind when we consider the eloquent correspondence of their twilight years is that they were self-consciously writing to us as well as to each other. Adams had been under persistent prodding from Rush to break the silence between Quincy and Monticello for several years, Rush claiming that he kept having dreams of the two patriarchs recovering the affinity of their early years, when they constituted, in Rush’s memorable phrase, “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.” Initially Adams told Rush that such dreams struck him as nightmares; Jefferson was a mysterious “shadow man” whose character was “like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.”20

  But gradually the ice melted at Quincy. He harbored “no Resentment or Animosity against the Gentleman” and would certainly respond “if I should receive a letter from him… ,” meaning that Jefferson would have to write first. Then Adams became downright playful about the matter, declar
ing that he would rename his Quincy estate “Montezillo,” a miniature version of Jefferson’s grand home, wondering out loud to Rush what had caused the separation with Jefferson in the first place and concluding “that the only Flit between Jefferson and me concerned hairstyles.” He preferred it straight and Jefferson preferred it curled. Or was it the other way around? Adams was clearly edging his way toward a rapprochement.21

  Eventually, on January 1, 1812, he made the decisive move with a short and cordial note, protesting all the while that there was nothing momentous or historic about the reconciliation. “Jefferson was always a Boy to me,” he joked; “I am bold to say that I was his Preceptor on Politicks and taught him every thing that has been good and solid in his whole Political Conduct.” How could one hold a grudge against one’s own disciple? The differences between them, Adams implied, were the product of exaggerated distortions put out by their mutual enemies, especially Hamilton. The friendship could be recovered easily because it had never really been lost. “It was only as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after twenty-five years’ absence,” Adams quipped, “and had accosted him, how fare you, Jack?” All these playful half-truths and benign rationalizations helped Adams avoid facing the fact that he was extending his hand over what had become a huge personal and political chasm.22