At yet another level the debate over Missouri transformed the huge midwestern region that Jefferson had acquired in 1803 from a source of release and relief to a source of ongoing contention. The West, as Jefferson had always envisioned it, was a place where festering social and political problems went to find answers. But the Missouri Question seemed to reverse the Jeffersonian process; it made the West a new theater of conflict, creating hostilities that then flowed back to Washington and exacerbated the old political and sectional tensions. If the West had once seemed like America’s fountain of youth, Missouri now poisoned it with the single most lethal subject the American republic could devise.
The position that Jefferson eventually adopted on the Missouri Question depended to a considerable extent on his refusal to abandon a quasi-mystical faith in the curative powers of the West. In effect, he argued that the vast lands of the trans-Mississippi region would dilute and then dissolve the toxic properties of the slavery issue and eventually slavery itself. He called his answer “diffusion,” the belief that allowing slavery to spread into the western territories would lead to its gradual extinction. As he put it, “diffusion over a greater surface would make them [slaves] individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a greater number of coadjutors.” In a letter to Henry Dearborn, his former secretary of war, Jefferson hinted that he was extending the line of argument that Madison had first made in Federalist 10. “I still believe that the Western extension of our confederacy will ensure its duration,” he explained, “by overruling local factions, which might shake a smaller association.” He seemed to be suggesting, albeit in an imprecise way that requires inspired guesswork on our part to complete his thoughts, that by enlarging the geographic area in which slavery existed, one might multiply the factions for and against its continuance, thereby averting a clear sectional division between North and South that might lead to civil war. If this was what he meant by “diffusion” and by “dividing the burden on a greater number of coadjutors,” it was a plan designed to enlist the support of westerners and provide the isolated slaveholders of the South with new partners in a policy of gradual emancipation. The political dimensions of his thinking are fuzzy. The picture he saw in his imagination is much clearer: Slavery would migrate to the West and simply disappear in the vastness of empty space.72
When Adams heard that his old friend, along with Madison and Monroe, advocated allowing slavery to spread as a way to ameliorate its effects and eventually kill it, he expressed astonishment, firing off letters to his son John Quincy and daughter-in-law Louisa Catherine Adams declaring that the Virginia dynasty had lost its collective mind. As Adams saw it, slavery was a cancer; claiming that its spread throughout the body politic would somehow lessen its lethality was bizarre. He also insisted that this new doctrine of diffusion contradicted the original intentions of the revolutionary generation, or at least that segment of the leadership, which surely included Jefferson, dedicated to the gradual abolition of slavery. All had then agreed that ending slavery depended on confining it to the South. The emergence of cotton as a lucrative cash crop and the concomitant spread of slavery into the new states of the Deep South had exposed the weakness of this strategy, but no one until now had ever claimed that this expansion of slavery was helpful to the cause of abolition. Precisely the opposite, the spread of slavery rendered the prospects for emancipation ever more distant. While Jefferson believed that northern insistence on banishing slavery from the western territories violated the sectional understanding within the founding generation, Adams accused Jefferson of repudiating the long-shared presumption that ending slavery meant isolating it in the South.73
In this debate over the true meaning of the American Revolution, which never became explicit because once again, it was too volatile a subject for the two patriarchs to share, Adams had the greater portion of historical evidence on his side. Indeed the ultimate source of Jefferson’s extreme frustration with the Missouri Question, as well as the source of his frantic and farfetched efforts to answer it without surrendering his antislavery credentials, was that he was trapped within the contradictions created by his own posture of procrastination and denial. Missouri made the long-standing paradox of slavery that he had been living so deftly into an undeniable contradiction. He had all along been living a lie.
This was not a tolerable realization, just as it was not tolerable to recognize that northern politicians had seized the high moral ground, which was normally Jefferson country, from which they were now casting a long shadow over his legacy. Given the intolerable character of this situation, Jefferson reached down once again to the primal categories of his political imagination, which were, as always, moral and binary. The more he thought about the debate over Missouri, the more he convinced himself that the real agenda had little to do with slavery at all. That was merely a pretext, a master stroke of manipulation by the same sinister forces that had been trying to undermine the American republic from its very inception. They were called tories in the 1770s, monarchists or monocrats in the 1790s, diehard Federalists during his presidency, but they were all really agents of the same corrupt cause. “The Missouri Question is a mere party trick,” he explained to Charles Pinckney. “The leaders of federalism, defeated in their schemes of obtaining power, have changed their tack and thrown out another barrel to the whale.” Although it had been defeated time and time again, this surviving remnant of Federalist corruption was up to its old tricks, “taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people” in order to recover political power, using the antislavery message as a new instrument to consolidate its control.74
“Consolidation” was the new term that Jefferson embraced—other Virginians were using it too—to label the covert goals of these alleged conspirators. In one sense consolidationists were simply the old monarchists in slightly different guise. Or they were a reconfiguration of the courtiers and political henchmen around George III in the revolutionary era. At bottom they all were dedicated to the same purpose: accruing political power for themselves in tight bundles of coercion far removed from any popular restraints or public responsibilities, using slavery in the same way the Hamiltonians had formerly used debt to justify their plot. However flawed this bogeyman explanation was as an accurate description of the political forces that had mobilized around the Missouri Question, it was Jefferson’s time-tested response to all complex political conflicts—namely, transform the swirling forces into a two-sided contest between good and evil. Simplification and exaggeration had always served him well in the past: George III had not really intended to enslave the American colonists, but rather to tighten imperial control over far-flung colonies; neither Hamilton nor Adams was really a monarchist, but rather advocates of a stronger executive and more energetic federal government. Moreover, his new label for the enemy—consolidationists—was actually a more accurate description of what had always distressed him about the primal concentration of political evil he saw in his mind’s eye: It was organized and clustered together so as to maximize its coercive influence over popular opinion. Diffusion, on the other hand, accurately conveyed the core feature of all truly legitimate political power as he conceived it in his imagination: It was unorganized; it achieved its goals in a silent, slow and seeping fashion that never resorted to willful coercion; it was natural, almost unconscious.
As Jefferson saw it, then, the crisis of 1820 was yet another version of the ongoing struggle that he had waged and won in 1776 and again in 1800. “The same parties exist now which existed before,” he wrote to Lafayette in 1822, only now the enemy has realized “that monarchism is a hopeless wish in this country, and are rallying anew to the next best point, a consolidated government.” The next day he wrote in the same vein to Gallatin, expanding his definition of the consolidation conspiracy to include the proposals for federal control over roads and canals—that is, all “internal improvements.” While serving in Jefferson’s cabinet, Gallatin
had in fact authored the first study of a national system of roads and canals, and most Republicans had long since accepted the principle of federal responsibility for an interstate network of transportation to bind together the geographic regions and connect the coastal states to the interior. Now, however, Jefferson apprised Gallatin that internal improvements were yet another dimension of the consolidationists’ plot. “Although this is not yet avowed (as that of monarchism, you know, never was) it exists decidedly,” he assured Gallatin, “and is the true key to the debates in Congress… .”75
What Gallatin actually thought about Jefferson’s conspiracy theory has not been preserved in the historical record. But the more expansive and inclusive version of Jefferson’s demonic vision, which now went beyond the matter of slavery in Missouri to include the entire national program for internal improvements, made it difficult to understand his moral crusade against consolidation as he himself understood it—that is, as another chapter in the ongoing story of the American Revolution. The ancestral voices he heard and the ghosts of Federalism he saw now had the decided look of a massive delusion. Even worse, the embarrassing truth was that he was allowing the enormous prestige associated with his name to be captured by the most reactionary segment of southern political culture, with its attendant defense of slavery and its doctrine of states’ rights.76
His language became more hysterical and apocalyptic. The decision to limit the expansion of slavery was a mere pretext for ruling slavery illegal throughout the United States, “in which case all the whites south of the Potomac and Ohio must evacuate their States, and most fortunate those who can do it first.” It was precisely the same kind of scheme Parliament had tried in the 1760s, whereby the right to tax the colonists was a mere opening wedge to establish tyranny in full fashion. He and his colleagues of the revolutionary generation had seen through this trickery, but their successors “having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76” were now completely duped into supporting “a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and moneyed corporations… riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.” It was the old Whig rhetoric, but now harnessed to the most provincial interests of Virginia politics. Though he expressed the fervent hope that he would not live to see it, “there can be no hesitation,” he concluded, if faced with a choice between “the dissolution of our Union… or submission to a government without limitation of powers.” Secession was preferable to consolidation. It was a sad and pathetic spectacle, all the more so because it seemed to ring all the familiar chords of 1776 and 1800, but he was in fact linking his legacy to the destruction of the republic he had helped create.77
REBEL REACTIONARY
THERE WERE extenuating circumstances, which Jefferson’s most ardent admirers, both in his own time and ever after, have been at pains to point out. One way to explain his descent into a nearly pathological mentality is to see it more as a consequence of the panic of 1819 than the Missouri crisis, two events occurring at the same time. The panic depressed prices and land values throughout Virginia. Jefferson’s financial problems and long-standing debts had forced him to sell his huge (nearly seven thousand volumes) library in 1815 for the relatively meager price of $23,950. And the economic depression that began in 1819 was probably sufficient to ruin whatever slim prospects he ever had to pay off his creditors. But the crowning blow came when he co-signed a note of $20,000 for Wilson Cary Nicholas, a wealthy old friend and relative by marriage. The panic destroyed the value of Nicholas’s extensive landholdings, forcing him to default on his loan and leaving Jefferson with annual interest payments of $1,200. Jefferson immediately recognized this misfortune as what he called his “coup de grace.” He was rescued from total despair only by the inimitable Jeffersonian style. “A call on me to the amount of any endorsements for you,” he wrote Nicholas, “would indeed close my course by a catastrophe I had never calculated.” His financial situation was undeniably hopeless after 1819. All his political statements after that date, so the argument goes, must be regarded as the ramblings of a depressed old man paralyzed by the realization that his bankruptcy would deprive his heirs of Monticello. His major domestic legacy was going to be debt. His political pronouncements of these last years, again so the argument goes, were colored by the pervasive sense of gloom that his financial misfortunes generated.78
He was also the victim of his own self-imposed isolation. “I read no newspaper now but Ritchie’s,” he wrote Nathaniel Macon in 1819, and “I feel much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than what is now passing.” Thomas Ritchie was editor of the Richmond Enquirer, a vehicle for militant states’ rights polemics, and Macon was another staunch old Republican who regarded the Missouri crisis as a plot to end slavery in the South. Apart from Adams, almost all of Jefferson’s regular correspondents were fellow Virginians like Macon, William Branch Giles and John Taylor, the latter the most verbose defender of agrarian values and states’ rights in the entire country. Outside the Old Dominion, Jefferson’s chief source of information on constitutional questions was William Johnson, a Supreme Court judge from South Carolina whose main claim to fame was his sporadic and usually inadequate efforts to oppose Chief Justice Marshall’s ringing endorsements of federal authority over the states. All in all, then, Jefferson’s sources of political information were highly partisan and narrowly provincial. Small wonder that his own views became distorted by similar prejudices.79
Finally, there is the much-quoted defense by Madison. Jefferson had asked his old disciple “to take care of me when dead,” a poignant request that the ever-loyal Madison did not fail to fulfill in the 1830s, when southern secessionists tried to claim Jefferson as their own. No one could challenge Madison’s claim that he knew Jefferson better than any man alive, and he expressed his clear conviction that “the charges against Mr. Jefferson,” meaning the claims on his patrimony by secessionists and resolute states’ righters, “can be duly refuted.” Madison observed that “allowances also ought to be made for a habit in Mr. Jefferson as in others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment.” A few latter-day utterances, lifted out of context, ought not to be allowed to align Jefferson’s long legacy with the most reactionary elements in the South. Coming as it did from Jefferson’s closest confidant, who was also a Virginian with impeccable credentials as a defender of southern interests, Madison’s insistence that Jefferson not be taken literally as a supporter of secession was both plausible and compelling.80
Each of these efforts at extenuation and helpful explication is true enough, especially Madison’s warning that Jefferson’s most disarmingly extreme statements not be seized upon in isolation as fair samples of his final thoughts. But it is also true that efforts to dismiss his latter-day political pronouncements as aberrations will not do. Whatever impact his financial predicament had on his emotional stability, he found ways to shield himself from the full implication of his indebtedness until only a few months before his death, using the same denial mechanisms that had served him so well throughout his life. And the narrowly partisan character of his correspondents was not just some accident of fate; Jefferson chose to focus his exchanges on politics with spokesmen for a “Virginia-writ-large” version of America because they tended to share his sense of impending doom for an agrarian society and a way of life that was inextricably bound up with slavery. Even Madison’s persuasive defense—that Jefferson had an inherently rhetorical way with ideas that ought not always be taken literally—must be challenged, since the rhetorical power of Jefferson’s political utterances was a central feature of their appeal and the singularly most significant key to the endurance of his legacy. In sum, Jefferson’s final thoughts on the meaning of the American Revolution and what that meaning meant for the government of the emergent American nation were extreme, but not in the sense of being aberrant or wildly misrepresentative; they were intensifications and pur
ifications of what he had been saying all along.
Perhaps alone among Jefferson’s contemporaries, Madison understood all this. (Adams kept trying to understand, but his classical assumptions about the need to discipline and balance political power prevented him from grasping the seminal source of Jefferson’s message.) Madison’s defense of Jefferson was in fact more than a bit disingenuous, since his own personal correspondence and conversations with his mentor during the last five years of Jefferson’s life gave him unique access to the final expression of Jeffersonian political wisdom, which was eminently vulnerable to capture by the southern secessionists. But Madison also understood better than anyone else that Jefferson was more a political visionary than a political thinker. In that ultimate sense his message defied capture by any single faction or interest group, including the ascendant southern secessionists; indeed it defied all traditional assumptions about what was possible in politics.
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