Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  32. Jefferson to Maria Jefferson Eppes, January 7, 1798, Domestic Life, 246–48. One can see the same internal mechanisms at work in several emotionally charged domestic conflicts that Jefferson preferred to relegate to some sealed inner chamber, to include a highly publicized infanticide case involving the Randolph family in 1793 and the death by poisoning of his old mentor George Wythe in 1806, a scandal that also included the not-to-be-mentioned fact that Wythe’s mulatto housekeeper was his mistress and mother of two of his children.

  33. Peden, ed., Notes, 164–65. The scholar-farmer referred to here is Douglas L. Wilson, currently the director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. A nice review of the issues is available in Joyce Appleby, “The ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Liberalism and Republicanism, 253–76.

  34. Until recently the most succinct and accessible assessment of Jefferson’s indebtedness has been Malone, III, 528–30. But the new authoritative source for our understanding of both the economic and psychological dimensions of Jefferson’s debt problem is Sloan, Principle and Interest, especially 13–49. Jefferson to George Washington, [April] 1794, Domestic Life, 229–30. The most recent study of the planter class in revolutionary Virginia is Bruce A. Ragsdale, A Planters’ Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia (Madison, 1994).

  35. Answers to [Jean] Démeunier’s Additional Queries, [January–February 1786], Boyd, X, 27; Jefferson to Mary Jefferson Eppes, January 7, 1798, Domestic Life, 247–48. For the economic condition of postrevolutionary Virginia, see Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 96–116; Breen, Tobacco Culture, 84–123; Sloan, Principle and Interest, 86–124; Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993).

  36. Farm Book, viii–x, 201–02, 325–36. The Research Department of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation at Monticello prepared a packet of materials entitled “My Family, My Farm, and My Books” for its winter tour of 1990–91 that includes a great deal of information on Jefferson’s lands and his efforts to improve them in the 1794–97 years.

  37. Farm Book, 257–310; Jefferson to Francis Willis, July 15, 1796, ibid., 255–57.

  38. Ibid., 310–11, 316–17, for the nagging problems with the crop rotation system and the elements. See also La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s appraisal of the predicament in Peterson, Visitors to Monticello, 24–26, and Malone, III, 198–206, for a nice summary of the clash between weather and hope.

  39. Farm Book, 335–36, 227–28, 238–39.

  40. The classic analysis of Virginia’s soil problems is Avery O. Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (Urbana, 1925). See also Jack Temple Kirby, “Virginia’s Environmental History: A Prospectus,” VMHB, IC (1991), 464–67.

  41. Jefferson to Jean Démeunier, April 29, 1795, Ford, VII, 14; Jefferson to James Lyle, July 10, 1795, Farm Book, 430; Jefferson to Henry Remsen, October 30, 1794, ibid., 428. See also Jefferson to Archibauld Stuart, January 3, 1796, Ford, VII, 49–51, and Jefferson to James Madison, March 6, 1796, Smith, II, 923. For Isaac Jefferson’s recollection, see Bear, ed., Jefferson at Monticello, 23.

  42. To my knowledge, the only book that has recognized the imaginative implications of Jefferson’s nailery is McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 110–11.

  43. ”Reminiscences of Madison Hemings,” in Brodie, Intimate History, 474; Edmund Bacon, in Bear, ed., Jefferson at Monticello, 71–82. For the interest in the other mechanical or construction projects, see Farm Book, 72–73, 341–46, 363–64.

  44. For the architectural and construction story of Monticello, the best book is McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello. For the aesthetic and interior story, Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993) is incomparable. For a convenient review of the story of the family and the mansion, see Elizabeth Langhorne, Monticello: A Family Story (Chapel Hill, 1987).

  45. Jefferson to George Wythe, October, 1794, quoted in McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 258; Jefferson to Steven Willis, November 12, 1792, Farm Book, 173, for the estimate of the bricks required; Jefferson to William Giles, March 19, 1796, Ford, VII, 67; Peterson, Visitors to Monticello, 18–19, 21–22; Jefferson to Count Constantin François de Volney, April 10, 1796, quoted in McLaughlin, Jefferson at Monticello, 259–60.

  46. Lucia Stanton, “ ‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 147–80, displaces all previous scholarly studies of the slave population at Monticello and draws extensively on the ongoing work of the Monticello Research Department.

  47. More has been written on Jefferson and slavery than any other subject in the Jefferson corpus. And here there is nothing like a scholarly consensus. The best defense of Jefferson’s record is Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue,” Atlantic Monthly, CCLXX (1992), 61–78. The most sustained scholarly attack of Jefferson’s record is Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery: ‘Treason Against the Hopes of the World,’ ” Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 181–221. The standard survey of the subject is Miller, The Wolf by the Ears. The deepest probe into the psychological issues at stake is Jordan, White over Black, 429–81. The best look at the Virginia context is McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. The most extensive effort to understand his latter-day procrastinations is Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 122–57. And this merely scratches the proverbial surface. What I am attempting to argue here is that our understanding of this controversial subject will be enhanced if we do two things: First, try to relate Jefferson’s position on slavery as a social problem with his own predicament as an owner of slaves and, second, recognize the shift that occurs in his thinking somewhere between 1783 and 1794, a shift toward passivity and procrastination.

  48. Jefferson to William A. Burwell, January 28, 1805, Farm Book, 20. One of the few ironies of Jefferson’s relation to slavery that has escaped the notice of historians involves the cotton gin. Jefferson’s oft-stated confidence that slavery was doomed in America was based on his belief that it would simply fail as a labor system. The development of the cotton gin was a crucial factor in vitalizing the slave economy, especially in the Deep South, thereby making him a poor prophet. When he was secretary of state, one of Jefferson’s responsibilities was the approval of patents, including Eli Whitney’s request for the cotton gin. See Jefferson to Eli Whitney, November 16, 1793, Ford, VI, 448.

  49. The fullest statement of his mature position on slavery was made in a letter to Edward Coles, a member of the younger generation that Jefferson regarded as the proper source of leadership. See Jefferson to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814, Farm Book, 37–39. For the short-lived scheme to import German peasants to “intermingle” with blacks, see Jefferson to Edward Bancroft, January 26, [1789], Boyd, XIV, 492–94.

  50. The following letters from Jefferson to his overseer at Monticello, Nicholas Lewis, discuss the sale of slaves, or the leasing of their labor, to meet the problem of rising debt: December 19, 1786, Boyd, X, 614–16; July 29, 1787, ibid., XI, 639–42; July 11, 1788, ibid., XIII, 339–44; Sloan, Principle and Interest, 22–23, also sees the late 1780s as the crucial moment when debt begins to become an integral part of all his thinking.

  51. Stanton, “Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” 174. Interestingly, this assiduous assessment of Jefferson’s position on slavery, which is unquestionably the most significant statement in the entire memoir that La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote of his visit to Monticello, did not make it into any of the published editions produced by modern scholars until Stanton generated her own translation from the microfilm version at the Library of Congress.

  52. Farm Book, 18.

  53. Domestic Life, 152–53, for the description of Jefferson’s return to Monticello in 1789, when the slav
es disengaged the horses and pulled the carriage up the mountain, then crowded around the returning master, laughing and crying with joy. Jefferson to Bowling Clarke, September 21, 1792, Farm Book, 13; Jefferson to Nicholas Lewis, April 12, 1792, ibid., 12. For his policy on runaways, see Jefferson to Reuben Perry, April 16, 1812, ibid., 34–35; and Jefferson to Randolph Lewis, April 23, 1807, ibid., 26, for his view on preserving slave families. All of this is carefully presented in Stanton, “Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” 158–59.

  54. Farm Book, 7.

  55. Thomas Mann Randolph to Jefferson, April 22, 1798, ibid., 436. The genealogy of the Hemings family is conveniently provided in Bear, ed., Jefferson at Monticello, insert after page 24. The terms governing the emancipation of Robert and James Hemings are set forth in Farm Book, 15–16. This La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt quotation is available in Peterson, Visitors to Monticello, 30.

  56. Judith P. Justus, Down from the Mountain: The Oral History of the Hemings Family (Perrysburg, Ohio, 1990), while not wholly reliable, gathers much evidence about many branches of the Hemings family. The Research Department of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation is currently involved in a major project to interview the descendants of the Hemings family, many of whom regard themselves as descendants of Jefferson via Sally Hemings.

  57. James Madison to Jefferson, October 5, 1794, Smith, II, 857.

  58. James Madison to Jefferson, November 16, 1794; Jefferson to James Madison, December 28, 1794, Smith, II, 859–60, 866–68; Jefferson to Edmund Randolph, September 7, 1794, Ford, VI, 512.

  59. On the Whiskey Rebellion, the most recent study is Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York, 1986). An older but still-valuable account is Leland D. Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels: The Story of a Frontier Uprising (Pittsburgh, 1939). On the politics of the Federalists arguing for a massive show of military force, see Richard H. Kohn, “The Washington Administration’s Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion,” JAH, LIX (1972), 567–74.

  60. James Madison to Jefferson, November 30, 1794, and December 21, 1794, Smith, II, 861–62, 865–66. See also Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook (Westport, 1976).

  61. Jefferson to Madison, December 28, 1794, Smith, II, 866–68. See also Jefferson to William Branch Giles, December 17, 1794, Ford, VI, 515–16.

  62. Jefferson to James Madison, February 5, 1795, February 23, 1795, March 5, 1795, Smith, II, 871–75. See also Jefferson to James Monroe, May 26, 1795, Ford, VII, 16–17.

  63. For the decision to subscribe to the Aurora, see Jackson, A Year at Monticello, 104.

  64. Jefferson to James Madison, March 6, 1796, Smith, II, 922.

  65. Perhaps my own lack of conviction toward most efforts at psychohistory requires me to offer an aside to the skeptical reader here. The problem with most Freudian, neo-Freudian or Eriksonian explanations of human motivation is that they employ a methodology that does not meet the traditional canons of evidence employed by historians and biographers. They essentially posit a hypothetical cause deep in the subconscious and usually deep in the childhood experience of the subject that “explains” the pattern of behavior by the adult but that lies beyond our retrieval except by reference to the particular theory posited at the start. The adult behavior sanctions or confirms the theory, which then achieves the status of a “fact,” and a circular process has begun that can generate some notorious conclusions. This is the method of Fawn Brodie in Intimate History and Erik Erikson in Dimensions of a New Identity: The 1973 Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities (New York, 1974). My intention here is not to attempt an exhaustive discussion of the clinical literature, which is vast, but rather to record my own inability to accept such circular reasoning and to note the central flaw of this interpretive tradition as I see it—namely, its capacity to “create” its own evidence based on a purely hypothetical model.

  That said, any historian or biographer worth his or her salt is intellectually obliged to make some occasional effort at explaining a decision or act without possessing all the direct evidence one would like. The explanation offered here for Jefferson’s obsessive hatred of the Hamiltonian fiscal program does not depend on any specific theory of human personality. It depends only on establishing a connection between Jefferson’s private problems with debt and his public position on the enlargement of the national debt. Since the private and public Jefferson were the same person, it is a connection made by common sense rather than theory. It represents an effort to unite that which Jefferson wished to keep separate in his own mind. The credibility of the connection also depends on the massive evidence about Jefferson’s indebtedness gathered in Herbert Sloan’s Principle and Interest.

  66. The two authoritative books on the Jay Treaty are Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New Haven, 1962) and Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Background of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley, 1970).

  67. James Madison to Jefferson, February 15, 1795; Jefferson to James Madison, February 23, 1795; Jefferson to James Madison, March 5, 1795, Smith, II, 872–74.

  68. James Madison to Jefferson, June 14, 1795, ibid., 879–80. The references to Hamilton and the mock toast are conveniently summarized in ibid., 882–85.

  69. Jefferson to James Madison, September 21, 1795, November 26, 1795, James Madison to Jefferson, December 13, 1795, ibid., 897–98, 900–01, 903–04; Jefferson to James Madison, November 30, 1795, ibid., 888–89.

  70. These are essentially the conclusions of Bemis and Combs, cited above, as well as the most recent scholarly treatment by Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 375–450. Concerning Jefferson’s rock-ribbed belief that England was a nation on the decline, it would be fascinating to give him a copy of Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), a truly elegant appraisal of the various sources of extraordinary allegiance the emerging British nation was able to draw upon from all sectors of its populace.

  71. James Madison to Jefferson, March 23, 1795, Smith, II, 875–76; James Madison to James Monroe, February 26, 1796, quoted in ibid., 940.

  72. Ibid., 940–41.

  73. Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, April 24, 1796, Ford, VII, 72–76. The infamous “Mazzei Letter” was picked up by an Italian newspaper in Florence and then translated back into English by Noah Webster’s Federalist newspaper the Minerva, on May 14, 1797. Washington ceased all correspondence with Jefferson as of this date. See Malone, III, 267–68, 302–07, for a heroic but futile effort to rescue Jefferson from his own denials of authorship.

  74. Jefferson to William Branch Giles, December 31, 1795; Jefferson to James Monroe, March 21, 1796, Ford, VII, 41–42, 67–68; Jefferson to James Madison, March 27, 1796, Smith, II, 928.

  75. Madison’s explanation of his constitutional strategy is most readily available in his many letters to Jefferson during the spring of 1796. See especially James Madison to Jefferson, March 6, 1796, and March 13, 1796, Smith, II, 925–26.

  76. John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 28, 1796, cited in ibid., 894; James Madison to Jefferson, May 1, 1796, April 18, 1796, April 23, 1796, May 22, 1796, ibid., 933–34, 936–38. A major contributing factor to the switch of western interests was the announcement of Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain, which guaranteed navigation rights on the Mississippi River and, when linked with the removal of British troops guaranteed by the Jay Treaty, allowed for unimpeded expansion into and beyond the Mississippi Valley. See Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distresses (rev. ed., New Haven, 1960).

  77. Jefferson to James Monroe, June 12, 1796, and July 10, 1796, Ford, VII, 80, 89.

  78. For an extended discussion of this more democratic brand of politics and its implications for the Federalists, see Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 431, 451–88.

  79. Fisher Ames to Oliver Wolcott, September 16, 1796, quoted in Smith, II, 940; James Madison to James Monroe, May 14, 1796, ibid.

  80. James Madis
on to Jefferson, December 5, 1796, ibid., II, 948. On Adams’s political position vis-à-vis Hamilton at this stage, see Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795–1800 (Philadelphia, 1957), 96–113. See also Manning Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore, 1953).

  81. Jefferson to James Madison, December 17, 1796, Smith, II, 949–50.

  82. Jefferson to John Adams, December 28, 1796, Cappon, I, 262–63; Jefferson to Archibauld Stuart, January 4, 1797, Ford, VII, 102–03; Jefferson to James Madison, January 1, 1797, Smith, II, 952–55; Jefferson to John Langdon, January 22, 1797, Ford, VII, 111–12; Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, January 22, 1797, ibid., VII, 114.

  83. Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, May 13, 1797, Jefferson to Edward Rutledge, December 27, 1796, Ford, VII, 119–20, 93–95; Jefferson to James Madison, January 8, 1797, Smith, II, 955.

  84. Jefferson to John Adams, December 28, 1796, enclosure with letter of January 1, 1797, Smith, II, 954–55.

  85. James Madison to Jefferson, January 15, 1797, ibid., II, 956–58.

  86. Jefferson to James Madison, January 30, 1797, ibid., 962–63.

  87. Jefferson’s recollection in “The Anas,” Ford, I, 273; Adams had a corresponding sense of the poignancy of the separation, though he tended to regard both Jefferson and his Federalist colleagues in the cabinet as misguided and motivated by party considerations. See Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works, IX, 285.

  88. Malone, III, 296–301.

  4. WASHINGTON, D.C.: 1801–04

  1. Domestic Life, 275–76, for the legendary account.

  2. Jefferson to Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819, L&B, XV, 212.

  3. My effort at a realistic rendering of the inauguration draws upon multiple accounts. See especially Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, History, I, 126–48; Noble Cunningham, Jr., The Process of Government Under Jefferson (Princeton, 1978). The quotation is from Jefferson to Maria Jefferson Eppes, February 15, 1801, Domestic Life, 274–75. The chief secondary work on the revolution theme is Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York, 1974).