After his inauguration, Jefferson wrote his friend again, thanking him for the kind things he had said about the inaugural address. Jefferson also told Rush about the responsibilities he now faced as president. His most onerous task concerned the midnight appointments made by his predecessor. In the waning days of the Adams administration, the Federalist-controlled Congress had passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which created a new tier of courts and judgeships. Almost until the last hour of the last day of his presidency, John Adams had continued making appointments to fill these new positions. The Federalists had entered panic mode in the closing days of the Adams administration. Not only were they losing the presidency; they were also losing their majority in the Senate and the House. Adams loaded the judiciary with Federalists to let his party retain a modicum of control over the remaining branch of the national government. Federalists were hoping that Adams’s appointees could exert control by legislating from the bench.
Nothing Adams did during his presidency irked Jefferson more than the matter of the midnight appointments. Jefferson admitted to Rush that he was determined to remove many of Adams’s appointees—“to expunge the effects of Mr. A’s indecent conduct”—in order to achieve something close to judicial parity between Federalists and Republicans. While optimistic about his chances of accomplishing this goal, Jefferson correctly surmised that his political enemies would interpret his behavior as partisan.2 Nowhere in this letter does Jefferson reiterate his promise to record his thoughts on Christianity for Rush. That task would seem to involve more time than the new president could spare.
Letters he wrote Moses Robinson, Elbridge Gerry, and Joseph Priestley in the weeks following the inauguration, however, show that he had not stopped thinking about religion. Early in his presidency, Jefferson was devoting much thought to the relationship between church and state. Writing Moses Robinson, the former senator from Vermont who had been one of his staunchest supporters during his tenure as secretary of state, Jefferson reiterated his hope of reconciling Federalists and Republicans and emphasized the need for patience. Understanding that it would take New England longer to accept the new government than it would the rest of the nation, he placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the clergy, who, he said, “had got a smell of union between church and state, and began to indulge reveries which can never be realized in the present state of science.”3
To Jefferson, the Enlightenment had progressed far enough in America that it was impossible to revert to the darkness of the religious past. No longer could people see “advances in science as dangerous innovations,” he told Robinson. Only by accepting such advances and reconciling them with their faith could clergymen hope to practice their religious beliefs in the enlightened era. To summarize the situation, Jefferson applied a proverb, slyly associating Christianity and Islam along the way: “Since the mountain will not come to them, they had better go to the mountain.” Only by accepting “the liberty and science of their country” and divesting Christianity from “the rags in which they have enveloped it” can the New England clergymen restore the “original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor.” Of all the religions, Jefferson continued, Christianity is the “most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansions of the human mind.”4
Jefferson’s contemporary remarks to Elbridge Gerry, his first friend in New England, echo what he told Robinson. More than anything, New England’s religious heritage was holding it back: “Your part of the Union tho’ as absolutely republican as ours, had drunk deeper of the delusion, and is therefore slower in recovering from it. The aegis of government, and the temples of religion and of justice, have all been prostituted there to toll us back to the times when we burnt witches.” Jefferson advised Gerry to stick to his principles and lead the people of New England away from religious superstition. His vivid imagery shows how much Jefferson disliked the attempts of the narrow-minded, overzealous clergy to restrain progress: “The people will support you, notwithstanding the howlings of the ravenous crew from whose jaws they are escaping.”5
Few men shaped Jefferson’s religious views more significantly than Joseph Priestley. Theologian and man of science, Priestley established a reputation for his advanced thinking in both realms. His experiments on the principles of gases made him England’s most respected scientist in that field. His denial of the Holy Trinity made him a leader of the Unitarian movement but antagonized the Anglican hegemony. Together with his outspoken views on governmental reform, his religious opinions made him unwelcome in his native land, so he left England for the United States. Considering Priestley’s situation, Jefferson observed, “His antagonists think they have quenched his opinions by sending him to America, just as the pope imagined when he shut up Galileo in prison that he had compelled the world to stand still.”6
Leaving England in 1794, Priestley settled in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Though befriended by many prominent Americans, including Washington and Jefferson, Priestley still did not escape censure here. Peter Porcupine attacked him in the press; angry preachers attacked him from the pulpit. During the Adams administration, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering wanted to prosecute him under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Not until Jefferson was elected could Priestley feel safe from persecution.7
Jefferson had been corresponding with Priestley for years, but he took special pleasure in writing him after his inauguration. The new president could now assure his friend that the kind of trouble he had encountered during the Adams administration was at an end. To illustrate his point, Jefferson used a favorite literary analogy, comparing Priestley to Gulliver and his small-minded enemies to the Lilliputians. Then he continued: “It is with heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moments of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise and good like you, and disdain the legitimacy of that libel on legislation, which under the form of a law, was for some time placed among them.”8 Jefferson would maintain a lively correspondence with Priestley during his first term as president.
The growing conflict with the Barbary Coast gave Jefferson an object lesson in what could happen when nations let religion dictate policy. For years, the Muslim states along the north coast of Africa had followed a policy of extorting money from other nations wishing to sail the Mediterranean. The vessels of any nation refusing to pay tribute would be at the mercy of Muslim pirates, whose governments gave them free rein to launch attacks in the name of Islam, capturing merchant ships, kidnapping their sailors, and holding them hostage. During the Adams administration, the United States had paid protection money to Tripoli and the other Barbary states to safeguard American merchant vessels from attack. Jefferson had long opposed this policy. As president, he refused to cave in to such extortion. In May 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States.
President Jefferson realized there was little hope in reasoning with the Pasha. He never fully articulated his thoughts on the subject, but the contemporary remarks of an American in Tunis are similar in tone and diction to comments Jefferson made elsewhere concerning the detrimental effects religion could have on policy: “The ignorance, superstitious tradition, and civil and religious tyranny, which depress the human mind here, exclude improvement of every kind; consequently the same habits, customs and manners, which were observed in the East three thousand years ago, are still prevalent here: Everything is done to the greatest possible disadvantage.”9 Jefferson dispatched a naval squadron to Tripoli. Though the squadron experienced some early successes, the Tripoline War would drag on for years.
In the early weeks of his administration, Jefferson assembled an excellent cabinet to advise him in matters both foreign and domestic. His choice of Albert Gallatin for treasury secretary surprised no one. Since emigrating from Switzerland as a young man, Gallatin had established himself as the foremost authority on public finance in the nation. While serving in th
e House of Representatives, he had harshly critiqued the policies of Alexander Hamilton. To facilitate a smooth-running economic policy, Gallatin established the House Committee on Ways and Means.10
James Madison, whom Jefferson selected as his secretary of state, would be his closest confidant throughout his administration. Since Madison would not reach Washington until May, Levi Lincoln, whom Jefferson tapped for attorney general, served as provisional secretary of state until Madison’s arrival. Being from Massachusetts, Lincoln helped balance the cabinet geographically. Despite his New England origins, Lincoln was a Jeffersonian through and through. The son of a farmer, he was apprenticed to a blacksmith until his precociousness led him to enroll at Harvard. During the Revolutionary War, he joined the Minutemen. He also wrote a patriotic essay series titled “Farmer’s Letters.” The persona Lincoln assumed for these letters confirms his affinity with Jefferson. As attorney general, Lincoln would resume this persona in his polemical Letters to the People, by a Farmer, which attacked the Federalists for politicizing the clergy.11
President Jefferson chose Henry Dearborn as secretary of war, and General Samuel Smith served as acting secretary of the navy, a cabinet-level post John Adams had established during his administration. Samuel Smith used his influence to get his brother Robert officially appointed to the position. Robert Smith, though without naval experience, was an expert organizer. Through his efforts, the U.S. Navy established a sophisticated logistical network to maintain naval supply lines, which allowed American vessels to exert continual pressure on Tripoli.12
Jefferson moved to the President’s House before the end of March. Meriwether Lewis moved in the following month. Lewis served as Jefferson’s personal secretary, an office Jefferson described as “more in the nature of that of an aid de camp, than a mere Secretary.”13 John Adams had been the first president to live in what would eventually be called the White House when the seat of government was relocated to Washington in 1800. Abigail Adams disliked the unfinished, cavernous residence. She called it a “great castle,” in part because of its function as the president’s house but also because of its size, dampness, and darkness. Jefferson also found it quite roomy. As he wrote his daughter Martha that spring, “Capt. Lewis and myself are like two mice in a church.”14
Unlike Abigail Adams, Jefferson did not mind the unfinished state of the President’s House. Monticello had been a work-in-progress ever since he first moved in three decades earlier. A home was a canvas on which Jefferson painted. He saw the condition of the President’s House as an opportunity, not a disadvantage. It gave him the chance to contribute significantly to its design. Indeed, some of the White House’s most distinctive features were designed by the nation’s third president during his residence there. In early May, James and Dolley Madison stayed at the President’s House for a few weeks until their home was ready. Dolley Madison’s conviviality helped make it the center of Washington society.
Once the Madisons settled in their own home, Jefferson perpetuated the convivial atmosphere Dolley Madison had helped to establish. During the Jefferson administration, the president’s dinner table became the place where many complex political issues were resolved. While serving as minister plenipotentiary in Paris, Jefferson had discovered his flair for entertaining. Throughout his two terms as president, he typically invited ten or twelve people to dine. Playing host, he encouraged intellectual conversation and helped iron out political disagreements.
Dolley Madison, after a painting by Gilbert Stuart. From Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Republican Court (1854). (Collection of Kevin J. Hayes)
Samuel Harrison Smith and his wife, Margaret Bayard Smith, were frequent guests at the President’s House. Mrs. Smith’s letters and reminiscences bring their experience alive. By limiting his company to twelve or less, Jefferson kept his dinners informal and his dinner conversation “general and unreserved.” Sitting next to him during her first dinner at the President’s House, Mrs. Smith found his manners “easy, candid and gentle.”15 In her reminiscences, she recorded one particular dinner conversation. Though written many years after the fact, the words she recorded are consistent with other accounts of Jefferson’s dinnertime conversation and confirm his fondness for tall talk—Jefferson took great pleasure whenever he could pull someone’s leg.16
“How I wish that I possessed the power of a despot,” he said one evening, shocking his dinner guests in the process. Strange words for a man who had sworn an oath against tyranny! If I were a despot, he continued, “I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifices to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor,” speaking of the beautiful magnolias, poplars, and tulip trees in the District of Columbia that were being destroyed for firewood.
“And have you not authority to save those on the public grounds?” one guest asked.
“No,” Jefferson replied wistfully, “only an armed guard could save them. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries seems to me a crime little short of murder, it pains me to an unspeakable degree.” Expressing a desire for despotism, Jefferson was talking tall, but the sadness he conveyed toward the loss of these great old trees was genuine. Jefferson was a conservationist before that term became current. While president, he advised his overseer at Monticello, “Use great economy in timber, never cutting down a tree for fire-wood or any other purpose as long as one can be found ready cut down, and tolerably convenient.”17
Other dinner guests recorded additional instances of Jefferson’s tall talk, but at least one of them, Dr. Samuel Mitchill, did not realize when Jefferson was pulling his leg. Having read Notes on the State of Virginia, Dr. Mitchill—physician, professor, and congressman—asked the president about one particular description.18 Mitchill reported their conversation in a letter to a friend:
I asked Mr. Jefferson some questions about the sublime prospect he has described in that work of the passage of the Potomac through the mountains. My chief object was to be directed to the proper place for observation—the place where he himself stood when there. He told me the place no longer existed, for during the reign of Federalism under Adams’s administration, the spot, which was a projecting point of rock on the brow of the mountain, had been industriously blown up and destroyed by gunpowder! A company of Federal troops quartered there were several days employed in boring and blasting the rock to pieces, doubtless with the intention of falsifying his account, and rendering it incredible by putting it out of the power of any subsequent traveller to behold the like from the same point of view. What shameful, what vandalic revenge is this!
Like Dr. Mitchill, others were drawn to the Blue Ridge from Jefferson’s glowing depiction of them. John Bernard observed, “Mr. Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, had given such a vivid description of these hills that I could not resist the temptation during the previous summer to visit the ‘passage of the Potomac,’ though then residing at a hundred miles’ distance.” Bernard was rewarded for his effort. The view, he concluded, was “unquestionably the sublimest scene in America, after the Falls of Niagara.”19
Bernard, who occasionally visited the President’s House during the Jefferson administration, also testified to the conviviality of his dinner gatherings. The two had met in Philadelphia when Jefferson was vice president. After establishing a reputation as a stage comedian in England, Bernard had been offered a lucrative salary by the Chestnut Street Theater. He accepted the offer, reached Philadelphia in 1797, and quickly emerged as one of the finest comedians on the American stage. He also became a fixture on Philadelphia’s social scene. Bernard established a Beefsteak Club in Philadelphia, which Jefferson visited while vice president.20
Besides contributing his own witticisms to the dinner conversation, Bernard enjoyed the president’s lively sense of humor. Recalling Jefferson’s conversation, he wrote, “With specimens of his humor I could fill pages.” In his memoirs, Bernard provided a general overview of Jefferson’s manner of speaking and recorded ma
ny snippets of conversation that occurred at the president’s table: “In all the chief requisites of the social character Mr. Jefferson appeared to me to possess few equals. His heart was warmed with a love for the whole human race; a bonhommie which fixed your attention the instant he spoke. His information was equally polite and profound, and his conversational powers capable of discussing moral questions of deepest seriousness, or the lightest themes of humor fancy. Nothing could be more simple than his reasonings, nothing more picturesque and pointed than his description.”21
Bernard’s memoirs are the source for several quips and anecdotes unrecorded elsewhere. In his presence, Jefferson retold his favorite stories. To illustrate the president’s capacity for humor, Bernard recorded corded what Jefferson said to Benjamin Rush upon learning that Rush and H——, “a well-known wit of Philadelphia,” had nearly lost their lives on a packet boat from New York to Baltimore.
“Well, doctor, such a fate would have suited your genius precisely,” Jefferson told Rush. “You, you know, are always for going to the bottom of things; though it would have been inappropriate for our friend H——, who prefers skimming the surface.”
Summers in Washington can be unpleasant, and many of the city’s residents, then as now, clear out before the heat and humidity reach their peak. By late June his first year in office, President Jefferson was already planning to return to Monticello. He wrote his daughter Martha, “I begin with pleasure to make memorandums, lay by what is to be carried there etc. etc. for the pleasure of thinking of it, of looking forward to the moment when we shall be all there together.”22
The Road to Monticello Page 61