by Gore Vidal
In 1792 the Virginians had promised me that if I stepped aside as vice-presidential candidate for George Clinton they would support me in that position four years later. In politics, as in life, one ought to do what one has promised to do. This has been my Quixotic code. The Virginians, however, were not so—I search for a word. Punctilious? Therefore I thought it time to remind the chief Virginian of the junto’s promise.
Yellow fever had broken out in New York City when I left Philadelphia by stage on September 18, 1795. I was accompanied by my valet Alexis. Why is it that a man’s servants figure not at all in his story, as told by himself or others? and yet our lives are mostly spent in the company of such true intimates. I have never had a friend as true as the black Santo Domingan Alexis who once—but that is for a different memoir.
By the time I arrived at the “city” of Washington I was feeling curiously stupid. There was a ringing in my ears. I was feverish. Nevertheless, I was taken in by a Miss Duncanson who displayed the courage of which martyrs and saints are made. Anyone else would have turned me out of the house to die in the woods as so many did die during the summer of ’93 when, fleeing the contagion in Philadelphia, they were kept at bay with rifles by the country-folk. Even President Washington when he left Philadelphia for Mount Vernon was not allowed to stop in several villages, and His Mightiness was obliged to sleep not surrounded by adoring subjects but beneath indifferent trees.
When Alexis drew the curtains the next morning and saw my face, he realized that his term of employment was practically at an end. “Diable!”
“Qu’a-t-il?” I could hardly speak. He brought me a mirror. My face and neck were swollen and the whites of my eyes were as scarlet as those poor Dr. Hutchinson surveyed me with for the last time. Worst, I could hardly swallow, speak.
Miss Duncanson was tact itself. The fever was never mentioned and—not mentioned—amiably did not go to its next phase. I ate nothing; allowed no doctor to bleed me; sprang a new man from my bed a few days later and in perfect health explored the new capital of our country.
I confess that I have never seen such a disheartening wilderness. Parts of the Capitol and presidential mansion were going up, but nothing else. The builders lived in shacks which, at the time of my last visit to the city in 1806, were still intact, still occupied.
I speculated in land like everyone else, including General Washington who had just bought two lots near the Capitol. I put a down payment on a lot near the White House. We were a mad sight! Grown men on horseback riding through dark woods, consulting maps in order to be able to point knowledgeably to this or that section of marshy soil and say, “Now that is the corner of such-and-such a street. Most convenient to the Capitol. I shall build a house—no, an hotel—there.” Yet those who persevered in that wilderness made vast fortunes. As usual I did not.
I then rode on to Monticello through a perfect wilderness crossed by some of the most treacherous streams and fords that I have ever encountered.
At about ten in the morning toward the end of September, I stood below the hill on which the mansion Monticello was a-building. All was confusion. A large forge manned (or rather boy-ed) by a dozen black children was turning out nails. The apostle of the agrarian life gaily admitted to now being a wholesale manufacturer.
“I have no choice,” said Jefferson who greeted me at the smithy. “The crops pay for re-building the house. The nails pay for groceries. I calculate at my present rate of production I shall be out of debt in four years.” I complimented him. I too have had my nail manufactories which were to get me out of debt. But somehow the nails never do the trick.
Jefferson mounted his horse and rode with me up the hill, chattering all the while. He was then about fifty, beginning to go gray, and very stiff with the rheumatism which he was gloomily certain was heralding his life’s end.
I was complimented for my opposition to Jay’s treaty. “Yours is the finest legal mind in the Senate.”
I said that, considering my peers, this compliment was not of the highest order.
Suddenly Jefferson’s horse shied. Savagely he jerked at the animal’s mouth till blood came with the foam; all the while using his whip until the poor creature was heavily wealed. It was my first experience of the way he always treated horses.
At the top of the hill I was invited to admire what looked to be a Palladian ruin. The main part of the house was half-dismantled. Bricks flew in all directions as walls came down; then, slowly, went up again, according to Jefferson’s latest design. “I think there is nothing so much in the world I like as tearing down and building up.”
We rode through a meadow filled with brick kilns. Slaves were everywhere, hard at work. I was surprised to see how “bright” they were. I do not know if that word is still in use at the south, but in those days a slave with a large degree of white blood was known as “bright.” It made me most uneasy to see so many men and women whose skins were a good deal fairer than my own belonging to Mr. Jefferson.
A number were remarkably handsome, particularly those belonging to the Hemings family whose most illustrious member was Jefferson’s concubine Sally, by whom he had at least five children. Recently I learned that Sally is living with one of her sons in Maryland. Apparently the son is now considered white, obliging his mother to keep her identity a secret from their neighbours in Aberdeen.
“I inherited the bright slaves from my father-in-law John Wayles.” Jefferson sighed. “It is no secret—there are no secrets in Virginia—that many of them are his children.” Sally Hemings was a daughter of Wayles which made her the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife. Certainly the girl bore a remarkable resemblance to Martha Wayles, if the portrait in the dining-room at Monticello was to be trusted. Amusing to contemplate that in bedding his fine-looking slave, Jefferson was also sleeping with his sister-in-law! One would have enjoyed hearing him moralize on that subject.
Sally greeted us at the door. She was a good-looking fair-complected girl. In her role as unobtrusive housekeeper she was exactly what Jefferson wanted a wife to be—submissive, shy, and rather stupid.
“It is plain to me that women are intellectually inferior to men.” This was over wine at dinner. “Excepting present company—and I do not subscribe to the Adam’s rib theory but to plain evidence.” He then made a number of foolish points that I refuted, referring to my own educational experiments with Theodosia who knew far more Greek and Latin—if such knowledge is to be a criterion—than this Virginia farmer and intellectual dabbler. But our discussion was amiable, what I could hear of it for the dining-room rang with the sound of falling bricks, the shouts of slaves, the rumble of carts coming and going.
My fellow guests at table were all neighbours of Jefferson; the sort of Virginia gentry that is rather more drunk than not at dinner’s end. Jefferson’s daughter Martha presided. Although her husband and a pair of Jefferson’s sisters were in the house, due to illness they did not join us. “I have been doctor and nurse all summer,” Jefferson said. Unlike his guests, he drank very lightly of his good French wine, and ate mostly vegetables, a sensible regimen I often follow.
Inevitably, the subject turned to Hamilton. Jefferson was like a man possessed whenever he contemplated his rival. “This colossus of monarchy—and he is a colossus, there is no denying his brilliance. It is self-evident like his corruption and his relentlessness even in what he calls retirement.”
I could and did testify to that relentlessness. Hamilton was currently managing a series of Federalist victories in New York state, and our party was in full retreat. As a result, I would lose my seat in the Senate to Hamilton’s father-in-law while the governorship would pass from our Clinton to his John Jay.
Jefferson was particularly interested in the fact that Hamilton has at last “revealed his love of force. Who else but a monocrat would lead twelve thousand militia into western Pennsylvania? to capture a few farmers who put up no resistance, who simply do not want to pay his whiskey tax, and should not pay it either.”
“The tax is a stupid one,” I agreed. Needless to say, I did not remind my host that, as secretary of state, he had raised no objection to the Whisky Tax Act.
“We fought a revolution to put an end to such iniquities.”
“So we did. But now we have a Constitution which says most clearly that Congress shall have power to levy and collect taxes, and so the taxes must be paid.”
“Congress, yes! The Executive, no!” Jefferson was a marvellous nit-picker when he chose. In this instance, however, as in the earlier matter of the Bank, he was laying the ground for the principle of nullification that will, I am certain, eventually disintegrate the union of these states. To Jefferson the Constitution was simply a convenience when it allowed him to do what he wanted to do, and a monarchical document when it stayed his hand. He regarded domestic government as the business of the states and foreign affairs as the business of the Executive, and he was naïve enough in those days to think that the two businesses could be kept separate. Enlightenment came when, as president, he decided to fight pirates in the Mediterranean, to buy Louisiana, to steal the two Floridas and, if possible, to annex Cuba. By the time Jefferson’s presidency ended, the Executive was more powerful than it had ever been under those two “monarchists,” Washington and Adams.
Jefferson’s daughter (who resembled him closely) tried to change the subject but Jefferson was now in full flow. I have not the art to give a proper rendering of his discourse, which came in floods. He seemed to think aloud and, as he did, one was obliged to think with him, in the process becoming so much a part of his mind that each time he hesitated for a phrase, one’s own brain stopped all functioning and waited upon his to think for us all, to express for us all. What a devilish gift!
“We should have indicted Hamilton as soon as we knew about his friend Duer. I am convinced that Hamilton knew exactly what Duer was doing at the Treasury. They were in it together. Two conscienceless speculators like those informers, Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds!” The bright eyes flashed at me; then looked away as I turned toward him, mesmerized as is the rabbit by the snake. Incidentally, Jefferson had the shiftiest gaze of any man I have ever known. But then after a lifetime of cross-examination in court, I have come to the conclusion that the man who cannot meet your gaze is the one who is telling the truth while the witness who looks you straight in the eye is lying. Naturally, my rule is proved by this one exception!
Conscious of the ladies at the table, Jefferson said no more of the Reynolds affaire. Not until much later did I learn the whole strange story of how Hamilton had been black-mailed by this strange lewd couple.
Jefferson now started to muse on the character of Washington, to the delight of the squires (excepting one who, presently, vanished from view beneath the table, signalling the end of our feast).
We moved outside onto the lawn—or rather a section of turf between two roaring kilns. The Virginians were so used to the noise and confusion that they entirely ignored it, as did our host.
Jefferson could not understand Washington’s response to the attacks that were now being made more and more frequently not only upon his administration but upon himself. “After all, it is the price of a free press, and small to pay considering the advantages.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “the President is distressed by the source of the attack?”
Jefferson looked at me with true innocence. “Source?”
“Freneau’s newspaper was devoted to your interest.”
“But surely we must try to strike a journalistic balance at Philadelphia. Besides, I have never complained about Fenno’s newspaper and its attacks upon me.” On almost every occasion that I spoke with Jefferson, he had bitter complaints to make about the calumnies, heresies, seditions, libels and licentiousness of the “free” press which, on at least one occasion, he tried to suppress.
“A great man ought to ignore such pin-pricks. Washington’s place in history is secure—if he is not subverted entirely by Hamilton.” Jefferson frowned and then, as bricks cascaded down the side of a near-by wall, he launched into a fine tirade. “I am besieged with visitors from abroad who come not to see me but to see the republic we are making, to see if this sort of life”—he waved his arm to include his mountain top, his kilns, his slaves, his vista of bronze-leaved trees in the valley below—“can be made to work. That a man on his own land—and I want every man to own at least fifty acres, even if the government must pay for it or otherwise acquire it from the Indians to the west—a man and his family on a farm can be entirely self-sufficient, growing their own food, making their own clothes—yes, nails, too! I tell you, Colonel Burr, there is nothing that a man cannot do in this marvellous climate, on this rich earth, and that includes,” his voice became solemn, the usual slight breathiness was replaced by an unusual clearness of tone, “the making of a republic, a true republic of the kind that no nation—until us—has attempted since classical times. That is why the alliance with France means so much. For we are the only two republics on earth, and we have much to teach one another.”
Indeed we had! As we were speaking, a French army officer named Bonaparte was being congratulated in the name of the republic for having opened fire on a Parisian crowd, killing 200 “malcontents”; the eagle had begun that spreading of wings which would presently leave us the sole republic on earth. Yet, finally, who was more truly imperial? Bonaparte with his military conquests now vanished? Or Jefferson with his strategic acquisitions that endure to this day?
The subject of France then suggested the troubles in Santo Domingo to our host’s allusive mind. “There is a lesson for us in what is happening.” He particularly addressed the Virginians. “Blacks have murdered whites. Slaves have murdered their masters. And I tell you that if we do not find some way of eliminating—gradually—the institution of slavery, our children’s children will be slaughtered just the way the French have been slaughtered on Santo Domingo.”
I recall this dialogue on a day when New York City is a battle-ground between Abolitionists and their enemies. Both factions are exploiting Jefferson’s name. What one would give to have him with us now, trying to explain himself!
Forty years ago, Jefferson was not an Abolitionist, to say the least. He detested and feared what was happening in Santo Domingo. “We cannot condone anarchy—in no matter what cause.” He prayed that France would soon restore good government to the blacks of Santo Domingo, even if this meant the restoration of slavery. He saw but one solution to the problem in the United States. “We must ship our black people to the Indies—as well as to Africa—and hope that restored to their original longitude they will enjoy the same freedoms we do, with whatever wisdom we might have imparted to them.”
On that note the Virginians wandered inside, and Jefferson offered to show me a plow he had invented; spoke fondly of his grandson. “He is a regular Indian, goes bare-foot in the winter. We have to tie moccasins on his feet.”
As we walked, Jefferson discoursed learnedly on Indians. “I think they must be of a similar stock as ourselves. Their intelligence seems equal to ours but unfortunately they are slaves to old, bad customs, and so will not work the soil, preferring the aimless life of the hunter. Yet if this American environment has made them what they are, will it have the same effect upon us?”
“Will we become hunters, do you mean? Abandon our cities …”
“… our farms.” The emphasis was plain. A small sandy-haired boy was throwing stones at the master’s recently invented (and highly successful) plow.
Benignly Jefferson watched the boy, his mind on Indians. “Buffon of course was wrong. He thought Indians physically degenerate because they are smaller than Europeans. Which is nonsense. The Iroquois are considerably larger than most Europeans. The lack of facial hair Buffon took to be a sign of effeteness—not noticing how painfully they extract those hairs. He was also confident that their organs of generation are smaller than ours which has not been true in my experience. Has it been so in yours?”
“I fear that my studies along that line are incomplete.” My small irony was lost. Buffon was refuted at length.
Then Jefferson referred again to the massacres in Santo Domingo. It was much on his mind. The nightmare of every slave-owner had finally become reality. Not only was it possible for slaves to seize a plantation, they could also seize an entire nation. “It is incredible! Yet how will they govern themselves? How will they survive? For one thing, Negroes are not like Indians, not like us. They have less intellectual capacity than we. Of course I should like to think that it is the fact of their unfortunate condition which has made them stupid. But then how explain the intelligence of the Roman slaves, the white Roman slaves? Their condition was the same as that of our Negroes but look at what they accomplished! Why, the slave Epictetus was the wisest man of his time. No. I fear that it is not the condition of slavery itself but some defect in nature that has denied to the Negro the highest intelligence.” Jefferson waved at a well-dressed black man riding toward us from the woods. “Though certainly in matters of the heart, nature has more than done the Negro justice.”
The black man was the renowned Jupiter who was often entrusted with such headful tasks as collecting money from those who bought Jefferson’s nails.
Jupiter saluted; reported on a transaction; departed. “White blood,” said Jefferson, aware of what I was thinking, “alters them.” Jupiter was black as onyx.
I indicated the small boy who was now perilously climbing a tree. “Your grandson is going to hurt himself.”
Jefferson flushed deeply. “That is a child of the place. A Hemings, I think.”
Since the child was obviously son or grandson to him, I had seriously blundered and, as in law, ignorance is not a defence. It was a curious sensation to look about Monticello and see everywhere so many replicas of Jefferson and his father-in-law. It was as if we had all of us been transformed into dogs, and as a single male dog can re-create in his own image an entire canine community, so Jefferson and his family had grafted their powerful strain upon these slave Africans, and like a king dog (or the Sultan at the Grande Porte) Jefferson could now look about him and see everywhere near-perfect consanguinity.