Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Page 19

  He was also a patriot and a politician, and he worried, as he had during the years of the war, about the threat of a frontier beyond American control. “I find they have subscribed a very large sum of money in England for exploring the country from the Mississippi to California,” Jefferson wrote George Rogers Clark from Annapolis in December 1783. “They pretend it is only to promote knowledge. I am afraid they have thoughts of colonizing into that quarter. Some of us have been talking here in a feeble way of making the attempt to search that country.” He fretted, though, about finding the means to do it. “But I doubt whether we have enough of that kind of spirit to raise the money. How would you like to lead such a party?”

  The man who saw America’s story in terms of the march of “human events” was aware of the scale of the experiment in which he was participating. In the first week of December 1783, Jefferson made inquiries about purchasing a mechanical copying device through Samuel House, a brother of Eliza House Trist and a Philadelphia merchant. He wanted to ensure that his role was part of the saga of the age when the time came for the telling of tales and the weaving of history. Jefferson had been thinking in such terms since he began sending out his original version of the Declaration of Independence. Now he was taking steps to preserve the daily, even hourly, record of a life lived on the largest possible stage.

  SEVENTEEN

  LOST CITIES AND LIFE COUNSEL

  The Governor is a most ingenuous naturalist and philosopher, a truly scientific and learned man, and every way excellent.

  —EZRA STILES, the president of Yale College, on Jefferson

  IN PHILADELPHIA all the talk was of balloons. “Congress imagined that when they removed to Annapolis to pout we should all be in deep distress and for every pout return a sigh—but the event is far otherwise,” Jefferson’s friend Francis Hopkinson wrote him in March 1784. “The name of Congress is almost forgotten, and for one person that will mention that respectable body a hundred will talk of an air balloon.”

  It was a season of grand ballooning experiments in Paris; word of the flights, including a manned one in November 1783, spread rapidly. Jefferson sensed the revolutionary possibilities of human control of the air. “What think you of these balloons? They really begin to assume a serious face,” he wrote. Reports had people flying six miles in twenty minutes at three thousand feet. He took a jocular tone, but his words were prescient. “This discovery seems to threaten the prostration of fortified works unless they can be closed above, the destruction of fleets and what not. The French may now run over their laces, wines etc. to England duty free. The whole system of British statutes made on the supposition of goods being brought into some port must be revised. Inland countries may now become maritime states unless you choose rather to call them aerial ones as their commerce is in [the] future to be carried on through that element. But jesting apart I think this discovery may lead to things useful.” Ten years later, in Philadelphia, Jefferson saw the first successful manned balloon flight in America.

  His friend Hopkinson, a lawyer, writer, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, saw a witty connection between the political and the scientific. “A high-flying politician,” Hopkinson wrote, “is I think not unlike a balloon—he is full of inflammability, he is driven along by every current of wind, and those who will suffer themselves to be carried up by them run a great risk that the bubble may burst and let them fall from the height to which a principle of levity had raised them.”

  Jefferson’s scientific curiosity never abated. One day James Madison wrote with extraordinary news from abroad: He had been told “a subterraneous city has been discovered in Siberia, which appears to have been once populous and magnificent. Among other curiosities it contains an equestrian statue around the neck of which was a golden chain 200 feet in length, so exquisitely wrought that Buffon inferred from a specimen of 6 feet sent him by the Empress of Russia that no artist in Paris could equal the workmanship.”

  The Reverend James Madison, the president of William and Mary and a cousin of Jefferson’s political ally James Madison, wrote Jefferson about climate (he was annoyed that “the British robbed me of my thermometer and barometer”), about new scientific books, and about a comet. “You have no doubt observed the comet which made its appearance here last Friday evening for the first time.… I shall endeavor to trace its progress and will send you the result.”

  J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur contacted Jefferson with a curious scientific inquiry: whether there was truth to a rumor in France that “in some of the remotest settlements of Virginia or Carolina, brandy has been distilled from potatoes.” He was asking Jefferson, he said, because of the “respect with which I have heard your name mentioned as well as from your extensive knowledge and taste for the arts and sciences.”

  Jefferson believed in trial and error, exploring Buffon’s theory of heat and seeking breakthroughs in botany. “I have always thought that if in the experiments to introduce or to communicate new plants, one species in a hundred is found useful and succeeds, the ninety-nine found otherwise are more than paid for,” he remarked.

  He wrote the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois to thank him for finding Patsy a French tutor in Philadelphia and for suggestions for her reading. Jefferson reported that he had given her a copy of Gil Blas, a French picaresque novel by Alain-René Lesage, and of Cervantes’s Don Quixote—“which are among the best books of their class as far as I am acquainted with them.” His selections suggested a love of intellectual adventure that he hoped his daughter would come to share.

  He was a generous father, but could be a stern one, too. “The acquirements which I hope you will make under the tutors I have provided for you will render you more worthy of my love, and if they cannot increase it they will prevent its diminution,” he wrote to his daughter. He had engaged Mrs. Thomas Hopkinson, Francis Hopkinson’s mother, to watch over Patsy, and he invested Mrs. Hopkinson with the authority of his beloved late wife.

  Consider the good lady who has taken you under her roof, who has undertaken to see that you perform all your exercises, and to admonish you in all those wanderings from what is right or what is clever to which your inexperience would expose you, consider her I say as your mother, as the only person to whom … you can now look up; and that her displeasure or disapprobation on any occasion will be an immense misfortune which should you be so unhappy as to incur by any unguarded act, think no concession too much to regain her good will.

  The love of the woman he was putting in her mother’s place, then, was to be contingent, not constant. Jefferson expected his daughter to apply herself to the work he prescribed with the same energy and effort he gave everything he did.

  With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve:

  From 8 to 10 o’clock, practice music.

  From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another.

  From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.

  From 3 to 4, read French.

  From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music.

  From 5 till bed-time, read English, write, etc.

  His tutelage was not limited to Patsy. “You are now old enough to know how very important to your future life will be the manner in which you employ your present time,” he wrote his nephew Peter Carr, son of his sister Martha and Dabney, in December 1783. “I hope therefore you will never waste a moment of it.” He entrusted Carr to James Maury, his old teacher.

  Jefferson had large ambitions for Carr—ambitions that mirrored those he had for himself. Jefferson wished Carr to become “a man of learning and influence” and expected him to be preparing for “the public stage of life.” (He also advised Carr to learn Spanish. “Our future connection with Spain renders that the most necessary of the modern languages, after the French,” he told him. “When you become a public man you may have occasion for it, and the cir
cumstance of your possessing that language may give you a preference over other candidates.”)

  Later, he told his nephew that religion required careful thought, not reflexive acceptance. “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

  Jefferson longed for order, control, affection. “Monroe is buying land almost adjoining me,” Jefferson wrote to Madison from Annapolis in February 1784. “[William] Short will do the same. What would I not give [if] you could fall into the circle.… Think of it. To render it practicable only requires you to think it so. Life is of no value but as it brings us gratifications. Among the most valuable of these is rational society. It informs the mind, sweetens the temper, cheers our spirits, and promotes health.”

  Jefferson was an attentive and good friend through the years. “Though the different walks of life into which we have been led do not bring us together, yet I inquire of your health, with anxious concern, from every one who comes from you,” he once wrote George Wythe. “I shall for ever cherish the remembrance of the many agreeable and useful days I have passed with you, and the infinite obligations I owe you for what good has fallen to me through life.” Jefferson’s friend Alexander Donald, of Richmond, was hosting Warner Lewis at home when a letter from Jefferson arrived in late 1787. The note, Donald told Jefferson, “was so friendly, and so very flattering to my pride, that I could not resist the vanity of showing it to him. He added to my pride by declaring … that of all the men he ever knew in his life, he believed you to be the most sincere in your profession of friendship.… Some people in your high character would be very apt to forget their old acquaintance, but you are not, and I must be allowed to do myself the justice to declare, I never entertained an idea that you would.”

  The Confederation Congress remained a mess seemingly beyond Jefferson’s control; it was difficult even to gather a quorum. “Admonition after admonition has been sent to the states, to no effect,” he told Madison in February 1784. “I fear that our chance is at this time desperate.”

  Reimbursement of the legislators’ personal expenses was also a problem. “Among other legislative subjects our distresses ask notice,” Jefferson said. “I had been from home four months and had expended 1200 dollars before I received one farthing.” For a few of Jefferson’s colleagues the money came too late. “In the meantime some of us had had the mortification to have our horses turned out of the livery stable for want of money. There is really no standing this.”

  On a graver note, chatter about kings or a reassertion of British influence was frequent enough to inform Jefferson’s thinking about politics through the decades. In late January 1784, Jefferson drafted a reply to a letter from a correspondent in Boston, who had written to warn of “encroachments … made on the territories of the state of Massachusetts by the subjects of his Britannic majesty from the government of Nova Scotia.”

  After reading a report from Benjamin Franklin several weeks later, Jefferson warned George Washington that it

  gives a picture of the disposition of England towards us; he observes that though they have made peace with us, they are not reconciled to us nor to the loss of us. He calls to our attention the numerous royal progeny to be provided for, the military education giving to some of them, the ideas in England of distraction among ourselves, that the people here are already fatigued with their new governments, the possibility of circumstances arising on the Continent of Europe which might countenance the wishes of Great Britain to recover us, and from thence inculcates a useful lesson to cement the friendships we possess in Europe.

  As he fought “an attack of my periodical headache” in March 1784, he wrote Washington: “I suppose the crippled state of Congress is not new to you.… The consequence is that we are wasting our time and labor in vain efforts to do business.”

  The British were dunning the Americans for prewar debts, and at least two elements of the Treaty of Paris were open issues: the British promise to abandon their forts in the West and their pledge to return captured and escaped slaves. Both, naturally, were of concern to Virginians, and the questions kept the two countries in a state of agitation for years.

  The West let him dream big, and he proposed a trade route connecting the Ohio and Potomac rivers. “This is the moment … for seizing it if ever we mean to have it,” he said. “All the world is becoming commercial.” Jefferson was pushing Virginia to approve a special tax for the river project, but, as he told George Washington, “a most powerful objection always arises to propositions of this kind. It is that public undertakings are carelessly managed and much money spent to little purpose.”

  Jefferson’s plan for overcoming these obstacles: recruit Washington from retirement to head up the project. The idea had fascinated Washington for decades, but the general’s reply was pragmatic. Though he agreed with Jefferson about the merits of the project, Washington said, “I have no expectation that the public will adopt the measure; for besides the jealousies which prevail, and the difficulty of proportioning such funds as may be allotted for the purposes you have mentioned, there are two others, which in my opinion, will be yet harder to surmount. These are (if I have not imbibed too unfavorable an opinion of my countrymen) the impracticability of bringing the great and truly wise policy of this measure to their view, and the difficulty of drawing money from them for such a purpose if you could do it.” Nevertheless, Jefferson’s letter renewed Washington’s interest. Their hope was to clear navigation on the Potomac to a point where a portage road could link it to the Ohio. Washington supervised improvements to the Potomac as head of a private company, but it would take decades before the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal came into being.

  In April, Washington implicitly complimented Jefferson by writing for his “opinion of the Institution of the Society of Cincinnati,” an organization of Washington’s officers that some feared was a nascent aristocratic order that could corrupt the republic.

  Jefferson was happy that Washington had asked. The issue of the Cincinnati, he said, “is interesting, and, so far as you have stood connected with it, has been a matter of anxiety to me.… I have wished to see you stand on ground separated from it; and that the character which will be handed to future ages at the head of our revolution may in no instance be compromised in subordinate altercations.”

  Jefferson knew his man. Nothing could be better calculated to win Washington’s attention than the suggestion that his own reputation was at risk. Jefferson said that he was certain that Washington meant no harm. The “moderation and virtue of a single character”—Washington—“has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish,” but even he “is not immortal, and his successor or some one of his successors at the head of this institution may adopt a more mistaken road to glory.” Congress, Jefferson said, shared his views.

  Jefferson argued against the Order on two grounds. First, that the political nature of man made it highly unlikely that a society designed to meet regularly would remain peaceable. “The way to make friends quarrel is to pit them in disputation under the public eye,” Jefferson said. A second Jeffersonian objection was that a hereditary society was out of harmony with the spirit of a republic based on what Jefferson called the “natural equality of man.”

  Washington appears to have taken Jefferson’s counsel seriously. The general pressed the Society to end the granting of honorary memberships, a category Jefferson had written “might draw into the order all the men of talents, of office and wealth; and in this case would probably procure an ingraftment into the government.”

  Jefferson thought broadly and boldly about the national government and national enterprises. “I see the best effects produced by sending our young statesmen here,” he told Madiso
n. “They see the affairs of the Confederacy from a high ground; they learn the importance of the Union and befriend federal measures when they return.”

  On Monday, March 1, 1784, Congress accepted the Virginia cession of territory northwest of the Ohio River, the culmination of several years of negotiations and clashing interests. The final cession transferred claims to the northwestern territory from Virginia to the United States. The lands ceded, the question was what would happen next.

  Rarely without a thought in such a situation, Jefferson had already been at work on a plan to create new states. He even had names for them: Sylvania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Michigania, Washington, Saratoga, Polypotamia, and Pelisipia. The Ordinance of 1784 is significant in that it left many of the details of organization to the future states themselves. They were, however, to “forever remain a part of this confederacy of the United States of America” and “their respective governments shall be republican.”

  Most significantly, the version of the Ordinance of 1784 that Jefferson supported banned the expansion of slavery into the new territories. The plan failed by a single vote in the Congress (a delegate from New Jersey was too ill to attend, dooming the bill). Reflecting on the closeness of the decision, Jefferson wrote: “Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.”

  After an early legal and legislative life attempting to abolish slavery, Jefferson, now at midlife, made a calculated decision that he would no longer risk his “usefulness” in the arena by pressing the issue. (There was a partial victory later: The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi rivers.) In all, though, for Jefferson public life was about compromise and an unending effort to balance competing interests. To have pursued abolition, even when coupled, as it was in Jefferson’s mind, with deportation, was politically lethal. And Jefferson was not going to risk all for what he believed was a cause whose time had not yet come.