Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (22 page)

So which won, the Head or the Heart? Jefferson gave the Heart both the last word and the highest accolade he could bestow when he credited it with victory in the American Revolution.

The immediate recipient of the letter was not sure how to react. “Your letter could employ me for some time, an hour to consider every word, to every sentence I could write a volume,” Maria wrote Jefferson, before lapsing into nonsensical English. They conducted a friendly, if sporadic, correspondence for the rest of their lives.

Jefferson's letter represents his most extensive literary attempt to reconcile competing human impulses. His categories of reason versus emotion here are useful but too tidy. The heart, for instance, can be driven by affection, appetite, or some combination of the two. Were his feelings for Maria rooted in his soul, or in his glands, or—most likely—both? The truth appears to have been murky even to Jefferson.

What is clear is that he was self-aware and prepared to live with unresolved contradictions, approaching the crises of life with a sense of hope tempered by a recognition that he, at least, was not fated to live to see the end of heartbreak, failure, disappointment, and death. “We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy,” he had written—as the Heart, not the Head. “It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.” Jefferson believed that the future could be better than the past. He knew, though, that life was best lived among friends in the pursuit of large causes, understanding that pain was the price for anything worth having.

TWENTY
-
ONE

DO YOU LIKE OUR NEW CONSTITUTION?

Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

D
EBT
-
RIDD
EN
, F
RANCE
FACED
A
supreme test. In the mid-1780s, partly because of its spending on the American Revolution, the Bourbon government of Louis XVI was in a long-term financial crisis, exacerbated by widespread hunger and by anger over the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Jefferson was shocked by the poverty he saw among ordinary Frenchmen; Patsy always remembered the beggars who surrounded their carriage as they first traveled to Paris.

The financial and political difficulties facing the monarchy and the French nation were immense. Taxes were unequal and haphazardly collected; the heaviest burden of the cost of the Crown and its expensive ways and wars fell less on nobles or clergy, who were largely exempt, and more on commoners, creating understandable tension and popular hostility. “It is impossible to increase taxes, disastrous to keep on borrowing, and inadequate merely to cut expenses,” Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Louis's finance minister, told the king in an August 1786 memorandum. At Calonne's urging, the king summoned an Assembly of Notables—the first in more than a century and a half—to consider a plan of reform. “Of course it calls up all the attention of the people,” Jefferson wrote to John Jay in January 1787. Still, Jefferson was no hothead, arguing that dealing with such large problems required a deft hand.

“Should they attempt more than the established habits of the people are ripe for, they may lose all, and retard infinitely the ultimate object of their aim,” Jefferson wrote a friend in March 1787.

The Assembly of Notables failed, leading to calls—including one from the Marquis de Lafayette—for an Estates-General, a institution of nobles, clergy, and commoners created in the Middle Ages to advise the monarchy. Its last meeting had been held in 1614.

Hope for large-scale reform began to quicken. One member of a liberally minded club captured the spirit of the hour as the Estates-General approached, writing: “We talked about the establishment of a new constitution for the state, as [if it were] an easy job, a natural event.” He continued, “In the ecstasy of those days of hopes and celebration, we scarcely cast a glance at the obstacles to be overcome, before laying the first bases of freedom, before establishing the principles rejected by the spirit of the court, the privileged orders, the great corporations, and the old customs.”

W
hile the French were dealing with an authoritarian state, the Americans had the opposite problem. “The inefficacy of our government becomes daily more and more apparent,” John Jay had written Jefferson in October 1786. “Our credit and our treasury are in a sad situation, and it is probable that either the wisdom or the passions of the people will produce changes.”

Which of the two—the wisdom or the passions—was the question. In New England, a group led by Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary veteran, rose up to protest a lack of debt relief. “A spirit of licentiousness has infected Massachusetts,” Jay wrote Jefferson.

John Adams sought to reassure Jefferson about Shays in November 1786. “Don't be alarmed at the late turbulence in New England,” Adams wrote. “The Massachusetts assembly had, in its zeal to get the better of their debt, laid on a tax, rather heavier than the people could bear; but all will be well, and this commotion will terminate in additional strength to government.”

Jefferson was relieved. “I can never fear that things will go far wrong where common sense has fair play,” he told Adams.

Then the inevitable issue: Would Britain use the moment to cause trouble for the United States? Jay wrote Jefferson that there might be Canadian designs on America through an “understanding between the insurgents in Massachusetts and some leading persons in Canada.” Jay also fretted that Britain could capitalize on an “idea that may do mischief”: the notion that “the interests of the Atlantic and Western parts of the United States are distinct” and “the growth of the latter tend[s] to diminish that of the former.”

Writing to a correspondent in America with the expectation that his views would be shared at home, the powerless congressman of 1783 to 1784 was now taking a softer, more sanguine tone about authority and order. There is no question that Jefferson's experience in France gave his politics a more democratic cast than they had had when he left America for Paris. Jefferson wrote:

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.… Do not be too severe upon [the people's] errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind.

Jefferson showed his grasp of politics and his understanding of the nature of both governor and governed in a letter to Madison on Tuesday, January 30, 1787.

There were, he said, three kinds of societies: those without government (“as among our Indians”); those “wherein the will of everyone has a just influence”; and those “of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics.” It was fine to think of the first as ideal, Jefferson said, but it was impractical where there was “any great degree of population”; he thus dispensed with an Edenic vision of free men dwelling together “without government.” The second was where men should focus their attention and their care. “The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils too: the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.”

Liberty, he was saying, requires patience, forbearance, and fortitude. Republics were not for the fainthearted. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

L
eaving Paris in late February 1787, Jefferson set out alone on a journey through the south of France and the north of Italy. “Architecture, painting, sculpture, antiquities, agriculture, the condition of the laboring poor fill all my moments,” he wrote William Short. At Aix-en-Provence he swooned at the beauty of the countryside, the excellence of the food, the joy of the wine. “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine,” he wrote Short. “What more can man ask of heaven? If I should happen to die at Paris I will beg of you to send me here, and have me exposed to the sun. I am sure it will bring me to life again.” He loved the Roman ruins, the old bridges, the aqueducts, and the Maison Carée at Nîmes, the first-century Roman temple, which inspired his design of the state capitol in Richmond. He was back in Paris on Sunday, June 10, 1787.

The world to which he returned seemed bright. In America, the Constitutional Convention had begun in May. Following the action in Philadelphia as closely as he could, Jefferson was skeptical of a proposal to give the federal Congress the authority to veto any individual act of a state legislature that concerned national affairs. Knowing human nature—and knowing the Congress, which was human nature writ large—he understood that the Congress would not be able to keep themselves from abusing their power by deciding that
everything
concerned the national interest.

O
n Tuesday, June 26, 1787, Polly Jefferson, age eight, arrived in London. Handed over to the care of Abigail Adams, Polly did not want to part with the man who had commanded the ship on which she had traveled, a man named Ramsey, and Captain Ramsey did not want to part with Sally Hemings. “The old nurse whom you expected to have attended her was sick and unable to come,” Abigail Adams wrote Jefferson. “She has a girl about 15 or 16 with her, the sister of the servant you have with you.”

There are no known images of Sally Hemings. From what little evidence we have, the fourteen-year-old Sally who accompanied Polly Jefferson into the Adamses's London house appeared nearly white and was “very handsome, [with] long straight hair down her back.” There may have been some resemblance, more and less pronounced as the years went on, to the Wayles side of the family—which is to say Sally could well have shared some characteristics with her late half sister, Mrs. Thomas Jefferson. It is also possible that at around fourteen Sally Hemings was well developed: Abigail Adams guessed she was a year or two older than she was.

We know, too, that Captain Ramsey was hoping to take an unchaperoned Hemings back across the Atlantic with him, and it seems safe to assume he was not chiefly interested in her conversation. It is a reasonable surmise that the Sally Hemings who arrived in Europe in the summer of 1787 was physically desirable.

Polly, it emerged, was a bright child capable of uncomfortable candor. In London she sobbed when taken from Ramsey, who had become a familiar and probably fond figure during the voyage. Mrs. Adams tried to calm her by invoking the girl's sister, Patsy. “I tell her that I did not see her sister cry once,” Mrs. Adams wrote Jefferson. “She replies that her sister was older and ought to do better, besides she had pappa with her.” Mrs. Adams then told Jefferson: “I show her your picture. She says she cannot know it, how should she when she should not know you.”

Jefferson, Mrs. Adams said, should come fetch his younger daughter and perhaps bring Patsy along, for that might “reconcile her little sister to the thoughts of taking a journey.” At the end of the day, Abigail reported: “Miss Polly … has wiped her eyes and laid down to sleep.”

A night of rest did wonders for the little girl. On Wednesday the twenty-seventh, she was, Abigail said, “as contented … as she was miserable yesterday. She is indeed a fine child.”

Mrs. Adams was less sure about Sally, who seems to have flummoxed her. “The girl who is with [Polly] is quite a child, and Captain Ramsey is of [the] opinion will be of so little service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge. She seems fond of the child and appears good natured.”

Jefferson thanked Abigail profusely on Sunday, July 1, 1787, dispatching his French maître d'hôtel, Adrien Petit, to fetch Polly and Sally. He claimed that the crush of work—the “arrearages of 3 or 4 months all crowded on me at once,” as he put it—kept him from coming personally.

In London, Polly was beside herself when she realized her father had delegated the duty of collecting her. Crying and “thrown into all her former distresses,” Polly clung to Abigail, who wrote Jefferson: “She told me this morning that as she had left all her friends in Virginia to come over the ocean to see you, she did think you would have taken the pains to have come here for her, and not have sent a man whom she cannot understand.” Lest Jefferson think Abigail was being too rough on him, she added: “I express her own words.”

Polly Jefferson and Sally Hemings arrived in Paris on Sunday, July 15, 1787. “She had totally forgotten her sister,” Jefferson wrote, “but thought, on seeing me, that she recollected something of me”—reversing the impression she had given Abigail Adams in London.

With Polly safely in hand, Jefferson sat down to thank his sister-in-law for all she and her husband had done for his little girl. “Her reading, her writing, her manners in general show what everlasting obligations we are all under to you,” Jefferson wrote Elizabeth Eppes. “As far as her affections can be a requital, she renders you the debt, for it is impossible for a child to prove a more sincere affection to an absent person than she does to you.”

T
hinking of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Jefferson warmly wrote John Adams, “It is really an assembly of demigods.”

One of the demigods, James Madison, was fretful. “Nothing can exceed the universal anxiety for the event of the meeting here,” Madison wrote Jefferson. Virginia was particularly unsettled. “The people … are said to be generally discontented.” Things had not yet gone as far as they did in Massachusetts, but a drought had wrecked the corn crop and “taxes are another source of discontent.” Several prisons, courthouses, and clerk's offices had been “willfully burnt.”

A fear of Jefferson's—one made all the stronger the more time he spent in proximity to the court of Louis XVI—was that the United States might tack toward hereditary power, up to and including the installation of a monarch.

Such rumors were in the air. “The report of an intention on the part of America to apply for a sovereign of the house of Hanover has circulated here; and should an application of that nature be made, it will require a very nice consideration in what manner so important a subject should be treated,” Lord Sydney wrote Lord Dorchester from London on Friday, September 14, 1787. Alexander Hamilton was said to believe the “most plausible shape” of a reunion with Great Britain would be “the establishment of a son of the present monarch … with a family compact.”

Dorchester reported the failure of all such enterprises, sending London a report in 1788 saying that an alleged plan of Hamilton's “that had in view the establishment of a monarchy, and placing the crown upon the head of a foreign prince … was overruled, although supported by some of the ablest members of the convention.”