Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (29 page)

O
n New Year's Eve, 1793, Jefferson extended his official resignation to Washington, who accepted it on the first day of 1794.

The president did so, he said, “with sincere regret.” He reassured Jefferson about his tenure in terms both men valued: those of reputation. Washington could not “suffer you to leave your station without assuring you that the opinion which I had formed of your integrity and talents … has been confirmed by the fullest experience; and that both have been eminently displayed in the discharge of your duties.”

Washington's benediction was warm: “Let a conviction of my most earnest prayers for your happiness accompany you in your retirement.”

Preparing to leave Philadelphia, Jefferson advised friends and correspondents “that Richmond is my nearest port and that to which both letters and things had best be addressed to me in future.”

How long he was to stay in seclusion was a subject of no little speculation. Few believed he was truly withdrawing forever. Hearing the news, a Revolutionary hero thought Jefferson's retirement was likely to be short-lived. Writing from Rose Hill in New York, Horatio Gates told Jefferson that he was leaving office “covered with glory; the public gratitude may one day force you from that retreat, so make no rash promises, lest like other great men you should be tempted to break them.” John Adams was more succinct, noting the marvel of how well political plants grow in the shade. The old friendship that had begun between Adams and Jefferson nearly twenty years before was a victim of the acrimony of the age. “Jefferson went off yesterday, and a good riddance of bad ware,” Adams wrote Abigail on January 6, 1794. “He has talents I know, and integrity I believe; but his mind is now poisoned with passion, prejudice, and faction.”

Jefferson spoke as though his retirement was to be permanent. “My private business can never call me elsewhere, and certainly politics will not, which I have ever hated both in theory and practice,” Jefferson wrote Horatio Gates on February 3, 1794. “I thought myself conscientiously called from those studies which were my delight by the political crisis of my country and by those events
quorum pars magna fuisti
”—the last an allusion to Virgil, meaning “in which we played great parts.” Returning to his nautical imagery, Jefferson went on: “In storms like those all hands must be aloft. But calm is now restored, and I leave the bark with joy to those who love the sea. I am but a landsman, forced from my element by accident, regaining it with transport, and wishing to recollect nothing of what I have seen, but my friendships.”

A man who ascribes his engagement in the world in terms of the elements, though, cannot rule out a return to that world should the storms come again—which storms tend to do.

TWENTY
-
SEVEN

IN WAIT AT MONTICELLO

I live on my horse from an early breakfast to a late dinner, and very often after that till dark.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

I
THINK
IT
IS
M
ONTAIGNE
who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head,” Jefferson wrote a friend from Monticello in February 1794. “I am sure it is true as to everything political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character.” Within weeks of being home from Philadelphia Jefferson was struck by how distant the politics of the capital could seem to many Americans. “I could not have supposed, when at Philadelphia, that so little of what was passing there could be known … as is the case here,” he told James Madison. “Judging from this … it is evident to me that the people are not in a condition either to approve or disapprove of their government, nor consequently to influence it.”

Jefferson's stay at Monticello between his resignation from Washington's cabinet and his return to national politics as a candidate for president against John Adams in 1796 lasted only about two years. This period was entirely characteristic, for in these years he practiced a kind of quiet politics at a distance, allowing himself to serve as an emblem of Republican hope as events in Britain, Philadelphia, western Pennsylvania, and among Democratic-Republican societies around the country cast the Federalists in a harsher monarchical light. Jefferson knew that heroes are often summoned from afar—after all, Washington himself had been, not so long ago. Americans had turned to a tall, retired Virginian for rescue before. They might do so again.

J
ohn Adams, serving still as vice president, sent a friendly note along with a book to Monticello in April 1794. “I congratulate you on the charming opening of the spring and heartily wish I was enjoying of it as you are upon a plantation, out of the hearing of the din of politics and the rumors of war.” Thanking Adams, Jefferson wrote, “Instead of writing 10 or 12 letters a day, which I have been in the habit of doing as a thing of course, I put off answering my letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day, and then find it sometimes postponed by other necessary occupations.” Yet he could not forbear a comment on foreign policy. “My countrymen are groaning under the insults of Gr. Britain. I hope some means will turn up of reconciling our faith and honor with peace: for I confess to you I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.”

This was an interesting point, for in New York and in Philadelphia Jefferson had rarely mentioned the military side of the Revolution. In Albemarle County, though, he may not have been able to keep his mind from the scenes of terror and the depredations of the British. Confronted with renewed reminders about the horrors of war, he had a perspective on events he might not have had in the hurry of a diplomatic struggle. Arnold, Cornwallis, and Tarleton were not forgotten.

Adams, too, abhorred the prospect of war and echoed Jefferson's hopes for peace with Britain. He closed with his own wish that he, like Jefferson, might soon “get out of the
Fumum et Opes Strepitumque Romae
”—“the smoke, wealth, and din of Rome.”

The latest threat to the peace both men wanted came from a series of British naval outrages on American shipping with the French West Indies. Now that Britain and France were at war, London had issued a secret Order in Council aimed essentially at closing down the lucrative (for the French) trade out of the islands—a trade largely carried on by American vessels. Americans also worried about unfair British trade policies, encouragement of the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, and support for hostile Indian tribes on the American frontier. “We must adopt such a mode of retaliation as will stake their kingdom to the centre,” a Republican newspaper declared.

Resisting pressure for war, George Washington dispatched John Jay to London. The former Confederation foreign affairs secretary who was now serving as the nation's first chief justice, Jay was undertaking a diplomatic mission that Jefferson hoped “may extricate us from the event of a war, if this can be done saving our faith and our rights.” It would not be easy. “The spirit of war has grown much stronger in this part of the country,” Jefferson told Monroe in April 1794.

B
ack on his mountain, Jefferson wanted to construct as self-sufficient a world as possible. In the mid-1790s he decided to pull down much of his house in order to build even more grandly; the first Monticello thus gave way to the Monticello familiar to ensuing generations. The estate was undergoing constant construction and renovation. “We are now living in a brick-kiln, for my house, in its present state, is nothing better,” Jefferson had written George Wythe during the building of the first house, and now, years later, it had all started again.

The house he wanted would not be finished until after he left the presidency in 1809, but he seems to have rarely been happier than when he was in the midst of construction. “He is a very long time maturing his projects,” a visitor once remarked, not particularly insightfully, given that Jefferson began work on the mountaintop in 1768 and was still at it four decades later. Jefferson himself admitted, “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements.”

As work progressed through the years on the expansion of Monticello, Jefferson's workmen—Irish joiners and enslaved men—also built the L-shaped terraces adjoining the house that he envisioned in 1770; the terraces largely concealed the work and living spaces below—the kitchen, dairy, smokehouse, wash house, ice cellar, store rooms, carriabe bays, and some slave quarters). While construction was underway, Mulberry Row, which ran along the southeastern edge of the main house, expanded to meet his needs. He added new slave quarters, a smokehouse, dairy, blacksmith's shop, carpenter's shop, wash house, sawpit, and, in April 1794, he launched a new manufacturing enterprise there: a nailery, where enslaved boys produced as many as 10,000 nails a day. Visiting Jefferson at Monticello in 1796, a French caller was impressed by Jefferson's easy sense of command and grasp of detail on the estate. “As he cannot expect any assistance from the two small neighboring towns, every article is made on his farm; his negroes are cabinet-makers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc.,” the visitor wrote. “The children he employs in a nail factory.… The young and old negresses spin for the clothing of the rest.”

As he built and farmed, he fought bouts with rheumatism (which kept him “in incessant torment”) yet found joy in his family. Writing of grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Patsy's son, in early 1795, he said: “Jefferson is very robust. His hands are constantly like lumps of ice, yet he will not warm them. He has not worn his shoes an hour this winter. If put on him, he takes them off immediately and uses one to carry his nuts etc. in. Within these two days we have put both him and Anne into moccasins, which being made of soft leather, fitting well and lacing up, they have never been able to take them off.”

He loved his guns and his horses; he loved to hunt and to fish. His mounts tended to have noble names, from Allycroker, Jefferson's first known horse, to Gustavus to Cucullin to The General to Alfred, Caractacus, Ethelinda, Silvertail, Orra Moor, Peggy Waffington, Zanga, Polly Peachum, and the carriage horses Romulus and Remus. There was also a Raleigh, a Tarquin, a Castor, a Diomede, a Bremo, a Wellington, a Tecumseh, a Peacemaker, and The Eagle, Jefferson's last horse, which was purchased in 1820.

Jefferson liked to fish at home and while away. He had a favorite spot “below the old dam” on the Rivanna, he enjoyed outings on the Schuylkill River when he was in Philadelphia, and he relished a day at Lake George in the Adirondacks on his trip through the north with James Madison in 1791. “An abundance of speckled trout, salmon trout, bass and other fish with which it is stored, have added to our other amusements the sport of taking them,” Jefferson had written Patsy. He had been as unhappy with Lake Champlain as he had been happy with Lake George, noting that the larger Champlain was “a far less pleasant water. It is muddy, turbulent, and yields little game”—all things Jefferson disliked in fishing as in life.

He kept guns and traveled armed (he once left behind a gun locked in a box at the inn at Orange Courthouse, and had to write the innkeeper to track it down). To Jefferson hunting was the best form of exercise. He often recommended it, though riding was the great solace and activity of his later years. Jefferson hunted “squirrels and partridges,” recalled Isaac Jefferson. “Old Master wouldn't shoot partridges settin'.” A fair-minded sportsman, Jefferson would “scare … up” partridges or rabbits before firing. He would also drive hunters away from Monticello's deer park.

Jefferson's gun collection included a “two shot-double barrel” and a set of Turkish pistols that he recalled having “20 inch barrels so well made that I never missed a squirrel at 30 yards with them.” He was a man of his time on the question of guns, writing in 1822 that “every American who wishes to protect his farm from the ravages of quadrupeds and his country from those of biped invaders” should be a “gun-man,” adding: “I am a great friend to the manly and healthy exercises of the gun.”

L
ed by James Madison, correspondents kept Jefferson current on politics and foreign affairs. Animosity between Federalists and Republicans was a constant theme. “Personalities, which lessen the pleasures of society, or prevent their being sought, have occurred in private and at tables,” Tench Coxe, an American economist who served as Hamilton's assistant secretary of the Treasury, wrote from Philadelphia. The next week James Monroe detailed the fight over resolutions connected to Jefferson's commerce report; the Senate's vote to expel Albert Gallatin, a Pennsylvania Republican, on the grounds that when elected he had not been a citizen of the United States for the requisite nine years; a battle over a congressional call to see Gouverneur Morris's correspondence; an Indian treaty; and, of course, the disastrous mission of Edmond-Charles Genet. Jefferson was living in relative isolation, but details of the world were in constant supply.

In March 1794, Federalist congressman Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts had introduced legislation to create a new army of fifteen thousand men and give the president extraordinary powers to control sea traffic. The argument, Monroe told Jefferson, was “founded upon the idea of providing for our defense against invasion, and the probability of such an event, considering the unfriendly conduct of G.B. towards us for sometime past.” However concerned the Republicans were about Great Britain, they were also skeptical of the Federalist plan, fearing that this was but a first step toward creating an army that might be raised to defend America but could end up being used to undermine the Constitution in a time of crisis. Republics tended to fall to military dictatorships, and military dictators needed a military. “A change so extraordinary must have a serious object in view,” Monroe wrote Jefferson. “They are to be raised in no given quarter, and although they may be deemed a kind of minute men in respect to their situation except in time of war, yet in every other respect they will be regulars
… 
. The order of Cincinnati will be placed in the command of it.”

The Republicans struck where they could. As part of a naturalization bill, William Branch Giles proposed requiring new American citizens to renounce any hereditary titles they held in other countries—thus, the Jeffersonians hoped, reducing the chance of emigrant aristocrats creating an old-world ethos in America.

In reaction, the Federalist congressman Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts suggested that slaveholding immigrants disclose their human property. “You want to hold us up to the public as aristocrats,” said Dexter. “I, as a retaliation, will hold you up to the same public as dealers in slaves.” Giles's amendment passed; Dexter's failed. Both efforts illuminated the emotional issues shaping American politics—Republican fear of the prospect of hereditary power and the Federalist anxiety about the strength of slaveholders.

T
he accumulation of power in the hands of Federalists was a running source of worry to Jefferson and his comrades. As Congress gathered in the late autumn of 1794, lawmakers who attended Washington's delivery of his annual message heard the president's account of the Whiskey Rebellion—and an unapologetic attack on the Democratic-Republican societies.

The Whiskey Rebellion in the West was rooted in farmers' fury over Hamilton's excise taxes. Episode built upon episode until there were attacks on Bower Hill, the home of General John Neville, a federal tax inspector. A leader of the protesters, James McFarlane, was shot and killed. A large government force under both Hamilton and “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was mustered and dispatched to western Pennsylvania; Washington himself rode out with the troops for a time. Though the rebellion collapsed, the violence was connected in Washington's mind with the political agitation of the Democratic-Republican societies, and he attacked both the Whiskey Rebellion and the societies in 1794.

Jefferson took a sage tone with William Branch Giles in mid-December. “The attempt which has been made to restrain the liberty of our citizens meeting together, interchanging sentiments on what subjects they please, and stating these sentiments in the public papers, has come upon us, a full century earlier than I expected.”

Taking the view that the administration was trying not only to quell the Pennsylvania uprising but to curtail peaceable freedom of assembly, Jefferson made himself plain to Madison. “The denunciation of the democratic societies is one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the faction of Monocrats.” And what did the Whiskey Rebellion amount to, really? To Jefferson it was hardly worth noting. “There was indeed a meeting to consult about a separation,” he wrote Madison in December 1794. “But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination.”