were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle
and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican. “There is not a
crowned head in Europe,” he wrote to General Washington, in 1788, “whose
talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the
people of America.”
But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live
with people among whom, as he said, “a man might pass a life without
encountering a single rudeness.” He liked their polished manners and gay
disposition, their aptitude for science, for philosophy, and for art; even
their wines and cookery suited his taste, and his preference in this
respect was so well known that Patrick Henry once humorously stigmatized
him as “a man who had abjured his native victuals.”
Jefferson’s stay in Paris corresponded exactly with the “glorious” period
of the French Revolution. He was present at the Assembly of the Notables
in 1787, and he witnessed the destruction of the Bastille in 1789.
“The change in this country,” he wrote in March, 1789, “is such as you can
form no idea of. The frivolities of conversation have given way entirely
to politics. Men, women, and children talk nothing else ... and mode has
acted a wonderful part in the present instance. All the handsome young
women, for example, are for the _tiers étât_, and this is an army more
powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the king.”
The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France
the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the
government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of
liberty, a feeling of fraternity, a passion for equality moved the
intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers
looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path
upon which France was entering. “Our proceedings,” wrote Jefferson to
Madison in 1789, “have been viewed as a model for them on every
occasion.... Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open
to explanation, but not to question.”
Jefferson’s advice was continually sought by Lafayette and others; and his
house, maintained in the easy, liberal style of Virginia, was a meeting
place for the Revolutionary statesmen. Jefferson dined at three or four
o’clock; and after the cloth had been removed he and his guests sat over
their wine till nine or ten in the evening.
In July, 1789, the National Assembly appointed a committee to draught a
constitution, and the committee formally invited the American minister to
assist at their sessions and favor them with his advice. This function he
felt obliged to decline, as being inconsistent with his post of minister
to the king. No man had a nicer sense of propriety than Jefferson; and he
punctiliously observed the requirements of his somewhat difficult
situation in Paris.
What gave Mr. Jefferson the greatest anxiety and trouble, was our
relations with the piratical Barbary powers who held the keys of the
Mediterranean and sometimes extended their depredations even into the
Atlantic. It was a question of paying tribute or going to war; and most of
the European powers paid tribute. In 1784, for example, the Dutch
contributed to “the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble, King, Prince,
and Emperor of Morocco,” a mass of material which included thirty cables,
seventy cannon, sixty-nine masts, twenty-one anchors, fifty dozen
sail-needles, twenty-four tons of pitch, two hundred and eighty loaves of
sugar, twenty-four China punch-bowls, three clocks, and one “very large
watch.”
Jefferson ascertained that the pirates would require of the United States,
as the price of immunity for its commerce, a tribute of about three
hundred thousand dollars per annum. “Surely,” he wrote home, “our people
will not give this. Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty?
If they refuse, why not go to war with them?” And he pressed upon Mr. Jay,
who held the secretaryship of foreign affairs, as the office was then
called, the immediate establishment of a navy. But Congress would do
nothing; and it was not till Jefferson himself became President that the
Barbary pirates were dealt with in a wholesome and stringent manner.
During the whole term of his residence at Paris he was negotiating with
the Mediterranean powers for the release of unfortunate Americans, many of
whom spent the best part of their lives in horrible captivity.
Mr. Jefferson’s self-imposed duties were no less arduous. He kept four
colleges informed of the most valuable new inventions, discoveries, and
books. He had a Yankee talent for mechanical improvements, and he was
always on the alert to obtain anything of this nature which he thought
might be useful at home. Jefferson himself, by the way, invented the
revolving armchair, the buggy-top, and a mould board for a plough. He
bought books for Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Wythe, and himself. He
informed one correspondent about Watt’s engine, another about the new
system of canals. He smuggled rice from Turin in his coat pockets; and he
was continually dispatching to agricultural societies in America seeds,
roots, nuts, and plants. Houdin was sent over by him to make the statue of
Washington; and he forwarded designs for the new capitol at Richmond. For
Buffon he procured the skin of an American panther, and also the bones and
hide of a New Hampshire moose, to obtain which Governor Sullivan of that
State organized a hunting-party in the depth of winter and cut a road
through the forest for twenty miles in order to bring out his quarry.
Jefferson was the most indefatigable of men, and he did not relax in
Paris. He had rooms at a Carthusian monastery to which he repaired when he
had some special work on hand. He kept a carriage and horses, but could
not afford a saddle horse. Instead of riding, he took a walk every
afternoon, usually of six or seven miles, occasionally twice as long. It
was while returning with a friend from one of these excursions that he
fell and fractured his right wrist; and the fracture was set so
imperfectly that it troubled him ever afterward. It was characteristic of
Jefferson that he said nothing to his friend as to the injury until they
reached home, though his suffering from it was great; and, also, that he
at once began to write with the other hand, making numerous entries, on
the very night of the accident, in a writing which, though stiff, was, and
remains, perfectly clear.
Mr. Jefferson’s two daughters had been placed at a convent school near
Paris, and he was surprised one day to receive a note from Martha, the
elder, asking his permission to remain in the convent for the rest of her
life as a nun. For a day or two she received no answer. Then her father
called in his carriage, and after a short interview with the abbess took
his daughters away; and thenceforth Martha presided, so far as her age
permitted, over her father’s household. Not a word upon the subject of her
request ever passed between them; and long afterward, in telling the story
to her own children, she praised Mr. Jefferson’s tact in dealing with what
she described as a transient impulse.
After this incident, Jefferson, thinking that it was time to take his
daughters home, obtained leave of absence for six months; and the little
family landed at Norfolk, November 18, 1789. They journeyed slowly
homeward, stopping at one friend’s house after another, and, two days
before Christmas, arrived at Monticello, where they were rapturously
greeted by the slaves, who took the four horses from the carriage and drew
it up the steep incline themselves; and when he alighted, Mr. Jefferson,
in spite of himself, was carried into the house on the arms of his black
servants and friends.
VIII
SECRETARY OF STATE
Mr. Jefferson had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to
France, but he yielded to Washington’s earnest request that he should
become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough
at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas
Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one
days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in
March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately
attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months.
The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly
revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on
what seems to have been a neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks.
It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which
Mr. Jefferson observed: “Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can
learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter
days interspersed.” But there were other causes beside homesickness and
headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward
he described them as follows:—
“I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of
natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to
those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited
by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues
and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The
courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them,
placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the
wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me.
Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican
government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not
be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only
advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests
there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative
houses.”
It must be remembered that Jefferson’s absence in France had been the
period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its
laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the
need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men’s minds.
The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was
elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed
in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be
given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question,
and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by
Jefferson on the other, which ended with the election of Jefferson as
President in the year 1800.
Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.(2)
John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of
corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted
that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best
practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not
for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton’s notion
was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed
in one or two ways,—by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the
ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of “a
thousand Spanish dollars” as the proper qualification for a voter.
The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises
chiefly from a different belief as to the connection between education and
morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded
either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and
morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class
is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this
assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with
him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows:—
“The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or
arm.... It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of
the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance
of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less
one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and
a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the
latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”
This is sound philosophy. The great problems in government, whether they
relate to matters external or internal, are moral, not intellectual. There
are, indeed, purely intellectual problems, such as the question between
free silver and a gold standard; and as to these problems, the people may
go wrong. But they are not vital. No nation ever yet achieved glory or
incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter
of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and
experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As
Jefferson himself said, “The will of the majority, the natural law of
every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps
even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and
short-lived.”
Washington’s cabinet was made up on the theory that it should represent
not the party in power, but both parties,—for two parties already existed,
the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, who, under Jefferson’s
influence, soon became known by the better name of Republicans. The
cabinet consisted of four members, Jefferson, Secretary of State,
Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and
Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General.
Knox sided almost always with Hamilton, and Randolph was an inconstant
supporter of Jefferson. Though an able and learned man, he was given to
hair-splitting and hesitation, and, in allusion to his habit of arguing on
one side, but finally voting upon the other, Jefferson once remarked that
he usually gave the shell to his friends, and reserved the oyster for his
opponents.
The political opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton were so diametrically
opposed that the cabinet was soon torn by dissension. Hamilton was for a
strong government, for surrounding the President with pomp and etiquette,
for a central authority as against the authority of the States. In
pursuance of these ideas, he brought forward his famous measures for
assumption of the state debts by the national government, for the funding
of the national debt, and finally for the creation of a national bank.
Jefferson opposed these measures, and, although the assumption and the
funding laws had grave faults, and led to speculation, and in the case of
many persons to financial ruin, yet it must be admitted that Jefferson
never appreciated their merits.
The truth is that both Hamilton and Jefferson were essential to the
development of this country; and the principles of each have been adopted
in part, and rejected in part. Hamilton’s conception of a central
government predominating over the state governments has been realized,
though not nearly to the extent to which he would have carried it. On the
other hand, his various schemes for making the government into an
aristocracy instead of a democracy have all been abandoned, or, like the
Electoral College, turned to a use the opposite of what he intended. So,
Jefferson’s view of state rights has not strictly been maintained; but his
fundamental principles of popular government and popular education have
made the United States what it is, and are destined, we hope, when fully
developed, to make it something better yet.
No less an authority than that of Washington, who appreciated the merits
of both men, could have kept the peace between them. Hamilton under an
assumed name attacked Jefferson in the public prints. Jefferson never
published a line unsigned; but he permitted Philip Freneau, who had slight
employment as a translator in his department, and the trifling salary of
$250 a year, to wage war against Hamilton in the gazette which Freneau
published; and he even stood by while Freneau attacked Washington.
Washington indeed once gave Jefferson a hint on this subject, which the
latter refused to take. “He was evidently sore and warm,” wrote Jefferson,
“and I took his intention to be that I should interfere in some way with
Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my
office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our constitution, which
was galloping fast into monarchy.... And the President has not, ... with
his usual good sense and _sang froid_, ... seen that, though some bad
things had passed through it to the public, yet the good have predominated
immensely.”
In the spring of 1792, Jefferson, who had now been two years in office,
was extremely anxious to retire, not only because his situation at
Washington was unpleasant, but because his affairs at home had been so
neglected during his long absences that he was in danger of bankruptcy.
His estate was large, but it was incumbered by a debt to English creditors
of $13,000. Some years before he had sold for cash a farm near Monticello
in order to discharge this debt; but at that time the Revolutionary war
had begun, and the Virginia legislature passed an act inviting all men
owing money to English creditors to deposit the same in the state
treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the English creditors after
the war. Jefferson accordingly deposited the $13,000 in gold which he had
just received. Later, however, this law was rescinded, and the money
received under it was paid back, not in gold, but in paper money of the
State, which was then so depreciated as to be almost worthless. In riding
by the farm thus disposed of, Jefferson in after years would sometimes
point to it and say: “That farm I once sold for an overcoat;”—the price of
the overcoat having been the $13,000 in paper money. Cornwallis, as we
have seen, destroyed Jefferson’s property to an amount more than double
this debt, which might be considered as a second payment of it; but
Jefferson finally paid it the third time,—and this time into the hands of
the actual creditor. Meanwhile, he wrote: “The torment of mind I endure
till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is
such really as to render life of little value.”
Urged by all these motives, Jefferson had resolved to resign his office in
1792, notwithstanding the remonstrances of Washington; but the attacks
made upon him by the Federalists, especially those made in the newspapers,
were so violent that a retirement at that time would have given the public
cause to believe that he had been driven from office by his enemies.
Jefferson, therefore, concluded to remain Secretary of State a few months
longer; and those few, as it happened, were the most important of the
whole term.
On January 21, 1793, King Louis of France was executed, and within a week
thereafter England was at war with the new rulers of the French. Difficult
questions at once arose under our treaties with France. The French people
thought that we were in honor bound to assist them in their struggle
against Great Britain, as they had assisted us; and they sent over as
minister “Citizen” Genet, in the frigate L’Embuscade. The frigate,
carrying forty guns and three hundred men, sailed into the harbor of
Charleston, April 8, 1793, with a liberty-cap for her figure-head, and a
British prize in her wake. Citizen Genet, even for a Frenchman, was a most
indiscreet and hot-headed person, and before he had been a week on shore
he had issued commissions to privateers manned by American citizens.
L’Embuscade then proceeded to Philadelphia, where, as in Charleston,
Citizen Genet was welcomed with the utmost enthusiasm. His coming was
hailed by the Republicans generally with rapture; and their cry was for
war. “I wish,” wrote Jefferson, in a confidential letter to Monroe, “that
we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair
neutrality.”
This was the position taken also by Washington and the whole cabinet; and
it is a striking example of Jefferson’s wisdom, justice, and firmness,
that, although the bulk of the Republicans were carried off their feet by
sympathy with France and with Genet, he, the very person in the United
States who most loved the French and best understood the causes and
motives of the French Revolution, withstood the storm, and kept his eye
fixed upon the interests of his own country. England, contrary to the
treaty which closed the Revolutionary War, still retained her military
posts in the west; and she was the undisputed mistress of the sea. War
with her would therefore have been suicidal for the United States. The
time for that had not yet come. Moreover, if the United States had taken
sides with France, a war with Spain also would inevitably have followed;
and Spain then held Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi.
Nevertheless, there were different ways of preserving neutrality: there
were the offensive way and the friendly way. Hamilton, whose extreme bias
toward England made him bitter against France, was always for the one;
Jefferson for the other. A single example will suffice as an illustration.
M. Genet asked as a favor that the United States should advance an
installment of its debt to France. Hamilton advised that the request be
refused without a word of explanation. Jefferson’s opinion was that the
request should be granted, if that were lawful, and if it were found to be
unlawful, them that the refusal should be explained. Mr. Jefferson’s
advice was followed.
Mr. Jefferson, also, though he firmly withstood the many illegal and
unwarrantable acts attempted by Genet, did so in such a manner as not to
lose the friendship of the minister or even a degree of control over him.
To Madison Jefferson wrote of Genet: “He renders my position immensely
difficult. He does me justice personally; and giving him time to vent
himself and become more cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely, and
he respects it; but he will break out again on the very first occasion.”
Finally Citizen Genet, becoming desperate, fitted out one of L’Embuscade’s
prizes as a frigate to be used against England, which amounted on the part
of the United States to a breach of neutrality; and being hindered in
sending her to sea, he threatened to appeal from the President to the
people of the United States. Thereupon the question arose, what shall be
done with Genet? and upon this question the cabinet divided with more than
usual acrimony. Knox was for sending him out of the country without
ceremony; Hamilton for publishing the whole correspondence between him and
the government, with a statement of his proceedings. Jefferson was for
sending an account of the affair to the French government, with copies of
the correspondence, and a request for Genet’s recall. Meanwhile the whole
country was thrown into a state of tumultuous excitement. There was a riot
in Philadelphia; and even the sacred character of Washington was assailed
in prose and verse.
The President decided to adopt the course proposed by Jefferson; France
appointed another minister, and the Genet episode ended by his marriage to
a daughter of George Clinton, governor of New York, in which State he
lived thereafter as a respectable citizen and a patron of agriculture. He
died in the year 1834.
The summer of delirium at Philadelphia culminated in the panic and
desolation of the yellow fever, and every member of the government fled
from the city, Jefferson being the last to depart.
When, in the next year, the correspondence between Genet and Jefferson,
and between the English minister and Jefferson, was published, the
Secretary was seen to have conducted it on his part with so much ability,
discretion, and tact, and with so true a sense of what was due to each
nation concerned, that he may be said to have retired to his farm in a
blaze of glory.
IX
THE TWO PARTIES