FIFTEEN
The states will go to war with each other in defiance of Congress; one will call in France to her assistance; another Great Britain, and so we shall have all the wars of Europe brought to our own doors.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, on his fears about a weak national government
HE WAS NEARLY FORTY years old, and, until recently, he had never really failed at anything. A favored son, a brilliant student, a legislator of his state at age twenty-five, author of the Summary View at thirty-one and of the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three, governor of Virginia at thirty-six: Thomas Jefferson was accustomed to public success and popular praise, to moving from strength to strength and from glory to glory.
No more. His beloved wife had died. His administration of Virginia in the face of the attacks of Benedict Arnold and Charles Cornwallis was widely seen as little less than disastrous. The details did not much matter. The fact was that people thought Jefferson’s leadership had been found wanting. It was a fact Jefferson hated, but it was a fact nonetheless.
Like the poet Dante, who found himself “in a dark wood wandering” at about the same age, Jefferson was forced to make his peace with the bitterness of his recent experience. He had to come to terms with the reality that he was no longer an immaculately golden public figure. Unless he convinced himself that no great life was without its mishaps and its mistakes, he would not be able to return to the arena.
Musing on the perils of fame as he prepared to put himself before the world again, he wrote George Rogers Clark, who had won celebrated victories during the war and faced criticism: “That you have enemies you must not doubt, when you reflect that you have made yourself eminent.”
It is impossible to read these lines without thinking of how they applied to their author as they did to his correspondent. “If you meant to escape malice you should have confined yourself within the sleepy line of regular duty,” Jefferson wrote Clark. “When you transgressed this and enterprised deeds which will hand down your name with honor to future times, you made yourself a mark for malice and envy to shoot at. Of these there is enough both in and out of office.”
Anguish was the price a public man paid for adulation. Since his governorship, Jefferson understood that in a way he never had before. He also knew that pressing ahead was the only way to leave the past behind. There was no other way to do it, unless one chose to retire forever, which could make things worse. Given that adversity itself was an intrinsic element of the political life Jefferson had chosen, the test of such a life came when one had to choose which path to take in adversity’s wake.
The personal and political miseries of 1781 and 1782—the invasions by the British, the aspersions on his character, and the death of his wife—might well have sent lesser men back to their plantations in bitterness and in anger at the injustice of it all.
Not Jefferson. He chose advance over retreat.
When news of Patty Jefferson’s death reached Philadelphia, Jefferson’s allies in the Congress asked him to serve on the Paris peace commission in France tasked with crafting the postwar order.
Jefferson accepted with alacrity. “I had two months before that lost the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I had lived the last ten years in unchequered happiness,” Jefferson recalled. “With the public interests, the state of my mind concurred in recommending the change of scene proposed.”
Tuesday, November 26, 1782, proved something of a turning point in Jefferson’s life. Visiting Ampthill, the plantation on the James River near Falling Creek that belonged to Archibald Cary, a revolutionary colleague, Jefferson was overseeing family inoculations for smallpox when he fully reengaged with his correspondence, and with the world beyond the one delineated by his grief of the previous three months.
In a draft message accepting his appointment as an envoy to France, Jefferson said that he intended to “pursue the object of my mission with integrity and impartial regard to the good of the whole states.” His emphasis on his broader vision and global portfolio served, he may have hoped, to turn the page on the last unhappy chapter in his political career. He was, in any event, eager to get started. “I shall lose no moment,” Jefferson said, “in preparing for my departure.”
In a letter to the Marquis de Chastellux he returned to the grim events of that autumn. He had not replied to earlier correspondence, Jefferson said, for he was only now “a little emerging from that stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she was whose loss occasioned it.”
He left his two younger children, Polly and Lucy, with Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, his brother-in-law and sister. The eldest, Patsy, was to travel with her father to his new assignment in Paris. From Monticello on Sunday, December 15, 1782, Jefferson published a notice in The Virginia Gazetteannouncing that he had “confided the care of his affairs” to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes of Chesterfield and to his friend Nicholas Lewis of Albemarle County. Jefferson and Patsy left home four days later. He did not know when they would return.
Jefferson was eager to get away—the farther the better—but neither the British nor the weather was cooperating. He and Patsy expected to sail from Baltimore with the French minister on the frigate Romulus. The ship was frozen in a few miles below Baltimore, so Jefferson remained in Philadelphia reacquainting himself with the national political scene he had left six years before. He and his daughter took rooms at Mary House’s establishment at Fifth and Market.
Mrs. House’s boardinghouse offered charming political company (including Madison) and provided the grieving Jefferson with what he had always needed (and, since his friendship with his sister Jane, had always had): a connection with a sympathetic woman—in this case, Eliza House Trist, the daughter of his landlady. Eliza Trist came to play a sustaining role in Jefferson’s life as a longtime admiring friend.
At Mrs. House’s lodgings, Jefferson played a supporting role in the domestic drama of the thirty-two-year-old Madison’s wooing of fifteen-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Floyd. The beautiful daughter of the New York congressman William Floyd, Kitty won the solemn Madison’s heart. Jefferson joined what he called the household’s “raillery” as it charted the romance.
In addition to spending time among colleagues old and new, Jefferson took detailed notes on a “Secret Journal of Foreign Affairs” kept by Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress. Jefferson studied the diplomatic correspondence between the Congress and Benjamin Franklin in France, John Jay in Spain, and John Adams in Holland. He reviewed instructions to commissioners to foreign states and the appointments of envoys to Vienna, Russia, Prussia, and Tuscany. He read Madison’s paper Observations Relating to the Influence of Vermont and the Territorial Claims on the Politics of Congress and considered documents related to Spanish-American disputes over the lands east of the Mississippi.
Attuned to how others saw the world—and understanding that most of them saw it with themselves at the center—Jefferson reached out to his future colleague John Jay, then an American diplomat in Europe: “Had I joined you at a more early period I am sure I should not have added to the strength of the commission and, coming in at the eleventh hour, I can propose no more than to avoid doing mischief.” It was a disarming note, designed to allay any jealousies or annoyances at the late arrival of a new diplomat. Jefferson was taking care to cultivate those around him.
And those above him, too: He wrote George Washington an ingratiating letter. Washington’s preeminence in the life of the nation was clear. In war Jefferson had maintained the most cordial of relations with him. At the possible approach of peace, he wanted to make himself pleasant to Washington, and perhaps useful. He offered Washington “my individual tribute to your Excellency for all you have suffered and all you have effected for us.”
Then came news that concluded Jefferson’s mission before it had begun: Jay and the incumbent American representatives in France had completed a draft of the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain, the document officially ending the Revolutionary War. The text of the pact was en route to the United States, where the Congress would have to ratify it.
Jefferson returned to Virginia, a reluctant private citizen once more, yet made his ambitions clear to James Madison. He wanted to be in the action again. “Should the call be made on me, which was sometimes the subject of our conversation,” Jefferson wrote, he would enthusiastically return to the national stage.
It did not take long. On Friday, June 6, 1783, Jefferson was elected to the Congress. Edmund Randolph’s report of the news to Madison was succinct: “Mr. Jefferson was placed at the head of the delegation not without his approbation.”
Jefferson had been without a public position for less than a month.
The Congress to which Jefferson was elected was the only institution of national government. Created by the Articles of Confederation, it was an inherently weak body. There was neither a separate executive nor a judicial branch—only the Congress. A state could not be represented without two members. A majority of nine of the thirteen states had to agree on most large questions, limiting the government’s effectiveness. Even if there were a quorum present and in agreement about major issues, the Congress had little power: It could not tax, regulate national trade, or create a military (though it was authorized to declare war). There was no means of enforcement; the states were essentially sovereign nations, which left the national government ill-equipped to create coherent foreign and commercial policies that might strengthen the young country.
The year 1783 had much in common with 1774: It was a time of twilight, an hour when the answers to great questions were unclear. In 1774 the issue was war. In 1783 it was peace—or, more precisely, whether Americans could emerge from the conflict and govern themselves as a sovereign power.
Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s 1775 proposal for an “Articles of Confederation,” Jefferson had been thinking about the practicalities of governing at the national level. He served on the committee to consider Franklin’s paper and was appointed to another panel in 1783 to devise a “visible head of the government during vacations of Congress.” The result was a Committee of the States, and Jefferson was a persistent advocate of more, rather than less, central control.
The committee failed. “This was then imputed to the temper of two or three individuals,” Jefferson recalled, “but the wise ascribed it to the nature of man.” Later in his career Jefferson was able to draw on the experience of wartime Virginia and the collapse of the mid-1780s national structure to become a disciple of a unitary (but accountable) executive. History offered no contrary examples. “Our plan best, I believe, combines wisdom and practicability, by providing a plurality of counselors, but a single arbiter for ultimate decision,” he said of the American presidency.
Contemplating the situation in the Confederation Congress of 1783, Jefferson worried about nothing less than anarchy. Now that the Revolutionary War was won, what was to keep state from turning on state, or region on region?
A power of central, national, and binding force was the only answer. The task was clear: Jefferson and his contemporaries had to lay their “shoulders to the strengthening of the band of our confederacy and averting those cruel evils to which its present weakness will expose us.”
The problems would persist for much of the 1780s. “I have long thought and become daily more convinced that the construction of our federal government is fundamentally wrong,” John Jay wrote to Jefferson in 1786. “To vest legislative, judicial and executive powers in one and the same body of men, and that too in a body daily changing its members, can never be wise.” The same year Jefferson told James Monroe, “There never will be money in the treasury till the confederacy shows its teeth. The states must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them.”
Without a powerful union, he expected the worst.
The question was not only of political science or of law but of character. The prospects for the survival of the new nation lay with the people themselves. In 1782 the issue had been framed pithily and well. “What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer.
Jefferson had been trying to answer that query for several years, albeit with a provincial, not a national, focus. In 1780, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, secretary of the French legation in America, had sent Jefferson a series of questions about Virginia. The result was Jefferson’s most sustained literary effort, a book—not published until a few years later, in Paris—entitled Notes on the State of Virginia. Organized as answers to the specific questions posed by Marbois—from “An exact description of the limits and boundaries of the state of Virginia?” to “The particular customs and manners that may happen to be received in that state?”—the work is precise but eclectic, formal yet conversational.
His pride in his native land is evident; the text is full of rhapsodic descriptions of the natural beauties of Virginia. He was also realistic about the difficulties of governing in a time of revolution. The government of his state was an unusual combination of elements. “It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies.”
What was true in Virginia, Jefferson was to find, was also true in America more broadly. The search for the point of temperate power between competing elements of life—the national government and the states, the states and the people—was far from over.
In an evening’s conversation on a rainy journey home to Orange, James Madison sounded fellow Virginian George Mason out on the questions of the day, discovering only one real example of “heterodoxy”: Mason, Madison told Jefferson, was “too little impressed with either the necessity or the proper means of preserving the confederacy.”
In two largely neglected pieces published anonymously in The Pennsylvania Journal, or, Weekly Advertiser in this period, Madison made an impassioned case for a strong national government—a case that, as Mason’s views indicated, was failing to resonate broadly.
Madison was having problems of a personal nature, too. Kitty Floyd broke off their engagement, crushing him. Concerned about his friend, Jefferson rapidly replied with warmth and empathy: “I sincerely lament the misadventure which has happened from whatever cause it may have happened.… No event has been more contrary to my expectations, and these were founded on what I thought a good knowledge of the ground. But of all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable.”
Jefferson’s words of consolation came from a good friend, one who knew sadness and who tried to take—as of old—a philosophical view of life’s disappointments. He had experienced heartbreak and desolation, and he had—painfully and arduously—kept his own emotional machinery working well enough to propel him forward despite all. He believed Madison would, too.
Jefferson, meanwhile, could never know too much. Ten days after his election to the national Congress, he asked a delegate to the Virginia General Assembly at Richmond to keep him minutely informed about state politics. “Parliamentary news is interesting and I hear little or nothing of it,” he wrote the delegate on Tuesday, June 17, 1783. “What have you done? What are you doing? What are the maneuvers of your leaders? Who are they? What the dispositions of the two houses? etc.”
Information, as ever, was power.