SIXTEEN
Foreign civil arrangement, and foreign treaties. Domestic civil arrangement. Domestic peace establishment of arsenals and posts. Western territory. Indian affairs. Money.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, listing the issues facing postwar America
THE CONGRESS WAS HOMELESS as well as largely powerless. Seated in Philadelphia, slated to move to Annapolis later in 1783, the lawmakers were driven out of Pennsylvania in the third week of June when four hundred Continental soldiers mutinied, storming the Congress to demand pay. Pennsylvania officials, who had jurisdiction over the city, refused to intercede, prompting the Congress to evacuate Philadelphia for Princeton, in New Jersey.
The national government, in other words, was on the run from its own people.
Appearances mattered much at this delicate hour. James Madison reported a strong inclination among the national lawmakers to leave Princeton and return to Philadelphia even at the risk of physical danger in order to “prevent any inferences abroad of disaffection in the mass of so important a state to the revolution or the federal Government.”
The Congress nevertheless remained at Princeton until it moved to Annapolis in November 1783. Though uncertain where the Congress would be sitting by the time his term began in the autumn, Jefferson had asked Madison to secure him a room—of any size—with Mrs. House if in Philadelphia, and he sought Mrs. Trist’s counsel on schooling for Patsy, who was to stay in that city no matter where the legislature held its sessions.
Jefferson left Monticello on Thursday, October 16, 1783. Traveling through Philadelphia, he arrived in Princeton to take his seat on November 4. It was the briefest of stays. On the evening of Jefferson’s arrival there, the Congress adjourned to Annapolis. Princeton had offered “scanty accommodations.” Madison dismissed it as a “village where the public business can neither be conveniently done, the members of Congress decently provided for, nor those connected with Congress provided for at all.”
To achieve order required authority, which the states wanted but the Congress needed. Neither a reflexive nationalist nor a states’-rights purist—categories that were already taking form—Jefferson was grappling with the distribution of power in a country of diverse interests.
His view of the role of the Confederation Congress in 1783–84 was in keeping with his thinking in the wake of his governorship. Whoever was in charge needed to be clearly and certainly in command. As “the United States in Congress assembled represent the sovereignty of the whole Union,” he wrote, “their body collectively and their President individually should on all occasions have precedence [over] all other bodies and persons.” Even if he were referring only to ceremonial occasions, the point was clear. To be effective, the Congress had to be granted pride of place.
Annapolis was quiet—too quiet, Jefferson believed, for the seat of the Congress of a victorious nation. “It is now above a fortnight since we should have met, and six states only appear,” he wrote Madison in December 1783. They needed nine to form a quorum and proceed. “We have some hopes of Rhode Island coming in today, but when two more will be added seems as insusceptible of calculation as when the next earthquake will happen.” Franklin, Adams, and Jay—the commissioners abroad—wrote that “the riot of Philadelphia and departure of Congress thence made the most serious impressions in Europe, and have excited great doubts of the stability of our confederacy, and in what we shall end,” Jefferson said.
The business at hand was momentous: The Congress had only a limited amount of time to ratify the Treaty of Paris, the pact ending the Revolutionary War and granting America recognition as an independent nation. On Saturday, December 13, 1783, Jefferson was appointed to a committee to consider the treaty.
There were ten major provisions, among them a generous grant of territory and a promise by the British to return confiscated property (including slaves). Critical, too, was article 10, concerning process: The treaty had to be ratified within six months of its signing, which had occurred in Paris on Wednesday, September 3, 1783.
Though Jefferson’s committee moved the ratification of the treaty, there was still no quorum in the Congress. No quorum, no action. Jefferson hated the feeling of powerlessness.
It was a troubling Christmas Eve. He was not feeling well, and he was worried. “I cannot help expressing my extreme anxiety at our present critical situation,” Jefferson wrote a Virginia correspondent on Wednesday, December 24, 1783. There was now only “a little over two months” to ratify the treaty and return it to Paris. “All that can be said is that it is yet possible,” Jefferson wrote, hoping for action before Britain attempted to force new changes should the ratification not come in time.
On New Year’s Day 1784 Jefferson was gloomy and sick. “I have had very ill health since I have been here and am getting rather lower than otherwise,” he told Madison.
If the Congress did not act quickly, the United States would humiliate itself abroad by failing to ratify and deliver the treaty in time. If it acted without the nine states, though, the national government risked the appearance of usurpation.
Jefferson sought a compromise, some means of preserving—establishing, actually—the nation’s international reputation without exposing the Congress to charges of overreaching. With lawyerly precision, Jefferson drafted a motion that took advantage of an earlier vote and extended its authority to the finished treaty. The means of saving the day were secured. (In the end, Connecticut and New Jersey at length arrived, and the treaty was ratified by nine states.)
For the moment, the system had succeeded in ratifying the treaty that, in turn, ratified the Revolution. Jefferson drafted a proclamation to announce the news. In it he called on “all the good citizens of these states” to draw on “that good faith which is every man’s surest guide” to respect, and to fulfill the articles of peace “entered into on their behalf under the authority of that federal bond by which their existence as an independent people is bound up together, and is known and acknowledged by the nations of the world.”
There was much work to be done. Jefferson thought “that were it certain we could be brought to act as one united nation” on trade policy, then Britain “would make extensive concessions.” As it was, however, “she is not afraid of retaliation.”
Still, the resolution of months of tension and uncertainty lifted Jefferson’s spirits and may have improved his health. “I have been just able to attend my duty in the state house, but not to go out on any other occasion,” he told Patsy. The day after ratification, however, he said he was “considerably better.” The author of the Declaration of Independence had declared the peace, affirming anew the national—not sectional—identity of the country.
With its attention to the occupation of forts, the treaty raised issues about the future of the American West, a longtime interest of Jefferson’s. His was an obsession romantic, scientific, and practical. He loved the image of endless forests—in this vision he was like a Saxon of old, dwelling in primordial liberty—and he was fascinated by what he called “the different species of bones, teeth, and tusks of the Mammoth” and other natural specimens. The French naturalist the Comte de Buffon, who argued that animal and plant life in the New World was inferior, was always on Jefferson’s mind. In Philadelphia in 1784 Jefferson would buy an “uncommonly large panther skin” to show Buffon.
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.