TWENTY-SIX

THE END OF A STORMY TOUR

I feel for your situation but you must bear it. Every consideration private as well as public requires a further sacrifice of your longings for the repose of Monticello.

—JAMES MADISON to Thomas Jefferson

THE PLANTATION WAS CALLED Bizarre. Home to Richard Randolph—a distant Jefferson cousin, inevitably—the estate on the Appomattox River in Cumberland County, Virginia, was the center of intense speculation and scandal in 1792–93 after a brutal and disturbing episode that tested even Jefferson’s outward equanimity.

The unmarried Ann Cary Randolph, a sister of Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (and thus Jefferson’s daughter Patsy’s sister-in-law), was apparently impregnated by her brother-in-law, Richard Randolph. Ann, called Nancy, delivered the baby (though she may have suffered a miscarriage), while on a visit to a neighboring plantation with her brother-in-law and her sister. The dead infant was taken outdoors; no corpse was ever found. The story was so mysterious and tantalizing that it rapidly spread, leading to a trial at which Richard Randolph was defended by lawyers that included John Marshall and Patrick Henry.

For Jefferson, the violence in Virginia was an occasion to think about the harmony so little in evidence in the capital. Urging Patsy to be generous of spirit with their besieged kin, he wrote: “Never throw off the best affections of nature in the moment when they become most precious to their object; nor fear to extend your hand to save another, lest you should sink yourself.” He believed in the virtues of civility, understanding that they were the most required when they were the least convenient. Jefferson faced such tests of harmony every hour in Philadelphia.

As Washington’s second inauguration approached, the national experiment still felt provisional. In a small session to discuss the ceremonies for the president’s swearing-in, Henry Knox’s anxiety led to an outburst. “In the course of our conversation Knox, stickling for parade, got into great warmth and swore that our government must either be entirely new modeled or it would be knocked to pieces in less than 10 years,” Jefferson wrote, “and that as it is at present he would not give a copper for it, that it is the President’s character, and not the written constitution, which keeps it together.”

In a letter he never sent, Robert R. Livingston of New York wrote that he hoped Jefferson would not resign amid the attacks of 1792–93. Jefferson, Livingston said, should not “suffer yourself in appearance to be drummed out of the regiment and that too when there is every reasonable ground to hope that upon the first vacancy you will be promoted to the command of the troops.” He referred, too, to Jefferson’s position in Washington’s cabinet as a “post in an enemies’ country.”

The war between Hamilton and Jefferson was unending. In September 1792, in the Gazette of the United States, Hamilton wrote: “Mr. Jefferson [is] … distinguished as the quiet, modest, retiring philosopher—as the plain, simple, unambitious republican. He shall not now for the first time be regarded as the intriguing incendiary—the aspiring turbulent competitor.”

In late 1792, Jefferson moved out of the city of Philadelphia to a house on the Schuylkill River. He was hungry for news of home. “From Monticello you have everything to write about which I have any care,” he told his family. “How do my young chestnut trees? How comes on your garden? How fare the fruit blossoms etc.”

Thoughts of Monticello were a relief from the strain of a life in which Jefferson was often out of sync with Washington, Adams, and Hamilton. A small instance: Jefferson had used the phrase “our republic” in letters drafted for Washington’s signature (as in, “your Min. plen. to our republic”).

According to Jefferson, Washington told him that “certainly ours was a republican government, but yet we had not used that style in this way: that if anybody wanted to change its form into a monarchy he was sure it was only a few individuals, and that no man in the U.S. would set his face against it more than himself: but that this was not what he was afraid of: his fears were from another quarter, that there was more danger of anarchy being introduced.”

Washington was out of sorts in any event. “Knox told some little stories to aggravate the Pr[esident],” Jefferson recalled. “To wit, that Mr. King had told him, that a lady had told him, that she had heard a gentleman say that the Pr. was as great a tyrant as any of them and that it would soon be time to chase him out of the city.”

Jefferson believed the Hamiltonians were drafting excessively critical articles about Washington in the voice of Republicans in order to alienate the president and “make him believe it was that party who were his enemies, and so throw him entirely into the scale of the monocrats.”

With Jefferson, Washington also alluded to a Freneau newspaper piece he disliked. “He was evidently sore and warm,” Jefferson wrote, “and I took his intention to be that I should interpose 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.”

Jefferson would not submit. In this battle of wills, the secretary of state, as usual, refused to give way.

The wars of the Old World were once again a subject of concern for the New in the first half of 1793. On February 1, eleven days after the execution of Louis XVI, the French Republic declared war on Britain. Washington was determined to declare the United States’ neutrality in the conflict. Jefferson disliked the draft of the proclamation, which he found Hamiltonian and pro-British.

The Neutrality Proclamation also raised some Republican questions about an overreaching executive. “It has been asked also,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “whether the authority of the Executive extended by any part of the Constitution to a declaration of the disposition of the U.S. on the subject of war and peace? … The right to decide the question … [of] war or peace … [is] vested in the Legislature.”

Was Washington acting too kingly? James Monroe thought the proclamation “unconstitutional and improper.”

The president was sensitive about the questions over neutrality, noting at a November cabinet meeting that he had used it in a draft of a document and “we had not objected to the term.” After dinner Washington remained sour. “Other questions and answers were put and answered in a quicker altercation than I ever before saw the President use,” Jefferson recalled.

Washington was tired of the strife of governing. In November 1793, the cabinet debated whether the president should propose the creation of a military academy. No, Washington decided, for “though it would be a good thing, he did not wish to bring on anything which might generate heat and ill humor.”

Both heat and ill humor were at hand in the prospect of a visit from an envoy from France, Edmond-Charles Genet. Hamilton questioned whether the Frenchman should be officially received, raising what Jefferson called “lengthy considerations of doubt and difficulty.”

Jefferson hoped an enthusiastic public reception would demonstrate broad support for France. Instead, Genet was a disaster, insulting Washington and making himself generally obnoxious. It was, however, more than a question of personality: The envoy was organizing privateers in violation of Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation. Genet was, Jefferson said, “Hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful and even indecent towards the P. in his written as well as verbal communications.… He renders my position immensely difficult.” Indeed Genet did, confiding in Jefferson about the possibility of fomenting rebellions against British and Spanish holdings—confidences Jefferson chose to keep, noting that Genet had spoken to him “not as secretary of state but as Mr. Jeff.”

At Hamilton’s urging, the cabinet decided to ask the French government to recall Genet in August 1793. Jefferson saw the result was inevitable: Hamilton had won this battle. “He will sink the republican interest if they do not abandon him,” Jefferson wrote Madison.

Madison sensed Jefferson’s dwindling patience with service in the administration but advised him to stay the course. Jefferson could not bring himself to agree with his old friend. “To my fellow-citizens the debt of service has been fully and faithfully paid,” Jefferson wrote in June 1793. After a quarter century of public service, in revolution, in war, and in a fraught, fragile peace, Jefferson was tired. “The motion of my blood,” he said, “no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.”

Then, in a cry of frustration, he cataloged the irritations he felt and the sense of futility that sometimes seized him. “Worn down with labors from morning till night, and day to day; knowing them as fruitless to others as they are vexatious to myself, committed singly in desperate and eternal contest against a host who are systematically undermining the public liberty and prosperity,” he was, he said, “giving everything I love, in exchange for everything I hate, and all this without a single gratification in possession or prospect, in present enjoyment or future wish.”

The battles seemed endless, victory elusive. James Monroe fed Jefferson’s worries, saying he was concerned that America was being “torn to pieces as we are, by a malignant monarchy faction.”

A rumor reached Jefferson that Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists Rufus King and William Smith “had secured an asylum to themselves in England” should the Jefferson faction prevail in the government. The source of the report “could not understand whether they had secured it themselves, or whether they were only notified that it was secured to them. So that they understand that they may go on boldly, in their machinations to change the government, and if they should be overset and choose to withdraw, they will be secure of a pension in England as Arnold … had.”

A sign of public dissatisfaction with the Federalist leadership in New York came with the organization and popularity of what were called Democratic-Republican societies led by the working and middle classes, with a strong immigrant presence. The groups’ rhetoric about republicanism and the threat of aristocracy enraged Washington, who lost his temper at a cabinet meeting after Henry Knox alluded to popular abuse of the president. As Jefferson recalled it, “The President was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.… Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives.… That by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet that they were charging him with wanting to be a king.”

The meeting was effectively over.

Jefferson wanted out. It was time for a tactical retreat to see whether the larger war could be won. Washington did not want Jefferson to go, and he paid a call at Jefferson’s Schuylkill house in August.

The president was unhappy. Hamilton also wanted to resign, and Washington felt he was losing control. Would Jefferson stay on until the end of the next congressional session? Jefferson declined, alluding to the “particular uneasiness of my situation in this place where the laws of society oblige me to move always exactly in the circle which I know to bear me peculiar hatred, that is to say the wealthy aristocrats, the merchants closely connected with England, [and] the new created paper fortunes.”

Washington replied that “the constitution we have is an excellent one if we can keep it where it is, that it was indeed supposed there was a party disposed to change it into a monarchial form, but that he could conscientiously declare there was not a man in the U.S. who would set his face more decidedly against it than himself.”

Jefferson told Washington that “no rational man in the U.S. suspects you of any other disposition, but there does not pass a week in which we cannot prove declarations dropping from the monarchial party that our government is good for nothing, it is a milk and water thing which cannot support itself, we must knock it down and set up something of more energy.”

When Jefferson suggested naming a temporary secretary of state who would then move to the Treasury, Washington demurred, observing that “men never chose to descend: that being once in a higher department he would not like to go into a lower one.”

Yellow fever struck Philadelphia in late summer 1793. “It has now got into most parts of the city and is considerably infectious,” Jefferson wrote. “At first 3 out of 4 died. Now about 1 out of 3. It comes on with a pain in the head, sick stomach, then a little chill, fever, black vomiting and stools, and death from the 2nd to the 8th day.” (One job seeker tried to find some personal gain in the epidemic: “Viewing with sorrow the large number of victims in all ranks and professions felled by the late distressing disease, I suppose that some vacancies have taken place amongst the persons employed in public offices. In this conception I take the liberty of addressing your Honor with the offer of my best services in that line.”)

Jefferson was unkind about Hamilton. “Hamilton is ill of the fever, it is said,” Jefferson wrote Madison. “He had two physicians out at his house the night before last. His family thinks him in danger, and he puts himself so by his excessive alarm.… A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phenomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation in military occasions were genuine.”

Jefferson was so much concerned about public opinion that he was willing to risk illness. “I would really go away, because I think there is rational danger, but … I do not like to exhibit the appearance of panic.”

On 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.

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