THIRTY-TWO
You always had the people and now have the government on your side, so that the prospect is as favorable as could be wished. At the same time it must be admitted you have much trouble and difficulty to encounter.
—JAMES MONROE
I know indeed there are monarchists among us.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
IT WAS NOT the warmest of exchanges. To make arrangements for the inaugural, Jefferson had to write to his cousin John Marshall—the Federalist whom John Adams had named chief justice and who only days before had been a possible rival of Jefferson’s for the presidency. “As the two houses have notice of the hour, I presume a precise punctuality to it will be expected from me,” Jefferson wrote. Marshall replied that he would “make a point of being punctual.”
Both men were on time. As noon approached on Wednesday, March 4, 1801, President-elect Thomas Jefferson prepared to make the short walk from Conrad and McMunn’s to the Capitol. John Adams was not present. The second president had made plans to leave Washington on the four a.m. stage, heading north toward home (he went through New York, it was said, “like a shot”). “Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor,” wrote the Massachusetts Spy. “It certainly would have had good effect.” Yet Adams was still grieving over the death, in December 1800, of his son Charles, and, with Abigail awaiting him at home in Massachusetts, he was more than ready to leave the capital. Though he was to live another quarter of a century, Adams never returned to Washington.
On Capitol Hill cannon fire had sounded outside the boardinghouse; it was a salute from the District of Columbia’s artillery corps. At one point in the morning hours Samuel Harrison Smith called on Jefferson to pick up a package: a copy of the inaugural address, written in Jefferson’s small, neat hand, to be set in type and published in the National Intelligencer.
At ten o’clock, a company of riflemen from Alexandria, Virginia, had arrived to form a small parade. Shortly before noon, Jefferson stepped outside to meet a detachment of militia officers that escorted him to the inaugural ceremonies. A delegation of congressmen joined him, and the politicians followed a group of officers to the Capitol. Their swords drawn, the militiamen parted to allow Jefferson through, and stood, saluting, as he passed by. After another blast of cannon rang out, echoing across the hilltop village, Jefferson went inside the Capitol building.
About a thousand people awaited him in the Senate chamber, a room one lawmaker described in a letter home to his wife as “magnificent in height, and decorated in a grand style.” The room was 86 by 48 feet, the ceiling 41 feet high. Each senator had a desk and a red leather chair. Margaret Bayard Smith wrote that it was “so crowded that I believe not another creature could enter.” Members of the House and the Senate rose in deference to Jefferson as he made his way to the well of the room.
After Marshall administered the oath of office, Thomas Jefferson delivered his inaugural address. In his weak voice—few in the crowded room could hear him distinctly—he read one of the most significant state papers in American history, a brief for freedom and forbearance.
All … will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.… Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.…
I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.… I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts.
The address was a political masterpiece. “Today the new political year commences—The new order of things begins,” John Marshall wrote Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the moments before the inauguration, adding: “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists: With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.” Still, “If he arranges himself with them it is not difficult to foresee that much calamity is in store for our country—if he does not they will soon become his enemies and calumniators.” Returning to his letter writing at four p.m., Marshall was slightly cheerier. “You will before this reaches you see his inauguration speech,” Marshall wrote. “It is in the general well judged and conciliatory.”
James Bayard thought it “in political substance better than we expected; and not answerable to the expectations of the partisans of the other side.” Hamilton admitted that it was “virtually a candid retraction of past misapprehensions, and a pledge to the community, that the new president will not lend himself to dangerous innovations, but in essential points will tread in the steps of his predecessors.” To Benjamin Rush, the physician and Jefferson admirer, it was an occasion for thanksgiving. “Old friends who had been separated by party names, and a supposed difference of principlein politics for many years, shook hands with each other, immediately after reading it, and discovered, for the first time, that they had differed in opinion only, about the best means of promoting the interests of their common country.”
In his political bitterness and personal grief, John Adams wrote Jefferson from Quincy, Massachusetts, about his dead son. “It is not possible that anything of the kind should happen to you, and I sincerely wish you may never experience any thing in any degree resembling it.” Then Adams added a gracious political note: “This part of the Union is in a state of perfect tranquility and I see nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.”
Jefferson’s was to be no caretaker presidency. He was a man of action and of strength, and he was eager to wield the power he had long sought. “We reflect … that it is according to nature for the strongest to bear the burden,” Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., wrote to Jefferson, “and we know well that your mind does from nature exult in grand scenes, in ample fields for exertion, in extraordinary toils.”
Jefferson’s ambition for the nation was limitless. He was to spend his presidential years, he said, “pursuing steadily my object of proving that a people, easy in their circumstances as ours are, are capable of conducting themselves under a government founded not in the fears and follies of man, but on his reason.… This is the object now nearest to my heart.”
Jefferson privately acknowledged the burdens he faced. “I feel a great load of public favor and of public expectation,” he wrote the day after the inauguration. “More confidence is placed in me than my qualifications merit, and I dread the disappointment of my friends.”
Whether seeking the approval of his father, his mother, his teachers, his contemporaries, or his countrymen, Jefferson had moved through life at once exhilarated and exhausted by the role of patriarch. Raised to be responsible for the lives and welfare of others, he knew nothing else. He had thought much about human nature and human government, and he believed it his duty to bring what in his inaugural he had called “harmony and affection” to the life of the American nation.
From war making to economic life to territorial acquisition to federal spending to subpoenas and the sharing of information with Congress and the courts, Jefferson maintained or expanded the authority of the presidential office. He was fortunate to preside over Republican congressional majorities; the Senate margin grew from a narrow 17 Republicans to 15 Federalists in 1801–1803 to 28–6 by Jefferson’s last year in office. The Republican rhetoric of limited and minimal government was heartfelt but hardly controlling. Jefferson had reached the pinnacle by articulating the ideal but acting pragmatically. He could have resigned the vice presidency to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts, for instance; he had, instead, preserved his position in the existing political order, awaiting the hour when he might ascend to the summit. As president he fully intended to rule in the way he had risen.
The story of his two terms in the President’s House is one of a lifelong student of control and power bringing all of his virtues and vices to the largest possible stage. Federalists who expected him to begin the world over again by seeking to simplify and minimize the executive office misjudged him.
Critics of Jefferson have argued that his vision of an agrarian nation with a weak central government puts him on the wrong side of history. It was Hamilton, they say, who correctly anticipated a future that would require a system of capital and large-scale action to create the means of national greatness.
This critique of Jefferson, while familiar, is incomplete. Jefferson sent a reassuring signal to the manufacturing and financial interests who had learned to fear him as a champion of the agrarian over the commercial. “One imputation in particular has been repeated till it seems as if some at least believed it: that I am an enemy to commerce,” Jefferson wrote a correspondent on Wednesday, February 18, 1801. “They admit me a friend to agriculture, and suppose me an enemy to the only means of disposing of its produce.”
The presidency Jefferson left in 1809 was rich in precedent for vigorous, decisive, and often unilateral action. It is not too much to say that Jefferson used Hamiltonian means to pursue Jeffersonian ends. He embraced ultimate power subtly but surely.
Open political warfare was not for him; he preferred to impress himself on the course of events without bombast or drama, leading so quietly that popular history tends to make too little of his achievements as president.
He understood the country was open to—even eager for—a government that seemed less intrusive and overbearing than the one Washington and Adams had created. In his eight years in office Jefferson cut the national debt from $83 million to $57 million. He cut taxes and spending, reducing military expenditures that had risen through the 1790s.
For Jefferson, there were too many taxes and too many judges. He had long cared about two things: American liberty and American strength. For eight years he summoned all the power he believed he required to make America more like what he thought it should be. In the partisan wars of the 1790s, many of his foes had misinterpreted his disposition toward individual freedom rather than toward Hamiltonian authority as dreaminess and weakness. They would learn—quickly and unmistakably—that they were wrong.
The outward reformation of Federalist America began on the morning of the inauguration, when Jefferson declined to wear a ceremonial sword to the swearing-in, breaking tradition with Washington and Adams. After the solemnities, Jefferson took his dinner as usual at Conrad and McMunn’s. He soon sold President Adams’s coaches and silver harnesses, another symbolic strike against Federalist trappings.
The Adamses had moved into the President’s House on the first day of November 1800. Abigail Adams hung laundry in the East Room, which Mrs. Adams had called the “great unfinished audience-room.” Jefferson now installed his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, there. For his own office the president took a room in the southwest corner of the first floor looking out toward the Potomac. There was a table with drawers for Jefferson’s tools and knickknacks; he kept geraniums in the window and mockingbirds at hand.
He liked quiet but could not stand silence. He was usually humming or singing softly to himself, and from the early 1770s forward Jefferson kept pet mockingbirds. He cherished the birds for their music, and in hours of contemplative leisure he sometimes opened their cage to allow them to flit about his private suite at Monticello or his President’s House office.
Jefferson bought his first bird from a slave of his father-in-law John Wayles in Charles City County in November 1772. It took another twenty years for mockingbirds to reach Monticello naturally. “Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs,” Jefferson wrote home, when he learned of the mockingbirds’ arrival on the mountaintop.
As president, Jefferson kept a bird he named Dick, hanging its cage in the window in his office amid geraniums and roses. According to Margaret Bayard Smith, Dick “was the constant companion of his solitary and studious hours,” sometimes settling on Jefferson’s shoulder or accepting “food from his lips. Often when he retired to his chamber it would hop up the stairs after him and while he took his siesta, would sit on his couch and pour forth its melodious strains.”
As Jefferson took over the presidential mansion, he ordered the demolition of an existing wooden privy on the lawn and had the parts for “water closets … of superior construction” sent from Philadelphia. Accustomed to mastery at Monticello, Jefferson sought to establish the same dynamic at the President’s House. He decided which pieces of furniture should stay and which should go. The room Adams had used for levees (the modern State Dining Room) was the one he had chosen for his working office, and an oval room on the first floor (the modern Blue Room) was made into a drawing room. He ordered the hanging of household bells in the mansion so that he could summon servants at will—a convenience contemplated by the Adamses but completed by Jefferson in his first months. His chief domestic, Rapin, kept Jefferson informed about the progress of renovations and construction. (Etienne Lemaire soon became Jefferson’s majordomo in Washington.)
The members of his cabinet represented the major regions of the country. James Madison of Virginia was appointed secretary of state; Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania accepted the Treasury Department; Henry Dearborn from Massachusetts became secretary of war; Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts was to be attorney general; Robert Smith of Maryland became secretary of the navy.
The appointment of Gallatin was one of the shrewdest. Born in Geneva in 1761, Gallatin came to the United States in 1780, served in the Revolution, taught French at Harvard, mastered finance, and held a variety of elective posts (including, briefly, the Senate seat from which he was ejected in 1794 for failing to meet the citizenship requirement). He was a key Republican leader in the House of Representatives during the tumultuous years of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Quasi-War with France from 1798 to 1800. Gallatin and his second wife, Hannah, got along well with Jefferson, who trusted Gallatin’s financial and political counsel. He would serve as secretary of the Treasury from 1801 until 1814.
Listing the Republican gains in Congress and in the states, the French diplomat Louis-André Pichon told Paris that Jefferson stood at a remarkable pinnacle. The fall of the Federalists from their seeming invincibility during the fever of the Quasi-War was striking—“one cannot help,” Pichon said, “but be astonished by its rapidity.” Even New England was not immune to the rise of the Republicans. “Henceforth, we can predict that Mr. Jefferson will have only a weak opposition,” Pichon wrote, noting that the expansion of western populations would only add to Jefferson’s power since such people would be “invariably opposed to the cities on the coast.”
In Jefferson’s enthusiasm, the new president fell back on his favored nautical imagery. “The storm through which we have passed has been tremendous indeed,” Jefferson wrote John Dickinson two days after the inauguration. “The tough sides of our Argosy have been thoroughly tried. Her strength has stood the waves into which she was steered with a view to sink her. We shall put her on her republican tack, and she will now show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.”
To the English scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley he allowed his historical imagination to take flight. “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new.”
Such was the idealistic Jefferson. But he was also realistic. “I am sensible how far I should fall short of effecting all the reformation which reason would suggest and experience approve, were I free to do whatever I thought best,” he wrote. “But when we reflect how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society, how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right, we see the wisdom of Solon’s remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear, and that will be chiefly to reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it, and improve some little on old routines.”
Even more bluntly and vividly, Jefferson referred to the Federalists as madmen: “Their leaders are a hospital of incurables, and as such entitled to be protected and taken care of as other insane persons are.” Still, there was hope—for to Jefferson, where there was freedom there was always hope. “The times have been awful,” he said, “but they have proved a useful truth that the good citizen must never despair of the commonwealth.”
Priestley hoped, too, that “Politics will not make you forget what is due to science.” Jefferson, in fact, saw them as connected. A politics of personal liberty created a sense of free inquiry. A man liberated from monarchical or hereditary limitations stood a greater chance of possessing a mind free to roam and to grow and to create and to innovate in a climate in which citizens lived together in essential harmony and affection. This was Jefferson’s ideal republic—and he was committed to making it real.
He did not lack for advice on how to govern in the wake of the narrow decision in the House. “Many friends may grow cool from disappointment,” wrote James Monroe, “the violent who have their passions too much excited will experience mortification in not finding them fully gratified: in addition .… the discomfited Tory party, profiting of past divisions and follies which have contributed much to overwhelm them, will reunite their scattered force against us… It will intrigue with foreign powers and therefore ought to be watched.” Tench Coxe issued a warning: “The dangers to our form of government, at home and abroad, yet exist,” he wrote Jefferson.
According to Virginia’s William Branch Giles, “The ejected party is now almost universally considered as having been employed in conjunction with G.B. in a scheme for the total destruction of the liberties of the people.”
On any given day Jefferson dealt with a range of issues and problems from his office on the first floor of the presidential mansion. Appointments to office, politics in New England, the Barbary Coast, agricultural policy, the West Indies, French and English diplomacy: Paper flowed in and out of Jefferson’s hands.
Neither Patsy nor Polly came to live with him in Washington, nor is there any record that Sally Hemings ever left Albemarle County to visit the President’s House. A social creature, Jefferson nevertheless lived in relative domestic isolation in Washington. Only Meriwether Lewis kept house with him in the unfinished mansion. Jefferson said the two of them lived like “mice in a church.”
He felt lonely early in his tenure. His colleagues were slow to assemble. “I am still at a great loss,” he said as he settled in. Neither the James Madisons nor the Albert Gallatins were yet in residence in the capital. When the Gallatins arrived, they received a blanket invitation from Jefferson, who asked them to dine every day. It would, he said, be “a real favor.” But he was disappointed when the Gallatins decided to move farther away from the President’s House. “The city is rather sickly, my family has their share, and they are extremely anxious on that account to move on Capitol hill,” Gallatin wrote Jefferson in August. The Treasury secretary was quick to reassure the president that he would remain nearby: “It is substituting precisely 20 minutes ride to ten.”
Unlike many of his fellow officials and lawmakers, Jefferson liked the new capital city. “We find this a very agreeable country residence,” he wrote. “Good society, and enough of it, and free from the noise, the heat, the stench, and the bustle of a close built town.”
Building a new American future required redeeming the excesses of the Federalist past, and Jefferson issued presidential pardons for some of the printers convicted under the Sedition Act. The case of his old ally James Thomson Callender, who had been convicted, fined, and imprisoned, was the most personal for him; Callender’s pardon was dated Monday, March 16, 1801.
Callender had three children to support and wanted his $200 fine to the government refunded. It was not forthcoming, and by Sunday, April 12, 1801, Callender was “hurt” by the “disappointment” of not having his fine repaid. “I now begin to know what ingratitude is,” he said.
Jefferson wanted to keep the Republican version of reality alive in the minds of the people. On Friday, March 20, 1801, he asked Albert Gallatin to reply to a circular letter by the Federalist Robert Goodloe Harper that extolled the virtues of the Washington-Adams years. It was, Jefferson said, a “false and frivolous” account, and “the other side of the medal requires to be shown.” In a sign of good care, Jefferson did not put his name to the request.
Orchestrating Republican writings from behind the scenes was nothing new for Jefferson, and it is revealing that he turned to Gallatin now that the administration had commenced. Callender, whom Jefferson had patronized in years gone by, had been out of favor since 1800.
Why did Jefferson turn on Callender? Part of the reason may lie in a recurring feature of American politics: a successful president’s discomfort with the less respectable men and means that got him to victory. There is usually a moment in the life of a new president when he begins to see himself not as an aspirant desperate to win but as a statesman above the squalor and the sweat of actual vote getting. Rising men do not like to be reminded of the smell of the stables; dignitaries dislike recollections of the dust through which they have come. The polemicist had been useful on the journey, but there was apparently no place for his acidic attacks now that the popular votes were cast and his machinations had been put on display at trial. In Callender, in the pursuit of power, Jefferson made a devil’s bargain: He supported and consorted with a man skilled in the dark arts of partisan warfare, but he seems not to have considered that the same man might one day turn on him.
When repayment for the fine was not forthcoming, Callender told Madison, “Mr. Jefferson has not returned one shilling of my fine.… I am not a man who is either to be oppressed or plundered with impunity.” Callender decided that the fine was important, but perhaps a sinecure as postmaster of Richmond would be even better. Traveling to Washington, he met with Madison. “The money was refused with cold disdain, which is quite as provoking as direct insolence,” Callender wrote. “Little Madison … exerted a great deal of eloquence to show that it would be improper to repay the money at Washington.”
There were many factors at work. “Do you know that besides his other passions he is under the tyranny of that of love?” Madison asked Monroe. “The object of his flame is in Richmond. I did not ask her name; but presume her to be young and beautiful, in his eyes at least, and in a sphere above him. He has flattered himself into a persuasion that the emoluments and reputation of a post-office would obtain her in marriage. Of these recommendations, however, he is sent back in despair.”
Madison also briefed the president, who dispatched Meriwether Lewis to give Callender fifty dollars to tide him over until the fine could be repaid in full. Callender’s attitude toward Lewis suggested that Jefferson might well have a larger problem on his hands than he realized. “His language to Capt. Lewis was very high toned,” Jefferson wrote Monroe. “He intimated that he was in possession of things which he could and would use of a certain case: that he received the 50 D not as charity but as a due, in fact as hush money; that I knew what he expected, viz, a certain office, and more to this effect.”
Angry and hurt, Callender awaited the hour of vengeance.
In the President’s House, Jefferson craved control. In November 1801, he sent a note to his cabinet about how his government was to work—and as usual with questions of process, it was a document about power.
Jefferson wanted to be in on every detail, and he framed his approach to the public business in terms of following President Washington’s precedent. Nearly all letters of business had passed through Washington’s hands. “By this means,” Jefferson told his own cabinet, President Washington “was always in accurate possession of all facts and proceedings in every part of the Union, and to whatsoever department they related,” Jefferson said.
This was how Jefferson wanted things, too. He felt, he said, “a sense of obligation imposed on me by the public will to meet personally the duties to which they have appointed me.” And so it would be. He looked forward to intelligence of any kind, telling Gallatin that papers “conveying information of what is passing or of the state of things, are … desirable.”
He wanted to know everything. He had to know everything.