THIRTY-SIX
If we can keep the vessel of state as steady in her course for another four years, my earthly purposes will be accomplished.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
I think you ought to get a damn kicking, you red-headed son of a bitch. You are a pretty fellow to be President of the United States of America, you dirty scoundrel.
—ANONYMOUS
ON MOST AFTERNOONS when he was in Washington, Jefferson received his dinner guests at the President’s House around three thirty or four o’clock. He entertained constantly, handsomely, and with a purpose. His instinct to open his house and table was natural, something he had learned growing up amid the rites of Virginia hospitality.
Jefferson believed, too, that sociability was essential to republicanism. Men who liked and respected and enjoyed one another were more likely to cultivate the virtuous habits that would enable the country’s citizens to engage in “the pursuit of happiness.” An affectionate man living in harmony with his neighbors was more likely to understand the mutual sacrifice of opinion of which Jefferson had spoken, and to make those sacrifices.
There was, of course, a more immediate point to frequent gatherings of lawmakers, diplomats, and cabinet officers at the president’s table. It tends to be more difficult to oppose—or at least to vilify—someone with whom you have broken bread and drunk wine. Caricatures crack as courses are served; imagined demonic plots fade with dessert.
Jefferson understood this, but he was ruthless about the use of his limited time in power. To create an ethos of supra-partisan civility would have required bringing politicians of opposing views together under his aegis. Jefferson disliked confrontation so much, however, that he forewent inviting Republicans and Federalists to dine together with him. He had only four or eight years to impress himself on the country and was unwilling to waste any of those hours presiding over arguments, even polite ones, between differing factions at his table. The possibilities of conflict in a setting designed to promote comity were too great.
Jefferson chose, then, to use dinner at the President’s House partly as a means of weaving attachments to him. It was his stage and his production. He ended the more formal arrangements common to Presidents Washington and Adams, forbidding seating by precedence—he preferred “pell-mell,” or the more democratic practice of having guests sit where they chose—and the drinking of toasts to one’s health, a tedious custom he replaced with more free-flowing, eclectic conversation. Like his aristocratic habit of dressing as though he were at Monticello rather than the capital—with his old slippers, which made such an impression on so many—the gentle creation of disorder at dinner magnified his own strengths as a conversationalist.
The architect Benjamin H. Latrobe reveled in his first dinner at the President’s House. The food, Latrobe wrote his wife, “was excellent, cooked rather in the French style (larded venison), the dessert was profuse and extremely elegant, and the knickknacks, after withdrawing the cloths, profuse and numberless. Wine in great variety, from sherry to champagne, and a few decanters of rare Spanish wine. ” At first Jefferson hung back, playing the host, then joined the stream of talk brilliantly.
Latrobe loved it all. “It is a long time since I have been present at so elegant a mental treat,” he said. “Literature, wit, and a little business, with a great deal of miscellaneous remarks on agriculture and building, filled every minute. There is a degree of ease in Mr. Jefferson’s company that everyone seems to feel and to enjoy.”
Jefferson had a conservationist’s turn of mind and once mused on the subject of the rapidly depleting number of trees along the sides of Capitol Hill and on the banks of the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers. “Such as grew on the public grounds ought to have been preserved, but in a government such as ours, where the people are sovereign, this could not be done,” Margaret Bayard Smith recalled. “The people, the poorer inhabitants, cut down these noble and beautiful trees for fuel”; others felled trees for profit.
“How I wish that I possessed the power of a despot,” Jefferson said one day, surprising his guests. “Yes,” he went on, “I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifices to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor.”
A guest asked, “And have you not authority to save those on the public grounds?”
“No,” said Jefferson, “only an armed guard could save them. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder, [and] it pains me to an unspeakable degree.”
Jefferson’s social civility softened the more strident hours of partisanship. The Federalist senator William Plumer of New Hampshire had begun his Washington career with a predictably harsh view of Jefferson. Early in the decade of the 1800s, Plumer dismissed the president as the leader of a “feeble, nerveless administration,” later adding: “I did think he had great talents, wisdom and a portion of those virtues that render a man amiable and useful; but craft and cunning are as distant from wisdom as meanness is from economy, or his views from true greatness.”
As the years passed, Plumer’s opinion of Jefferson, formed at close quarters as a guest in the President’s House, evolved from hostility to one of partial respect. “The more critically and impartially I examine the character and conduct of Mr. Jefferson the more favorably I think of his integrity,” Plumer wrote in 1806. The senator still disagreed strongly with the president on policy, but Jefferson’s grace and hospitality did its work. “I have a curiosity, which is gratified, by seeing and conversing” with Jefferson, Plumer wrote. “I gain a more thorough knowledge of his character, and of his views, and those of his party—for he is naturally communicative.”
At the President’s House, Jefferson gave Plumer some pecans to cultivate, and the two men engaged in the most chivalrous of exchanges. “After twenty years they will bear,” Jefferson said.
“I shall, then, despair of eating of them,” Plumer said.
“Your children will eat with pleasure the fruit of your industry,” said Jefferson.
“I will teach them to bear in remembrance to whose politeness they are indebted for the nuts that produced these trees of fruit,” replied Plumer.
Jefferson left no guest behind. Struggling to make small talk with the president, the wife of the mayor of Georgetown could remember only that she had heard of Carters Mountain—the redoubt where Jefferson was alleged to have run away from the British in 1781. Unaware of the trauma and embarrassment evoked by even the mention of the place, she asked Jefferson if he lived near Carters Mountain.
“Very close,” he said, “it is the adjoining mountain to Monticello.”
“I suppose it’s a very convenient, pleasant place,” the wife said, plunging on unknowingly as her husband sat awkwardly, powerless to stop her.
Jefferson maintained his poise, replying simply, “Why, yes, I certainly found it so, in the war time.” There the subject was dropped.
At dinner late on another afternoon, the table talk was dominated by a few men whom Mrs. Smith, who was also there, described as “distinguished persons.” The conversation was “earnest and animated,” but one guest, who had lived in Europe for a time, sat “silent and unnoticed,” apparently feeling overwhelmed by the high-powered company. He began thinking himself “a stranger in his own country [who] was totally unknown to the present company.”
Then the president of the United States fixed his attention on the returning American. “To you, Mr. C., we are indebted … [and] no one more deserves the gratitude of his country.”
The chatter stopped. The capital crowd at the table was startled by this presidential praise, and suddenly attention warmed the long-ignored guest. “Yes, sir,” Jefferson went on, “the upland rice which you sent from Algiers, and which thus far succeeds, will, when generally adopted by the planters, prove an inestimable blessing to our Southern states.”
With a stroke of grace, Jefferson had transformed an unnoticed guest into what Mrs. Smith called “a person of importance,” and the president fulfilled the most fundamental duty of a host: He showed respect to those under his roof, making them feel comfortable and cared for.
To Jefferson, each guest who came into his orbit was significant, and he had little patience—no patience, in fact—with the trappings of rank. His blend of politics, republican simplicity, and haute cuisine was not universally popular. Anthony Merry, the new minister from Britain, found that his and Jefferson’s ideas of the deference due a representative of George III were difficult to reconcile. The president’s reception of the new envoy passed without incident. Not so the dinner to which Merry and his wife were invited at the President’s House. Mrs. Madison was the hostess for the evening, and Jefferson took her into dinner. The Merrys ended up in what they believed to be inferior seats at the table.
Thus began a small but pitched social and diplomatic battle in the drawing and dining rooms of Washington. The Merry faction included the family of the Spanish minister, who also favored more ceremony and nicety. Mrs. Merry, Jefferson said, was “a virago, and in the short course of a few weeks has established a degree of dislike among all classes which one would have thought impossible in so short a time.”
It was the Old World versus the New, and on Jefferson’s watch the New was to win. “We say to them, no; the principle of society with us, as well as of our political constitution, is the equal rights of all: and if there be an occasion where this equality ought to prevail preeminently, it is in social circles collected for conviviality,” Jefferson wrote in January 1804.
There was a specific political element to the tempest. The British representatives, Jefferson said, thought that “we are not as friendly now to Great Britain as before our acquisition of Louisiana.” Jefferson denied it: “This is totally without foundation. Our friendship to that nation is cordial and sincere: so is that with France.… We consider each as a necessary instrument to hold in check the disposition of the other to tyrannize over other nations.”
Anthony Merry never warmed to Jefferson, and the British diplomat followed any whisper of American discontent. Jefferson’s popularity was such—he was renominated by the Republican congressional caucus in February 1804 for a second term as president—that Federalist concern was turning into desperation.
On Saturday, February 11, 1804, Senator Timothy Pickering sat down in Washington to lament the sorry state of things in the age of Jefferson. Federal judges and other officeholders were under assault. The Jefferson-led mob ruled. “And must we submit to these evils?” Pickering wrote the Massachusetts Federalist Theodore Lyman. “Is there no remedy?”
Secession, Pickering believed, could be the one way “to resist the torrent” of Jefferson’s government. Massachusetts was thought to be the most likely leader. If she went, then Connecticut would, followed by New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. If New York were convinced it would be the center of the new nation, she would surely join, he said, which could, in turn, bring along New Jersey and Pennsylvania east of the Susquehanna.
And Britain—Britain would probably agree to let parts of its North America holdings join forces with a northern union. In theory, it all seemed so reasonable. “It is not unusual for two friends when disagreeing about the mode of conducting a common concern, to separate, and manage each in his own way his separate interest; and thereby preserve a useful friendship which without such separation would infallibly be destroyed,” Pickering said.
Pickering’s vision probably meant civil war. Why would Jefferson’s party let the North go? Another Pickering correspondent, Massachusetts Federalist George Cabot, thought the hour for separation was not yet at hand—but was open to finding the right one. “We are democratic altogether, and I hold democracy in its natural operation to be the government of the worst,” Cabot wrote Pickering.
Pickering was adamant. “I am disgusted with the men who now rule us and with their measures,” he wrote on the third anniversary of Jefferson’s inauguration. Pickering was putting much faith in reports that Burr might try to become governor of New York, which would, he hoped, provide a counterweight to Virginia. “Jefferson would then be forced to observe some caution and forbearance in his measures,” Pickering said.
The Federalist view, according to a correspondent of Rufus King’s, was “that the shortest and beaten road of Tyranny is that which leads through Democracy.”
King was no disunionist, but he said that Pickering’s letter “ought to fix the attention of the real friends of liberty in this quarter of the Union, and the more so as things seem to be fast advancing to a crisis.” Rumors of disunion persisted for several years. Anthony Merry heard them and reported them to London; the British diplomat Augustus J. Foster wrote about them to his mother. “The possibility of a division is even openly talked of in the public papers and recriminations are exchanged between the Eastern and Southern states,” he wrote in June 1805.
Then there was Aaron Burr, an elusive and daunting political force. On Thursday, January 26, 1804, Burr called on Jefferson at the President’s House. After the electoral college tie of 1800–1801, the two men had had little contact in the first term, and Jefferson was determined to keep him off the ballot in 1804.
As Burr told his story, he cast himself in the warmest and best of lights. He was, he was saying, the humblest and most honest of men.
Burr knew he was under attack publicly and privately. Jefferson reported that Burr had said “many little stories had been carried to him, and he supposed to me also, which, he despised, but that attachments must be reciprocal or cease to exist, and therefore he asked if any change had taken place in mine towards him: that he had chosen to have this conversation with myself directly and not through any intermediate agent.” Burr was willing to stand down, he said, but to do so he needed Jefferson’s help: an appointment of some kind.
Jefferson’s reply was maddening. The president disclaimed any role in electioneering. He said he could do nothing for Burr.
Meanwhile, the proposed Twelfth Amendment was making its way through the states. The amendment was designed to prevent any future electoral crisis by separating the ballots for president and vice president, meaning that there could be no more ties between candidates who were putatively running as a ticket. “That great opposition is and will be made by Federalists to this amendment is certain,” Jefferson wrote Thomas McKean in January 1804. “They know that if it prevails, neither a President or Vice President can ever be made but by the fair vote of the majority of the nation, of which they are not.”
Afire had devastated Norfolk, Virginia (Jefferson sent $200 “for the relief of the poor sufferers,” but asked to remain anonymous). At Edgehill, Polly gave birth to a daughter on Wednesday, February 15. “A thousand joys to you, my dear Maria, on the happy accession to your family,” Jefferson wrote on Sunday, February 26, 1804, using the name Polly had taken for herself in November 1789.
But all was not well. Polly was not recovering. Her husband, John Wayles Eppes, left Washington for home. It was a difficult journey complicated by high winds and ice. “I feel dreadfully apprehensive that the great debility under which she labors may terminate in some serious complaint,” Eppes wrote Jefferson.
In the Mediterranean, on the last day of October 1803, the U.S. frigate Philadelphia had been captured by Tripolitan forces. Three and a half months later, in the middle of February 1804, Commodore Stephen Decatur led a courageous expedition to destroy the Philadelphia in order to keep it from being turned against the United States. In British vice admiral Horatio Nelson’s view, Decatur’s mission was “the most bold and daring act of the age,” and Jefferson struck the same notes in his remarks on the episode. “In general I am mortified at the consternation which most of our public agents abroad have manifested at the loss of the Philadelphia,” Jefferson wrote Madison on April 15, 1804. “It seems as if they thought on the loss of one frigate, that everything was lost. This must humble us in the eyes of Europe, and renders it the more indispensable to inflict on Tripoli the same chastisement of which the two most powerful nations of Europe have given the world repeated examples.”
Jefferson left Washington on Sunday, April 1, 1804, for Monticello. When he arrived three days later, he discovered Polly in much worse condition than he had anticipated. He immediately took charge of her care.
In a rare instance of understatement, Jefferson told Madison that things were not all they could be. “Our spring is remarkably uncheery,” Jefferson wrote Madison on Friday, April 13—Jefferson’s sixty-first birthday. As Polly grew worse, Jefferson wrote to Dearborn, Gallatin, and Madison, trying to turn his mind, if only for the briefest of moments, to business. It did not work. On a question about Spanish duties at Mobile, Jefferson told Dearborn that Polly’s “distressing situation … disable[s] me from forming any opinion on the subject.” On Tuesday, April 17, 1804, Polly died. “How the President will get over this blow I cannot pronounce,” Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., wrote Caesar A. Rodney. “He passed all last evening with his handkerchief in his hand. Adieu. I begin to feel the want of mine.”
Dolley Madison learned the news directly from Jefferson. “A letter from the President announced the death of poor [Polly] and the consequent misery it has occasioned them all—this is among the many proofs … of the uncertainty of life!” Mrs. Madison wrote her sister. “A girl so young, so lovely—all the efforts of her father, doctors and friends availed nothing.”
Exhausted and grieving, Jefferson returned to Washington. “I arrived here last night after the most fatiguing journey I have experienced for a great many years,” Jefferson wrote Patsy, now his last surviving child with his late wife, from Washington on May 14.
On Saturday, June 2, an unexpected letter arrived at the President’s House from Quincy, Massachusetts. “It has been some time since that I conceived of any event in this life, which could call forth feelings of mutual sympathy,” wrote Abigail Adams. “But I know how closely entwined around a parent’s heart, are those chords which bind the filial to the parental bosom, and when snapped asunder, how agonizing the pangs of separation.”
Jefferson replied, politely, and the brief correspondence touched on the things that had come to divide Jefferson and the Adamses—Callender’s vicious Prospect Before Us and the midnight appointments.
Abigail Adams wrote him again on Sunday, July 1, explaining the source of her deepest anger toward Jefferson:
I have never felt any enmity towards you, Sir, for being elected president of the United States. But the instruments made use of, and the means which were practiced to effect a change, have my utter abhorrence and detestation, for they were the blackest calumny, and foulest falsehoods. I had witnessed enough of the anxiety, and solicitude, the envy, jealousy and reproach attendant upon the office, as well as the high responsibility of the station, to be perfectly willing to see a transfer of it.…
[N]ow, Sir, I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship, and placed you in a light very different from what I once viewed you in—
One of the first acts of your administration was to liberate a wretch who was suffering the just punishment of the law due to his crimes for writing and publishing the basest libel, the lowest and vilest slander, which malice could invent, or calumny exhibit against the character and reputation of your predecessor, of him for whom you professed the highest esteem and friendship, and whom you certainly knew incapable of such complicated baseness. The remission of Callender’s fine was a public approbation of his conduct. Is not the last restraint of vice, a sense of shame, rendered abortive, if abandoned characters do not excite abhorrence? … The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth.
This letter is written in confidence—no eye but my own has seen what has passed. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Often have I wished to have seen a different course pursued by you. I bear no malice; I cherish no enmity. I would not retaliate if I could—nay more in the true spirit of Christian charity, I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.
Jefferson replied on Sunday, July 22, claiming that his support of Callender had been based on opposition to the sedition laws and his agreement with the writer’s politics at the time. “My charities to him were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life.”
Jefferson and Abigail held such starkly different views of the events of the last decade or so that, despite the exchange of a total of seven letters from May to October 1804, it became clear further conversation was pointless. The exchange ended as suddenly as it had begun. John Adams learned of it only after it came to a close in the autumn of 1804.
On Wednesday, July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey, high above the Hudson River, the vice president of the United States shot the first secretary of the Treasury dead in a duel fought over allegedly disparaging remarks Alexander Hamilton had made about Aaron Burr.
Jefferson made only the most cursory allusions to Hamilton’s death. There was no testimonial, no letter of tribute to a friend that Jefferson expected to reach the newspapers. His silence at the time—the middle of 1804—seems odd, even ungracious. The politics of the moment may help explain why Jefferson held his tongue and his pen on the subject. The public reaction to Hamilton’s death was intense and emotional. He was eulogized as “the greatest and most virtuous of men” by the newspaper he founded, the New-York Evening Post. His huge New York funeral, concluding with his burial at Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street in lower Manhattan, was a spectacular occasion.
With the presidential election coming in the autumn, Jefferson likely believed a dignified silence—or at least silence he hoped would be seen as dignified rather than callous—was the best course. In the heat of the summer of 1804, praise of Hamilton was interpreted not as the elegant reaction to a shocking and untimely death but as an endorsement of his program and a condemnation of his opponents. John Adams saw this, later writing Jefferson that Hamilton’s partisans had “seized the moment of public feeling to come forward with funeral orations and printed panegyrics.… And why? Merely to disgrace the old Whigs, and keep the funds and banks in countenance.”
To Jefferson, Hamilton had represented the most dangerous of tendencies. As president, however, Jefferson did little to destroy the system Hamilton had built. “We had indeed no personal dissensions,” Jefferson later said of Hamilton. “Each of us, perhaps, thought well of the other as a man, but as politicians it was impossible for two men to be of more opposite principles.”
The more pressing issue was Burr, who was indicted for murder both by a coroner’s jury in New York and by a grand jury in New Jersey. The vice president escaped both states in late July. For Jefferson, the problem of Aaron Burr was just beginning, for on Monday, August 6, 1804—not quite a month after Hamilton’s death—Anthony Merry told London that Burr wanted to “effect a separation of the western part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantic and the mountains, in its whole extent.”
As president Jefferson found it useful to be aware of what the opposition was saying and doing: Behind the scenes, he was a shrewd consumer of newspapers and political intelligence. Reading the enemy journals, Jefferson detected perils to a possible second term. “I sincerely regret that the unbounded calumnies of the Federal party have obliged me to throw myself on the verdict of my country for trial, my great desire having been to retire at the end of the present term to a life of tranquility, and it was my decided purpose when I entered into office,” he wrote Elbridge Gerry in 1804. “They force my continuance.”
George Clinton replaced Burr as the Republican candidate for vice president in the 1804 election. A New Yorker, Clinton was the child of Irish immigrants, and his rise to power presaged much of the story of American politics. “Clinton’s family and connections do not entitle him to so distinguished a pre-eminence,” John Jay had written of him. That was a strongly Federalist view. The Jeffersonian view was different, allowing for social and political mobility among whites.
The Federalists fielded Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who had been John Adams’s vice-presidential candidate four years before. Any challenge to the incumbent was an honorable but hopeless cause: Jefferson’s popularity, based on lower taxes, significant prosperity, and the Louisiana Purchase, was secure. The president was reelected decisively, carrying 162 electoral votes to Pinckney’s 14. Once so dominant, the Federalist enterprise was failing.
Writing from Philadelphia in December 1804, a correspondent signing himself “A Friend of the Constitution” told Jefferson that “there is a plot formed to murder you.… A band of hardy fellows have joined to do it. They are to have ten thousand dollars if they succeed in the attempt. They are to carry daggers and pistols. I have been invited to join them but would rather suffer death. I advise you to take care and be cautious how you walk about as some of the assassins are already in Washington.”
The virulence of such threats belied the larger reality in the country. “The power of the Administration rests upon the support of a much stronger majority of the people throughout the Union than the former Administrations ever possessed since the first establishment of the Constitution,” John Quincy Adams said in the wake of Jefferson’s victory. The political faith of Adams’s own father was doomed.
What lived and ruled was quintessentially Jeffersonian. The vibrant, breathing, prevailing politics of the hour reflected the complicated character of the triumphant president. The America of Jefferson was neither wholly Federal nor wholly Republican. It was, rather, a marbled blend of the two, confected by a practical man of affairs. The significance of the case of Louisiana in shaping the destinies of the country and in illuminating Jefferson’s political leadership cannot be overstated. He believed, for instance, in a limited government, except when he thought the nation was best served by a more expansive one. It was a moment to savor success.
The capital was quiet. “We have but few strangers in town,” Jefferson wrote Patsy on Monday, January 7, 1805.
His second inaugural at hand, Jefferson’s thoughts drifted back over the trials he and his compatriots had faced in the past forty years. “We entered young into the first revolution and saw it terminate happily,” Jefferson wrote the New Hampshire statesman John Langdon. “We had to engage when old in a second more perilous, because our people were divided. But we have weathered this too and seen all come round and to rights.”
Yet even in victory Jefferson felt the weight of expectation. He knew political serenity never lasted. In December 1804, the Federalist senator William Plumer of New Hampshire had been invited to dine with Jefferson. The president was dressed well (“A new suit of black—silk hose—shoes—clean linen, and his hair highly powdered”) and the company ate well (“His dinner was elegant and rich”). To Plumer, though, Jefferson did not seem a man at the height of his political fortunes. “He was today reserved—appeared rather low spirited—conversed little,” Plumer wrote in his diary.
The president had much on his mind. It was the age of Napoleon and Nelson, of contending powers who seemed never truly at peace, and America remained what it had been for so long: a target for the designs of enemies determined to dominate all or part of it. His final four years in public office were like the previous decades: Jefferson still struggled to secure the nation.
It began—but hardly ended—with Britain, which still harbored doubts about the wherewithal of the United States. “We drove them into being a nation when they were no more fit for it than the convicts of Botany Bay,” the British diplomat Augustus Foster wrote his mother in 1805.
On Saturday, March 2, 1805, Vice President Burr took his leave of the capital with a paean to the Senate, which he called “a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of popular frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of a demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.”
William Plumer thought Burr was finished in political life—then thought again. “He can never, I think, rise again,” Plumer wrote in his diary. “But surely he is a very extraordinary man, and is an exception to all rules.” Plumer could not yet know how close to the mark he was.
All is now business, hurry, interruption,” Jefferson said on the eve of his second inauguration.
His political dominance over the nation was a given. In a private letter, Augustus Foster referred to him sarcastically as “the successor of Montezuma”—an allusion to the sixteenth-century Aztec god-king—but the irony was a tribute to Jefferson’s power.
Jefferson’s second inauguration fell on a Monday. He dressed in black and left the grounds of the President’s House on horseback. In the Senate chamber, again speaking too softly to be widely heard, Jefferson gave his second inaugural address. “During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare,” he said. “These abuses of an institution, so important to freedom and science, are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.” The marketplace, however, should decide. Censorship should be in the hands of the people.
Afterward Jefferson opened the President’s House to callers. It, too, was run according to “pell-mell,” and Foster, who made his way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the celebration, reported that “all those who chose attended and even towards the close blacks and dirty boys, who drunk his wine and lolled upon his couches before us all.” Some music capped the day, Foster noted—“a few pipes and drums”—and the festivities, such as they were, came to a close.
Jefferson was now the second two-term president of the United States. As he returned to greet the public—even the “blacks and dirty boys” of Foster’s formulation—he had every intention of following Washington’s example and retiring in four years’ time. Only one contingency could tempt him to a third election—a contingency he mentioned to John Taylor of Caroline in early 1805. “My opinion originally was that the President of the U.S. should have been elected for 7 years, and forever ineligible afterwards.” Now he was not so sure:
I have since become sensible that 7 years is too long to be unremovable, and that there should be a peaceable way of withdrawing a man in midway who is doing wrong. The service for 8 years with a power to remove at the end of the first four, comes nearly to my principle as corrected by experience. And it is in adherence to that that I determine to withdraw at the end of my second term. The danger is that the indulgence and attachments of the people will keep a man in the chair after he becomes a dotard, that reelection through life shall become habitual, and election for life follow that. Genl. Washington set the example of voluntary retirement after 8 years. I shall follow it and a few more precedents will oppose the obstacle of habit to anyone after a while who shall endeavor to extend his term. Perhaps it may beget a disposition to establish it by an amendment of the Constitution.… There is however but one circumstance which could engage my acquiescence in another election, to wit, such a division about a successor as might bring in a monarchist. But this circumstance is impossible.
Visions of a crown worried him still.
In the spring of 1805, the first fruits of the Lewis and Clark expedition started coming east. “It being the wish of Captain Lewis, I take the liberty to send you, for your own perusal, the notes which I have taken in the form of a journal in their original state,” William Clark wrote Jefferson in April. Briefing Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis wrote: “I can foresee no material or probable obstruction to our progress, and entertain therefore the most sanguine hopes of complete success.”
From Fort Mandan, the expedition’s winter encampment on the Missouri River in North Dakota, the two leaders sent Jefferson a collection of artifacts. There was a box with the skins and skeletons of antelope and weasels and wolves. There were elk horns. There were scores of plants, and four living magpies. For Jefferson, it was a joyous delivery.
Accounts of Lewis and Clark fascinated the public. “The voyage of discovery of Capt. Lewis has engaged the attention of the curious and attracted the notice of many who were prejudiced against that country,” wrote William Eustis from Massachusetts in August 1805. “This nation was never more respected abroad. The people were never more happy at home.”
In late 1805, on a tree overlooking the Pacific, after a journey of more than three thousand miles, Clark staked the claim Jefferson had long dreamt of:
Capt. William Clark
December 3rd, 1805.
By Land.
U States in 1804 & 1805
A mission conceived on the Potomac had culminated on the Pacific. It was a staggering achievement, a Jeffersonian projection of power to find a path through the wilderness—and to master a continent.
Jefferson delighted in receiving things from the West and the East. From London he ordered an eight-volume edition of Baxter’s History of England; copies of essays on brewing, geometry, and astronomy; and maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. He wanted a telescope, too, and a pair of British globes “with the new discoveries to 1800.”
It all fit. In his years in office he turned the presidency—and the President’s House—into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, a vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.
Jefferson set aside a room in the mansion for fossils. There were pieces of skulls, jawbones and teeth, tusks and a foreleg, “one horn of a colossal animal,” and two hundred small bones collected by William Clark. “The bones are spread in a large room where you can work at your leisure, undisturbed by any mortal, from morning to night, taking your breakfast and dinner with us,” he wrote Caspar Wistar, Jr., the Philadelphia physician who later published A System of Anatomy.
The bones were the least of it. The explorer Zebulon Pike purchased two bear cubs for Jefferson from an Indian along the Rio Grande. His men nursed them with milk, and they arrived safely at the President’s House in 1808. “I would recommend if practicable that they should be confined together in a cell (without chains) and regularly supplied with food and water, when I am nearly convinced that they will harmonize and become much more docile than if chained and confined asunder,” Pike told the president.
Jefferson took Pike’s advice. “I put them together while here in a place 10.f. square,” Jefferson wrote the naturalist and painter Charles Willson Peale. “For the first day they worried one another very much with play, but after that they played at times, but were extremely happy together.” Unsurprisingly, it proved impracticable to keep bears at the President’s House, and Jefferson sent them to Peale’s zoo in Philadelphia.
Considering a request from a man seeking counsel on determining whether a stone had been a meteor, Jefferson said: “We certainly are not to deny whatever we cannot account for.” He was not always as skeptical as he ought to have been. He could be hopelessly wrong about scientific matters. Alluding to the maneuvering between Madison and Monroe for the presidential succession, Timothy Pickering said that while the Republicans fought for 1808, “the actual President is exploring the wilds of Louisiana—its salt plains—its rock or mineral salt—its immense prairies—in which he has discovered the earthly paradise—its numerous tribes and remnants of tribes of Indians and how many languages they speak—the hot springs and the warm mud-puddles in their vicinity—and the wonderful phenomena in one of a small or ‘very minute shell fish’ in shape resembling a mussel, but having four legs; and in another ‘a vermes about half an inch long, moving with a serpentine or vermicular motion’!”
Jefferson could be prideful about his passions. “A jealous sense of praise and censure [are] among the most striking features of Mr. Jefferson’s character, and his gratitude for the former [is] in exact proportion to his implacable resentment against the latter,” wrote the British diplomat Edward Thornton. Jefferson, Thornton said, “is well-placed to be considered as an able statesman; but he is still more proud of being thought to combine a capacity for public affairs with the abstraction necessary for scientific pursuit.”
The British even attributed some of Jefferson’s longstanding hostility toward London to the French cultivation of his love of science and letters. “I really believe that the little account made in England of his literary talents at an early period added considerably to the bitterness which other causes had excited in his mind against her,” Thornton wrote. “The French, under the monarchy at least, seem to have understood better this part of his character, and they gained his heart by associating him in their literary societies.”
Still, his curiosity was perennial. “Will you come and take an Indian dinner with us tomorrow?” Jefferson wrote John Breckinridge in March 1806. “There is one of the chiefs who is really a curiosity, as possessing the art of speaking by signs, of which we have often heard, but never before seen an example. The hour, as usual, half after three.” With William Dunlap, the playwright and painter, Jefferson shared notes on the croaking of frogs in Washington, “the early approach of spring, of gardening French and English, preferring the latter and praising their great taste in laying out their ground.” With Samuel and Margaret Bayard Smith, over tea in the President’s House, Jefferson spoke of “agriculture, gardening, the differences of both in different countries and of the produce of different climates.” He sent Mrs. Smith home with winter melon seed from Malta.
The subject did not matter; he was forever working over political and philosophical problems. “What would you think of raising a force for the defense of New Orleans in this manner?” Jefferson wrote to Madison, Gallatin, and Dearborn in February 1806. “Give a bounty of 50 acres of land, to be delivered immediately, to every able bodied man who will immediately settle on it, and hold himself in readiness to perform 2 years military service (on the usual pay) if called on within the first seven years of his residence.”
He was always ready with suggestions for the young. “I would … advise him to read Livy, Tacitus, and Horace this summer,” he wrote a friend with a son. “The two former will give him a good knowledge of the Roman history, while they instruct him in the language. He may at the same time read Anacharsis in French, which will strengthen his knowledge of that language and possess him of the Grecian history. I would advise him to read too Baxter’s history of England as a corrective of Hume, which he has read. Indeed it is Hume republicanized.”
Much of the nation’s political energy in 1805 was devoted to dealing with tensions with Spain over the exact boundaries of the Louisiana territory, the fate of the Floridas, which Madrid declined to hand over, and financial claims. Spain remained a presence in North America, and it was allied with France. A mission of Monroe’s to the Spanish capital failed, giving rise to a debate within the Jefferson administration about the use of force against Spanish posts and holdings.
Should the United States risk a broader war against Spain and France by taking a strong stand? In such a case, would it make sense for America to make common cause with England, which wanted allies against Napoleon, thus turning London, a potential enemy, into a friend, at least for the time being?
Jefferson’s ultimate answer was no. Despite exploring the possibilities of a provisional treaty with Britain that would have created an alliance in the event of an American war with Spain or France, Jefferson decided that neutrality was still the country’s best course. “Our Constitution is a peace establishment—it is not calculated for war,” Jefferson said. “War would endanger its existence.” In Jefferson’s reading of history, war was about armies and navies and debt and honors, all of which had played their part in the fall of republics and the rise of empires.
Yet occasionally one had to fight to preserve liberty. Jefferson knew this, and he recognized that combat, though a last resort, was still a resort. The man who had been hunted by Tarleton would use every other weapon he could think of before projecting American military force. Measures short of traditional warfare—the fortification of harbors with cannons, the building of gunboats for coastal defense, and the preparation of the militia for possible deployment—were to be aggressively pursued, and Jefferson called for all of these in his annual message to Congress at the end of 1805.
As the year drew to a close, Jefferson saw foes wherever he looked. The British and, to a lesser extent, the French were harassing American ships. Napoleon won a glorious victory at Austerlitz. Nelson had died a hero’s death in his triumph at Trafalgar. Closest to home, Burr, his old vice president, was allegedly plotting against the United States.
Thinking of France and England, Jefferson tried to make the best of a troubling hour. “What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit at this instant,” Jefferson wrote in January 1806. “Our wish ought to be that he who has armies may not have the dominion of the sea, and that he who has dominion of the sea may be one who has no armies. In this way we may be quiet, at home at least.” Jefferson had to face the inevitable question: How long would the quiet last—how long could it last?