Although Jefferson never explicitly compared himself with Rittenhouse, he did suggest to Edmund Pendleton in the late 1770s that he might retire completely from government in order to continue his philosophical studies. Pendleton was appalled at the suggestion and told Jefferson so. “You are too young to Ask that happy quietus from the Public,” he said, “and should at least postpone it ’til you have taught the rising Generation, the forms as well as the Substantial principles of legislation.”10
• • •
TO KEEP JEFFERSON from retiring from public service in the midst of the war, Pendleton and many of his colleagues in the legislature decided in June 1779 that they had to elect him governor of the state. Granting Jefferson an honor that he could scarcely refuse was one way of getting him off his mountaintop retreat and back into politics. Jefferson quite correctly predicted that becoming governor would not add to his happiness.11
Before he became governor and experienced the war firsthand, Jefferson seemed not to have grasped the nature and severity of the conflict. He didn’t think that the kind of hatred of the enemy that Adams expressed was good for the soul. While Adams in 1777 wanted to meet the “barbarian Britains” in the field, Jefferson sought to temper such “sweet and delicious” feelings of revenge.12 Not only was Jefferson remarkably sanguine about the outcome of the war, but he assumed that the war was being waged in a more polite and civilized manner than it was in reality. While still in Congress he set forth his views of what war in the enlightened eighteenth century ought to be. “It is the happiness of modern times,” he wrote, “that the evils of necessary war are softened by the refinement of manners and sentiment, and that an enemy is an object of vengeance, in arms and in the field only.”13 His idealism about the nature of war accounts for the way in which he treated the British and German soldiers who had surrendered at Saratoga in October 1777.
America’s General Horatio Gates had signed a convention with Britain’s General John Burgoyne allowing the return of his troops to Europe with the promise that they would not be used again in America. Because of a number of British actions, including the British treatment of American prisoners and Burgoyne’s unwillingness to provide a list of his officers, Congress refused to agree with the convention and decided to keep the enemy soldiers in America until George III ratified it, which the Congress doubted would happen. In November 1778 this “Convention Army” was marched seven hundred miles from Boston, where it had been awaiting embarkation to Europe, to Charlottesville, Virginia, arriving in January 1779. These enemy soldiers were held in hastily constructed barracks until 1781, when the appearance of an invading British army forced their removal to Pennsylvania.
Jefferson was delighted with the presence of several thousand enemy officers and soldiers in his neighborhood not only because they brought some much-needed money to the area, but, more important, because they offered an opportunity for him to demonstrate the liberality and humanity of America in wartime. “It is for the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as possible,” he told Patrick Henry, his predecessor as governor, in March 1779. “The practice therefore of modern nations of treating captive enemies with politeness and generosity is not only delightful in contemplation but really interesting to all the world, friends, foes and neutrals.” Jefferson urged Governor Henry to apply this enlightened practice to the Convention Army. If Virginians did not treat these enemy soldiers correctly, other nations, he warned Henry, would charge Americans with ignorance, whim, and cruelty. Jefferson wanted to demonstrate the possibility of civilizing war.14
Jefferson was especially pleased to have so many British and German officers in his neighborhood; they brought European charm and cultivation to what he often referred to as the cultural barbarism of his state. He was eager to show the European prisoners the polite and civilized nature of Americans, to convince them that his countrymen were not the mongrel savages that many Europeans presumed. He played music and talked art and philosophy with the European officers and invited them to dinner and accepted their invitations in return. He and his family developed an especially close relationship with the ranking Hessian officer, Major General Baron de Riedesel, and his wife, who had been with her husband at the Battle of Saratoga. In fact, it was common for as many as 15 percent of the soldiers in the British army to have their wives with them.15 Jefferson obviously enjoyed the company of these European sophisticates and was eager to win their friendship and respect.
Releasing captured officers on parole and allowing them to move freely within a designated area was a common eighteenth-century practice in Europe; but the degree of intimacy Jefferson attained with the enemy prisoners in Charlottesville during the war was truly extraordinary. The hospitality he extended to the European officers went beyond all customary practice. After the war, he continued to correspond with some officers and met with them later when he went to Europe. One young Hessian officer, upon leaving America, wrote Jefferson how satisfied he had been in “conversing with a person in whom I find all the qualities which can arouse esteem and affection.” Jefferson could scarcely have been more delighted at receiving such a compliment. He painstakingly worked over his response, eager to make it appear as gracious and polished as possible, lest the German gentleman think him uncultivated. Until Jefferson got to Europe itself, his consorting with these European prisoners was the next best thing.16
The burdens of being governor soon put a damper on his socializing with the enemy officers; it would be one of his many regrets at becoming his state’s chief executive. His experience as the governor of Virginia for two years was rough. Jefferson, of course, knew that the executive was weak, and in 1776 he had wanted it weak; but the war graphically exposed to him and to the other state constitution-makers of 1776 their mistake in having so severely emasculated their chief executives. It was not long before Jefferson was longing to retire and return to the comforts of Monticello.
When the British forces under the command of Benedict Arnold invaded the state at the beginning of 1781, his difficulties became even more serious. He was slow to appreciate the danger and hesitated in calling out the militia, which allowed Arnold’s relatively small raiding army to enter Richmond, which had replaced Williamsburg as the state capital, without opposition. At the same time the British general Lord Cornwallis invaded Virginia from the south and in May 1781, much to Jefferson’s surprise, linked up with Arnold.
The invading British armies attracted thousands of slaves seeking freedom, including twenty-three of Jefferson’s slaves from his several estates; he later recovered five of them. Ever since the November 1775 proclamation of Virginia’s last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offering freedom to all servants and slaves who were willing to join His Majesty’s troops, the Virginia planters lived with the fear that their slaves would not just flee but would turn on them. In the weeks following that proclamation, hundreds of slaves had fled to Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment; the governor’s actions, said Jefferson, “raised our country into perfect phrenzy.”17
Now the same thing was happening as slaves once again saw an opportunity for freedom. In 1781 he described his slaves as having “fled to the enemy,” “joined enemy,” or “ran away.” Several years later he altered his verbs to the passive voice, so that the slaves became victims and no longer active agents.18 By the mid- and late 1780s he claimed that Cornwallis had “carried off” his slaves, numbering them as thirty when it appears that he had lost at most nineteen. He used Cornwallis’s destruction of his property and the taking of his slaves to justify his difficulty in paying his debts to his British creditors. “The useless and barbarous injury he did me at that instance,” he explained to a British creditor, “was more than would have paid your debt, principal and interest.” He went on to allege that the British had taken about thirty thousand slaves from Virginia plantations—a gross exaggeration, but one that he later used to explain the difficulty the Virginians in general had in paying their prewar de
bts to British creditors. Although he said in 1786 that he planned to pay his debts, the British had no right to expect prompt payment of prewar debts since they had withdrawn “American property contrary to express stipulation” in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.19
Perhaps five thousand or so slaves in the upper South ran away to the British lines between 1779 and 1781. By the end of the Revolutionary War, a total of about twenty thousand black slaves were estimated to have joined the British side, with roughly twelve thousand coming from the South. It was the greatest emancipation in America until the Civil War.20
• • •
BESET BY CRITICISM OF THE VIRGINIANS’ capacity to wage war, especially from Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer who had joined the American cause, Governor Jefferson tried to explain why his countrymen were having such trouble dealing with the enemy. “Mild Laws, a People not used to war and prompt obedience, a want of the Provisions of War and means of procuring them,” he told the Marquis de Lafayette, “render our orders often ineffectual, oblige us to temporize and when we cannot accomplish an object in one way to attempt it in another.”21
Just as his annual term as governor was ending in early June 1781, Jefferson came close to getting captured by the British. Surprised by approaching redcoats, he was forced to flee in embarrassment from Monticello. He compounded this embarrassment by suddenly deciding not to serve as governor the third and final year for which he was eligible, but he failed to issue a formal statement of his decision, leaving his fellow planters in the legislature befuddled. Consequently, the Virginia assembly had to scramble to elect his successor, which left the state with no chief executive for nearly a week.
It was hardly the time for a governor to retire. The situation in Virginia seemed so dire that, as Jefferson admitted in his Notes on the State of Virginia, there was talk in the legislature of setting up “a dictator” who would be “invested with every power legislative, executive, and judiciary, civil and military, of life and death” over persons and property.22 Although at the time Jefferson condemned this talk of a dictator, in the autobiography written many years later he sought to exonerate himself by explaining that he had “resigned the administration at the end of my 2d. year” so that a military commander might be appointed governor. Such a combination of military and civil power, he said, “might be wielded with more energy and promptitude and effect for the defence of the state.”23
Predictably, his retiring so abruptly as governor in the middle of this crisis angered some members of the assembly, including Patrick Henry. As a result the legislature resolved that at its next session “an inquiry be made into the conduct of the Executive of this State for the last twelve months.”24 For someone as confident as Jefferson of his social standing and his intellectual superiority, this was a harsh humiliation, and he never forgot it. It was by far the worst moment in his entire public career. No wonder he concluded that he found “the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.”25
Despite this cloud hanging over him, he was once again pressured to get involved in the government. Congress even invited him to become one of the peace commissioners in Paris. If he hadn’t already decided to avoid all public business, that office would have been agreeable to him. Indeed, he told Lafayette that by declining the European mission he was losing “an opportunity . . . of combining public service with private gratification, of seeing count[ries] whose improvements in science, in arts, and in civilization it has been my fortune to [ad]mire at a distance but never to see.”26 But, he told Edmund Randolph, a member of the Continental Congress, his decision was final. “I have . . . retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will evermore separate me.”27 Even when Randolph warned him that his “irrevocable purpose of sequestering yourself” was consigning “southern interests wholly to the management of our present ministers,” Jefferson remained firm in his withdrawal from public life.28
The American and French victory at Yorktown in October 1781 reduced the fearful atmosphere in Virginia, with Jefferson congratulating the victorious General Washington “on your return to your native country” from years of military maneuverings in the North.29 In December the House of Delegates, the name given to the lower house in the new Virginia state constitution, exonerated Jefferson’s actions as governor. But his deep hurt was not soothed. Although in the spring of 1782 he was once again elected to the House of Delegates by his county, he refused to serve. James Monroe, Jefferson’s young protégé, begged him to reconsider; in response Jefferson penned the most dispirited letter he ever wrote.
He was, he told Monroe, “thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition.” He was now reduced to a “mere private life,” and in order to rest easy in it, he had to rid himself of every “lurking particle” of ambition. He was sure that “every fibre of that passion” had been “thoroughly eradicated.” Besides, he had done enough. He had spent thirteen years engaged in public service at the expense of his private affairs. Despite his “constant sacrifice of time, labor, loss, parental and friendly duties,” instead of gaining the affection of his countrymen, which was the only reward he ever wanted, he had lost even the small estimation he had once possessed. He might have accepted “disapprobation of the well-meaning but uninformed people,” but the action of his legislative colleagues was an unexpected shock. To be sure, the legislature later issued “an exculpatory declaration,” but in the meantime he had been suspected of “not mere weakness of the head,” but of “treason of the heart.” Only death, he said, would relieve him of “the wound on his spirit.”
He then went on in this lengthy, bitter letter to complain that the state had no right to command the public services of its citizens. Fully cognizant of the classical republican tradition of the citizen’s obligation to sacrifice his private interests for the sake of the public good, Jefferson was hard-pressed to justify his refusal to participate in government. All he could say was that everyone since independence was doing it. “Offices of every kind and given by every power, have been daily and hourly declined and resigned.” His anxiety was acute, for he was confronting principles he had thoroughly imbibed in his extensive readings in the ancient classics. He knew he had political duties, but not at the expense of his whole existence. “If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater degree we are made for ourselves.” In order to rationalize his uneasy position, he had to exaggerate what the republic was demanding. No state, he said, had “a perpetual right” to the services of its citizens. That would be slavery and not the liberty for which they fought the Revolution. It would “annihilate the blessing of existence,” it would “contradict the giver of life who gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness.” Anyway, he said, he was not so vain as to count himself “among those whom the state would think worth oppressing with perpetual service.” He hoped that since he had spent “the whole of the active and useful part” of his life in service to the public, he would “be permitted to pass the rest in mental quiet.” And then as a final gibe at his colleagues, he pointed out that at least he had been direct and honest in making “a simple act of renunciation.” He had not tried to invoke the many legal disqualifications that others were using to justify their selfish withdrawal from governmental service.30
This angry outburst was not characteristic of Jefferson, and the intensity of his bitterness puzzled his colleagues. Even his close friend James Madison could not excuse his anger. “Great as my partiality is to Mr. Jefferson,” Madison told Edmund Randolph, “the mode in which he seems determined to revenge the wrong received from his Country, does not appear to me to be dictated either by philosophy or patriotism.”31 Eventually, Jefferson’s anger and self-pity subsided, his self-confidence returned, and he joined the world once more. It turned out that he was not as unambitious as he claimed in this moment of deep despair.
• • •
DURING THESE YEARS that Jeffer
son was philosophizing at Monticello and serving as governor of Virginia, Adams was abroad, except for six months in the latter half of 1779, when he briefly returned to Massachusetts to write the state’s belated constitution. Adams was experiencing firsthand all the science, arts, and civilization of enlightened Europe that Jefferson could only admire at a distance.
Adams had been sent over to Paris to replace Silas Deane as one of the three commissioners to help negotiate treaties of alliance and commerce with France. By the time he got to Paris in April 1778 to join the two other commissioners, Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin, the treaties had already been signed. Adams and Lee were unknowns compared with Franklin. Indeed, Franklin was the most celebrated American in the world and the toast of France. Adams lamented that he was “a Man of no Consequence—a Cypher.” When he first arrived in France, some mistook him for “Le fameux Adams,” by which they meant Samuel Adams. Adams had great fun in his diary describing the difficulties he had in France convincing the French that he was not “the famous Adams.” At least, he said, “No body went so far . . . as to say I was the infamous Adams.”32
Adams had met Franklin in the Continental Congress and on one occasion in 1776 had shared a bed with him, a common practice in the eighteenth century. The two delegates had wrangled over shutting or not shutting the window while they slept. The incident was funny enough for Adams to recall it many years later in one of his incomparable anecdotes. Most of his memories of Franklin were not so humorous.33
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