Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Although Jefferson knew that people differed from one another, he could never accept Adams’s harsh description of America’s severe and permanent social inequalities. Confident of his position in society and believing that real hereditary aristocracies existed only in Europe, he saw his own country as peculiarly egalitarian. In America, said Jefferson, “no other distinction existed between man and man” except those separating government officials from private individuals. And among these private individuals, he said, “the poorest labourer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest.”32

  Like most people receiving a gift from a friend of such a dense and massive tome, Jefferson was eager to assure the author that he actually had dipped into the book, and the best way to do that was to object to a minor point in the conclusion in which Adams had said that the Congress was “only a diplomatic assembly.” When Jefferson received the second volume of the Defence six months later, he admitted that he only had time to “look into it a little.” But putting that brief look at the second volume together with his hasty reading of the first volume, he summarized what he thought Adams was getting at: “The first principle of a good government is certainly a distribution of it’s powers into executive, judiciary, and legislative, and a subdivision of the latter into two or three branches.” Since Jefferson’s superficial summary seems to be the response of most modern scholars to Adams’s Defence, it is perhaps understandable; but it scarcely did justice to Adams’s powerful and pessimistic understanding of the way society operated.33

  Adams was probably fortunate that most people found the writing in his Defence impenetrable. Like Jefferson, most of his contemporaries tended to ignore his references to social estates and orders and simply concluded that he was only defending the bicameral legislatures and the separation of powers that existed in most of the state constitutions and in the new federal government. Even Adams’s notion that the senate should be socially different from the lower house was widely shared by anxious elites. But few followed his arguments about the corruption of American society and appreciated the degree to which his book challenged the basic enlightened premises of the American Revolution. To be sure, many of his fellow Americans sensed that he was enamored of the English constitution, but few grasped just how dark and forbidding and un-American a picture of their society he had painted.

  • • •

  BY 1787 JEFFERSON AND ADAMS had developed very different takes on what was happening in America, especially on the issue of aristocracy. Like Adams, Jefferson opposed the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati, and in 1784 he had politely outlined to George Washington his objections to this hereditary institution, which sought to preserve the fellowship of the military officers, including French officers, who served in the Revolutionary War. But once he arrived in Europe and discovered how passionately French reformers like the Comte de Mirabeau were attacking the Society of the Cincinnati, Jefferson found himself on the defensive, trying to explain to them why a nation dedicated to equality would create such an aristocratic institution.

  In his observations on the entry on America in Jean Nicolas Démeunier’s encyclopedia, Jefferson was eager to downplay the significance of the Cincinnati in America and to emphasize “the innocence of it’s origins.” The criticism that arose in America, he said, was full of “exaggerations”; it had to be based on the critics’ rich imaginations, “for to detail the real evils of aristocracy they must be seen in Europe.” In the end, Jefferson claimed that Americans would have abolished the society except they did not want to insult and appear ungrateful to the French officers who had been elected to membership.34

  Jefferson’s claim that no real aristocratic distinctions existed in America and that “a due horror of evils which flow from these distinctions could be excited in Europe only” could not have been more at odds with Adams’s belief that aristocracy and inequality were everywhere in America and that America, in this respect especially, was no different from Europe.35

  Given their different attitudes toward America, Adams and Jefferson were bound to have different responses to Shays’ Rebellion. In 1786 several thousand distressed debtor farmers in western Massachusetts, after years of rioting and complaining of high taxes and tight money, finally took up arms in protest against eastern creditors who were foreclosing their mortgages and seizing their farms. The rebels, led by a former militia captain named Daniel Shays, closed the much despised courts and threatened to seize a federal arsenal. Although the uprising was eventually put down by privately funded eastern militia, it frightened elites up and down America, especially since it occurred in the very state that was supposed to have the most balanced and strongest constitution of all the thirteen states.

  Adams was disturbed by the rebellion, calling it “extremely pernicious.” But in November 1786 he initially told Jefferson not to be alarmed, that “all will be well”; and he predicted that “this Commotion will terminate in additional Strength to Government.” Since the uprising reflected badly on his home state and the constitution he had helped create, he naturally was eager to minimize its significance. Abigail had no such inhibitions, especially since by the time she wrote Jefferson in January 1787 news of the rebellion had become more frightening. She told Jefferson that “ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principals, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretence of grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations.”36

  Jefferson took a much more sanguine view of Shays’ Rebellion. He told Abigail in November 1786 that he was “not alarmed at the humor shown by your countrymen.” He liked to see “the people awake and alert.” The “spirit of resistance to government” was at times so valuable that he wished it would always be kept alive. “I like a little rebellion now and then,” he declared in one of the most memorable of his statements. “It is like a Storm in the Atmosphere.”37

  A year later, when the rebellion had been put down and the new federal Constitution ratified, he was even more relaxed in his view of the uprising. Not only was it not worth worrying about, he wrote in a letter to Adams’s son-in-law, but it was natural and healthy for a republic to have periodic uprisings of the people. It was the only way the people could correct misconceptions. “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” If the people remain quiet too long, “it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.” Rulers need to be warned every once in a while that the people have a spirit of resistance. What did a few lives lost every century or two matter? “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”38

  With such expressions Jefferson revealed a political temperament very different from Adams’s. He had none of Adams’s doubts about the people and none of his worries that their ambitions and desires were a danger to the stability of the society. Jefferson believed that “the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army” for putting down a rebellion. “They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves.”39 With his revolutionary ideology of 1776 fixed and intact in his mind, he was essentially immune to the doubts about the people many American leaders had developed in the decade following the Declaration of Independence.

  • • •

  JEFFERSON SHARED FEW OF THE FEARS that his friend Madison had about the vices of the political system and the excesses of democracy in the states. Those fears led his fellow Virginian to lead a movement to scrap the Articles of Confederation in favor of an entirely new national government that operated directly on individuals rather than on the states. Like almost all Americans by 1786, Jefferson was open to revising the Articles by adding amendments that would give the Congress the powers to levy duties on imports and to regulate international trade. But he never fully grasped just how radical Madison’s plans actually were. Madison and his colleagues took the consensus in favor of adding amendments to the Articles
and ran with it, using the general acceptance of reform as an opportunity to convene a meeting in Philadelphia to do much more than simply amend the Articles. In fact, Madison was eager to drastically reduce the power of the states in the Union.

  Because both Jefferson and Adams were abroad when the Constitutional Convention met in the summer of 1787, they had to learn about the new Constitution months after it was drafted. Although Jefferson thought the Convention was “an assembly of demi-gods,” he objected to its vow of secrecy and was shocked by the Constitution it created. He told Adams he didn’t think a new constitution was necessary. “Three or four new articles,” he said, might have been “added to the good, old, and venerable fabric” of the Articles of Confederation. He especially objected to the office of the president. It seems, he said, “to be a bad edition of a Polish king,” who, once elected, served for life—which is what Jefferson feared would happen with the American president. Instead, he wanted the president to serve for only four years and be ineligible for a second term.40

  By contrast, Adams was pleased that the Articles had been scrapped. The new Constitution so much resembled the balanced government and the separation of powers he advocated in his Defence that he naturally was satisfied with much of it. Unlike Jefferson, he approved of the office of the president, and having the president chosen over and over was “so much the better.” Since Adams feared aristocracy more than monarchy, he told Jefferson that he would “have given more Power to the President and less to the Senate,” especially in the appointment of officers. “Elections to offices, which are great objects of Ambition,” Adams told Jefferson, ought to be regarded “with terror”—an extraordinary remark for someone who was supposed to be a republican.41

  Jefferson let this provocative remark pass. Perhaps that was because he and Adams in 1787–1788 were so caught up in issues involving negotiating loans, international trade, and a civil war in the Netherlands that offhand remarks about elections scarcely seemed to matter. But Jefferson also had a propensity to overlook important points in letters or, as in the case of the Defence, books that did not fit with his conceptual world. In the fall of 1787, Madison wrote Jefferson an incredibly lengthy letter, explaining in great detail the thinking that went into the making of the new federal Constitution. He especially emphasized his own ideas about the dangers of majority rule in a republic. In his response Jefferson scarcely acknowledged Madison’s sophisticated account of the thinking behind the Constitution. Instead, he set forth his objection to a president who could be continually reelected, and reaffirmed his “principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail”—precisely the point that Madison had most systematically questioned.42 Still, there is no doubt that Jefferson’s growing appreciation of his friend Madison’s great contribution to the creation of the Constitution helped him to come around and support the Constitution more enthusiastically than he had at the outset.43

  One other “bitter pill” Jefferson found in the Constitution was its lack of a bill of rights.44 Adams also raised that omission with Jefferson, mainly because he had included a declaration of rights in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution. But Jefferson seems to have desired a bill of rights at least partly out of embarrassment over what “the most enlightened and disinterested characters” among his liberal French friends might think, especially since they were busy drawing up drafts of possible declarations of rights for their own nation. No matter that Madison had tried to explain to Jefferson in great detail that the new government did not resemble traditional governments that had had to be bargained with and that writing out the people’s rights might actually have the effect of limiting them. Jefferson knew, and that was enough, that “the enlightened part of Europe have given us the greatest credit for inventing this instrument of security for the rights of the people, and have been not a little surprised to see us soon give it up.”45

  • • •

  WHILE HIS FELLOW AMERICANS back home were creating a new federal Constitution and debating its ratification, Jefferson, despite his official position as minister to France, was becoming more deeply involved in the efforts of Lafayette and his other French friends to reform the French monarchy. These efforts, which culminated in the French Revolution, ultimately changed Jefferson’s attitude toward the world and in particular his attitude toward the American Revolution. He came to believe that the American Revolution was not simply an event whose significance was confined only to Americans. It became for him, much more clearly than he had realized in 1776, a historic event that had launched a republican revolutionary movement that would spread around the world. He came to see the French Revolution as a consequence of the American Revolution. He eventually concluded that France had become a sister republic to the United States, and because of that relationship he became much more emotionally invested in the success of the French Revolution than many of his countrymen and certainly more than John Adams. Indeed, Adams became skeptical of the French Revolution at the outset and thus began the estrangement of the two American friends.

  It took a while for Jefferson to realize the seriousness of the emerging crisis in France. In August 1786 he had no inkling whatsoever of any trouble brewing among the French people. In contrast to England, which had experienced an assassination attempt on George III, the French people were engaged in “singing, dancing, laugh, and merriment.” There were, he told Abigail Adams, “no assassinations, no treasons, rebellions or other dark deeds. When our king goes out, they fall down and kiss the earth where he has trodden: and then they go on kissing one another. . . . They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.”46

  When the Assembly of Notables met early in 1787 and was widely mocked, Jefferson concluded that the French were not seriously interested in reform. But all the turmoil, he complained, was ruining social life in Paris. “Instead of that gaiety and insouciance which has distinguished it heretofore, all is filled with political debates into which both sexes enter with equal eagerness.”47 Although he said he was a mere spectator of events, he couldn’t resist the requests from his liberal French friends—Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld, du Pont de Nemours, Condorcet, and others—for constitutional advice. Indeed, he periodically met in an informal seminar on political theory with these friends, members of what Jefferson called “the Patriotic party.” He seemed to think that the Patriots were merely French versions of the American patriots of 1776. They were “sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, [and] longed for occasions of reforming it.” They would “from the natural progress of things . . . press forward to the establishment of a constitution which shall assure them a good degree of liberty.”48 With his usual optimism Jefferson was sure that everything could be sorted out in a rational manner.

  As early as December 1787, Adams, with his skeptical view of human nature, saw things quite differently. He realized that all of Europe was talking of reviving assemblies and calling for meetings of estates, with France taking the lead. Surely, he told Jefferson, some improvement, some lessening of superstition, bigotry, and tyranny, would result from all this ferment. But he had doubts that things could be kept under control. “The world will be entertained with noble sentiments and enchanting Eloquence, but will not essential Ideas be sometimes forgotten, in the anxious study of brilliant Phrases?” Europe, he said, had tried such experiments before, and they had never worked out. “Contradictions will not succeed, and to think of Reinstituting Republicks . . . would be to revive Confusion and Carnage, which must again End in despotism.”49

  In response Jefferson expressed none of these doubts. He was pretty sure that France’s “internal affairs will be arranged without blood.” The opposition was moderate, and if it could remain so, he said, “all will end well.”50 In November 1788 he asked John Jay, who was now the American secretary for foreign affairs in the Confederation government, for a leave of absence for five or six months to go home to attend to his plantation. Jefferson fully expected
to return to France. When he learned that the Estates-General would convene in May 1789—the assembly of clergy, nobles, and the Third Estate of commoners hadn’t met since 1614—he predicted that France in two or three years would probably enjoy “a tolerably free constitution, and that without it’s having cost them a drop of blood.”51 He had come to realize, as he told Washington in December 1788, that “the nation has been awakened by our revolution, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde.”52 Instead of a republic, however, he thought France would end up with a constitutional monarchy like that of England.

  By May 1789, while his countrymen were getting their new national government on its feet, Jefferson was still in France and still enthusiastic about the course of its Revolution. “The revolution in this country has advanced thus far without encountering any thing which deserves to be called a difficulty,” he reported to John Jay. But, he admitted, there had been riots in Paris and elsewhere, with several hundred Frenchmen killed by government troops. This was not a little rebellion feeding the tree of liberty; indeed, these mobs, he said, were composed of “the most abandoned banditti of Paris,” and their rioting was totally unprovoked and unjustified. Believing that France was involved merely in a constitutional reformation, Jefferson had little sense of the deep rumbling anger of the French people that was beginning to erupt. None of these riots, he claimed in all innocence, had “a professed connection with the great national reformation going on.”53

  Sometimes Jefferson seemed to forget that he was the U.S. minister to a foreign country; instead of maintaining an official detachment from French affairs, he began acting as if he himself were one of the French reformers—in violation of all diplomatic protocol. He was in constant touch with his friends in the Patriot party, badgering them to create a constitution modeled on that of England. The king, he suggested, might be set over a bicameral legislature with the orders of the clergy and the nobility located in an upper house. He counseled his friends on the role of juries, and drafted a ten-point charter of rights that he sent to Lafayette. But the Third Estate ignored both his advice and his charter and, calling itself the National Assembly, persuaded many of the clergy and the nobility to join it and agree to vote by persons, not by “orders” or estates, thus creating a single uniform nation—the very sort of unicameral body Adams hated and feared. At this point Jefferson told Jay he wouldn’t report to him as frequently as he had in the past, “the great crisis being now over.”54