Friends Divided
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But events kept outrunning his high hopes for a compromise between the king and the people. On July 11, 1789, Jefferson assured Thomas Paine that the Revolution was once again effectively over, only to be confronted with the momentous events of the succeeding days, including the destruction of the Bastille. But even these bloody events did not shake Jefferson’s confidence that all would soon be well, as long as his Patriot friends were in control. In August, he hosted at his house a six-hour meeting of eight of the leading French liberal reformers as they plotted what steps to take. The discussion, he recalled, was “truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity, as handed down to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and Cicero.”55 (The next day he apologized to Louis XVI’s minister of foreign affairs for this extraordinary diplomatic impropriety.)
His naïve faith in the future was breathtaking. He had witnessed the mobs destroying the Bastille and “saw so plainly the legitimacy of them” that he never lost a bit of sleep. Since “quiet is so well established here . . . there is nothing further to be apprehended.” There was no want of bread, and the members of the National Assembly were in control. Being “wise, firm, and moderate. . . they will establish the English constitution, purged of it’s numerous and capital defects.” He had, he said, “so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government” and had such little fear of failure “where reason is left free to exert her force” that he was willing “to be stoned as a false prophet” if everything in France did not end well.56
Years later, in his autobiography, Jefferson set forth his account of what had happened and revealed how little understanding he had of the origins of the French Revolution. The queen, Marie Antoinette, he claimed in retrospect, was ultimately responsible for everything. If she, wallowing in her “inordinate gambling and dissipations,” had not prevented her weak husband, Louis XVI, from acting sensibly, things would have been different. “I have ever believed,” Jefferson concluded, “that had there been no queen, there would have been no revolution.”
Despite this unsophisticated conception of the historical process, Jefferson by 1821 had nevertheless come to appreciate the world-shattering consequences of the French Revolution. It had unleashed forces that had spread everywhere, with the result being “the condition of man thro’ the civilized world will be finally and greatly ameliorated.” Like the American Revolution, which was sparked by “a two penny duty on tea,” the French Revolution, he said, was “a wonderful instance of great events from small causes.”57
• • •
IN 1789 ADAMS WROTE JEFFERSON that “your Friend” had come in second in electoral votes to Washington and was thus going to be vice president. With his usual protective sarcasm, he told Jefferson that “it may be found easier to give Authority than to yield Obedience.”58
By December 1788, Jefferson had already heard that Adams—along with John Hancock, John Jay, and Henry Knox—was being suggested in the middle and northern states for vice president, it being taken for granted that Washington would become president. In October 1788, Madison had informed Jefferson that Adams and Hancock were “the only candidates in the Northern States brought forward with their known consent.” Madison thought both men were “objectionable” and wished that they would be satisfied with lesser positions in the government. Adams, he said, had “made himself obnoxious to many particularly in the Southern states by the political principles avowed in his book.” Others objected to Adams because he presumably had caballed against Washington during the war and was extravagantly self-important. Some wondered why, given his modest means, Adams preferred “an unprofitable dignity to some place of emolument better adapted to private fortune.” It seemed that he might have his “eye on the presidency,” and because of his “impatient ambition might even intrigue for a premature advancement,” especially if some “factious characters . . . should get into the public councils.” At any rate, said Madison, many believed that “he would not be a very cordial second to the General.”59
As it turned out, Adams received thirty-four votes to Washington’s sixty-nine. With every elector allowed to vote for two persons from two different states, Washington received every possible electoral vote. Adams’s thirty-four votes were just shy of a majority, with most of them coming from New England. The rest of the electoral votes were scattered among several individuals, with no one receiving more than John Jay’s nine votes.60 Adams knew that the southerners did not like him but was upset that the New Yorkers seemed to oppose him as well. With Washington, the Virginian, guaranteed to be president, it was natural for the electors to vote for a northerner, especially a New Englander, for their second choice; and Adams seemed to be the most famous New Englander. He made it clear to friends that he would not become a senator; in fact, he implied that he would accept nothing less than the vice presidency.
Although Adams had every right to feel that his election as vice president was a mark of respect for him, he nevertheless thought he had been elected “in a scurvy manner” and not out of “the Gratitude” that he thought was due him. Despite his election as vice president, he could not refrain from telling his friends privately how ignorant and inexperienced the American people were and how they had forgotten that “laws are the fountain of Freedom and Punctuality the source of Credit.”61 By 1789 Adams had become as fearful of the majority of commoners as he was of the aristocracy.
• • •
ALTHOUGH ADAMS, UNLIKE JEFFERSON, did not personally get involved in the French Revolution, his Defence of the Constitutions did. Early in 1789, Jefferson’s liberal friends Condorcet, du Pont de Nemours, and the Italian physician and agent for Virginia during the Revolution Philip Mazzei brought out a French translation of John Stevens’s Observations on Government, which had been originally published in New York in 1787.62 Stevens’s pamphlet was a severe attack on both Adams’s Defence and on De Lolme’s Constitution of England. Writing anonymously as a “Farmer of New Jersey,” Stevens, a well-to-do future inventor, who seems to be one of the few Americans who actually read the Defence with care, condemned Adams for suggesting that American governments resembled the English constitution and for promoting aristocracy in America. Stevens denied that there were any orders or estates in America, and therefore Adams’s rationale for a mixed or balanced government in the United States was misplaced. Since Stevens accepted a bicameral legislature with an independent executive, many, including some scholars, could not understand what his quarrel with Adams was about.63 But Stevens rightly realized that Adams in his Defence was presuming a social order of aristocrats in America, and he wanted no part of that claim. For him and for most Americans by 1787, there were no estates or social orders in America that had to be embodied in separate parts of the government as in England; instead, all parts of America’s governments—lower houses, senates, and executives—had become simply different kinds of representatives of the sovereign people. America had no aristocratic social power or an aristocracy of any sort, said Stevens. Adams was simply too caught up in his admiration for the English constitution to appreciate America’s uniqueness.
“Had Mr. Adams been a native of the old, instead of the new world,” wrote Stevens, “we should not have been so surprised at his system.” In Europe, he said, “wealth and power [were] everywhere in the hands of a few—nobility almost universally established,” especially in the English constitution.64
For Jefferson’s liberal French friends this was precisely the point that attracted them to Stevens’s pamphlet: they wanted to discredit the English constitution as a model for France and collapse that separate estate of the aristocracy into the Third Estate, so that everyone would become a commoner in a single body of the people. They issued their French edition of Stevens’s pamphlet to boost their effort to do away with orders or estates in the French government. Condorcet and Du Pont added so many notes and commentary to Stevens’s pamphlet that their version turned out to
be several times longer than the original. They annotated and manipulated Stevens’s work as they saw fit, turning his 56-page pamphlet into a 291-page book that included 174 pages of notes, a translation of the U.S. Constitution, and some notes from the Virginia ratifying convention. All this was done with the purpose of justifying a single assembly that would represent the whole nation. As their translation of Stevens’s pamphlet was invoked repeatedly in the debates that took place in the National Assembly during 1789, Adams had become a whipping boy for the problems of French society.65
• • •
BEFORE JEFFERSON DEPARTED for his six-month leave in the United States, fully intending to return to Paris, he wrote a remarkable letter to Madison outlining his idea “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Apparently discussions with his physician, Richard Gem, an elderly Englishman who was friendly with the philosophes and a supporter of the American Revolution, helped to gel his thinking about the issue of “whether one generation of men has a right to bind another.” Jefferson had in fact discussed this problem of the rights of succeeding generations with Lafayette in January 1789. He was particularly interested in the burden of debt that one generation left for successive generations, understandable since he was just becoming aware of the extent of his own personal debts.66 He suggested that these successive generations ought to be able to repudiate debts that had been incurred by previous generations. Constitutions ought to be treated in the same way. No single generation, which Jefferson with mathematical precision decided was nineteen years in length, should be able to “make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. . . . Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”67
In his response, Madison very tactfully suggested that Jefferson’s extraordinarily utopian idea was not “in all respects compatible with the course of human affairs,” and he went on to point out its various impracticalities. Jefferson respected Madison’s advice and never sought to implement his notion legally or constitutionally. Nevertheless, he remained stubbornly convinced for the rest of his life that the past should never be a burden to the present: it was central to his radical approach to the world, that people should never be held back by the dead hand of history.68
Adams, who probably had read more history than Jefferson and had certainly written more of it—three volumes of what he called “all genuine History”—never thought that society could ever be free of the past: it was a record of constant struggles between aristocrats and democrats from which mankind must learn the truths of politics. “Lessons,” he told Jefferson, “are never wanting. Life and History are full” of them. Describing these lessons in his volumes had cost him “a good deal of Trouble and Expence.” He had delved “into Italian Rubbish and Ruins,” among many other sources, but he had found “enough of pure Gold and Marble . . . to reward the Pains.” The past was the invaluable source of lessons for the present. Nearly all the commentators on the French Revolution, he lamented, had no sense of history whatsoever, which was why they so misjudged it. The only commentator, he said, who understood the importance of the past was Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.69
• • •
WHEN JEFFERSON ARRIVED back in the United States in the fall of 1789, both he and America had changed. Living in Europe had given him a new perspective on his country. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s, he had criticized his fellow Virginians for their backwardness and the likelihood of their losing all sense of virtue—often in terms similar to those of Adams. He had urged reform of everything—of the Virginia constitution, of the laws, of religion, of slavery. He had warned that “from the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill.” Our rulers would become corrupt and the people careless. The people would be forgotten and their rights disregarded. “They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money.”70
But now he was no longer obsessed with reforming his state and society. Even eliminating slavery was no longer uppermost in his mind; instead he emphasized ameliorating the conditions of his slaves at Monticello. His experience with European sophistication and luxury had given him a new appreciation of the plainness and provinciality of America. He was “savage enough,” he told a German correspondent in 1785, “to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital” of Paris. America didn’t need reforming, but old decayed oppressive Europe did. Indeed, Jefferson returned from Europe convinced that America must avoid at all costs becoming more like Europe.71
But when he arrived in the temporary federal capital of New York in March 1790 to take up the position of secretary of state in the new federal government, a responsibility he accepted reluctantly, he discovered that many Americans wanted to do just that—become more like decadent, monarchical Europe. He was “astonished,” he later recalled, “to find the general prevalence of monarchical sentiments,” especially sentiments in favor of the English constitution. At dinner parties and other social occasions, he found very few Americans who seemed willing to support “republicanism.”72
Jefferson’s memory was not faulty. America had changed a great deal since he had left in 1784, and talk of royalism and monarchy had indeed become more prevalent, especially in New England and New York. Benjamin Tappan, the father of the future abolitionists, told Henry Knox in 1787 that “monarchy” had become “absolutely necessary to save the states from sinking into the lowest abyss of misery.” Not only had the Constitution been created largely out of fear of too much democracy, but the strong independent president was very much welcomed as an elected monarch, resembling the Polish king that Jefferson had predicted.
In 1789 the president had been greeted with acclamations of “Long live George Washington!” with some calling his inauguration as president “a coronation.” One of his future secretaries of war even saluted Washington, “You are now a King, under a different name”—may you “reign long and happy over us.” With toasts being drunk to “his Highness,” it was not surprising that, in the first draft of his inaugural address, Washington attempted to counter these monarchical expectations by pointing out that he had no offspring, “no family to build in greatness upon my country’s ruins.” Although Madison talked him out of this draft, Washington’s desire to show the public that he entertained no kingly ambitions revealed just how widespread was the talk of monarchy in 1789.73
Jefferson recalled that the most anyone in 1790 would do in support of republican features in the new government was to say that the Constitution was inevitably going to become more monarchical in time.74 Indeed, that was a common supposition of those who favored a stronger, more monarchical-like government in 1789—the Federalists, they called themselves, clinging to the name the supporters of the Constitution had adopted. Many of these Federalists thought that time was on their side. They were well versed in the theory of the Scottish social scientists that held that states progressed through four stages of development—from hunter-gathering, to herding, to an agricultural phase, and finally to the sophisticated commercial stage that characterized the modern states of Britain and France. As American society inevitably left the agricultural stage and became more mature, more unequal, and hierarchical, and came to resemble the societies of Europe, the Federalists concluded that the United States would necessarily have to become more monarchical. Rawlins Lowndes of South Carolina thought that America was halfway there. Its government, he said, so closely resembled the British form that everyone naturally expected “our changing from a republic to monarchy.”75
• • •
AS FAR AS JOHN ADAMS WAS CONCERNED, the United States was already a monarchy, a republican monarchy, to be sure, but nevertheless a monarchy. “The Constitution of Massachusetts is a limited Monarchy,” he said. “So is the new
Constitution of the United States.” No one could understand what he meant. By his lights, however, any state that had a strong independent executive was a monarchy of some sort, a concept that most Americans found confusing, if not absurd. Most, especially most southerners, were convinced that all Adams cared about was the monarchical English constitution.76
Since southern aristocrats were more confident of their position in the society and less fearful of democracy than elites in the North, they became the most fervent supporters of liberty, equality, and popular republican government and at the same time the most severe critics of both Adams and the northern talk of monarchy. Like Jefferson, these southern aristocrats could claim to be full-fledged republicans without fearing the populist repercussions their northern counterparts had come to dread.
It was not surprising, as Senator William Maclay from Pennsylvania noticed, that most of those who supported titles and dwelled on other monarchical formalities in government came from New England, where the social structure was most equal and the gentlemen-aristocrats, such as they were, were always more vulnerable to challenge. Southern slaveholding aristocrats, whose elite status could usually be taken for granted, could therefore, as one Marylander did, easily mock Adams’s talk of “the awful distance which should be maintained between some and others” and more readily ridicule his rants “upon the necessity of one of his three balancing powers, consisting of the well born, or of those who are distinguished by their descent from a race of illustrious ancestors.” Where in America, asked this sarcastic Marylander, “are those well born to be found?”77