Jefferson had been especially alarmed by Adams’s decision to open up trade with the black rebel state. Allowing “Toussaint’s subjects to a free commerce” with the southern states and “free ingress & intercourse with their black brethren” made him very uneasy. “If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatsoever,” he told Madison, “we have to fear it.” Since the Federalists were willing to accept this migration of blacks into America, he said sarcastically, then they ought not to worry so much about a possible French invasion of the country. “If they are guarded against the Cannibals of the terrible republic,” he declared, “they ought not to object to being eaten by a more civilized enemy.”6
Although neither Adams nor Jefferson had campaigned personally, Jefferson had kept tabs on what was happening in each state, promoted with advice and funds the writings of Republican scandalmongers, and in numerous letters to key Republicans set forth his principles and ideas. He became as much of a party leader as any presidential candidate in American history.
• • •
JEFFERSON LATER RECALLED THAT HE had met Adams on the day they had learned of the vote of New York that gave the Republicans the victory. Adams was “very sensibly affected” and told Jefferson that although he had been beaten “in this contest,” he would be “as faithful a subject as any you will have.” Jefferson replied that he did not see the election as a “personal contest” between him and Adams, but as a division between two parties, with different principles of government, which had put each of them at their head. According to Jefferson, Adams said, “You are right . . . that we are but passive instruments, and should not suffer this matter to affect our personal dispositions.” Unfortunately, recalled Jefferson, Adams “did not long retain this just view of the subject.”7
Since the inauguration of the new president was not until March 4, 1801, Adams had several months remaining in his term. The lame-duck Federalist Congress passed a Judiciary Act and other legislation that created six new circuit courts with sixteen new judges along with many new marshals and district attorneys and justices of the peace. Before surrendering the presidency to Jefferson, Adams appointed Federalists to these new offices, at the same time selecting his new secretary of state, John Marshall, as chief justice of the United States. Because Adams signed the commissions of many of these appointments shortly before Jefferson’s inauguration, the infuriated Republicans exaggeratedly labeled them “midnight appointments” and vowed to repudiate the Judiciary Act as soon as possible.
Since Jefferson and his presumed vice president, Aaron Burr, had inadvertently ended up with the same number of electoral votes, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Adams played no role in the resolution of the crisis, but both he and Abigail much preferred Jefferson to Burr. Adams saw Burr as an upstart, “rising like a balloon,” whose political manipulations could only encourage “party intrigue and corruption!” Abigail said “his private Character will not bear the scrutiny which Mr. Jefferson’s will.” He had Napoleonic ambitions and was “a much more dangerous Man than Mr. Jefferson.”8
Abigail recorded a conversation she had with Jefferson (recorded perhaps because such conversations had become so rare) at a large presidential dinner held in January 1801, two months before Jefferson took office. Knowing that congressmen would soon decide his fate, Jefferson asked her to identify several members attending the dinner, since he never went into the House of Representatives and thus knew only about one in twenty of them. Pointing at one member, she said, “You surely know him, Smiling. He is a democrat.” “No, I do not,” he answered. His ignorance had proved embarrassing, he told Abigail, because some congressmen had complained that he did not take off his hat to them when passing. Besides, said Jefferson, he wouldn’t go into the House because he knew “there are persons there who would take a pleasure in saying something purposefully to affront me.” Abigail declared she knew nearly all of the congressmen, “a few violent demos excepted,” but she had recently avoided attending the House for the same reason as Jefferson: “party spirit is much alike upon both sides [of] the Question.” When Jefferson replied that there was “more candor and liberality upon one side than there is upon the other,” she said, “I differ with you, Sir.” Jefferson then asked her what she thought the House would do about the tie vote for president. She said she didn’t know, but she quoted a clergyman who declared that when people “do not know what to do, they should take great care that they do not do—they know not what.” At this, said Abigail, Jefferson “laught out, and here ended the conversation.”9
Abigail’s recording of her exchange with Jefferson revealed her ambivalent feelings—her saucy sarcasm directed at the leader of what many Federalists caustically labeled the “dems” mingled with her respect for his civility and politeness.
Despite his preference for Jefferson over Burr, Adams was not happy with Jefferson’s election, for it meant that the country would be tossed “in the tempestuous sea of liberty for years to come and where the bark can land but in a political convulsion I cannot see.” Americans, he said, “have sett up pretensions to superior information, intelligence and public virtue in comparison with the rest of mankind.” Those pretensions “will very soon be found wanting, if they have not already failed in the trial.” He doubted whether America’s experiment in republicanism could last.10
• • •
BY CONTRAST, Jefferson was filled with optimism. He told John Dickinson in 1801 that America’s ship of state had passed through a storm promoted by individuals seeking to sink it, but his administration would right the ship and put it on its proper republican tack. The spirit of 1776, he said, had finally been fulfilled, and the United States could at last become a beacon of liberty for the world. “A just and solid republican government” of the kind he sought to build “will be a standing monument & example for the aim & imitation of the people of other countries.” Expanding on the theme of his inaugural address, he told Dickinson that the American Revolution had excited the minds of “the mass of mankind.” Its “consequences,” he said, “will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.”11 With Napoleon’s assuming the office of consul for life and the apparent stifling of the French Revolution, America’s role as the sole emblematic republic became all the more important. It was Jefferson, more than any other single figure, who created the idea of America’s exceptionalism and its special role in the world.
With the end of a decade of Federalist delusion, the new Democratic-Republican president had recovered his confidence in the future. America had thrown off its momentary fantasies, he told Joseph Priestley, a fellow supporter of the French Revolution noted for his radical religious views. The forces of “bigotry in Politics & Religion,” said Jefferson, had been routed. “We can no longer say that there is nothing new under the sun, for this whole chapter in the history of man is new.” He told Priestley that his predecessor, President Adams, had never understood the progressive wave of popular opinion sweeping the country and had never appreciated innovation. Adams was one of those who pretended to encourage education, but it was “the education of our ancestors” that he meant.
Jefferson invoked once again Adams’s 1798 response to the young men of Philadelphia whose reactionary character had so shocked him. Adams, he told Priestley, had claimed in his answer that there could be no real progress in science and religion and that “we were to look backwards not forwards for improvement.” Jefferson believed that Adams and the Federalists—“the barbarians”—had sought “to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put every thing into the hands of power & priestcraft.” This was the sort of ignorance that had forced Priestley to flee Britain in 1791 and more recently had embroiled him in controversy in America. All those “who live by mystery and charlatanerie,” said Jefferson, “fear being rendered useless” by those like Priestley who sought to simplify “the Christian philosophy.” No doubt, he said, Christi
anity was “the most sublime & benevolent” religion, but it was also the “most perverted system that ever shone on man.”12
Despite his disparaging remark about Adams in his letter to Priestley, he had wanted, as he told Madison in December 1800, to reach “a candid understanding with mr A.” He didn’t think Adams’s feelings or his interest would object to some sort of rapprochement. Confident of his ability to soothe Adams’s quirky sensibilities, Jefferson hoped “to induce in him dispositions liberal and accommodating.”13 Anticipating his major means of politicking as president, Jefferson on January 17, 1801, invited Adams to dinner.14
Jefferson’s friends were bewildered and mortified by his persistent praise of Adams, praise that they felt was undeserved. “Your minds are not congenial,” one friend told him, “his being too contracted to contain a generous or disinterested sentiment and his conduct towards you has evinced it—he has done all he cou’d to injure you and he hates you on that account.” But Jefferson tended to ignore such advice, and he remained confident of his ability to conciliate not just Adams but most of the Federalists as well. Consequently, he inserted in his inaugural address an appeal for unity. Although Americans were called by different names, he declared that “we are all republicans: we are all federalists.”15
Adams likewise had hesitated to criticize Jefferson publicly during the campaign, which puzzled some of his fellow Federalists. Instead of condemning Jefferson, complained Fisher Ames, the arch-Federalist from Adams’s own state of Massachusetts, Adams tended to praise Jefferson as “a good patriot, citizen and father.” He “acts as if he did not hate or dread Jefferson.”16
Still, Adams was pained by his defeat. During the crisis over the electoral tie between Jefferson and Burr, Jefferson met Adams and told him that a Federalist plan to override the election by congressional action “would probably produce resistance by force and [have] incalculable consequences.” Adams showed no sympathy for Jefferson’s plight and, “with a vehemence” he had not shown before, said that the problem could be quickly solved if Jefferson would simply give assurances that he would honor the public debt, maintain the navy, and not remove the federal officers. Jefferson replied that he would not enter the office “but in perfect freedom to follow the dictates of my own judgment.” Then, said Adams, “things must take their course.” With that abrupt remark, the conversation ended. It was “the first time in our lives,” Jefferson recalled, that he and Adams “had ever parted with any thing like dissatisfaction.”17
The two former friends exchanged several businesslike letters that showed little or no warmth. Several weeks before the inauguration, Adams informed Jefferson that he was leaving seven horses and two carriages in the stables for the new president’s use. Unfortunately, Congress discovered that Adams had purchased the horses and carriages out of the wrong federal fund, and the issue became embarrassing to Adams. (The British chargé in the new capital city of Washington, D.C., thought this was one of the reasons Adams skipped the inauguration.) Jefferson didn’t want the horses and carriages anyhow and purchased his own.18
On March 8, 1801, Jefferson forwarded to Adams a private letter that had mistakenly been delivered to him. The letter had contained information about the funeral of Adams’s son Charles, who had died recently of alcoholism at age thirty. Adams told Jefferson that if he had read the letter, it “might have given you a moment of Melancholly or at least of Sympathy with a mourning Father.” Adams went on to say that he hoped that Jefferson would never experience anything similar. The tone suggested that Adams had been hurt that Jefferson never acknowledged Charles’s death. Adams concluded by rather belatedly wishing Jefferson “a quiet and prosperous Administration.”19 They would not correspond again with each other for eleven years.
• • •
BELIEVING THAT MOST OF THE EVILS afflicting human beings in the past had flowed from the abuses of inflated political establishments, Jefferson set out to regain what he believed was the original aim of the Revolution: to reduce the overweening and dangerous power of government. He sought to create a general government that could rule without the traditional attributes of power—with as few offices, as little debt, as low taxes, and as small a military establishment as possible.
Jefferson advocated his kind of minimal government because, like such other eighteenth-century radicals as Thomas Paine and William Godwin, he believed that society was naturally harmonious and benevolent and did not need much government. This eighteenth-century radicalism was determined by how much faith theorists had in the inherent sociability of people. Carry this belief in the natural sociability of people far enough and a thinker ended up, as William Godwin did, with a kind of anarchism. Jefferson and Paine never wanted to go that far, but they both sought to disparage government and shrink its power as much as possible. Get rid of the intrusive elements of monarchy—its titles, privileges, excessive taxes, perquisites of offices, monopolies, and corporate grants—and society could sustain itself.
In the opening of Common Sense, Thomas Paine had drawn a sharp distinction between society and government. “Society,” he wrote, “is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.” Society “promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections”; government “negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.” Later in his Rights of Man, which Jefferson completely agreed with, Paine went even further in denigrating the importance of government. Since “society performs for itself almost every thing which is ascribed to government,” Paine thought that government contributed little or nothing to civilized life. Instead of ordering society, as Adams and other Federalists believed, government, said Paine, “divided it; it deprived it of its natural cohesion, and engendered discontents and disorder, which otherwise would not have existed.”20 If only the natural tendencies of people to love and care for one another were allowed to flow freely, unclogged by the artificial interference of government, particularly monarchical government, Paine and Jefferson both believed, society would prosper and hold itself together.
This would occur because people were innately sociable; they possessed a social sense that naturally bound people together. Such an inherent social predisposition was needed to counter the problems raised by Lockean sensationalism. Although Jefferson generally accepted the premises of Lockean sensationalism—that the character and personality of individuals were formed by the environment operating through the senses—he and other liberals were not such out-and-out sensationalists that they counted on men and women being able by reason alone to control the environment’s chaotic bombardment of their senses. Something else was required in individuals to help structure their sensuous experiences. Otherwise human personalities, as James Wilson pointed out in 1790, citing David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, would become “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, . . . in a perpetual flux and movement.”21
A society composed of such variable and unstable personalities would be impossible. Something had to bind people together intuitively and naturally and bring order out of all the various sensations flying about. As Jefferson said, “The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions.” Jefferson and others modified their stark Lockean environmentalism—their belief that circumstances by themselves shaped people’s character—by positing a natural sense of sociability and sympathy in every human being. “Nature,” said Jefferson, “hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.” Jefferson admitted that this moral sense did not exist in everyone and was imperfect in others. But that there were exceptions did not contradict the rule that such a social disposition was “a general characteristic of the species.” When this moral sense was lacking, he said, “we endeavor to suppl
y the defect by education, by appeals to reason and calculation.”22
Although the idea of such a moral gyroscope in the English-speaking world went back at least to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, and Bishop Joseph Butler, by the late eighteenth century it was generally identified with the Scottish moral or commonsense philosophy associated with Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, and other Scots; but it was much too prevalent among enlightened liberals like Jefferson to be linked to any single writer or group of writers. It resembled the categories of Immanuel Kant, which were likewise designed to counteract the worst and most frightening implications of pure Lockean sensationalism. If man’s character were simply the consequence of the “impressions” made upon him “from an infinite variety of objects external and internal,” Nathaniel Chipman, the federal district judge in Vermont, wrote in 1793, “he would be the sport of blind impulses.” In order “to prevent the utmost capriciousness of conduct” by individuals beset by multitudes of fluctuating impressions, “some constant regulator is necessary.” In wild and changing environments, people needed “a balancer, as well as some arbiter of moral action.”23
And this regulator, balancer, or arbiter was not reason, which was too unequally distributed in people, but a common moral disposition hardwired in nearly every person’s heart or conscience, however humble and however lacking in education that person may have been. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,” said Jefferson; “the former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” Despite his jaundiced view of the inferiority of blacks in reason and imagination, Jefferson did concede that the African slaves possessed the same moral sense and sympathy for others as whites. They had the same endowments of “the heart” and the same feelings of “benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity” as whites.24
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