• • •
ADAMS WAS MUCH BETTER prepared intellectually and emotionally to deal with the emerging democratic and commercial circumstances of the early republic. Not that he favored them. He simply had many more doubts about the rationality and virtue of the American people than Jefferson had. Adams was never as bewildered and frightened as Jefferson by the new dynamic and popular world developing in the early nineteenth century. Profiteering, speculation, and corruption were only to be expected in a government as popular and democratic as America’s. Adams’s cynicism and low expectations of human nature protected him from the kind of disappointments Jefferson was experiencing.
Adams was never much committed to democracy in the first place. From the beginning in 1776, he had doubted the capacity of Americans to sustain their republic. He never had Jefferson’s faith in the virtue of the people, and he never assumed that democracy was the be-all and end-all of government.
Where Jefferson was sincere and earnest, Adams was ironic and facetious. As he put it in 1817, he was never able to “contemplate human Affairs, without laughing or crying.”54 He had few illusions about the world and thus was much less likely to become disillusioned. By contrast, Jefferson was full of illusions and was unprepared intellectually and emotionally for the rapidly changing world of the early republic.
Jefferson had always been the ultimate optimist, a virtual Pollyanna about everything. His expectations always outran reality. He thought he would have more rain to supply water for his mountaintop home than he had. His elaborate plans for flowers and vegetables at Monticello were never fulfilled. He was surprised by the immature and riotous behavior of the students at his new university in violation of the honor code. And of course there was his deep faith in a French Revolution that had gone awry. He was the pure American innocent. He had little understanding of man’s capacity for evil and had no tragic sense whatsoever. That is, he possessed no sense of the circumstances impinging on and limiting human action, little or no appreciation of the blindness of people struggling with a world they scarcely understood.55
More than any of the revolutionary leaders, Jefferson had placed unquestioning trust in the people and in the future. All the problems of the present would be taken care of by the people, if not now, then eventually. As he told Adams in 1816, he always liked “the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”56 While Adams was complaining about the society’s corruption and the direction it was taking, Jefferson had nearly always remained calm and hopeful. Even when he had moments of apprehension over the future, as he did in 1808, he did not allow them to get him down. He told his daughter Martha that “not being apt to deject myself with evils before they happen, I nourish the hope of getting along.” He expected problems to be solved by themselves, that sooner or later something would turn up. He saw his financial troubles coming at him and his household “as an approaching wave in a storm. Still I think we shall live as long, eat as much, & drink as much, as if the wave had already glided under our ship. Somehow or other these things find their way out as they come in, & so I suppose they will now.”57 Jefferson had always believed that the future was on his side and on the side of the people. A liberal democratic society would be capable of solving every problem, if not in his lifetime, then surely in the coming years.
It was the same with every difficulty. In one way or another, he expected things eventually to work out. He knew slavery was a great evil, but he believed his generation could do little about it. Instead he counseled patience and a reliance on the younger generation who would follow. When one of those younger men, Edward Coles, actually called on Jefferson in 1814 to lend his voice in the struggle against slavery, he could only offer his confidence in the future. “The hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come.”58
• • •
ALAS, DURING THE LAST DECADE of his life Jefferson came to have increasing doubts that the future would work out as he had expected. His correspondence in these years was punctuated with laments over “the rising generation, of which I once had sanguine hopes.”59 American society, including that of Virginia, was not progressing after all, but seemed to be going backward. Although Jefferson always celebrated common ordinary people, he hadn’t anticipated their entering and actually wielding the powers of governments. He had not foreseen the popular middle-class revolution that he and his Democratic-Republican Party had inspired. He was frightened by the popularity of Andrew Jackson, regarding him as a military man of violent passions and unfit for the presidency. He was dismayed that the American people were not learning to love one another but were increasingly engaged in partisan, sectarian, and sectional strife.
Although Jefferson had always prided himself on his cosmopolitanism, in the final years of his retirement he became more narrow-minded and localist than he had ever been. He tended to cut himself off from many of the current sources of knowledge of the outside world, and became, as one of his visitors, George Ticknor, noted, “singularly ignorant & insensible on the subjects of passing politics.” Jefferson read avidly, but, he admitted, “not of newspapers, these I have discarded.”60 He actually took only one newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer, and seemed to have no strong interest in receiving his mail, perhaps because he dreaded having to answer all of his many letters.
It was almost as if Jefferson couldn’t face what was happening around him in his beloved “country” of Virginia. Decay was everywhere in early-nineteenth-century Virginia, and Jefferson felt it at Monticello. According to one observer, Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, had become a “scene of desolation that baffles description.” Farms were “worn out, washed and gullied, so that scarcely an acre could be found in a place fit for cultivation.”
By 1820 Virginia, which once had been the most populous state by far, had already been surpassed by Pennsylvania and New York. The growth of its population had slowed dramatically, and it no longer possessed its earlier confidence that it would be in charge of the nation. Although cotton had come to dominate the exports of the lower South, Virginia had no secure staple. Its climate prevented the growing of cotton, and the old standby tobacco had depleted the state’s land. Some planters, including Jefferson, were trying to grow wheat for export, but it was not enough. Unable to farm the exhausted soil, many of Virginia’s vigorous and ambitious younger people were fleeing the state, moving with their slaves to the new territories of Alabama and Mississippi.61
Despite his contempt for the politicians and priests of New England, Jefferson had a half-conscious admiration for the society the Federalists had created. His dream of a three-tiered educational system and his desire to establish participatory democracy in little ward-republics resembled nothing so much as the townships of Adams’s New England.62 Jefferson knew there were great differences between the North and the South, and if he had forgotten, he had his granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge, who had moved to New England in 1825, to remind him. When she told him of the beauty and prosperity of New England that the southern states could never hope to emulate, not as long as “the canker of slavery eats into their hearts, and diseases the whole body by this ulcer at the core,” he could only agree. If only “one single circumstance” could be changed, he told his granddaughter, Virginia would be the equal of Massachusetts in beauty. “One fatal stain,” he said, “deforms what nature has bestowed on us of her fairest gifts.” He knew, however—it had become the dread of his life—that that awful stain could not be easily eradicated.63
Jefferson’s personal situation aggravated his sense that things were spinning out of control. Despite his lifelong aversion to public debts, his private debts kept mounting as he took out new loans to meet old ones. The enormous debt of £4,000 he had inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles, loomed over him, and he realized that he might never be able to pay it off. He feared that he might even lose Monticello. Although he complained constantly of his debts, he refused to cut back on his l
avish hospitality and his expensive wine purchases. In 1819 he cosigned a note for $20,000 for former Virginia governor William Cary Nicholas, whose daughter had married a Jefferson grandson. When Nicholas defaulted on the note, Jefferson became responsible for the debt. But he never let that responsibility affect his relationship with his granddaughter-in-law or with Nicholas. He was a gentleman to the end.64
Ordinary people in whom he had placed so much confidence were not becoming more enlightened after all. In fact, superstition and bigotry, which Jefferson identified with organized religion, were actually reviving, released by the democratic revolution he had led. Unlike Adams, he was temperamentally incapable of appreciating the deep popular strength of the evangelical forces that were seizing control of American culture in these early decades of the nineteenth century. He became a confused and embattled secular humanist in the midst of real moral majorities. Although he was still hopefully predicting that there was not a young man now alive who would not die a Unitarian, in 1822, Methodists, Baptists, and other evangelicals were gaining adherents by the tens of thousands in the Second Great Awakening and transforming American society.
Since he thought the priests of New England, with all their “pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying & slandering,” were behind this attempt “to evangelize the nation,” he dismissed the effort as simply an insidious scheme by New England, “having lost it’s political influence by disloyalty to it’s country, . . . to recover it under the mask of religion.”65
Jefferson’s solution to this perceived threat from New England and its “pious young monks from Harvard and Yale” was to hunker down in Virginia and build a university that would perpetuate true republican principles.66 “It is in our Seminary,” he told Madison, “that that Vestal flame is to be kept alive,” where it would then “spread anew over our own and the sister states.”67
Yet even building the University of Virginia brought sorrow and shock. Jefferson thought he had retired as president with a degree of popularity at least among Republicans, but that hadn’t been borne out in his own state of Virginia. His attempt to found a university in order “to procure an improvement in the moral condition of my native state . . . ran foul of so many local interests, of so many personal views, and of so much ignorance” that he could only count on posterity to vindicate his public service.68
He admitted to Adams that the Virginia legislature was not as eager to spend money for higher education as he had expected. The members were “a good piece of a century behind the age they live in,” and they had “so many biasses, personal, local, fanatical, financial, etc. that we cannot foresee in what their combinations will result.”69 Although Adams congratulated Jefferson on his new university, he was hardly comforting. He told Jefferson that with such esteemed supporters as Madison, Monroe, and himself, much was expected of the university. “But if it contains any thing quite original, and very excellent,” Adams feared that “prejudices are too deeply rooted to suffer it to last long.” It would not always have “such a noble Tryumvirate” to maintain it. He especially objected to Jefferson’s “sending to Europe for Tutors and Professors.” He thought that American professors had “more active ingenuity, and independent minds” than the Europeans, who were “all deeply tainted by prejudice both Ecclesiastical and Temporal.”70
Actually, Jefferson’s position in Virginia was such that his support for the university became more of a political liability in the legislature than an asset. “There are fanatics both in religion and politics,” he told Joseph Cabell, his collaborator in promoting the university, in 1818, “who, without knowing me personally, have long been taught to consider me as a raw head and bloody bones.” Even some in his own county were opposed to his promotion of higher education in Virginia.
Consequently, he even came to doubt the viability of popular republican government. “There is some flaw, not yet detected in our principle of representation,” he told Thomas Cooper, the British émigré scientist, “which fails to bring forth the wisdom of our country into it’s councils.” Just as Adams had predicted, the people weren’t electing into office the natural aristocrats after all. Where this would end he did not know, but it was bound to lead to “a state of degradation, which I thank heaven I am not to live to witness.”71
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ALTHOUGH JEFFERSON was always opposed to the past binding the present and as late as 1816 had urged the need to accommodate governments and institutions to changing circumstances in order “to keep pace with the times,” he became increasingly fearful of the federal government’s usurpation of authority at the expense of the states.72 In the presidential election of 1824, he favored William H. Crawford of Georgia, the southern candidate, and was deeply disappointed in Crawford’s third-place finish behind Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. The electoral result, he said, weakened his confidence in the discretion of his fellow citizens. “The ignorance of character, the personal partialities and the inattention to those questions which ought to have guided their choice, augur ill of the wisdom of our future course.”73
Although he politely congratulated Adams on the election of his son to the presidency, he feared that John Quincy’s election would only lead to a further consolidation of federal authority, especially since the new president proposed using the powers of the federal government to promote internal improvements and the general welfare. Most alarming was the fact that the government seemed to be expressing the will of the people. Although the members of Congress were behaving badly in looking for “objects whereon to throw away the supposed fathomless funds of treasury,” Jefferson realized “that in one of their most ruinous vagaries, the people were themselves betrayed into the same phrenzy with their Representatives.”74
Yet the Congress and its members were not the branch of government to be most feared. “Taxes and short elections will keep them right.” It was the judiciary that was most dangerous. The federal judges were “a subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric,” with the aim of turning America’s state-based government into a single supreme national government. It was a good thing for judges to be independent of a king, but it was a gross error to make them independent of “the will of the nation.”75
Consequently, Jefferson became a bitter critic of the usurpations of the Supreme Court, which were “driving us into consolidation.” He denied the Court “the right they usurp of exclusively explaining the constitution.” He claimed that the other branches had an equal and coordinate right of interpreting the Constitution, including deciding issues between the federal government and the states. If Chief Justice Marshall’s theory of judicial review was allowed to stand, Jefferson believed that the Constitution would become “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”76
Jefferson thought that the state governments were granted power over “all legislation and administration in affairs which concern their own citizens only,” and to the federal government was “given whatever concerns foreigners, or the citizens of other states.” Hence the United States was a single confederation, with the states being “the domestic, the other the foreign branch of the same government, neither having control over the other, but within it’s own department.” If serious conflicts should arise between the two levels of government, “a Convention of the states must be called” as an umpire to settle the differences.77
As much as he hated slavery, he loved Virginia and its culture more. Suddenly he realized that the North was eager to interfere with the southern way of life. With the Revolution, the northern states had begun eliminating slavery, and by 1804 all of the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had legally abolished the institution. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, antislavery sentiment in the North was spreading, making the future for Jefferson seem increasingly ominous. The Missouri crisis of 1819–1820, provoked by n
orthern efforts to limit the spread of slavery in the West, became for Jefferson and other southerners “a fire bell in the night” that marked “the knell of the Union” and a threat to the revolutionary dream of republican self-government.78
Like many other southerners, Jefferson believed that the Missouri crisis was “merely a question of power,” not of morality. He thought the Federalists, “despairing of ever rising again under the old division of whig and tory,” had devised a new division, “of slave-holding & non-slave-holding states.” This sectional division had “a semblance of being Moral,” but it was really about northern efforts to gain ascendancy over the South in the nation. Indeed, he told Gallatin, if there was any morality in the Missouri crisis, it lay with the South. By spreading and diffusing slavery over the territories of the West, the southern slaveholders were actually increasing the “happiness” of the slaves and helping to make possible their “future liberation.”
Using the federal government, as the northerners were trying to do, to restrict the right of the people of Missouri to own slaves was a serious violation of the Constitution and an ominous threat to self-government. Congress, Jefferson said, had no right “to regulate the conditions of the different descriptions of men composing a state.” Only each state had the “exclusive right” to regulate slavery. If the federal government arrogated to itself that right, then it would next declare all slaves in the country free. “In which case all the whites within the United States South of the Potomak and Ohio must evacuate their states; and most fortunate those who can do it first.” A breakup of the Union was possible, and bad as that would be, it would have the additional deplorable consequence of discouraging the European nations from overthrowing “their oppressive and Cannibal governments.”79
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