The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  The partnership worked both ways. Washington supplied Madison with a letter, backing the Congressman’s attempt to win a tonnage discrimination bill against the British. In the struggle to persuade dubious congressmen to back a bill of rights, Washington declared that Madison’s list of amendments “have my wishes for a favorable reception in both houses.” The two branches of Congress approved Madison’s bill in a joint resolution on September 25, 1789.16

  Washington’s support of the Bill of Rights played a crucial part in bringing North Carolina into the union. The state’s governor, Samuel Johnston, had written the President a letter, congratulating him on his election and promising that North Carolina would consider changing its negative stance if a bill of rights was added to the Constitution. Washington wrote a cordial reply, which Madison urged the governor to publish in Tarheel newspapers. Within a few weeks of Congress approving the rights, North Carolina voted to send congressmen and senators to New York. Now Rhode Island was the only state that still declined to join the Union.

  When Congress adjourned in September 1789, Washington discussed with Madison an idea he had been thinking about for some time. Did Madison think there was any “impropriety” in his taking a trip through the New England states during the next two months? Madison pronounced it an excellent idea and saw no reason why the President should not undertake it.

  As for Congressman Madison, he was heading back to Virginia to mend a few political fences there on behalf of the new government. At least one obstacle to his efforts had been removed. Patrick Henry had recently announced he was leaving politics to practice law and make enough money to feed his numerous children. Madison was also looking forward to a reunion with his old friend, Thomas Jefferson, who was coming home on a five-month leave of absence from his ambassadorship. Madison promised to explore in more detail Jefferson’s feelings about becoming Washington’s Secretary of State.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Birth of an Ideologue

  IN FRANCE, DURING AMERICA’S eighteen-month struggle to create and ratify the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson was having a very different experience. A revolution was rumbling beneath the surface of a country he had grown to love. He considered King Louis XVI “a good man,” though he privately deplored the immense unchecked powers he and his ministers wielded, and their apparent indifference to France’s numerous poor.

  Nevertheless, Jefferson made many friends among upper-class French men and women. Above all, he admired their politeness—to him and to each other. “It is impossible to be among people who wish more to make one happy,” he told a correspondent. He was occasionally troubled by the widespread indifference to marital vows among the rich. Domestic happiness, as Jefferson understood it, and had experienced it in America, was dismissed as a myth.

  In his many trips around the country, Jefferson talked as well as he could in his halting French (he never learned to speak the language well) to the common people of France. He bought food from them in their kitchens, asked them about the hours they worked, the money they made, their feelings about their country. He acquired a knowledge of their attitudes and problems that filled his heart with pity.

  Once, near the chateau of Fontainbleau, Jefferson met a ragged woman trudging along a road. The ambassador asked, Did she work? Yes, she was a day laborer. How much did she make? Eight sous (about eight cents) a day. She had two children to support and the rent for her house was six hundred sous a year. Jefferson realized that that was seventy-five days’ wages. Often, the woman continued, there was no work. What then? No bread. They starved.

  “We walked together near a mile and a half and she had…served me as my guide,” Jefferson said. “I gave her on parting 24 sous. She burst into tears of gratitude.”

  Jefferson was so moved, he wrote a letter to his friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, urging him to make a similar trip through the countryside. He should travel “absolutely incognito” and “ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds…to find out if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of this investigation, and a sublime one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing of a morsel of meat into their kettles of vegetables.”1

  The Marquis did not reply to this advice, which he almost certainly thought bizarre. Like most noblemen, Lafayette spent his days in his mansion in Paris and in frequent visits to King Louis XVI’s vast palace at nearby Versailles. No ruler in Europe approached the splendor in which Louis XVI lived, surrounded by hundreds of servants and swarms of courtiers. The royal court was an apotheosis of the absolute power that the king’s great-great-great grandfather, Louis XIV, had created to make France the ruling power of Europe.

  The result was a political vacuum in the rest of the country. “The nation,” one of Louis XVI’s ministers of finance wrote in a confidential report, “is an aggregate of different and incompatible social groups, whose members have so few links between themselves that everyone thinks solely of his own interests…Your Majesty is obliged to decide everything by yourself or through your agents. Special orders are needed before anyone will contribute in any way to the public good.”2

  Louis XVI’s annual revenues were 500 million livres—the equivalent of 100 million dollars or 20 million pounds. (In modern money, 1 billion, 500 million dollars.) This was far more than King George III of England dared to collect from his subjects, and twice as much as the Austrian emperor’s income. It was also three or four times the incomes of the kings of Prussia, Russia, or Spain. But the tax system was so antiquated and corrupt, France had long been forced to resort to deficit financing. The government owed hundreds of millions of livres to Dutch and English bankers on which it paid outrageous interest.3

  Early in 1787, the King and his ministers finally admitted the nation was on the verge of bankruptcy. They summoned an Assembly of Notables to advise them on how to fix the tax system. Essentially, the notables were an expanded version of the king’s council, selected by the ruler for their dependability and loyalty. The aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois resisted any and all requests by the King’s ministers to join them in raising more revenue. Instead, they accused the ministers—and, by implication, the King and his court—of gross waste and corruption. The Marquis de Lafayette emerged as one of the leaders in this blame game.

  The King was forced to call a meeting of a much larger body, the Estates General, in which the aristocrats, the clergy, and the middle class were represented. On May 5, 1789, while Congress was in the opening days of its first session in New York, Ambassador Jefferson was one of the two thousand spectators at this historic conclave. They met in a huge hall constructed in Versailles solely for this purpose.

  The chief problem, as Jefferson soon noted in letters to several American correspondents, was the immense size of this ancient parliament—twelve hundred members. He wondered if “tumult and confusion” could be avoided in such a gigantic conclave. There were no rules of procedure or debate. The members were Frenchmen, “among whom there are always more speakers than listeners.” Even more unhelpful was the decision to have the three estates meet in separate chambers of the gigantic “hall of states.”4

  There was another problem that Jefferson foresaw in a long letter to George Washington on the eve of the fateful year, 1789. “In my opinion,” he wrote, there was “a kind of influence which none of their plans for reform take into account [which] will elude them all; I mean the influence of women in the government. The manners of the nation allow them to visit, alone, all persons in office, to solicit the affairs of husband, family friends, and, [in] their solicitations, bid defiance to laws and regulations.”

  Growing gloomier with every word, Jefferson declared that no American, without the evidence of his own eyes, would believe “the desperate state to which things are reduced in this country from the omnipotence of [this] influence.” Americans did not realize how fortunate they were t
hat in their country, women did not try to extend their influence “beyond the domestic line.”5

  Most of the time, Jefferson tried to be optimistic. He assured James Madison and other friends that the French government would be transformed peacefully. He managed to dismiss the first outbreak of violence in Paris, shortly before the Estates General met. The army was called in to disperse rioters protesting a paper manufacturer who tried to reduce the wages of his workers. The troops opened fire and killed about one hundred of the protesters. In contrast to the way he had praised the rebellion of Daniel Shays and his followers in Massachusetts, Jefferson described these agitators as “the most abandoned banditti of Paris.” Never, he added, was a riot “more unprovoked and unpitied.” When similar disturbances erupted in other French cities, he dismissed them as nothing unusual. The cause was probably “want of bread.”6

  It gradually became evident that peaceful progress in the Estates General was virtually impossible. The nobles and the clergy refused to have any serious conversations with the “Third Estate”—the people’s representatives. They haughtily rejected the idea that the three estates should merge and vote as individuals, not as separate groups.

  Soon rumors swirled through the Third Estate that the King was summoning troops from all parts of France to assert his absolute control. On June 20, 1789, the people’s spokesmen found soldiers barring their access to the great hall and retreated to a nearby indoor tennis court, the Jeu de Paume. In a tumultuous meeting, they took an oath to remain in session until they had achieved a constitution, no matter what the King or his ministers said.

  The other estates had also been excluded from the hall of states. The King was mourning the death of his son and heir, and had presumed the Estates would join him. The violent reaction of the Third Estate was an ominous sign that they were determined to assert themselves. Soon they began calling for the other estates to join them in a congress or parliament that would speak for the whole nation.

  Jefferson had predicted that the nobles, led by Lafayette, would welcome such an invitation. But the majority of the aristocrats, including Lafayette, resisted the idea. To Jefferson’s surprise, the clergy were much more receptive. Most of them were parish priests, and they had strong class sympathies.

  On June 22, the bourgeoisie, most of the clergy, and numerous moderate nobles like Lafayette marched in a body to The Church of St. Louis, hoping a divine presence would help them resolve their differences. Jefferson and an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, joined them to hear the discussions. Mazzei later recalled that Jefferson “stopped at the threshold and said: ‘This is the first time that churches have ever been made some good use of.’”7

  By June 29, 1789, Jefferson was telling his American correspondents that “the triumph of the Tiers [the Estates General] is considered complete. Tomorrow they will recommence business, voting by persons on all questions…All danger of civil commotion here is at an end.” Little more than a week later, the shocked American envoy was forced to ask the king’s foreign minister, the Comte de Montmorin, for a guard of royal troops. His house had been robbed three times by roaming bands of thieves from the Paris slums. Civil commotion would soon become much too tame a term to describe the politics seething through Paris.8

  On July 10, Lafayette introduced a bill of rights in the National Assembly—the new name for the Estates General. The next day, Jefferson wrote a triumphant letter to Thomas Paine, who was in England, eagerly cheering on events in Paris. The ambassador praised the assembly for having shown “a coolness, wisdom and resolution to set fire to the four quarters of the kingdom and perish with it….rather than relinquish an iota of their plan for a total change of government.”

  Admittedly, Jefferson was writing in a state of high excitement. Still, the reader of this book may wonder if James Madison or George Washington would have been as thrilled by this vision of total power passing into the hands of the National Assembly. It was precisely the sort of government that Madison had labored to avoid in the Constitutional Convention—an arrangement without a trace of a check or balance to prevent the excesses of majority rule. Jefferson added to the letter a long list of rights and principles that the Assembly would have to incorporate in a constitution. But he soon learned that revolutionary events were outrunning the rational expectations of a man who loved to legislate. Instead, the four corners of the kingdom were about to catch fire.

  On July 13, as Jefferson was passing the Tuileries Gardens in his carriage, he witnessed a confrontation between a mob and a detachment of royal cavalry trying to preserve order. The mob attacked the cavalry using stones that had been collected for a new bridge over the Seine, Pont Louis XVI. “The showers of stones forced the horse to retire,” Jefferson reported. “The people now armed themselves with such weapons as they could find in armorer’s shops and private houses…and were roaming all night through all parts of the city.”

  The law-abiding citizens realized there was only one way to maintain a semblance of order. They organized a citizen’s guard and made the Marquis de Lafayette its commander in chief. Everyone began wearing cockades of white, blue, and pink colored ribbon which bore witness to their support for the revolution.

  Still clinging to optimism, Jefferson told Thomas Paine that “the progress of things here will be subject to checks from time to time, of course. Whether they will be great or small depends on the army. But they will be only checks.”

  That letter was mailed on the thirteenth of July. The next day, the mob, now semi-organized, acquired more weapons when they smashed open the gates of St. Lazare Prison and released the inmates. The rioters seized additional guns and ammunition at nearby armories and headed for the gloomy prison known as the Bastille, where prisoners of state were held. They demanded guns from the prison’s governor, who tried to stall them, hoping royal troops would rescue him. The mob exploded and swiftly overwhelmed the small garrison. Seizing the governor and lieutenant governor, they decapitated them on the spot and paraded their bleeding heads through the streets.

  Instead of hundreds of prisoners, a grand total of seven were released from the Bastille. Four were convicted forgers, a fifth was an aristocrat incarcerated at the request of his family because his taste in sexual adventures resembled the Marquis de Sade’s. The final two were lunatics, one of whom thought he was Julius Caesar; they were swiftly confined in another prison. Revolutions de Paris, a newspaper that began publishing on July 17, declared that uncounted innocent victims and venerable old men, imprisoned for generations, had been freed from the Bastille. It was the revolutionists’ first, but by no means the last, resort to the fine art of lying to the public.

  The truth or falsity of this aspect of the fall of the Bastille became irrelevant as the screaming mob held aloft the decapitated heads and surged through the city. One historian of the event maintains these blood-dripping skulls represented “a kind of revolutionary sacrament.” Some people turned away, appalled. They had supported the revolution as long as it was confined to abstractions such as Liberté. Others with stronger nerves and tougher stomachs decided, like their future descendants in Moscow, Peking, Havana, Caracas, and other capitals, that violence—blood—was the real key to power.9

  Few citizens in Paris were more excited by these murders than Thomas Jefferson. He rushed another letter to Thomas Paine, reporting that “the city committee” had organized an impromptu army of forty-eight thousand men with Lafayette as its commander. In Versailles, the king and his government began coming apart. Minister after minister resigned. On July 17, Louis XVI and the National Assembly decided to come to Paris and assure the citizens of their sympathy and support. Jefferson described the incredible sight to John Jay, who was still serving as foreign secretary to the old Congress.

  “The King’s carriage was in the center, on each side of it the Assembly, in two ranks afoot, at their head, the Marquis de Lafayette on horseback and [the] guards before and behind. About sixty thousand citizens of all forms and conditions, [some]
armed with the muskets of the Bastille….the rest with pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, scythes…saluted them everywhere with cries of ‘vive le nation.’”

  At the Hotel de Ville (the Paris City Hall), a leader of the city committee pinned a white, blue, and pink cockade on the King’s hat, and the people shouted “vive le roi et la nation!” Whereupon Lafayette and his guardsmen escorted the subdued king back to his palace in Versailles, followed by the members of the National Assembly. It was, Jefferson wrote, “such an amende honorable [pledge of friendship] as no sovereign ever made and no people ever received.”

  What did it mean? The power of the National Assembly was “absolutely out of the reach of attack,” Jefferson told Paine. They had total “carte blanche.” Neither Jefferson nor Paine realized that the “city committee” that had staged this demonstration would soon become the Paris Commune, a power that would make the National Assembly’s carte blanche more and more meaningless.

  In letters to America, Jefferson repeatedly stressed the impact of the decapitations of the men in charge of the Bastille as a key factor in destroying the King’s and his ministers’ will to resist. He noted with evident pleasure that the “Aristocrats of the Nobles and Clergy in the Estates General” now “vied with each other in declaring how sincerely they were converted to the justice of voting by persons, and how determined to go with the nation all its lengths.” These were the words of frightened men, testifying to the efficacy of terror as a political weapon. But Jefferson seemed unbothered by this harsh fact.10