Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  Actually, Jefferson’s personal belief that slavery was morally incompatible with the principles of the American Revolution was not cause for worry. He had made his position on that controversial subject known on several occasions in the Virginia Assembly and the federal Congress. What did merit worry was his insinuation that the planters of Virginia and the Chesapeake region were already moving inexorably toward emancipation. This was a piece of wishful thinking that defied the unattractive political realities. True, he had said much the same thing in his discussion of slavery in the Encyclopédie Méthodique, but those remarks were aimed at a French audience and were designed to put an optimistic gloss on a potentially damaging topic.

  Most worrisome of all were those dramatic passages in Notes prophesying racial war in America and “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” Indeed Jefferson seemed to say that if racial war should come, God was on the side of the blacks: “Indeed I tremble for my country. When I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.” Jefferson was justifiably concerned that such apocalyptic sentiments would enjoy no supportive audience at all. French readers would be shocked; Virginians would be enraged.48

  As it happened, all the letters he received commenting on the antislavery passages of Notes were strongly supportive. David Ramsay, the South Carolina historian, even lectured him on not going far enough. Ramsay claimed that “in a few centuries the negroes will lose their black color. I think now they are less black in Jersey than Carolina.” So instead of racial conflict, one could look forward to the gradual assimilation of all blacks, who would achieve this worthy goal by actually becoming white. The Reverend James Madison, president of William and Mary, disagreed, saying that Jefferson’s formulation in Notes was being borne out by experience. The Indian population, Reverend Madison predicted, would eventually be integrated into American society. There were even reports of an Indian near Albany who had become almost fully white in a matter of only a few years. But there were no reliable reports of any black man changing color. “It seems,” observed Reverend Madison sadly, “as if Nature had absolutely denied to him the Possibility of ever acquiring the Complexion of the Whites.” Reverend Madison congratulated Jefferson for forcing his fellow Virginia slaveowners to recognize that unless something were done about slavery, their children or grandchildren would die in a genocidal war between the races. While indicative of the prevalent and deep-rooted racism present even within the more progressive circles of American society, the remarks of Ramsay and Madison also showed that Jefferson’s treatment of the forbidden subject had not isolated him as fully as he had initially feared.49

  Nevertheless, the worrying he did about the public response to Notes exposed his intense discomfort with any expression of his personal thoughts that he could not orchestrate or control. This is the likely reason why Notes became the first and last book he ever published. More significantly, the experience had a lasting effect on his posture toward the slavery question. From this time onward the characteristically Jeffersonian position emphasized the need to wait for public opinion to catch up with the moral imperative of emancipation. Instead of a crusading advocate, he became a cautious diplomat. “You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery,” he wrote to a French friend in 1788. “But… I am here as a public servant; and those whom I serve having not yet been able to give their voice against this practice, it is decent for me to avoid too public a demonstration of my wishes to see it abolished. Without serving the cause here, it might render me less able to serve it beyond the water.” He began to develop the argument—it became the centerpiece of his public position on slavery throughout his mature years until the end of his life—that the problem should be passed along to the next generation of American statesmen. These were the leaders born during the American Revolution and therefore “suckled in the principles of liberty as it were with their mother’s milk.” And so “it is to them,” he now claimed, that “I look with anxiety to turn the fate of this question.” Here was a political posture that possessed several strategic advantages, the chief one being that it allowed him to retain his moral principles while justifying inaction on the grounds of seasoned wisdom and practical savvy. He thereby kept his principles pure and intact by placing them in a time capsule; there they could stay until that appropriate moment in the future when the world was ready for them.50

  Meanwhile there were also capsules or compartments inside his own mind or soul that were being constructed at this time to keep certain incompatible thoughts from encountering one another. Perhaps the most graphic example of this capacity to keep secrets from himself dates from August 1786. A fellow American slaveowner traveling to France inquired about the French law prohibiting slavery and allowing any slave brought into the country to claim his freedom. “I have made enquiries,” Jefferson explained, “on the subject of the negro boy you brought, and find that the laws of France give him freedom if he claims it, and that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to interrupt the course of the law.” But there was a way around or perhaps over the law: “I have known an instance,” Jefferson observed discreetly, “where a person bringing in a slave, and saying nothing about it, has not been disturbed in his possession.” If one simply avoids mentioning the subject, “the young negro will not probably… think of claiming his freedom.” The instance Jefferson was referring to almost certainly involved his own black servant James Hemings. It is almost equally certain that Jefferson felt no twinge of conscience about recommending a policy of secrecy, which merely mirrored the deeper secrecies he routinely practiced inside himself.51

  In sum, the considerable diplomatic experience Jefferson acquired during his years in France was accompanied by what we might call a diplomacy of the interior regions. Or perhaps the psychological dexterity he had always possessed became fully visible during his French phase. At the most obvious and well-intentioned level, this internal diplomacy derived from his genuine desire to tell different correspondents what they wanted to hear. Jefferson always regarded candor and courtesy as incompatible, and when forced to choose, he invariably picked courtesy, thereby avoiding unpleasant confrontations. This was what he meant by “taking the handle by the smooth end.” Letter writing was a perfect instrument for this diplomatic skill, in part because of Jefferson’s mastery of the written word and in part because different audiences could be independently targeted. A Frenchman would have been disconcerted to read the advice he was offering to young Americans about the snares and pitfalls of decadent Paris and might have plausibly concluded that Jefferson was a hypocrite. But Jefferson saw himself as modulating his message to suit his audience, adjusting his own views to accord better with the attitudes of his correspondents. This was not so much duplicity as politeness.

  Pushed a bit further, however, and the harmless urge to avoid conflict could assume more sinister implications. Unlike Adams, whose heart and mind were wired together in a single network that carried ideas and urges along lines that linked them to a common power source, Jefferson had created separate lines of communication inside himself that were designed to prevent one set of signals from interfering with the other. Adams, as a result, could be most dangerous when most honest. Honesty for Jefferson, on the other hand, was a more complicated internal negotiation. He was most disarming when a morally resonant subject like slavery drove a wedge between his incompatible convictions, and he remained serenely oblivious of the disjunction.

  What his critics took to be hypocrisy was not really that at all. In some cases it was the desire to please different constituencies, to avoid conflict with colleagues. In other cases it was an orchestration of his in
ternal voices, to avoid conflict with himself. Both the external and internal diplomacy grew out of his deep distaste for sharp disagreement and his bedrock belief that harmony was nature’s way of signaling the arrival of truth. More self-deception than calculated hypocrisy, it was nonetheless a disconcerting form of psychological agility that would make it possible for Jefferson to walk past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row at Monticello thinking about mankind’s brilliant prospects without any sense of contradiction. Though it made him deaf to most forms of irony, it had the decided political advantage of banishing doubt or disabling ambiguity from his mental process. He had the kind of duplicity possible only in the pure of heart.

  SENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

  ONE OF JEFFERSON’S most distinctive voices, which became fully audible during his French years, was the voice he assumed toward women. As we have seen, Abigail Adams played a major role in helping him settle in Paris. She also provided him with what was probably his first exposure to a wife who was a full partner in her husband’s career, as well as a woman capable of conversation that moved naturally from questions of parental responsibility to matters of European statecraft. But even Abigail felt most comfortable offering Jefferson her sharpest-edged advice about his obligations as a father. In that sense she implicitly recognized the legitimacy of the borders separating the domestic domain of women and the traditional male province of politics. In effect Abigail provided Jefferson with a gentle introduction to an entire gallery of Frenchwomen who crossed the sexual borders with an impunity that seemed to cast doubt on all his traditional presumptions about gender.

  One can conjure up some sense of what Jefferson experienced in an observation that John Adams made many years later, when he recalled his own initial encounter with the “learned Ladies” of the Parisian salons. “I have such a consciousness of Inferiority to them,” Adams remembered in his best self-effacing style, “that I can scarcely speak in their presence… . Very few of these Ladies have ever had the condescention to allow me to talk. And when it has so happened, I have always come off mortified at the discovery of my Inferiority.”52

  Adams was referring to the conspicuously cavalier style of the leading ladies of France’s salon society. Jefferson was more adept than Adams at negotiating such elegant obstacles. What distressed him was what occurred after the parties were over. He explained to George Washington that the informal but highly influential authority that wives and mistresses had over the decisions of government was the single most worrisome feature of French society: “The manners of the nation allow them to visit, alone, all persons in office, to sollicit the affairs of the husband, family, or friends, and their sollicitations bid defiance to laws and regulations… . [Few Americans] can possibly understand the desperate state to which things are reduced in this country from the omnipotence of an influence which, fortunately for the happiness of the sex itself, does not endeavor to extend itself in our country beyond the domestic line.” Especially when writing to American women, he liked to document his contrast of American virtue with European decadence by congratulating American women, “who have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other,” with Frenchwomen, “who wrinkle their heads with politics.” It was, he concluded, “a comparison of Amazons and Angels.”53

  Jefferson was on the side of the angels. One of the reasons he went against Abigail’s advice and placed both his daughters in a convent school was that the arrangement, or so he thought, provided insulation from the vicissitudes of Parisian society. He was hard pressed to assure friends that Patsy and Polly were not being protected from the world at the risk of being indoctrinated in the values of Catholicism. He insisted that “not a word is ever said to them on the subject of religion… . It is a house of education only.” And Panthemont offered the kind of education appropriate for the fairer sex—that is, courses in drawing or painting, dancing, music, etiquette and Italian.54

  Though always eager to please her father, Patsy proceeded to demonstrate that neither the ladylike curriculum nor the high walls of the convent afforded the insulation Jefferson wanted for her. She reported that, while her French was nearly native, she was losing the ability to speak, write or even think in English. Then she revealed that not even the nuns could prevent adolescent girls from sharing stories of sexual scandal. “There was a gentleman,” she wrote her father, “that killed himself because he thought his wife did not love him. They had been married ten years. I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left.” Then came the final straw, when Patsy announced that she had decided to become a nun. Family legend has it that Jefferson drove up to the gates of Panthemont the following day, said not a word to the nuns or to Patsy, escorted her into his carriage, then drove her home in silence. This happened in April 1789, and Jefferson immediately began to make plans for returning to America, in part to assure that his daughters would be raised in a safer, more domestically inclined environment.55

  It is possible to get glimpses of Jefferson’s interactions with his daughters that support the image of a loving and devoted father. One visitor to Jefferson’s quarters, for example, described an intimate family scene in which Patsy was playing the harpsichord while a doting father helped Polly write a letter to friends back in Virginia. This is the kind of sentimental scene that Jefferson always idealized. And it allows us to visualize the domestic sphere not just as a special place that women inhabit but also as the innermost chamber of Jefferson’s private utopia. In that sense his tendency to consign women to a more rarefied and less contentious domain was not an alienating act but rather an endorsement of feminine values and virtues as central fixtures in the Jeffersonian paradise.56

  But most of the available evidence about Jefferson’s relationship with his daughters comes from letters. And the letters exist because Jefferson chose to keep his daughters separate from his household throughout the vast bulk of his time in France. Moreover, both the major message and the abiding tone of the letters conveyed a willful distancing of parent from child, what might be called arm’s-length parenting in the patriarchal style. For example, Patsy had wanted to accompany her father on his tour of southern France in the spring of 1787. Jefferson declined the request, then sent back sermons: “Determine never to be idle. No person will ever have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing. And that you may always be doing good, my dear, is the ardent prayer of yours affectionately.”

  From Aix-en-Provence he apologized for his infrequent letters, then continued in the moralistic mode: “No laborious person was ever yet hysterical… . It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate; to surmount every difficulty by resolutions and contrivance… . You ask me to write you long letters. I will do it my dear, on condition that you will read them from time to time, and practice what they inculcate.”

  An earlier letter to Polly strung together the same homilies on hard work and then, in a particularly insensitive passage, seemed to say that his own love was conditional upon her measuring up. You must apply yourself, Jefferson lectured, “to play on the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French and such things as will make you more worthy of the love of your friends… . Remember too as a constant charge not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.”57

  It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jefferson, who was so remarkably adept at crafting his literary persona to suit the audience, simply lacked the ability to convey affection to his own children. This does not mean that he was an unloving or uncaring father. His idealization of domestic bliss as the ultimate source of his personal happiness was certainly sincere, and his children were integral parts of that protected space where the ideal lived in his imagination. But in real life, in the day-by-day interactions with his flesh-and-blood daughters, he was incapable of sustained intimacy.

  His relationships
with mature women were decidedly different. If Jefferson tended to place women on a pedestal and then place that pedestal in the most cherished chamber of his mental Monticello, his letters to women friends combined conspicuous gallantry with a flirtatious, playfully intimate style. If his letters to his daughters have a lecturish, almost wooden tone and seem hurried and obligatory, his correspondence with women his own age is highly personal, soft to the point of sentimentality and carefully crafted.

  For example, his letters to Angelica Schuyler Church, a renowned beauty and accomplished artist whose daughter was attending Panthemont with Patsy, suggest a kind of male coquette. “When you come again,” he apprised Church after her visit in Paris, “I will employ myself solely in finding or fancying that you have some faults, and I will draw a veil over all your good qualities, if I can find one large enough.” He then imagined Church visiting him at Monticello, the two of them gazing appreciatively all afternoon at the majesty of the Natural Bridge. He affected the same swooning style in correspondence with Madame de Tessé, an aunt of the Marquise de Lafayette’s whose estate at Chaville featured gardens in which Jefferson loved to stroll: “Here I am, Madam,” he wrote from Nîmes, “gazing whole hours at the Maison quarrée, like a lover at his mistress. The stock-weavers and silk spinners around it consider me as an hypochondriac Englishman, about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris.” The first, he noted, was occasioned by a statue of Diana he viewed in Beaujolais.58

  Actually, the statue of Diana had been preceded by a quite living and equally lovely woman by the name of Maria Cosway, the wife of the prominent miniaturist Richard Cosway. (Almost all of Jefferson’s female friends were married or widowed.) If ever Jefferson encountered the essence of femininity as he imagined it, Cosway personified the ideal perfectly. She was described by contemporaries as “a golden-haired, languishing Anglo-Italian, graceful to affectation, and highly accomplished, especially in music,” and the various portraits that survive depict a set of deep blue eyes, a tumble of blond curls, a beguiling blend of hauteur and vulnerability. When these were combined with an almost imperious pouting posture and the soft trace of a foreign accent—Italian was her native language—the total effect was usually devastating on men. Jefferson proved no exception. They met in early August 1786, introduced by the young American artist John Trumbull, who had accepted Jefferson’s invitation to join his household in Paris while he worked on his painting “The Declaration of Independence.” Within days Jefferson was head over heels in love.59