Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  There was European society, with governments that ruled by force, usually monarchical in form, what Jefferson described as “a government of wolves over sheep.” Then there was American and, to a slightly lesser extent, English society, with governments responsive to the populace as a whole, where “the mass of mankind enjoys a precious degree of liberty & happiness.” Finally there was Indian society, which managed itself without any formal government at all by remaining small and assuring the internalization of common values among all members. If forced to choose, Jefferson preferred the Indian solution, while admitting that it was “inconsistent with any degree of population.” He reiterated the point in a letter to Edward Carrington, a conservative Virginian planter and politician. “I am convinced,” he explained, “that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their gen’l mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.”72

  The Jeffersonian ideal, in short, was not a specific version of balanced republican government. It was a world in which individual citizens had internalized their social responsibilities so thoroughly that the political architecture Madison was designing was superfluous. Though prepared to acknowledge the need to make necessary compromises with his ideal for practical reasons—the size of the American population and the vastness of its territory obviously demanded some delegation of authority beyond the sovereign self—he did so grudgingly. And the elaborate reasoning about constitutional structure that so captivated political thinkers like Madison and the other delegates at the Constitutional Convention never animated the best energies of his mind, which drew its inspiration from a utopian vision of the liberated individual resisting all external coercion and regarding all forms of explicit government power as a necessary evil.

  All this helps explain his initially hostile reaction to the news leaking out of Philadelphia about the shape of the new American Constitution in the summer of 1787. Madison had tried to prepare him for what was coming, suggesting that America needed an energetic federal government “with a negative in all cases whatsoever over the local legislatures.” But Jefferson resisted the suggestion and questioned the decision to make wholesale changes in the current, albeit inadequate, national government: “The negative proposal… on all acts of the several [i.e., state] legislatures is now for the first time suggested to my mind,” he told Madison. “Prima facie I do not like it. It fails in an essential character [by proposing] to mend a small hole by covering the whole garment.” He expressed the same apprehension to Adams, claiming that “the good of the new constitution might have been couched in three or four articles to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabrick, which should have been preserved even as a religious relique.” Edward Carrington also tried to prepare him for a fundamentally new kind of federal government, not just a minor revision of the Articles of Confederation. “The Ideas here suggested,” Carrington wrote in June, “are far removed from those which prevailed when you was amongst us, and as they have arisen with the most able, from an actual view of events, it is probable you may not be prepared to expect them.” Jefferson’s location in Paris rather than Philadelphia proved a major advantage, by providing time to adjust to political ideas that ran counter to his own and that he would in all likelihood have opposed if present.73

  He concealed his worries about what was brewing in Philadelphia from all his European correspondents, preferring to play his customary role as America’s champion. “Our Federal convention is likely to sit till October,” he wrote a French friend, “and we may be assured their propositions will be wise, as a more able assembly never sat in America. Happy for us, that when we find our constitutions defective and unsufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms… .” Meanwhile Madison apologized for his inability to provide a detailed account of the ongoing deliberations. “I am still under the mortification of being restrained from disclosing any part of their proceedings,” he wrote in July. “As soon as I am at liberty I will endeavor to make amends for my silence and… give you pretty full gratification. I have taken lengthy notes of every thing that has yet passed… .”74

  Madison was as good as his word. His letter of October 24, 1787, provided Jefferson with a lengthy report on the wide-ranging deliberations at the Constitutional Convention and a truly remarkable appraisal of the constitutional issues at stake. He described how the delegates had tried “to draw a line of demarkation which would give to the General Government every power requisite for general purposes, and leave to the States every power which might be most beneficially administered by them.” This formulation blurred the relative powers of federal versus state authority, but in terms that clearly extended federal jurisdiction over domestic policy in ways that Jefferson staunchly opposed. Madison then went on to analyze the intricate and purposefully ambiguous layering of jurisdiction by the different branches of government and the different versions of representation. “Those who contend for a Simple Democracy, or a pure republic, actuated by a sense of the majority, and operating within narrow limits,” he observed, “assume or suppose a case which is altogether fictitious.” What Madison was terming “fictitious” was in fact the essence of Jefferson’s thinking about government. Jefferson acknowledged as much in his response to Madison. “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” he confessed. “It is always oppressive… . After all, it is my principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail.” Madison did not write back to explain that, at least as he saw it, the Constitution had been designed to subvert mere majority rule on the assumption that the chief threat to individual liberty in America was likely to come from that direction. Jefferson would have found such an argument unintelligible, since he found it impossible to regard popular majorities as dangerous or to think about the powers of government in positive ways. Madison’s entire emphasis on social balance was at odds with Jefferson’s commitment to personal liberation.75

  Here was the first significant occasion—it would not be the last—when the special relationship between Jefferson and Madison assumed a human version of the checks and balances principle. Despite deep reservations about an energetic federal government, especially a federal government empowered to tax, Jefferson decided to follow the advice of his most loyal lieutenant and endorse ratification of the new Constitution. At first he declared himself neutral, telling Carrington that “there is a great mass of good in it… , but there is also to me a bitter pill or two,” then directing him to confer with Madison for more specific information about his views. On all the specific provisions empowering the new national government to make laws for all the states, he decided to remain silent and let Madison speak for him. Over the course of the following months, as the ratification process went forward in the respective states, Jefferson worked out a responsibly critical posture: The new Constitution had his approval, even though he preferred specific limitations on the tenure of the president and an explicit bill or declaration of rights that defined those personal freedoms that no federal government could violate.76

  Even Adams concurred on the latter point, as did many of the advocates of the Constitution in the state ratifying conventions. As for his apprehensions about excessive executive power, Jefferson wrote to Washington to assure the man who was virtually certain to be elected the first president that his worries were about the future, after Washington had left the office. They were also intensified by his European experience. “I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe,” he apprised Washington, and was “ten thousand times more so now since I have seen what they [i.e., kings] are… . I can further say with safety there is not a crowned head in Europe whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of any parish in America.” He had expressed his worries more directly to Adams, claiming that “the President seems a bad edition of the Polish k
ing.” But his preference for term limits—he favored one four-year term—did not place him outside the boundaries of respectable criticism.77

  Nevertheless, word leaked back to America that Jefferson’s support for the new Constitution was soft and perhaps even nonexistent. “Bye the Bye,” wrote Francis Hopkinson from Philadelphia, “you have been often dish’d up to me as a strong Antifederalist, which is almost equivalent to what a Tory was in the Days of the War, for what reason I know not, but I don’t believe it and have utterly denied the Insinuation.” During the ratification debate in Virginia both Patrick Henry and George Mason, who led the opposition, claimed that mutual friends assured them that Jefferson also opposed the creation of a strong central government with powers over the states. Madison, however, rose to contradict the claim and, as he explained it to Jefferson, “took the liberty to state some of your opinions on the favorable side.” 78

  Precisely what Jefferson himself would have said if he had been present in Virginia for the ratification debate is impossible to know. Madison, perhaps the most able parliamentary maneuverer in American politics, carried the Jeffersonian flag with him to victory in the Virginia convention. Jefferson’s own remarks throughout the summer and fall of 1788 were inconsistent and contradictory. First he advocated support for the Constitution until nine states had ratified, then opposition so as to force amendments and acceptance of a bill of rights. Then he backed away from that position, endorsing ratification but only on the condition that a bill of rights be added once the new government was in place. When Carrington sent him a copy of the recently published Federalist Papers, Jefferson sent his compliments to Madison, one of the main contributors, praising the work as “the best commentary on the principles of government which was ever written” and conceding that “it has rectified me in several points.” In an earlier letter to Madison he had conceded that on the specific question of presidential term limits, “I readily therefore suppose my position wrong… .” But when asked by Hopkinson if he was a staunch Federalist, meaning supporter of the Constitution, he gave an equivocal answer that was rescued from its inherent ambivalence by the lyrical quality of its concluding line: “I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever… . Such an addiction is the last degredation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”79

  In a very real sense, this statement, albeit unintentionally, captured the essence of Jefferson’s ultimate position on the Constitution and indeed on all specific constitutional schemes. He found them excessively technical configurations of political power that did not speak directly to his own political creed, which transcended categories like “Federalist” and “Antifederalist” by inhabiting a more rarefied region where political parties, constitutional distinctions and even forms of government themselves were rendered irrelevant. His lifelong attitude toward the constitutional settlement of 1787–88 remained ambiguous and problematic. The trouble with most Europeans, he wrote to Hopkinson, was that they had been bred to prefer “a government which can be felt; a government of energy. God send that our country may never have a government, which it can feel.” Madison and most Federalists believed that the new American Constitution was admirable for precisely the energetic qualities Jefferson denounced. As for Jefferson, his mind and heart longed for a world where government itself had disappeared. Given the terms of the constitutional debate that raged in America in 1788, the one issue that best embodied his political convictions was the insistence on a bill of rights that transcended all the Madisonian complexities. That was pretty much what he chose to emphasize.

  REVOLUTIONS AND GENERATIONS

  AT ALMOST THE same time that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were gathering in Philadelphia, the Assembly of Notables was convened by the French king, Louis XVI, in Versailles. The advantage of hindsight allows us to know that this gathering, rendered necessary by a financial crisis that threatened to bankrupt the French government, was actually the opening chapter in a bewilderingly complex and horridly bloody chain of events that tore French society to pieces and fundamentally altered the course of modern history. But neither Jefferson nor anyone else for that matter could be expected to recognize at the time that he was witnessing the start of the French Revolution, or that comfortably confident endorsements of “a little rebellion now and then” would take on such a very different meaning after the cataclysms of 1789.80

  Jefferson’s initial instinct was to see the Assembly of Notables as an inferior version of the Constitutional Convention, another illustration of his running argument about the inherent superiority of the American environment and the degraded condition of European politics. He kept up a standing joke with the Adams family in which the delegates at Philadelphia were described as demigods or modern-day Ciceros, while the French nobility gathered at Versailles were comic buffoons who delivered long soliloquies that bore only a tenuous relationship to the political issues at stake. (Lafayette, Jefferson’s closest French friend and himself a delegate to the Assembly of Notables, joined in the banter by wondering if his colleagues should be called “not able.”) By the summer of 1787 Jefferson could complain to Monroe that the latter’s reports on the Constitutional Convention were brimming with excitement and vigorous arguments, while “I have nothing to give you in return but the history of the follies of nations in their dotage.”81

  His early characterizations of the king’s behavior fitted into the same pattern of European corruption. “The king goes for nothing,” Jefferson wrote Jay. “He hunts one half the day, is drunk the other, and signs whatever he is bid.” His confidential and coded letters to Adams and Madison reiterated the image of a royal family drowning in wine and incapable of any form of political leadership, except serving as role models in the most advanced arts of sexual promiscuity. He was sufficiently confident that nothing significant would happen at Versailles—aristocratic bombast directed at a drunken monarch more resembled a political opera than an occasion for serious statecraft—that he went ahead with his plans to travel through southern France rather than remain in the capital.82

  Although the motif of European degradation never completely disappeared from his thinking or his correspondence, by the summer of 1787 Jefferson had begun to recognize the seriousness of the political crisis France was facing. The frivolous tone of his earliest letters receded, his critical and condescending attitude toward Europe’s hopelessly corrupt condition became a minor note and the major note became that of a respectful and cautiously optimistic witness to history in the making. His reports to Jay, who still retained overall responsibility for American foreign policy, emphasized the steady progress France was making: Representative assemblies had been created in the various provinces; the infamous corvées, requiring peasants to perform unpaid labor for feudal lords, had been abolished; some kind of parliamentary system of government seemed inevitable, albeit one in which the power of the king would probably remain greater than the English constitutional model. “All together,” he wrote Jay, these were impressive reforms that “constitute a vast improvement in the condition of this nation.”83

  His shift from irreverent criticism to guarded optimism reflected his growing conviction that “the contagion of liberty” released onto the world by the American Revolution was now spreading to Europe and that France was the first European country to experience its liberating consequences. As one who had been present at the creation of this revolutionary movement in America, he felt almost providentially privileged to witness its arrival as a liberating army of ideas marching through France and, he hoped, eventually all Europe. If the detailed work of constitution making did not engage his fullest energies, the contemplation of more overarching political trends and truths did so naturally.

  All this explains his extremely—and as subsequent events proved, excessively—optimistic appraisal of the ongoing political drama in revolutionary France. “So that
I think it is probable that this country will within two or three years be in the enjoiment of a tolerably free constitution,” he wrote Monroe in 1788, “and without its having cost them a drop of blood.” When Adams expressed his concern that the different factions in the Estates-General would find compromise impossible, Jefferson assured him that “her [France’s] internal affairs will be arranged without blood” because moderates in the new national legislature were in control. “In every event, I think the present disquiet will end well,” he told Washington, explaining that the people of France “have been awaked by our revolution, they feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde.” France looked to him like the America of Europe. It was struggling to create a new constitution; like America—echoes of Shays’s Rebellion in the background—the threat of violence had been faced “but as yet not a life has been lost,” and again like America, thoughtful leaders “are all employed in drawing plans of bills of rights.”84

  Later in his life, probably when he was reviewing his correspondence in preparation to write his autobiography in 1821, Jefferson was somewhat embarrassed at his unrelieved optimism in the late 1780s. For by then, of course, he knew that the Assembly of Notables would fail to reach agreement about a solution to the fiscal crisis, which would then lead to the calling of the Estates-General, which would fail to resolve the political crisis in a way acceptable to the nobility and bourgeoisie, which would then lead to mob action in Paris, bread riots throughout the countryside, mass executions, the Reign of Terror and eventually dictatorial rule by Napoleon. On at least one occasion toward the end of his life he doctored his correspondence, inserting a more cautionary statement designed to convince posterity that his affection for France had not blinded him to the possibility of unparalleled violence. “Should they attempt more than… the established habits of the people are ripe for,” he later added to one letter from 1787, “they may lose all, and retard indefinitely the ultimate object of their aim.” The undoctored correspondence, however, reveals no premonition of the looming convulsions and instead shows an abiding confidence that French political leaders would manage their way past trouble much as their counterparts in America were doing.85