Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  But Jefferson did not really mean what Hamilton and all the other commentators thought they heard him say. Part of the problem was actually a matter of translation. In the version of his address printed in the National Intelligencer and then released to the newspapers throughout the country, the key passage read: “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists.” By capitalizing the operative terms, the printed version had Jefferson making a gracious statement about the overlapping goals of the two political parties. But in the handwritten version of the speech that Jefferson delivered, the key words were not capitalized. Jefferson was therefore referring not to the common ground shared by the two parties but to the common belief, shared by all American citizens, that a republican form of government and a federal bond among the states were most preferable. Since one would have been hard pressed to discover a handful of American citizens who disagreed with this observation, his statement was more a political platitude than an ideological concession. The impression that Jefferson had publicly retracted his previous statements about the party conflict as a moral struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness was, as it turned out, badly mistaken.

  There were several suggestive passages that provided clues to Jefferson’s truly visionary version of “pure republicanism,” but most commentators were too transfixed by the apparent message of moderation to notice. John Marshall, who was presumably close enough to the podium to hear the speech as delivered, went straight back to his home and recorded his impression: “I have administered the oath to the President… . It [the Inaugural Address] is in direct terms giving the lie to the violent party declamation which had elected him; but it is strongly characteristic of his political theory.” Marshall was right, though he did not specify what he meant by “political theory.” But this was hardly the chief justice’s fault. A crucial component of Jefferson’s genius was his ability to project his vision of American politics at a level of generalization that defied specificity and in a language that seemed to occupy an altitude where one felt obliged to look up and admire without being absolutely certain about the details.24

  One such passage in the Inaugural Address occurred when Jefferson was enumerating the natural advantages enjoyed by American citizens, who were “separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe” and had the good fortune to possess “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” Then he concluded the list of assets with what he called “one thing more”: “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them free to regulate their pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” This was Jefferson’s clearest statement of his minimalist theory of government. While Federalists were listening nervously for clarifications of his position on executive authority, the role of the judiciary and the proper jurisdiction of federal versus state law, Jefferson framed his answer at a level where all such distinctions dissolved. The very notion of government itself was the core problem. In that sense he remained true to the Whig tradition, which stigmatized all forms of political power as inherently corrupt, as well as to his own ideal of personal autonomy, which regarded any explicit exercise of authority that was not consensual or voluntary as inherently invasive. Though an old and venerable political tradition and a long-standing Jeffersonian conviction, this perspective assumed a novel shape in the Inaugural Address because it meant that Jefferson was declaring that his primary responsibility as president was to render ineffectual and invisible the very government he was elected to lead. On the face of it, this seemed to put him in a strange and anomalous position, much like naming Luther to head the Catholic Church.25

  The obvious question that followed logically from this disavowal of a positive role for government was not lost on Jefferson himself. He raised it midway through his speech and made at least a glancing attempt at an answer:

  I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may possibly want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it is the only one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.26

  This is both the richest and most elusive passage in Jefferson’s Inaugural Address. It acknowledged, at least implicitly, that his election had prompted widespread apprehension about the dismemberment of the federal government and the resulting dissolution of the national union. But then Jefferson inverted the argument, claiming that his critics had been seized by a “theoretic and visionary fear.” This in fact was precisely the accusation being leveled against him—namely, that he was a naive visionary who lacked a realistic understanding of how much national stability depended upon an energetic federal government that he (not his Federalist critics, as he seemed to say) had pledged to dismantle. Jefferson had somehow transformed himself into the defender of a national government as “the world’s best hope”—a phrase Abraham Lincoln was to pick up and improve upon as “last, best hope” in his own First Inaugural—and consigned his critics to the role of skeptics who lacked his republican faith.

  But the truly creative transformation, again more implied than asserted, was Jefferson’s suggestion that the true, indeed only source of energy in a republic was not the government per se but the voluntary popular opinion on which it rested. The traditional presumption, which was a bedrock conviction among all Federalists, was that an active federal government was necessary to embody authority and focus national policy. In the absence of such governmental leadership, it was assumed that the American republic would spin off into a series of factions and interest groups and eventually into separate regional units. Without a strong central government, in short, one could not have a coherent American nation. In Jefferson’s formulation, however, which must have seemed counterintuitive to the Federalists, the release of national energy increased as the power of government decreased. Whereas the Federalist way of thinking about government concerned itself with sustaining discipline, stability and balance, the Jeffersonian mentality bypassed such traditional concerns and celebrated the ideal of liberation. Lurking in his language about what makes a republican government strong was a belief in the inherent coherence of an American society that did not require the mechanisms of the state to maintain national stability.

  In the weeks following the delivery and distribution of his Inaugural Address, Jefferson made a point of writing to surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as other colleagues from the Continental Congress who had also been “present at the creation,” to share his celebratory sense that the version of “pure republicanism” he had professed in his speech was a recovery of what they all had intended back in 1776. Whatever new and ideologically experimental ideas were lurking within the rhetorical recesses of the Inaugural Address, Jefferson was absolutely certain that his message represented a restoration of the vision shared by the original revolutionaries as “the antient and sacred truths” on which American independence had been based. He explained to Benjamin Rush, the old revolutionary gadfly in Philadelphia, that “these sentiments have been long and radically mine,” and Rush concurred that Jefferson’s address gave poetic expression to the values they all had thought they were fighting for in the glory days. Something magical and spiritual had happened at the founding moment, a kind of primal encounter with political purity that all the original participants experienced as a collective epiphany. Jefferson’s first instinct was to share with his fell
ow survivors and sharers of that experience—outsiders and the younger generation could not understand—that the true “spirit of ’76” was back. The sinners had at least been cast out of the temple, and the saints were once again in control.27

  His emphasis on austerity and simplicity, both in the inaugural ceremony itself and in his prescriptions for a stripped-down federal government, represented his core conviction about the recovered meaning of what the American Revolution had been about and what his own election to the presidency had reestablished. Much like his fondness for “a little rebellion now and then” or for “sweeping away” the accumulated debris of history every generation, Jefferson regarded his ascendance to power as a mandate to purge the American government of all the excess institutional baggage it had acquired since its pristine birth a quarter century earlier. While his Federalist critics and even some of his moderate Republican supporters worried out loud how far Jeffersonian reform would go (did it include eliminating the national bank? the federal judiciary? the navy?), Jefferson’s own mind simply did not work at that level of specificity. His thinking about his presidential agenda, like his lyrical language in the Inaugural Address, hovered above such particulars. As he explained to John Dickinson, another of the revolutionary “band of brothers,” the American government was like a ship that had passed through some very rough seas: “We shall put her back on her republican tack, and she will show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.” Once the nation was put on its proper course, in short, forces as natural as the wind and tide would take over and carry America toward its destiny. God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars. If one could just align the ship of state with them again, all those minor squabbles about executive power or federal jurisdiction would become irrelevant and sink from sight. Those who kept raising nettlesome questions about such items were inadvertently confessing that they lacked the pure republican faith.28

  THE TEXTUAL PRESIDENCY

  WHEREVER ONE might wish to locate God’s abiding presence, its political manifestation was very much on Jefferson’s side at the start of his presidency. As it turned out, Adams had been the perfect predecessor. His irascible and all too human executive style had contrasted unfavorably with the Olympian presence of the godlike Washington, thereby making Adams unpopular and lowering expectations for his own successor. What’s more, the most unpopular and unilateral act of the Adams presidency, to send an American delegation to Paris with instructions to negotiate an end to the “quasi war” with France, had proved to be a brilliant success. The terms of the new peace treaty arrived too late to help Adams in the presidential election of 1800 but in time to end the “quasi war” before Jefferson took office. And not only was America at peace with the European powers, but France and England had agreed to what was in effect an armistice in their seemingly perpetual struggle for the domination of Europe. Jefferson inherited the most stable and peaceful international scene since the United States had declared its independence.29

  On the home front, providence proved just as kind. The much-despised Alien and Sedition Acts, which had allowed the Federalists to prosecute their most outspoken Republican opponents for treason, had in fact backfired, helping mobilize popular support for Republican candidates in the congressional elections of 1800. In the new Congress coming to Washington with Jefferson, the Republicans enjoyed a two-to-one majority in the House and a smaller but decided majority in the Senate. What’s more, the legislation that had created the Alien and Sedition Acts was due to lapse in the early months of Jefferson’s presidency, so he needed to do nothing on that score but wait. Add to this happy set of circumstances the resumption of a flourishing West Indian trade now that peace with France was restored, an overall expansion of American commerce with a now-peaceful Europe and an agrarian economy that was humming along at unprecedented levels of productivity, and Jefferson’s vision of a minimalist federal government—pursuing what he described as “a noiseless course… , unattractive of notice”—began to look like a sensible act of hands-off statesmanship. With history dealing out cards like this, who would not want to stand pat?30

  As it turned out, even the most invisible and unobtrusive federal government required executive leadership, if for no other reason than to implement the principle of republican austerity. Here again Jefferson was the beneficiary of the Adams administration, but this time as a graphic example of how not to do it. “My wish is to collect in a mass around the administration all the abilities and the respectability to which the offices exercised here can give employ,” Jefferson explained, adding that he was determined to “give none of them to secondary characters.” Adams, not certain about how much discretion he possessed as incoming president, had felt obliged to retain Washington’s cabinet as his own. It proved to be the most disastrous decision of his presidency and the chief source of his political frustrations, since he inherited the “secondary characters” Jefferson was referring to, as well as a cabinet more loyal to Hamilton and to memories of Washington than to Adams himself. (Jefferson later recalled that Adams became so frustrated by the recalcitrance of his own cabinet that he ended up convening it in order to scream obscenities at its advice while stomping around the cabinet meeting room and “dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.”) The cabinet choices Jefferson made were governed by two criteria: proven ability and complete loyalty to the Jeffersonian version of republicanism. On this score he was extremely shrewd as well as blessed. His cabinet proved to be one of the ablest and the most stable collection of executive advisers in the history of the American presidency.31

  The two most prominent and invaluable members were James Madison and Albert Gallatin. Madison had long been a foregone conclusion as secretary of state. He was Jefferson’s lifetime lieutenant and protégé, a fellow member of the Virginia dynasty, a battle-tested veteran of the party wars of the 1790s and the shrewdest student of the Jefferson psyche ever placed on earth. Gallatin was a Swiss-born émigré to America who had settled in Pennsylvania and quickly risen in the Republican ranks on the basis of his deft way with both words and numbers. He was short, balding and hawk-nosed, but his unimpressive appearance and lingering Genevan accent belied intellectual powers second to none among the rising generation of Republican leaders. Gallatin was only forty, and he was the one man in America capable of going toe-to-toe with Hamilton in debate over fiscal policy and comfortably holding his own. Since Jefferson’s considerable experience in foreign policy meant that—no offense to Madison’s extraordinary competence—he could and often would serve as his own secretary of state, Gallatin as secretary of the treasury was the most invaluable and strategically positioned member of the cabinet.32

  The other members, if not “secondary characters,” were lesser figures. Levi Lincoln, the attorney general, was a respected lawyer from Massachusetts. Along with Henry Dearborn, secretary of war, who was from the Maine district of Massachusetts, Lincoln was that singular phenomenon, a New England Jeffersonian whose Republican credentials had proved themselves by surviving in the homeland of Federalism. “Both are men of 1776,” observed Gallatin, “and decided Republicans.” The same could be said of Gideon Granger, who as postmaster general was not officially a member of the cabinet but had important responsibilities dispensing patronage. Granger was that rarest of species, a Republican from Connecticut, where rumor had it that a Yale degree was a prerequisite for success in politics or the pulpit, and a vow of eternal hostility to the infidel from Monticello was a mandatory part of the Yale commencement ceremony. The eventual choice as secretary of the navy, after much unsuccessful lobbying of other candidates, was Robert Smith, a prominent Baltimore lawyer. Jefferson joked that he “shall have to advertise for a Secretary of Navy,” because of the widespread presumption, which proved correct, that the main mission of the job was to scuttle much of the infant American fleet in order to implement the Jeffersonian goal of republican austerity.33

  Most students of the Jefferson presidency explai
n his leadership style in terms of the positive lessons he had learned from Washington and the negative ones learned from Adams. It is true that Jefferson himself referred to these obvious and opposing models as his guides, with the Adams model (i.e., sulking patriarch) less personally appealing and politically effective than Washington’s model (i.e., military commander-in-chief surrounded by staff officers). In one sense Jefferson’s organization of the executive branch represented an adaptation of the Washington scheme. All business had to go through the appropriate department heads first. On every working day each department head sent Jefferson a written summary of all decisions or issues in his area. Jefferson responded in writing, if possible on the same day, and also made himself available for individual conferences before his daily horseback ride at one o’clock. Unlike Washington, Jefferson preferred not to schedule regular meetings of the full cabinet, convening the entire group only when difficult decisions or a looming crisis required it. This arrangement made the president, as Jefferson put it, “the hub of a wheel” with the business of the nation done at the rim, conveyed through the departmental spokes but all supervised at the center. It was a system that maximized control while simultaneously creating necessary distance from details.34