Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  During the debate over Jefferson’s proposal in the Senate, John Quincy Adams, undoubtedly enjoying the irony and fully aware the Republicans would vote whatever Jefferson wanted, attempted to add a provision protecting the rights of the Louisiana residents against being taxed without their consent. The following year a delegation of three agents from the territory came to Washington to present a remonstrance, protesting the violation of their rights and their de facto status as colonists. “Do the political axioms on the Atlantic become problems,” they asked rhetorically, “when transplanted to the shores of the Mississippi?” Jefferson avoided any contact with the delegation or conversation about their remonstrance. In his private correspondence he explained that “our new fellow citizens [in Louisiana] are as yet incapable of self-government as children, yet some cannot bring themselves to suspend [republican] principles for a single moment.” The suspension was only temporary, he promised, until he could be assured that the political temperature had sufficiently lowered to avoid the risk of insurrection.77

  From the long-term historical perspective, and with all the advantages of hindsight, Jefferson’s controversial decisions about the Louisiana Territory can be—most of them indeed should be—defended as wise. The decision to bypass the constitutional issue was unquestionably correct, for the practical reason that the debate over a constitutional amendment would have raised a constellation of nettlesome questions—about slavery and the slave trade, Indian lands, Spanish land claims and a host of other jurisdictional issues—that might have put the entire purchase at risk. The hard-boiled and dismissive attitude toward Spanish arguments about borders, especially in West Florida, followed naturally from a realistic assessment of Spanish impotence and American demographic destiny. Even the decision to install an essentially arbitrary and despotic provisional government over the Louisiana Territory to carry it through the early years of assimilation cannot be condemned outright, since both the sheer size of the region and the ethnic diversity of the Creole population posed governance problems that justified a firmer hand at the start.78

  The issue, then, is not whether Jefferson’s policies toward Louisiana were right or wrong but rather how he managed to implement decisions that defied in so many ways his long-standing commitment to limitations on executive power and the near-sacred character of republican principles. Two of the more conventional answers to this question do not ring true: First, Jefferson was not simply seized by power-hungry impulses once he assumed the presidency, since in a broad range of other policy areas he exhibited considerable discipline over the executive branch and habitual deference to the Congress; second, he did not suddenly discover a pragmatic streak in his political philosophy, since on issues like the debt and, later on, the embargo he clung tenaciously to Jeffersonian principles despite massive evidence that they were at odds with reality. The pragmatic interpretation fails to explain why he was capable of putting his belief in “pure republicanism” aside in this instance and not in others.

  The answer would seem to be the special, indeed almost mystical place the West had in his thinking. When history presented him with an unexpected and unprecedented opportunity to eliminate forever the presence on America’s western border of any major European power (Spain did not count here), it triggered his most visionary energies, which then overrode his traditional republican injunctions. For Jefferson more than any other major figure in the revolutionary generation, the West was America’s future. Securing a huge swatch of it for posterity meant prolonging for several generations the systemic release of national energy that accompanied the explosive movement of settlements across the unsettled spaces. (The Indians, like Spain, did not count in this calculus.) What Frederick Jackson Turner later called a safety valve was for Jefferson more like a self-renewing engine that drove the American republic forward. The West was the place where his agrarian idyll could be regularly rediscovered, thereby postponing into the indefinite future the crowded conditions and political congestions of European society. Jefferson liked to think of the West in much the same way that some modern optimists think of technology, as almost endlessly renewable and boundlessly prolific. It was the secret weapon that made the American experiment in republicanism immune to the national aging process, at least for the remainder of the century. It was America’s fountain of youth.79

  As a result, any issue involving the fate of the American West possessed the potential to trump his other political convictions. Jefferson’s visionary sense of what the West meant for America also made him virtually immune to the doubts, prevalent among Federalists and even shared by some of his Republican colleagues, about the country’s capacity to assimilate the vast Louisiana Territory. After all, when such a massive area had come under British control after the French and Indian War in 1763, it had led directly to political problems that eventually resulted in the American Revolution and the dissolution of the British Empire in America. While easterners, especially New England Federalists, worried that their influence would erode as more western states entered the Union, the predominant fear was fragmentation, that the expanded version of the United States would split up into several regional units in the European mode. Jefferson’s reaction to such fear was almost cavalierly dismissive: “Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children and descendants as those of the eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this.”80

  This was a remarkable statement since it conveyed an almost ostentatious nonchalance toward the preservation of national union, the dominant political issue of the next half century. Jefferson did not worry about the integration of the West into the United States because he thought about the process more dynamically and as part of a larger transformation. From his perspective, the United States was not just integrating the West into the Union; the West was actually integrating the older United States into a newer and ever-changing version of America. In spirit, if not in fact, Jefferson was a westerner, captivated by the apparently endless horizons and the exciting unknowns that Meriwether Lewis might bring back to nourish the present with news of the future. It also helped that the vast majority of westerners were likely to prove staunch Republicans.

  SCANDALS

  IF THE WEST was that future place where the creative juices of the expanding American republic flowed most freely, then New England was the past, where, as Jefferson saw it, Federalism stewed in its own poisonous juices while adjusting to its abiding irrelevancy. Unfortunately for Jefferson, whose impressive intellectual range did not extend to an appreciation of the compressed energies of New England Puritanism, his declaration of war to the death against the “incurables” of Federalism alienated some of the most formidable figures among the best-educated population in the country. Jefferson was an excellent hater and a skillful polemicist, but he more than met his match in the Federalist press and pulpit, where the expiring condition of Federalism as a viable political movement only intensified the desperation of its defenders. Later in life, after Jefferson and Adams had reconciled and resumed their correspondence, they kept up a running joke about which one could assemble the larger volume of vindictive criticism directed at him during his presidency. This was one area of playful competition where Jefferson was the indisputable winner. The assaults on his character were unparalleled in the history of the early republic.81

  That does not mean they were unprecedented. During the presidential campaign of 1800 Adams had been subjected to several attempts at character assassination, the chief blow coming from Hamilton, who published a lengthy indictment of the president’s explosive personality. The gist of the charge was that Adams was mentally deranged and fully capable of destroying the infant American republic during one of his spasms of lunacy. Even the godlike Washington had become a target of abuse during his second term, when he was accused of senility as well as
pro-Hamilton favoritism that derived from the groundless but sensational allegation that Hamilton was secretly his illegitimate son. Hamilton himself was charged with a variety of indiscretions, the most scandalous being that his sexual affair with a married woman exposed him to blackmail by the woman’s husband, who demanded political favors for his silence. Ever the master of audacity, Hamilton took out newspaper space to announce that the charges of infidelity were sadly true but that, despite this personal failure, his public virtue as a government official had never been compromised. The line of demarcation that he attempted to draw between his private life and his public integrity was precisely the line that newspaper editors and political pundits refused to recognize. By the time Jefferson ascended to the presidency, then, the private lives of public figures were clearly regarded as fair game by the press, and Jefferson, who had been active behind the scenes in paying off hired character assassins in the party wars of the 1790s, knew perfectly well that he could expect the same treatment. “They say we lied them out of power,” he observed in reference to the Federalists, “and openly avow they will do the same by us.”82

  The Federalist barrage started right away, though the earliest shots tended to be aimed to wound rather than kill, poking fun at such targets as the distinctive Jeffersonian literary style, with its fondness for exalted phrasings and frequent alliterations. “Man is, by nature, a mighty megalonyx,” wrote one Federalist in mock imitation of the Declaration of Independence, “produced purposely, in a philosophical view, to prowl, pillage, propagate, and putrify.” The publication of five new editions of Notes on Virginia in 1801, presumably an effort by publishers to cash in on Jefferson’s new visibility as president, offered Federalist editors a broad range of easy targets. For some reason they tended to fasten upon Jefferson’s claim that huge, hairy prehistoric beasts called mammoths still lived on in the unexplored American West, one of those pre-Darwinian ideas Jefferson found attractive because it supported his anti-Buffon contention that the American environment produced large animals. Federalist wits ridiculed his “mammoth theory” over and over again, and the motif became a centerpiece of opposition sarcasm toward Jefferson’s pretensions as a scientist. In the same quasi-playful mode, Jefferson’s defenders countered the mammoth onslaught by presenting him with a “mammoth cheese” weighing 1,235 pounds, reputedly from the milk of nine hundred cows, “not one of them a federalist.”83

  The truly serious assaults on his character first came on the religious front. In his Notes on Virginia Jefferson had presented an argument for religious freedom that concluded with a clever comment on his own open-mindedness: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The Federalist clergy of New England seized on this remark as conclusive evidence that Jefferson was some combination of pagan, infidel, atheist and heretic. Editorials throughout New England played on the theme that the most Christian country in the world was now headed by a man who denied the central tenets of Christianity. While Jefferson does not appear to have been personally hurt by the charge, he recognized the political damage it was doing to his party; so he composed a brief essay on the merits of Jesus as a role model, which was actually based on a similar essay by Joseph Priestley, the English deist, that compared Jesus and Socrates as splendid embodiments of humanistic values. Jefferson saw to it that his essay was leaked to Republican friends in order to counter what he called “the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions.” Yes, he explained to Benjamin Rush, he did reject “the corruptions of Christianity,” but not “the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”84

  Such distinctions were wasted of course on his Federalist critics, who were looking for ammunition rather than truth. Jefferson provided them with more than they could have hoped for when, only two weeks after his inauguration, he offered passage on a government ship to Tom Paine, who was attempting to return to America from France after barely escaping the guillotine. Jefferson’s letter to Paine was picked up by the American press from the Paris papers, where Paine himself had probably planted it to publicize the honor of Jefferson’s testimonial. “I am in hopes,” Jefferson wrote to Paine, “you will find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. In these it will be your glory to have steadily laboured and with as much effect as any man living. That you may long live to continue your useful labours and reap reward in the thankfulness of nations is my sincere prayer. Accept assurance of my high esteem and effectionate attachment.”85

  From Jefferson’s perspective Tom Paine was an authentic American hero, a charter member of “the band of brothers” that had made the American Revolution happen and had then carried “the spirit of ’76” to France, where it had produced more collateral damage than either man had anticipated, true enough, but where the future would surely recover the original ethos. Unfortunately for Jefferson, Paine’s reputation in America had not aged well. When he landed in Baltimore, the local newspaper caught the mood by observing sarcastically that “our pious President thought it expedient to dispatch a frigate for the accommodation of this loathsome reptile.” Paine’s chief offense was not that he was a practicing alcoholic with the social graces of a derelict, though that was true, but rather that he had written The Age of Reason, which was as full-throated an attack on Christianity as Common Sense had been on monarchy. By publicly associating with Paine, Jefferson exposed himself to the full-broadside blasts of the Federalist press as an “arch infidel,” “a defiler of Christian virtue” and “a companion of the most vile, corrupt, obnoxious sinner of the century.” All Americans who took Christianity seriously now had to make a choice, said one editor, between “renouncing their savior, or their president… .” The attacks were relentless and unequaled in the early history of the young nation for their polemical intensity. As Henry Adams put it, if Jefferson had decided to congratulate Napoleon for his despotic seizure of power in France, “he could not have excited in the minds of the New England Calvinists so deep a sense of disgust by seeming to identify himself with Paine.” It was, in a real sense, one of Jefferson’s finer moments, since he was fully aware of Paine’s notoriety but stuck by him to the end, even inviting him to live and dine at the presidential mansion for several weeks. Federalist editors had a field day describing “the two Toms” walking arm in arm, allegedly comparing notes on the ideal way to promote atheism or their past successes in despoiling Christian virgins.86

  “The circle of our President’s felicities is greatly enlarged,” observed the editor of the Federalist Port Folio, “by the indulgence of Sally the sable, and the auspicious arrival of Tom Paine the pious.” The reference to “Sally the sable” was a casual insertion of the most sensational accusation made against Jefferson, a charge of sexual (and in its own day racial) impropriety. Virtually every Federalist newspaper in the country picked up the story, which first appeared in the Richmond Recorder in September 1802. “It is well known,” the story began, “that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY… . The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking, although sable resemblance to those of the President himself.” For several months the Federalist press printed editorials disclaiming knowledge as to whether the allegations were true, but then proceeding to provide readers with colorful variations on the provocative gossip, some even set to verse:

  Of all the damsels on the green

  On mountain or in valley

  A lass so luscious ne’er was seen

  As Monticellan Sally.

  Editorials referred to “Dusky Sally,” “Black Sal,” the “African Venus” and the “mahogoney colored charmer.” The Boston press was especially interested in how the fifty-nine-year-old president managed to make love with a much younger (Sally was thirty-one or thirty-two) woman. The answer was her African features:

  Thick pouting lips! h
ow sweet their grace!

  When passion fires to kiss them!

  Wide spreading over half the face,

  Impossible to miss them.

  And so on.87

  It was a publicist’s dream at the time because it gave the Federalists, who were growing more desperate with each Republican victory in the ongoing state elections, the kind of small but sharp-edged piece of scandal that cut across all party or policy disagreements and straight into the core question of Jefferson’s character. It has been a publicist’s dream ever since, because the charges could not until recently be conclusively proved or disproved and because advocates on each side of the debate possessed just enough evidence at their disposal to block a comfortable verdict for the opposition. (See “A Note on the Sally Hemings Scandal” at the end, for a concise summary of the evidence.) John Adams had one of the shrewdest reactions to the charges when they first surfaced. Adams was still in his anti-Jefferson phase, so his response was not conditioned by their former friendship. As a victim of similarly venomous vendettas Adams claimed to empathize with Jefferson. On the other hand, the allegations were “a natural and almost inevitable consequence of a foul contagion in the human character, Negro Slavery.” Jefferson was not only contaminated by that contagion, but also not above suspicion because “there was not a planter in Virginia,” Adams observed, “who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.” The charge of sexual impropriety therefore placed “a blot on his Character” that was not completely implausible. It possessed a certain moral truth because it raised to relief the inherently immoral condition in which all slaveowners, Jefferson included, lived their lives.88

  What Adams did not say for the record, but almost surely thought, was that there was an analogous sense of poetic justice about the allegations, because they originated with a former Republican scandalmonger named James Callender, whose previous career had been spent vilifying Jefferson’s opponents, Adams among them, in much the same truth-be-damned fashion and with Jefferson’s support and approval. Callender had been the reporter to break the story of Hamilton’s shady escapades in 1797 and the following year had slandered Adams as “the corrupt and despotic monarch of Braintree” in a pamphlet entitled The Prospect Before Us. Jefferson had endorsed and helped pay for Prospect, but Callender, whose only consistency was a perverse flair for treachery, turned against him when Jefferson refused to reward his labors with the postmaster’s job in Richmond. According to one Federalist account, probably apocryphal, Callender lingered outside the presidential mansion for several days hoping for a personal interview. When he spotted Jefferson at an upstairs window, he shouted out his threat: “Sir, you know that by lying I made you President, and I’ll be d———d if I do not unmake you by telling the truth.” Jefferson denounced Callender as “a lying renegade from Republicanism,” then had Monroe, still governor of Virginia at the time, release statements denying that Jefferson had ever befriended or salaried Callender or had anything to do with his earlier diatribes against Adams. But Callender had saved his copies of Jefferson’s incriminating letters and immediately distributed them to the Federalist press. “I thank you for the proof-sheets you enclosed me,” Jefferson had written to Callender in reference to Prospect; “such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect.”89