by Chernow, Ron
When Jefferson went to France in 1784, succeeding Ben Franklin as U.S. minister— the word ambassador was still eschewed as a vestige of monarchy—he had firsthand experience of an absolutist government. “The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil,” he told a friend.16 To George Washington, he expressed himself as unequivocally. “I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe. I am ten thousand times more so since I have seen what they are.”17 His French sojourn radicalized Jefferson and left him with a heightened suspicion of the damage that could be done by any aristocratic or monarchical sympathies in America—suspicions that were to crystallize around the figure of Alexander Hamilton.
All the while, Jefferson clung to a vision of France as America’s fraternal ally. “Nothing should be spared on our part to attach this country to us,” he wrote to Madison.18 While scorning French political arrangements, Jefferson adored his life in that decadent society. He relished Paris—the people, wine, women, music, literature, and architecture. And the more rabidly antiaristocratic he became, the more he was habituated to aristocratic pleasures. Jefferson fancied himself a mere child of nature, a simple, unaffected man, rather than what he really was: a grandee, a gourmet, a hedonist, and a clever, ambitious politician. Even as he deplored the inequities of French society, he occupied the stately Hotel de Langeac on the Champs Elysées, constructed for a mistress of one of Louis XV’s ministers. Jefferson decorated the mansion with choice neoclassical furniture bought from stylish vendors. The philosopher in powdered hair employed a coachman, a footman, a valet— seven or eight domestics in all, a household staff so complete that it included a frotteur whose job consisted solely of buffing the floors to a high gleam. Jefferson’s colossal shopping sprees in Paris—he bought two thousand books and sixty-three paintings—betrayed a cavalier disregard for his crushing debts as well as the slaves whose labor serviced them. While Jefferson’s Parisian life seems to contradict his politics, he was embraced by a group of Enlightenment aristocrats who exhibited the same exquisite contradictions.
For part of his Parisian stay, Jefferson was joined by his two daughters. The younger one, Polly, arrived in 1787 in the company of his light-skinned fourteenyear-old slave, Sally Hemings, who was called “Dashing Sally” at Monticello and was later described by another slave as “mighty near white” and “very handsome” with “long straight hair down her back.”19 Jefferson had inherited the Hemings family via his wife, and it is now presumed that Sally Hemings was her half sister. We do not know for certain whether Jefferson’s apparent romance with Sally Hemings began at this time or after he returned to America. He was a widower who was highly susceptible to women. For all his paeans to married life, he had no qualms about flirtations with married women. In 1786, Jefferson, forty-three, squired around Paris a blond, coquettish British artist born in Italy, twenty-six-year-old Maria Cosway, whose husband, the painter Richard Cosway, was usually absent. Their dalliance lasted long enough to bring Jefferson into contact with Maria Cosway’s closest friend, Angelica Church, who had recently incorporated the Cosways into her thriving salon.
When Jefferson first met Church in Paris in late 1787, she acted as a go-between for Mrs. Cosway, which tells us something about her own liberal views on extramarital escapades. “Have you seen yet the lovely Mrs. Church?” Maria Cosway wrote to Jefferson that Christmas. “If I did not love her so much, I should fear her rivalship, but, no, I give you free permission to love her with all your heart.”20 Church brought Jefferson a little tea vase from her friend. He was as entranced by the worldly, seductive Church as Hamilton. Jefferson loved her warm vivacity and what he described as her “mild and settled” temperament.21 When John Trumbull painted two miniatures of Jefferson, the American minister sent one copy to Maria Cosway, the other to Angelica Church. “The memorial of me which you have from Trumbull is the most worthless part of me,” Jefferson confided to Church in an accompanying note. “Could he paint my friendship to you, it would be something out of the common line.”22 In an equally coquettish reply, Church said that she and Cosway were “extremely vain of the pleasure of being permitted to write him and very happy to have some share of his favorable opinion.”23 Though Angelica Church was married with four children, Jefferson persisted in his advances. In 1788, projecting a trip to America the following year, he invited her to visit him at Monticello, or else he would visit her in New York and they would travel to Niagara Falls. So close were Jefferson and Angelica Church at this time that Jefferson’s copy of The Federalist displays this surprising dedication: “For Mrs. Church from her Sister, Elizabeth Hamilton.”24 Evidently, Church had given Jefferson the copy that Eliza rushed off to her in England.
In the end, Angelica Church spurned Jefferson’s coy overtures, and nothing ever came of their flirtation. The feud beween Hamilton and Jefferson forced Church to choose between the two men, and, inevitably, she chose her brother-in-law. Yet the brief liaison may have had a political impact. During her 1789 stay in New York, Church doubtless told Hamilton about Jefferson’s fling with Maria Cosway and his provocative suggestion that he and Church travel together in America. She may even have voiced some suspicions about Sally Hemings, whose son Madison later claimed that it was in Paris that “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called home, she was enceinte by him.”25 Any such gossip about Jefferson in Paris would have given Hamilton an image of the new secretary of state strikingly different from the more ascetic one he wanted to project to the world. And when Hamilton later began a campaign to unmask what he saw as the real Jefferson, the closet sensualist, the knowledge of Jefferson’s amorous ways, culled from Church’s stories, may have colored his portrait. Both Hamilton and Jefferson came to see each other as hypocritical libertines, and this fed a mutual cynicism. Hamilton offered testimony of his own inexcusable lapses in this area, while the sphinxlike Jefferson was a man of such unshakable reticence that it took two centuries of sedulous detective work to provide partial corroboration of the story of his sexual liaison with Sally Hemings.
A congenital optimist, Jefferson was convinced that France, following America’s lead, would cast off the shackles of despotism. Lafayette and other French aristocrats, he believed, after imbibing a love of liberty in America, would effect a comparable transformation in their own society. In November 1788, Jefferson wrote to Washington of a France buoyant with hope: “The nation has been awakened by our revolution, they feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde.”26 No less serenely, he told James Monroe that within two or three years France would have “a tolerably free constitution” without “having cost them a drop of blood.”27 As late as March 15, 1789, Jefferson seemed oblivious of the violent emotions churning in the breasts of the French populace, telling Madison, “France will be quiet this year, because this year at least is necessary for settling her future constitution.”28 By this point, desperate French peasants were looting grain wagons. The following month, the mere rumor that a wallpaper manufacturer was about to slash wages led workers to encircle his house, shouting, “Death to the rich, death to the aristocrats.”29 The subsequent crackdown on protesters left dozens, perhaps hundreds, dead.
It would be richly paradoxical that Jefferson, long an eyewitness to French politics, was blind to the murderous drift of events while Hamilton, who never set foot in Europe, was much more clear-sighted about the French Revolution. At first, Jefferson’s exuberance was natural and understandable. In June 1789, the legislature was renamed the National Assembly, as Louis XVI seemed to accept a constitutional monarchy. On July 11, Lafayette presented to the assembly a declaration of rights that had been helpfully reviewed by Jefferson. Then came the gory atrocities that shadowed the Bastille’s fall on July 14, 1789: severed heads propped on pikes, mutilated bodies dragged through the streets, corpses swinging from streetlamps. For those who cared to read the signs, the future of th
e Revolution was written in these bloodstained images. Simon Schama has noted that violence was, from the outset, part and parcel of the Revolution: “The notion that between 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure garden before the erection of the guillotine is a complete fantasy.”30
With his highly selective vision, Jefferson preferred to dwell on the hopeful aspects of the situation and filtered out the carnage. On August 3, 1789, he wrote to a friend:
It is impossible to conceive a greater fermentation than has worked in Paris, nor do I believe that so great a fermentation ever produced so little injury in any other people. I have been through it daily, have observed the mobs with my own eyes in order to be satisfied of their objects and declare to you that I saw so plainly the legitimacy of them that I have slept in my house as quietly through the whole as I ever did in the most peaceable moments....I will agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this country.31
To Maria Cosway, Jefferson hazarded a small joke about decapitating aristocrats— “The cutting off heads is become so much à la mode that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders”—and he left little doubt that the French Revolution was a worthy sequel to its American predecessor: “My fortune has been singular to see in the course of fourteen years two such revolutions as were never seen before.”32 Even as Jefferson departed from France that fall, thousands of poor, desperate women were swarming toward Versailles, determined to drag the royal family back to Paris.
Many Americans were flattered to think that their revolution had spawned a European successor with a similar respect for legal forms. All the more prophetic then the letter of October 6, 1789, that Hamilton sent to his old friend Lafayette, who had been appointed head of the national guard. Sitting in New York, slaving over his Report on Public Credit, the new secretary of the treasury peered deeper into French affairs than did Jefferson after five years in residence. “I have seen with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension the progress of the events which have lately taken place in your country,” Hamilton began his carefully worded letter. “As a friend to mankind and liberty, I rejoice in the efforts which you are making to establish it, while I fear much for the final success of the attempts, for the fate of those I esteem who are engaged in it.” Hamilton knew that Lafayette would wonder why he experienced “this foreboding of ill” and listed four reasons. The first three were the disagreements that would surface over the French constitution; the “vehement character” of the French people; and the resistance of the nobility to the sacrifices they would have to make. The fourth point was perhaps the most compelling: “I dread the reveries of your philosophic politicians who appear in the moment to have great influence and who being mere speculatists may aim at more refinement than suits either with human nature or the composition of your nation.”33
The future secretary of state, now sailing home, was to strike Hamilton as just such a “philosophic politician” ignorant of human nature. Hamilton later explained to a political associate that Jefferson in Paris “drank deeply of the French philosophy in religion, in science, in politics. He came from France in the moment of a fermentation which he had had a share in exciting and in the passions and feelings of which he shared both from temperament and situation.”34 Fresh from the French Revolution, Jefferson was to be greeted by a most unexpected shock when he showed up in New York to assume his post.
On March 21, 1790, Jefferson moved into lodgings on Maiden Lane, where he was to live with something less than republican austerity. From Paris, he had shipped home eighty-six crates packed with costly French furniture, porcelain, and silver, as well as books, paintings, and prints. He had brought home 288 bottles of French wine. To appease his craving for French food, he also brought along one of his slaves, James Hemings (Sally’s brother), who had studied fine cooking with a Parisian chef. While secretary of state, Jefferson maintained a household of five servants, four horses, and a maître d’hôtel imported from Paris.
In seeming contradiction to this patrician style, Jefferson cherished a vision of America as a place of arcadian innocence. “Indeed, madam, I know nothing as charming as our own country,” he had written to Angelica Church from Paris. “The learned say it is a new creation and I believe them, not for their reasons, but because it is made on an improved plan. Europe is a first idea, a crude production, before the master knew his trade, or had made up his mind as to what he wanted.”35 Settled in his palatial Parisian residence, Jefferson lamented reports of unspoiled Americans succumbing to luxurious ways. “I consider the extravagance which has seized them as a more baneful evil than toryism was during the war,” he told one correspondent.36 Now he was eager to assess “the tone of sentiment” in America after his prolonged absence.37
In New York, Jefferson soon decided that America had been corrupted in his absence and that the Revolution stood in mortal danger. He concluded that “a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment” among affluent New Yorkers.38 As he attended dinners, he was taken aback by the pro-British inclinations of many merchants and the sumptuous gowns and jewelry of their wives. The town struck him as infested with Tories and avaricious speculators in government securities, all looking worshipfully to Hamilton as their favorite. The heroes of 1776 had given way to those of 1787; as exemplified by Hamilton, they were a different, more conservative breed. Jefferson blamed the influence of British manners and manufactures for this decay of republican purity.
Twelve years Jefferson’s junior, Hamilton had never met him before. Hamilton had been a lowly artillery captain at the time Jefferson was composing the Declaration of Independence, and Hamilton’s incandescent rise had coincided with Jefferson’s years abroad. Hamilton would have heard favorable things about Jefferson from Angelica Church and from James Madison, and the latter likely introduced them. That Hamilton and Jefferson were to become antagonists in a bloody, unrelenting feud would not have occurred to either man upon first meeting, and their relations started out amicably enough. Alexander and Eliza hosted a welcoming dinner for the newcomer, who showed up in a blue coat and crimson knee breeches and talked fondly of the French people and their desire to eliminate the monarchy. Jefferson got to know Eliza so well that he chided Angelica Church in June for not writing more often and sighed with mock despair, “I can count only on hearing from you thro’ Mrs. Hamilton.”39 The new secretaries of state and treasury traded cordial notes.
Jefferson never underestimated Hamilton’s superlative talents. After reading The Federalist, Jefferson pronounced it the “best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.”40 Nor did he slight Hamilton’s virtues. As he noted in later years, after their epic battles had faded into history, “Hamilton was indeed a singular character of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life—yet so bewitched and perverted by the British example as to be under thorough conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.”41 By corruption, Jefferson did not necessarily mean outright payments so much as unhealthy executive influence over legislators through honors, appointments, and other perquisites of office. A central tenet of the American Revolution had been that a corrupt British ministry had suborned Parliament through patronage and pensions and used the resulting excessive influence to tax the colonists and deprive them of their ancient English liberties. Jefferson always viewed Hamilton through the lens of this unsettling analogy.
By the time Jefferson arrived in New York, Madison had been trounced by Hamilton in the discrimination vote, and the treasury secretary was hurtling ahead with his funding scheme. Jefferson must have regretted having arrived so late. He had no doubt that the original holders of government paper had been cheated of rightful gains by speculators who were “fraudulent purchasers of this paper.... Immense sums were thus filched from the poor and ignorant and fortunes accumulated by th
ose who had themselves been poor enough before.”42 Jefferson’s objections to Hamilton’s plan had philosophical roots. In his view, the smaller the government, the better the chances of preserving liberty. And to the extent that a central government was necessary, he wanted a strong Congress with a weak executive. Most of all, Jefferson wished to preserve state sovereignty against federal infringement. Since Hamilton’s agenda was to strengthen the central government, bolster the executive branch at the expense of the legislature, and subordinate the states, it embodied everything Jefferson abhorred.
Jefferson feared that the funding scheme would create a fiercely loyal following for Hamilton among those enriched by it. He later told Washington that Hamilton had promoted a “regular system” of “interested persons” who were at the beck and call of the Treasury Department.43 He was convinced that congressmen were investing in government securities and that “even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty to their interests and to look after personal rather than public good.”44 Jefferson also did not believe that Hamilton really intended to pay off the government debt. “I would wish the debt paid tomorrow,” Jefferson told Washington. “He wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the legislature.”45 This idea of perpetual debt flew in the face of Hamilton’s express words and turned his funding program into a blatant grab for power.
