by Andrea Wulf
Not only might the United States “supply themselves sugar for their own consumption,” Jefferson wrote, “but be great exporters.” He had been thinking about this for some time and had asked for facts and figures on maple sugar production in New England, where small orchards were cultivated for domestic use. He had also requested some sugar samples which he forwarded to Washington, knowing that the president was always keen to learn about new crops. Only a few days before his departure, Jefferson had asked his old revolutionary friend Benjamin Rush to write an account of the tree, its locations and the tapping and yield of sugar, as well as the possible cultivation of the tree in an orchard and the process of turning the sap into sugar. Having assembled all the facts that he possibly could, Jefferson would use his botanical tour to talk to local growers and gain as much firsthand knowledge as possible.
On 4 June, about halfway through their trip, he and Madison arrived in Bennington, a town in Vermont at the foot of a hill that was entirely covered with maple trees. They had reached the heart of sugar maple country and the home of Moses Robinson, who had just recently been elected to the U.S. Senate. Like the two Virginians, Robinson opposed Hamilton’s economic plans and would become a steadfast member of the Republican party. Here, during their two-day stay, party politics and botany wove together. Robinson entertained Jefferson and Madison at his house, inviting other leading citizens and local Antifederalists, including Joseph Fay, the former secretary of state for Vermont. They walked in the garden and the two friends found yet more trees they hadn’t seen before. Madison admired one, which was releasing clumps of downy seeds that sailed in the wind like delicate cotton balls, but had to wait until Jefferson consulted his botanical books back in Philadelphia to learn that it was balsam poplar, the northernmost hardwood in North America.
The conversation then turned to the economic possibilities of expanding the small-scale New England sugar production to a national level. Sensing that they were in the presence of a kindred spirit, Madison and Jefferson bombarded their host and other guests with questions and passionately advocated the plan. Fay happily agreed to promote the project. He would examine his “young groves,” he promised, to calculate the number of maples per acre and he would plant an orchard “to encourage others.” Their enthusiasm for patriotic orchards was clearly infectious. When they talked to Anthony Haswell, another fervent Republican and the printer of the Vermont Gazette, he was quickly convinced and ran a piece in his paper declaring that “attention to our sugar orchards is essentially necessary to secure the independence of our country.”
There may have been other motives behind the stopover at Bennington besides the sugar maples, for Jefferson added it to their itinerary only after the Rights of Man scandal erupted. One British diplomat correctly suspected that Jefferson’s and Madison’s intentions “have been to feel the pulse of the country.” Although they were not formally establishing a fully organized party apparatus, their discussions with Robinson, Haswell and Fay certainly hint at an attempt to gauge possible party loyalties. Indeed Madison had by this time emerged as the opposition leader, after a local newspaper in Albany described him as “the Charles Fox of America,” referring to the leader of the opposition in the British government. When the article was republished in other parts of the country the idea of parties echoed across America’s political landscape.
Politics, Madison wrote to a friend, “entered of course into our itinerary conversations.” Jefferson certainly had party politics on his mind—or “party Jugglings” as one of Hamilton’s friends called it—because he had asked that the Gazette of the United States be sent to him during the tour. Jefferson hated the Federalists’ mouthpiece for “disseminating the doctrines of monarchy,” he said, but it was important to know what their rivals were thinking.
At Bennington Jefferson and Madison praised Paine’s Rights of Man and reflected on the “defects of British Government.” Though Fay was not immediately convinced by their position, he quickly changed his mind on reading Paine. All of them—Robinson, Haswell and Fay—remained lifelong Republicans and supporters of Jefferson. Haswell later reported in the Vermont Gazette that Jefferson and Madison “secured to themselves a fund of political knowledge” in Bennington.
After their politically charged weekend in Vermont, Jefferson and Madison traveled south through Massachusetts and Connecticut, where their attention turned back to agriculture and plants. Madison recorded everything from soil types, crops, sizes of farms, the price of land and the different species of forest trees. His journal read like an agricultural survey: “soil good but often very sandy,” “farms vary from 50 to 200 acres,” “useful growth Sugar maple, white pine, White Cedar,” “An acre of good land yields 30 bushs. Indian Corn Rye, potatoes.” Passing through Connecticut, however, they now entered the heartland of the staunch advocates of Hamilton’s plans. Their trip had not gone unnoticed and the local politicians and landowners “ridiculed, J___n & M__n’s Tour.” John Trumbull, for example, the state attorney, had sardonically written to Adams after Hamilton’s bank bill passed that Madison had “dwindled … to the insignificant leader of an impotent Minority.” Later that year, as party divisions intensified, Trumbull would tell friends that he planned to write a satire about the Virginia politicians and the strength of the Federalists.
From Connecticut Jefferson and Madison sailed to Oysterpond Point (today’s Orient Point) at the northeastern tail of Long Island for the last leg of their journey. Their final stop was William Prince’s nursery in Flushing, a visit that once again brought politics and gardening together. Just as the old revolutionaries frequented Bartram’s Garden when Congress met in Philadelphia, they had all discovered the nursery when New York had been the temporary capital of the United States. Madison had bought trees here in the past, while Adams and Washington had visited together in 1789, during the first year of the presidency. Being accustomed to Bartram’s vast selection, Washington was disappointed, noting in his diary that the “shrubs were trifling and the flowers not numerous”; only the “young fruit Trees” had fulfilled his expectations.
Jefferson, however, was not interested in variety on this occasion, rather he wanted to buy a few of the trees that they had seen during their tour. Most of all he wanted sugar maples—not just some but “all you have,” he told Prince with characteristic extravagance. The thriving sugar orchards in the northern states together with Hamilton’s continuing mercantile overtures to Britain convinced Jefferson that he needed to act fast if he was to reduce American dependency on British sugar. It was as if the formations of orderly rows upon rows of upright saplings were symbols of America’s defiance against Britain, an arboreal army fighting for economic independence.
Jefferson’s urgency was matched by that of Hamilton, for the secretary of the treasury had been steadily working on his rival version of America’s future. In April he had supported the foundation of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures and was now canvassing for America’s first industrial city, which would supply Americans and customers across the world with paper, linen, cotton, blankets, carpets and other products.14 In the summer, as Jefferson and Madison returned from their tour, Hamilton sent two agents to find a suitable site for this shining new city. A few weeks later they reported to have found “one of the finest situations in the world,” the Great Falls of the Passaic River. Such natural wonders had always impressed Jefferson, who had declared Niagara Falls so stupendous that they were “worth a voiage across the Atlantic,” but Hamilton was not interested in awe-inspiring nature. The roaring water that plunged more than two hundred feet into a narrow gorge might have looked magnificent, but the real beauty was that it could be harnessed to power the mills.15
As Hamilton worked on his industrial dream, Jefferson continued to campaign for sugar maple orchards across the country. He was so efficient in promoting this American sugar (asking people to taste it in order to convince them to plant the orchards) that it quickly became impossible to procure even a
few grams from anywhere in the United States. At Monticello he planted an entire grove from Prince’s delivery, but in the end he failed to produce sugar due to the climate. Despite the setbacks he continued to order seeds and saplings, for it “is too hopeful an object to be abandoned.”
At the same time the tour of the northern states had also been of great personal benefit—when Jefferson arrived back in Philadelphia on 19 June, a little more than a month after he had left, he told Washington that “Mr. Madison’s health is very visibly mended.” Of his own health, he was able to report that his headache had disappeared. Jefferson probably also hoped that the furor about his attack on John Adams had finally died down, but instead he found that it had flared. In the midst of the tour, on 8 June, the first of eleven essays criticizing Paine’s Rights of Man (and by extension Jefferson) had been published under the pseudonym Publicola16 and reprinted in newspapers across the country, from Massachusetts to South Carolina. At the same time, Hamilton’s new national bank opened. Investors scrambled for stocks, selling them on within one hour to the highest bidders. Madison was appalled by the “eternal buzz [of] the gamblers” and Hamilton’s “Bank-Jobbers”—men who made their money by shifting paper rather than soil. Banks, Jefferson warned, would sweep away the fortunes and morals of the people.
The old revolutionary friends and colleagues had drifted apart. And though the new alliances were complex and sometimes even contradictory, the once subtle divisions hardened. Adams, for example, was regarded as a Federalist (in fact he would become the first and only Federalist president), but at the same time he also mistrusted Hamilton and the financial coterie around him. Like Jefferson and Madison, Adams believed that the soil held the future of the United States of America, and when Abigail suggested he buy stocks in the new national bank he refused to invest. Had he followed her advice, they would have earned more money than they ever made through their farm.
Washington was left in the middle, despairing about the fissures within his own administration. “I regret—deeply regret—the difference in opinions which have arisen, and divided you and another principal Officer of the Government,” he wrote to Jefferson. By autumn the Republicans had their very own national partisan newspaper. In early August Freneau sent the proposal for the new paper to Jefferson, “the hint of which you, Sir,” he wrote to Jefferson, “in conjunction with Mr. Madison were pleased to mention to me in May last.”
During those four weeks in May and June 1791, Jefferson and Madison aligned politics and plants so closely that it is impossible to consider them separately. Sometimes plants were the reminder of their vision of the United States of America; sometimes nature provided a place of solitude, an escape from the political quarrels in Philadelphia; and sometimes a plant such as the sugar maple tree held the promise of changing the political and economic landscape.
Hamilton’s son would later write that Jefferson and Madison used “the pretext of a botanical excursion” to rally party support. Continuing the botanical theme, he claimed that they sowed “tares” along the way—comparing their political ideas with weeds that could overtake productive grain fields. He might have exaggerated, as the tour did not create a coherent party overnight, but it certainly was the beginning of Republican allegiances—only five years later a presidential election was fought with smear campaigns along the new party lines. Above all, however, the tour cemented Jefferson’s and Madison’s friendship and political alliance. Almost forty years later, Madison would remember the botanical ramble as an occasion that “made us immediate companions.” Their friendship “was for life, and … never interrupted in the slightest degree for a single moment.”
* * *
1 The noting of botanical dates such as times of blossoming and leafing was also part of his long study of the American climate.
2 A month later Mary wrote back, telling her father that in fact she hadn’t failed him because the “fruit was not killed as you thought.”
3 Originally The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787. Of the eighty-five essays, Madison wrote twenty-nine, Hamilton fifty-one and John Jay five.
4 The Jeffersonian Republicans—sometimes also called Democrats by their enemies—later split and became the modern Democratic Party. The Jeffersonian Republicans were also called “Antifederalists” and the Federalists were called “Antirepublicans.” Although parties had not been formally established in 1791, for the sake of consistency, they will be called “Republicans” and “Federalists” throughout this chapter.
5 Years later, in 1816, Jefferson was so appalled by the commercialization of the United States that he talked about a separation between the industrial North and the agricultural South. “I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us separate,’ ” Jefferson wrote. “I would rather the States should withdraw, which are for unlimited commerce and war, and confederate with those alone which are for peace and agriculture.”
6 Jefferson continued his endeavor and during his retirement dispatched rice to the governor of Georgia. By 1813 he was proud to report that rice was successfully cultivated in the upper parts of Georgia and Kentucky.
7 As Jefferson prepared to move from New York to Philadelphia, he asked Franklin’s grandson William Temple Franklin to find a house for him with a garden—in fact, he wanted two houses as “to assign the lower floor of both to my public offices, and the first floor and both gardens entirely to my own use.” In the end he couldn’t afford this and moved to a house with no garden at all.
8 Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in November 1790.
9 Adams had written about this in the Defence but also talked about it during a cabinet meeting in April 1791. Adams had said, Jefferson later recalled, that if some of its defects were corrected, the British constitution “would be the most perfect constitution of government ever devised by man.” Abigail had rightly worried that “they will think in America that he [Adams] is for sitting up a King.”
10 Clinton had called Hamilton an “upstart attorney” and “a superficial, self-conceited coxcomb.”
11 Meticulous as always, Jefferson also listed the exact daily mileage, as well as rating the inns along the way as “*good,” “+middling” or “-bad.”
12 After their return Jefferson wrote to Madison, “I am sorry we did not bring with us some leaves of the different plants which struck our attention,” because without the leaves he was finding it difficult to identify them. It was unsurprising that Jefferson was struggling because it was a different species from the only two that had been classified at that time—R. periclymenoides and R. viscosum. They had probably seen R. prinophyllum, which has a spicy clove-like fragrance. The other northern species with deep red blooms is rhodora (R. canadensis), but it’s not noted for its scent and it has a different number of stamens from the other species, which Jefferson would have certainly noticed.
13 Jefferson and Madison asked farmers about the life cycle of the Hessian fly. How many eggs were on one stalk, when had the insect first appeared and, most important of all, could the eggs, larvae and flies be found in the grain? In order to save their wheat exports they needed to prove that the fly could not cross the ocean in the harvested grain.
14 Since February Hamilton had been systematically working on his “Report on Manufactures,” which he presented to Congress in December. The report laid out how the federal government should support and finance large-scale manufacturing. Even children could be employed, Hamilton enthused, because many were working in Britain’s cotton mills at “a very tender age.” In the end the report was never translated into legislation, but Jefferson and Madison regarded it as another attempt to place more power in the hands of the federal government and to undermine the agrarian republic. Adams believed that the encouragement of manufacturers should only be “discreet” and only in the “general Interest of Agriculture.”
15 The manufacturin
g town on the Passaic River was never completed, and by early 1796, all that was left were a few abandoned and derelict buildings.
16 Many readers, including Jefferson, thought that Adams was “Publicola,” but it was Adams’s son, the future president John Quincy Adams.
5
“POLITICAL PLANTS GROW IN THE SHADE”
THE SUMMER OF 1796
“I WILL NOT SIT HERE IN SUMMER,” Vice President John Adams moaned in April 1796, “I would sooner resign my Office.” His sullen mood was the result of having been holed up in Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the United States. Over the past seven years, whenever Adams had to attend to his office during the congressional sessions, he had missed his fields, his long walks and of course his wife, Abigail, who often remained behind to run the farm in Quincy in his absence. “I long for rural sceanes,” he wailed, “I want to take a Walk with you in the Garden.” From Philadelphia he instructed her on agricultural matters and complained bitterly when she failed to mention the farm. Abigail’s replies tended to combine reports on manures, clover, ploughs and pruning with sage political advice. His outcries when her letters were delayed revealed just how much he needed them: “No Letter for The Vice President,” he would sulk. “All Day in bad humour—dirty Weather—wet walking—nothing good—nothing right … Smooked I know not how many Segars.”
THE FRUSTRATION HE FELT during his time in Philadelphia was rooted in his visceral experience of nature. He had always loved the feel of the wind in his face, as well as picking plants when he went on long rambles in the woods, fields, meadows, and by rivers and lakes. Away from his beloved farm, he dreamed of being home pruning apple trees or planting cabbages. When the lack of fresh air and gardens in Philadelphia became too much, he visited the country estates outside the city to observe new methods of husbandry and gardening, but nothing compared to seeing his own land. “Oh my farm when shall I see thee,” he lamented, “there will be no End of my tragic Oh’s and tragic Ah’s.”
