Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

Long before there were levelers in France, Jefferson was a leveler in Virginia; and because he was a leveler in Virginia, the reactionaries who resented his reforms were afterward to charge his democracy to the influence of the levelers of Paris. His democracy was inherent, in part inherited from a pioneer father. His dislike of the aristocratic system amounted to a prejudice, and he could not bear the novels of Scott because of his detestation of the institutions of medieval times.[375] Having written the Declaration of Independence in the house of a bricklayer, he declined a reëlection to Congress to enter the House of Burgesses in Virginia to revamp the institutions of the State along democratic lines. When he finished his work there, he had made himself one of the foremost democrats of all times—and the French Revolution was still in the distance.

The Virginia system had been made for caste society; the landed aristocracy were as much a caste as that in England—minus the titles. They had the same love of land, the same obsession that the alienation of any part of their possessions was treason to the family. Through the system of entail, the lands and slaves of the aristocracy could be passed on down through the generations, proof against the extravagance and inefficiency of the owners and the attacks of creditors. The law of primogeniture was designed to serve the same general end of preventing the disruption of the great estates. With a fine audacity, Jefferson sallied forth quite gayly to attack them both. Even Henry thought this was radicalism gone mad. Pendleton was more hurt than outraged. The aristocratic members of his mother’s family looked upon him as a matricide. Undaunted by the hate engendered, he put his hand to the plough and kept it there until he had ploughed the field and prepared it for a democratic harvest. His friend Pendleton begged a compromise on primogeniture giving the eldest son a double share of the land. ‘Yes,’ replied the leveler, ‘when he can eat twice the allowance of food and do double the allowance of work.’ It was his purpose to eradicate ‘every fibre of ancient or future aristocracy.’[376] The outraged landed aristocracy never forgave him. He was the first American to invite the hate of a class, and from the beginning he turned his back on the aristocracy and made his appeal to the middle-class yeomanry.[377] All this was behind him when he went to Paris before the Revolution there began. There the tall, slender American in the elegant house on the Grande Route des Champs Elysées, with its extensive gardens and court, was an impressive figure. ‘You replace Doctor Franklin, I hear,’ said Vergennes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. ‘I succeed him,’ Jefferson replied; ‘nobody could replace him.’ There could have been no more ingratiating reply, for his predecessor had been greatly admired and loved.

No one could have found the conversation of the salons and dinner tables more congenial. His manners were those of a man of the world, and he shared the French fondness for speculative talk, and the French knack of spicing gravity with frivolity. Even his table tastes were similar. He ate sparingly and preferred the light wines. Both his natural hospitality and his respect for the dignity of his position spread the reputation of his lavish table; and while he gave no great parties, gay and frequent dinners were the rule. Lafayette ran in and out constantly; members of the diplomatic set found Jefferson’s house an agreeable meeting-place; the young French officers who had served in America liked his company, and De la Tude, the wit, who had served thirty-five years in prison for writing an epigram on Pompadour, enlivened many an evening with his reminiscences. American tourists were captivated by his civilities, introductions to celebrities, itineraries for profitable trips. Like Franklin before him, he charmed the beautiful women of the court with his wit and humor, and the eloquence of his conversation. He loved the promenades and shops, and was constantly alert for something unusual to send his friends at home—rare books for Madison, Monroe, and Wythe, a portable table for Madison, an artistic lamp for Lee. And yet he was far from an elegant idler, and his days were laboriously passed; mornings at his office, afternoons given to country walks, evenings to society, art, music. He found time for elaborate and illuminating reports that are models in diplomatic literature and which exacted tribute from even John Marshall. Feeling frequently the need of absolute seclusion for his work, he had rooms in the Carthusian Monastery on Mount Calvary where silence was enjoined outside the rooms, but where he had the privileges of the garden.

‘I am much pleased with the people of this country,’ he wrote a lady. ‘The roughness of the human mind is so thoroughly rubbed off with them, that it seems one might glide through a whole life without a jostle.’[378] And in another letter, the same impression: ‘Here it seems a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.’[379] But if he loved the society of Paris, he was not, like Morris, seduced into an acceptance of its system. His passion for democracy did not permit him to judge the happiness of a nation by the luxuries of the court and aristocracy. He struck out into the country to judge for himself of the condition of the peasants, looked into the pots on the fire to see what they ate, felt their beds to see if they were comfortable. He inquired into the wages and the working conditions of the artisans of the cities—and his conclusions were unavoidable, of course. ‘It is a fact,’ he wrote, ‘in spite of the mildness of their governors, the people are ground to powder by their form of government. Of twenty million people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion there are nineteen million more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual in the whole United States.’[380] And to another: ‘I find the general fate of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here is either the hammer or the anvil.’[381] He was shocked by a system that dedicated the sons of peasants as cannon fodder in remote wars precipitated by the whims of a prostitute; that winked at the debauchery of their wives and daughters; that gave men to the Bastile for the expression of a criticism; that crushed the people with intolerable taxation to sustain the luxury of a few; that forced the poor to live on food not fit for a stray dog in a city slums, and which awed the masses into submission to such conditions by the bayonets of the soldiery. This was the France of which he thought in the day when his sympathy with the Revolution was to damn him with the Federalists’ taunt of ‘Jacobin’ and ‘anarchist.’

Such being his observations and views, he rejoiced in the popular awakening in the dawning days of the Revolution. Witnessing the meeting of the Assembly of the Notables, a fascinated spectator of the razing of the Bastile, listening, deeply moved, to the audacious eloquence of Mirabeau, he wrote, with the joy of the reformer, to Washington that ‘the French nation has been awakened by our Revolution.’ It was in those days that Gouverneur Morris, the friend of Hamilton, was accustomed to drop in on Jefferson for a chat on the situation, and their friendly disagreements were soon to appear in a party division in America. ‘He and I differ,’ wrote Morris in his diary, ‘in our system of politics. He with all the leaders of liberty here is desirous of annihilating distinctions of order.’[382] And yet he was not hostile to the King or the monarchy. He hoped for reforms, freely granted. Louis he found ‘irascible, rude, very limited in his understanding,’ with ‘no mistress,’ but governed too much by the Queen—‘devoted to pleasure and expense, and not remarkable for any other vices or virtues.’[383] As the storm-clouds lowered and the easy-going monarch remained inert, he became less tolerant. ‘The King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper. The Queen cries but sins on. The Count d’Artois is detested.’[384] And a month later: ‘The King goes for nothing. He hunts one half the day, is drunk the other, and signs whatever he is bid.’[385]

As the future Terrorists ascended from the cellars and descended from the garrets, and occasional riots gave premonitory signs of the bloody days ahead, he reported to Jay that the rioting was the work of the ‘abandoned banditti of Paris,’ and had no ‘professed connection with the great national reformation going on.’[386]

All this time he was being constantly consulted by Lafayette and the moderate leaders who were to become the members of the attractive but unfortunate party of the Gironde. They even met at his dinner table to make plans, without notifying him of their intent, and his voluntary explanation to the Minister was received with the expression of a hope that he might be able to assist in an accommodation of differences. He did, in fact, propose a plan, which, had it been accepted, might have saved the monarchy. It was his suggestion that Louis step forward with a charter in his hands, granting liberty of the person, of conscience, of the press, a trial by jury, an annual legislature with the power of taxation, and with a ministry responsible to the people.[387] These associations and these views are conclusive as to the absurdity that he was permeated with the theories of Jacobinism and brought them back to the United States. He was the same kind of Jacobin as Lafayette. His interest was the interest in democracy and popular rights that he had taken with him when he sailed for Europe. Mirabeau was still laboring to save the monarchy with reforms when Jefferson returned to America on leave.

IV

Jefferson was a humanitarian ahead of his time. His humanity spoke above the passions of the Revolution in his letter to Patrick Henry against the mistreatment of the German prisoners. ‘Is an enemy so execrable,’ he wrote, ‘that though in captivity his wishes and comforts are to be disregarded and even crossed? I think not. It is for the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as possible.’[388] These captives, interned near Monticello, came to love the master on the hill for his efforts to lighten the burdens of their captivity.[389] A little later, in the Virginia Legislature, we find him opposing the death penalty except for treason and murder, and the policy of working convicts on the highways and canals. ‘Exhibited as a public spectacle,’ he wrote, ‘with shaved heads and mean clothing, working on the highroads produced in the criminals such a prostration of self-respect, as, instead of reforming, plunged them into the most desperate and hardened depravity.’[390] It was novel then to hear men speaking of reform instead of punishment.

That this humanitarian impulse was not confined to people at a distance is shown in his relations to his own servants, both the employees and the slaves. A woman of fashion commented on ‘the most perfect servants at the White House’ during his eight years there and the significant circumstance that ‘none left.’[391] But we must turn to his relations with his slaves to find him at his best. One picture will suffice. It is on the occasion of his return to Monticello from his French mission. At the foot of the hill all the slaves in their gaudiest attire are assembled to greet him. The carriage appears down the road. The slaves, laughing, shouting, rush forward to welcome him, unhitch the horses to draw the carriage up the steep hill, some pulling, some pushing, and others huddled in a dark mass close around the vehicle. Some kiss his hands, others his feet, and it is long after he reaches the house before he is permitted to enter. This was long before the day when correspondents with cameras pursued public men and demonstrations were staged.[392] Here was a master who loved his slaves.