IX
Interested as he was in art and inventions, his heart was with the country life and the farmer’s lot. He was never happier than when, in the early morning, mounted on one of his beloved horses, he rode over his broad acres at Monticello, observing with a perennial zest the budding of the trees in spring, the unfolding of the flowers, the ripening of the harvest. Wherever he was, throughout his life, he longed for the house he had made on the hill, the broad fields, the family circle and the servitors and slaves. There he was lord of the domain. If he employed Italian gardeners, they conformed to his ideas. If he had a supervisor, it was he himself who determined what should be planted and where—where the orchards should be, what trees should be set and their location; and even the vines and shrubs, the nuts and seeds, the roots and bulbs claimed his personal attention. Even his hogs were named, and when one was to be killed, he designated it by name.[448] There, too, he lived in an atmosphere of affection. There he had taken his bride, a woman of exquisite beauty, grace, and loveliness; there his children had been born, and there, all too soon, their mother died. He was passionately devoted to her and there was no successor. To the daughters who were left he became both a father and a mother, resulting in an intimacy seldom found between father and daughters. In Paris he would not permit even his trusted servant to do their shopping, reserving that duty for himself. Always patient, never harsh, and ever sympathetic, he was the ideal parent.[449]
Though he did not remarry, he was fond of the society of women and they of his. The few letters to women that have been preserved are masterpieces of their kind, sprightly, playful, sometimes beautiful. His relations with the women of the Adams family are shown in a note to John Adams’s married daughter, written from Paris: ‘Mr. Jefferson has the honor to present his compliments to Mrs. Smith and to send her the two pair of corsets she desired. He wishes they may be suitable, as Mrs. Smith omitted to send her measure. Times are altered since Mademoiselle de Samson had the honor of knowing her; should they be too small, however, she will be so good as to lay them by a while. There are ebbs as well as flows in this world. When the Mountain refused to go to Mahomet, he went to the Mountain.’[450] In Paris he formed a few cherished friendships with women, notably with Mrs. Cosway, Italian wife of an English painter, a woman of charm, beauty, and intellect, with whom he corresponded. One of his letters, the dialogue between the Head and the Heart on her departure for England, is unique and sparkling.[451] He appreciated the exquisite Mrs. Bingham whom he met in Paris, and his chiding letters to her after her return to America must have pleased that artificial lady immensely.[452] He was a friend of the Comtesse De Tesse whose mind he admired,[453] and of Madame De Corney whose beauty attracted him. ‘The Bois de Boulogne invited you earnestly to retire to its umbrage from the heats of the sad season,’ he wrote her gallantly. ‘I was through it to-day as I am every day. Every tree charged me with this invitation.’[454]
Such was Thomas Jefferson who took upon himself the organization of the forces of democracy, when its enemies were in the saddle, booted and spurred, and with a well-disciplined and powerful army at their back. None but an extraordinary character could have dared hope for victory, and he was that, and more. Democrat and aristocrat, and sometimes autocrat; philosopher and politician; sentimentalist and utilitarian; artist, naturalist, and scientist; thinker, dreamer, and doer; inventor and scholar; writer and statesman, he enthralled his followers and fascinated while infuriating his foes.
CHAPTER VI
THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND
I
‘IF New York wanted any revenge for the removal,’ wrote Mrs. Adams to her daughter soon after reaching Philadelphia, ‘the citizens might be glutted if they could come here, where every article has been almost doubled in price, and where it is not possible for Congress and the appendages to be half as well accommodated for a long time.’[455] Reconciliation for the removal was not complete several months later when Oliver Wolcott wrote his father complaining that ‘the manners of the people are more reserved than in New York.’[456] Even so he had ‘seen nothing to tempt [him] to idolatry,’ after having seen ‘many of their principal men,’ and he had no apprehensions of ‘self-humiliating sensations’ after a closer acquaintance.[457] It was not with unrestrained enthusiasm that the officials took up their residence in the greater city, with its population of more than 60,000. ‘The Philadelphians,’ according to the indignant comment of Jeremiah Smith, ‘are from the highest to the lowest, from the parson in his black gown to the fille de joie or girl of pleasure, a set of beggars. You cannot turn around without paying a dollar.’[458]
To the visitor entering by coach on Front Street and rumbling up to the City Tavern the prospect did not seem so black as to those who received their first impressions from the water-front. These beheld ‘nothing ... but confused heaps of wooden store houses, crowded upon each other’—and, behind the wharves, Water Street, narrow, shut in by the old bank of the river, dirty, filthy, stinking.[459] Could he have looked down upon the city from some convenient hill, he would have found something to revive his drooping spirits in the compactness of the town and the substantial character of the houses. The principal streets of the period were Front, Second, Third, and Fourth, and beyond Sixth there were scarcely any habitations. No one thought of building on Arch or Chestnut Streets west of Tenth, where the land was thickly dotted with frogponds.[460] Practically all of business and fashion was to be found east of Fourth Street, and the visitor or official sojourner could congratulate himself on the ease with which he could get about from place to place. An English tourist, observing that with the exception of Broad and High Streets the thoroughfares were not more than fifty feet in width, found them suggestive of ‘many of the smaller streets of London except that the foot pavement on either side is of brick instead of stone.’[461]
If the filth of the odorous water-front, the narrowness of the streets, and the frogponds on the outskirts, so audible in the night, were depressing, the houses, attractive, and in many instances architecturally pretentious, hinted of comfort and solidity if not of opulence. The fact that almost all were constructed of brick was not lost upon the travelers.[462] In the more congested districts these houses had a shop on the first floor.
The streets, with their red-brick foot pavements and rows of trees, making them fragrant after summer rains, and drearily murmurous in the winter winds, were paved with pebbles in the middle,[463] with a gutter made of brick or wood, and lined with strong posts to protect the area of the pedestrians.[464] The trees, mostly buttonwood, willow, and Lombardy poplars, had been brought over from Europe some years before by William Hamilton.[465] At frequent intervals town pumps offered refreshment to the thirsty, or, in the night, an accommodating hanging-post for the inebriate staggering home from one of the popular taverns.[466] Not without its charm was a walk through the streets of Philadelphia in the days when Hamilton and Jefferson were exchanging shots, with the poplars and willows to shut off the sun, the pumps to minister to the comfort, and with most of the houses offering to the view a garden filled with old-fashioned flowers—lilacs, roses, pinks, and tulips, morning-glories and snowballs with gourd vines climbing over the porches. In the case of the more imposing mansions there were more elaborate gardens with rare flowers and shrubbery, but in many of these wealth claimed its privilege and shut off the view from the common folk who could only catch the fragrance.[467]