Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism

by Gilbert Chinard

From his retirement he found time to answer letters from Madison and Monroe. Before leaving Philadelphia, he had transmitted to the House of Representatives a Report on the Privileges and Restrictions of the Commerce of the United States.[313] It was incumbent upon Madison to draw from it specific recommendations. Jefferson pointed out in a dispassionate way the obstacles put by Great Britain to the growth of American commerce, her lack of reciprocal treatment, her prohibitions and restrictions. He ended by indicating that France had, of her own accord, proposed negotiations for improving the commercial relations between the two countries by a new treaty on fair and equal principles; that her internal disturbances alone had prevented her from doing it, though the government had repeatedly manifested reassuring dispositions. On the contrary, "in spite of friendly advances and arrangements proposed to Great Britain, they being already on as good a footing in law, and a better in fact, than the most favored nation, they have not, as yet, discovered any disposition to have it meddled with." As a remedy, pending the conclusion of treaties, Jefferson laid down five principles to protect American commerce and retaliate in so far as would not hurt the interests of the American people, although at the beginning trade might suffer from it. A storm broke out in Congress, and once more Jefferson became the target of the Federalists.

He was not uninformed of these developments, for Madison and Monroe sent him several letters at short intervals at the beginning of March; nor did he leave his lieutenants without directions. He still hoped that a war could be avoided; but he could not conceive that it would be possible in any event to let Great Britain seize the French West Indies: "I have no doubt that we ought to interpose at a proper time, and declare both to France and England that these islands are to rest with France, and that we will make a common cause with the latter for that object." Having thus outlined these policies, he relapsed into his ataraxy, affirming that he had not seen a Philadelphia paper until he had received those inclosed by Madison. The patience of Monroe must have been taxed to the breaking point when, after sending to his chief a long letter full of detailed information, he received in answer an equally long letter replete with agricultural disquisitions—"on such things as you are too little of a farmer to take much interest in."[314]

The supposed leader of the Republicans was not more encouraging in his letters to Madison when he wrote a month later: "I feel myself so thoroughly weaned from the interest I took in the proceedings there, while there, that I have never a wish to see one [315] Yet the old fame flared up occasionally, as when he learned that Hamilton was being considered to succeed Pinckney who would be recalled from England: "a more degrading measure could not have been proposed," he wrote to Monroe. In regard to Hamilton, he foresaw an investigation on the Treasury and had wanted to withdraw before it took place.[316]

But he fell back into the same detached attitude of mind, when he wrote to Washington the next day: "I return to farming with an ardor which I scarcely knew in my youth, and which has got the better entirely of my love of study. Instead of writing ten or twelve letters a day, which I have been in the habit of doing as a thing of course, I put off answering my letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day."

As a matter of fact, I doubt very much whether he had reached any such equanimity. For if he was unwilling to reënter public life, he was not averse to giving his opinion and advice in critical circumstances. While Madison's resolutions were still before Congress, news arrived in Philadelphia of the seizure of American ships in the Caribbean, under the Order in Council of November 6. Indignation was running high and democratic societies held patriotic meetings throughout the country. War seemed imminent, and although Jefferson preferred to contemplate the tranquil growth "of his lucern and potatoes", he still felt indignant when thinking "of these scoundrels" (the British). Yet he believed that war should be avoided and wrote to that effect to Tench Coxe:

We are alarmed here with the apprehension of war; and sincerely anxious that it may be avoided; but not at the expense either of our faith or honour.... As to myself I love peace, and I am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferers.[317]

To Washington he wrote two weeks later a most amusing letter, starting with a dissertation on crop rotation and "a certain essence of dung, one pint of which would manure an acre according to Lord Kaims", but not forgetting, in a negligent way, to slip in at the end a piece of political advice: "to try to extricate ourselves from the event of a war; at the same time to try to rouse public opinion in Great Britain and the only way to do it being to distress their commerce." But he added once more, "I cherish tranquillity too much to suffer political things to enter my mind at all."[318] This was nothing but the non-intercourse policy then debated by the government and of which Jefferson had evidently heard. When his letter reached the President, a solution had already been adopted and Jay had sailed for England on the mission which was to end with his signing the famous or infamous treaty. The summer went on without any new letter from Jefferson. A letter of the Secretary of State, asking him whether he would not consider lending a hand to the President in the present emergency, found him in bed "under a paroxysm of rheumatism which had kept him for ten days in constant torment." Then he emphatically added,

No circumstance will evermore tempt me to engage in any thing public.... It is a great pleasure to me to retain the esteem and approbation of the President, and this forms the only ground of any reluctance at being unable to comply with every wish of his. Pray convey these sentiments, and a thousand more to him, which my situation does not permit me to go into.[319]

This was the very time when the Whisky Boys of Eastern Pennsylvania revolted against the excise laws of Hamilton which fell on them harder than on any other part of the rural population, for they could not market their grain for lack of transportation facilities and their only means of living was distilling it into whisky. Individual acts of resistance to the agents of the excise culminated in August, 1794, in an armed convention denouncing the law and defying the government on Braddock field, under the leadership of the chief expert of the Jeffersonians, Albert Gallatin. Not only was the militia called but the President and Hamilton went to visit the camp at Carlisle. The insurrection ended without bloodshed, but the side of the insurrectionists was taken up in the large cities by the Democratic societies in which the Irish element was largely represented—hot-headed people, recently come from an oppressed land, who felt an ingrained spirit of revolt against soldiers and men in uniform,—until dressed in a uniform themselves. The immediate effect of the Hamiltonian policy was to amalgamate rural population and urban groups of mechanics and small operatives in a hostile attitude towards the aristocratic government. Hamilton thought the time had come to crush the vanguard of the Jeffersonian troops, and Washington, who had an inveterate hatred of anything smacking of disorder and mob rule, lent a favorable ear. He wrote a stinging denunciation of the Democratic societies in his yearly message to Congress.

This time Jefferson was aroused, although personally he had never had anything to do with Tammany in New York nor any of the Democratic societies in Philadelphia. He fairly exploded in a letter to James Madison: the denunciation of the Democratic societies was "one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the faction of monocrats." How could one condemn the Democratic societies and let alone the Society of the Cincinnati, "a self-created one, carving out for itself hereditary distinctions, lowering over our Constitution eternally." It was an inexcusable aggression. With regard to the transactions against the excise law, he refused to take seriously the "meeting of Braddock field", and ridiculed the mobilizing of an army against men who were not thinking seriously of separating, "simply consulting about it."—"But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting on such determination," he advised. A fine legal distinction which Jefferson forgot at the time of the Burr conspiracy! But "the first and only cause of the whole trouble was the infernal excise law." The first error was "to admit it by the Constitution"; the second, to act on that admission; the third and last will be to "make it the instrument of dismembering the Union." In conclusion he advised Madison to stay at his post, "to take the front of the battle" for Jefferson's own security, and once again he reaffirmed that he would not give up his retirement for the empire of the universe.[320]