Alexander Hamilton (64 page)

In 1789, French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon executed a bust of Jefferson that shows a handsome man with a calm, self-confident air. Yet the vigilant eyes hint at someone who moved slowly, cautiously, taking everything in before acting. The tightly sealed lips convey something enigmatic beneath the patrician ease. Like Burr, Thomas Jefferson found strength in secrecy, in silence. Shy and aloof, he seldom made eye contact with listeners yet could be a warmly engaging presence among small groups of like-minded intimates. This laconic man knew how to sprinkle his conversation with brilliant aperçus that lingered in people’s minds. With his quiet charm and courtly demeanor, he had a knack for winning people over at dinner parties distinguished by good food and eight varieties of wine.

Tall, lean, and freckled, with reddish hair and hazel eyes, Jefferson had one trait that the marble bust failed to capture: his slack-jointed movements. When William Maclay met the new secretary, his slouching figure seemed to lack ministerial dignity. Maclay groused, “He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other…. [H]is whole figure has a loose, shackling air.”
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His dress was casual, almost sloppy. The folksy air charmed people and allowed Jefferson to root out their secrets. The plain dress, mild manners, and unassuming air were the perfect costume for a crafty man intent upon presenting himself as the spokesman for the common people.

With an elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, while his mother, Jane Randolph, came from a prominent family. By the time Peter Jefferson died, he bequeathed to his children more than 60 slaves, 25 horses, 70 head of cattle, 200 hogs, and 7,500 acres; two-thirds of this bountiful legacy went to his eldest son, Thomas.

Peter Jefferson gave the boy a complete classical education. Tutored at home at age five, Jefferson went to a boarding school at age nine that afforded such thorough grounding in Greek and Latin that biographer Dumas Malone claims that for Jefferson “the heroes of antiquity were more real than either the Christian saints or modern historical figures.”
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He attended the College of William and Mary, which schooled the scions of the Virginia gentry, before being admitted to the bar. Like Hamilton, Jefferson was a fanatic for self-improvement. He rose before dawn each morning and employed every hour profitably, studying up to fifteen hours per day. Extremely systematic in his habits, Jefferson enjoyed retreating into the sheltered tranquillity of his books, and the spectrum of his interests was vast. He told his daughter, “It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”
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Whether riding horseback, playing the violin, designing buildings, or inventing curious gadgets, Thomas Jefferson seemed adept at everything. Like many accomplished people, he was seduced by this quest for self-perfection and not easily lured into public office. The self-sufficiency and philosophic repose made him an atypical politician. He once wrote, “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.”
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This pampered life rested on a foundation of slavery. Jefferson’s earliest memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave on horseback. He never tried to justify slavery and said he eagerly awaited the day “when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”
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When the Virginia legislature rebuffed his bid to stop importing slaves into the state, he regretted that “the public mind would not bear the proposition.”
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However much Jefferson deplored the “moral and political depravity” of slavery, his own slaves remained in bondage to his career and his incorrigibly spendthrift ways.
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When he commissioned his mountaintop home at Monticello, he seemed oblivious of the toll this would exact on his slaves, who had to hoist the building materials to such a height.

In 1769, while the fourteen-year-old Hamilton dreamed of escape from St. Croix, the twenty-six-year-old Jefferson was elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Jefferson belonged to an aristocracy with a clear path of advancement. At twenty-eight, he married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, who inherited 135 slaves after her father’s death. This loving ten-year marriage was marred by childhood mortality—only two of their six children reached maturity—and in September 1782 Martha herself died at thirty-four. Only thirty-nine at the time, Jefferson survived his wife by forty-four years but never remarried. Ensconced at Monticello with his books, inventions, and experiments, Jefferson became an unfathomable loner.

If the American Revolution had not supervened, Thomas Jefferson might well have whiled away his life on the mountaintop, a cultivated planter and philosopher. For Jefferson, the Revolution was an unwelcome distraction from a treasured private life, while for Hamilton it was a fantastic opportunity for escape and advancement. Like Hamilton, Jefferson rose in politics through sheer mastery of words—sunny, optimistic words that captured the hopefulness of a new country. Nobody gave more noble expression to the ideals of individual freedom and dignity or had a more devout faith in the wisdom of the common man. As chief draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson took often commonplace ideas and endowed them with majestic form. When the new government was formed, the Declaration had not yet attained the status of American Scripture. (Jefferson’s authorship remained largely anonymous until he found attribution politically convenient in the 1790s.) Thus, when Hamilton first met Jefferson in 1790, he did not see him as quite the revered figure that we do today.

Hamilton may have believed that Jefferson’s contributions to the nation paled beside his own and not just because of his own work on behalf of the Constitution. Besides handling Washington’s correspondence, Hamilton had spent five years in combat, exposing himself to enemy fire on many occasions. Jefferson had never set foot on a battlefield. Elected Virginia governor in 1779, he found the job irksome and wanted to resign, prompting Edmund Pendleton to complain to Madison, “It is a little cowardly to quit our posts in a bustling time!”
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When the turncoat Benedict Arnold burned and pillaged Richmond in January 1781, the capital stood defenseless despite warnings from Washington to Jefferson. Governor Jefferson fled in the early hours, giving up Richmond without a shot and allowing munitions and government records to fall into British hands. In June, in Jefferson’s waning hours as governor, the British pounced on Charlottesville and almost captured the Virginia Assembly gathered there. Then, when word came that a British cavalry was approaching Monticello, Jefferson scrambled off on horseback into the woods. He was accused of dereliction of duty and neglecting the transfer of power to his successor. Though the Virginia Assembly exonerated him of any wrongdoing, Hamilton wasn’t the only one who suspected Jefferson of cowardice. He later wrote mockingly that when real danger appeared, “the
governor
of the
ancient dominion
dwindled into the
poor, timid philosopher
and, instead of rallying his brave countrymen, he fled for safety from a few light-horsemen and shamefully abandoned his trust!”
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The Revolution left Jefferson with an implacable aversion to the British, whom he regarded as a race of “rich, proud, hectoring, swearing, squabbling, carnivorous animals.”
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He had a long list of personal grievances beyond his distaste for Britain as a corrupt, monarchical society. Cornwallis had ravaged one of Jefferson’s farms, butchering animals, torching crops, and snatching thirty slaves. Like many Virginia plantation owners, Jefferson was land rich but cash poor and chronically indebted to British creditors. He once said mordantly that the Virginia planters were “a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.”
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By the late 1780s, as tobacco prices plummeted, Virginia planters struggled to repay old debts to London creditors and demanded the return of slaves carried off by British troops. The steep payments he owed British bankers forced Jefferson to retain his enormous workforce of slaves despite his professed hatred for the institution. “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall owe not a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value,” he told his American manager in 1787. But he would not sell land to pay his debts; “nor would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labor.”
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The weight of that debt, created by his own extravagance, perhaps prevented Thomas Jefferson from being the person he would ideally like to have been. Even while secretary of state, he remained in hock to British creditors for an exorbitant seven thousand pounds. He carried these large debts until his death in 1826, necessitating the sale of 130 of his slaves at Monticello six months later. It was not the image that the philosopher of the common man would have preferred to leave to posterity.

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 fourteen-year-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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Evidently, Church had given Jefferson the copy that Eliza rushed off to her in England.