American Sphinx (14 page)

The major diplomatic achievement of his stay in France was a $400,000 loan from Dutch bankers, done in collusion with Adams in the spring of 1787. The loan was significant because it allowed the American government to consolidate its European debts, thereby creating a source of funding to ransom American captives in Algiers and make regular payments to French veterans of the American Revolution. Jefferson took considerable pleasure in the deal, since it provided a semblance of fiscal responsibility for America’s European creditors. But he acknowledged that he was a passive accomplice in the negotiations, which were handled primarily by Adams. In fact Jefferson confessed that the intricacies of high finance, involving floating bond rates and multiple interest charges, left him feeling confused and uncomfortable. He trusted Adams’s judgment on such matters more than his own.
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When Adams prepared to depart London for America, he passed along to Jefferson responsibility for the Dutch loan, warning him to be on guard against “the unmeasurable avarice of Amsterdam.” At just that moment the Dutch bankers threatened to increase the interest rates on the loan, and Adams worried out loud to Jefferson that they were doing so because they sensed that the American minister to France did not really understand the intricacies of the financing agreement: “I pity you, in your situation,” Adams wrote to Jefferson, “dunned and teazed as you will be, all your Philosophy will be wanting to support you.” Just remember one thing, Adams advised: “[T]he Amsterdammers love Money too well to execute their threats.” Jefferson listened to this advice; the loan was not renegotiated, and American credit in the capitals and markets of Europe improved. All the forward-looking Jeffersonian visions of a liberal international community, comprised of open markets and national cooperation, had foundered on the rocks of European intransigence. From a historical perspective, his lifelong recognition that American foreign policy was the one area requiring a strong federal government congealed at this time. It was also becoming clear that his own idealistic instincts worked best when surrounded by more realistic and tough-minded colleagues. Ironically, the major substantive success of his tenure was a hardheaded financial arrangement with the Amsterdam bankers that, as he freely admitted, he never fully understood.
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VOICE OF AMERICA

O
F COURSE
diplomacy entailed much more than negotiating treaties. The departure of Franklin for America in the summer of 1785 left Jefferson as the ranking American minister at the court of Versailles. Like Franklin, Jefferson was the beneficiary of France’s apparently irresistible urge to project onto its premier American resident the Gallic version of the American essence. Jefferson’s reputation as a younger Franklin with a southern accent received a boost when the Marquis de Chastellux published an account of his travels in America that featured a romantic sketch of Jefferson at Monticello. “It seemed as if from his youth,” Chastellux wrote, Jefferson “had placed his mind, as he had done his house, on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.” Back in America he was only beginning to be known beyond the borders of Virginia. The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia seemed to confirm Chastellux’s estimate by electing Jefferson one of its members in 1786; Yale College followed suit by awarding him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree the same year. American visitors to Paris further reinforced his emerging reputation by describing Jefferson’s infinite composure and aristocratic bearing at court sessions in Versailles.
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Whereas Franklin’s fame in France merely intensified his established reputation in America, Jefferson’s budding prominence in Paris served to create his image as a great American, which then migrated back to America with all the prestige of European recognition. He became the primary conduit for the Franco-American cultural exchange. The French had never seen wild honeysuckle or swamp laurel, so seeds should be sent over from Virginia for planting in French soil. The Americans, for their part, needed to know of French experiments in the new science of air travel or “ballooning,” to include the several calamitous failures when “at the height of about 6000 feet, some accident happened” and the unfortunate aviators “fell from that height, and were crushed to atoms.” Meanwhile the French reading public, which was so deprived of news from America that, as Jefferson put it, “we might as well be on the moon,” received the benefit of Jefferson’s editorial additions to the
Encyclopédie Méthodique.
There he corrected several factual errors in the French accounts of the American Revolution, predicted that the unfortunate institution of slavery was slowly but surely dying out, that emancipation “will take place there at some point not very distant” and envisioned the entire North American continent occupied by American settlers within forty years.
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He saw to it that France’s premier sculptor, Jean-Antoine Houdon, was dispatched to Mount Vernon to do the casts for the definitive sculpture of George Washington. He requested, in fact ordered, that all work cease on the new Virginia capitol at Richmond, so that the builders could work from an architectural model he was sending over. It was based on the Maison Corrée at Nîmes in southern France, what he called “the best morsel of antient architecture now remaining.” (When it came to architectural matters, Jefferson was utterly unambiguous.) The Richmond builders needed to tear down what they had constructed and start again, using the designs he was providing: “They are simple and sublime. More cannot be said. They are not the brat of whimsical conception never before brought to light, but copied from the most precious, the most perfect model of antient architecture remaining on earth.” The Virginia Assembly, acknowledging his discerning architectural eye and uncompromising tone, did precisely as it was told.
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Finally, and rather comically, Jefferson decided to refute the leading French naturalist of the day, Georges de Buffon, who had argued that the mammals and plants of North America were inferior in size, health and variety to those of Europe. Buffon’s theory, silly as it sounds today, benefited from his reputation as France’s premier natural scientist; it also had the disarming implication of rendering the entire American environment as fatally degenerate, a kind of laboratory for the corruptive process. Jefferson launched an all-out campaign to gather specimens of American animals that were larger than anything in Europe. Sparing no expense, he commissioned an expedition into the White Mountains of New Hampshire to obtain “the skin, the skeleton, and the horns of the Moose, the Caribou, and the Original or Elk.” The hunters were ordered to “leave the hoof on, to leave the bones of the legs and of the thighs if possible in the skin with the horns on, so that by sewing up the neck and belly of the skin we should have the true form and size of the animal.” The expedition produced the desired specimens, but Jefferson was disappointed in their lack of size, especially the moose, which he had counted on as the trump card to play against Buffon’s puny European deer.

So another hunting party went out, another moose was killed, another carcass was shipped over to Paris, where Jefferson put it on display in the entry hall of his hotel, still somewhat frustrated that the moose was only seven feet tall and that its hair kept falling out. Buffon, who was himself a minuscule man less than five feet tall, was invited to observe the smelly and somewhat imperfect trophy but concluded it was insufficient evidence to force a revision of his anti-American theory. It was one of the few occasions when Jefferson failed to enhance mutual understanding along the Franco-American axis.
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His unqualified success as the most visible American in Paris derived in great part from his outspoken affection for all things French. His abiding awkwardness with spoken French could be forgiven as the single stain on an otherwise spotless record of Francophilia. French wine, French food, French architecture and the discreet charms of French society were all obvious sources of pleasure for the American minister to the court at Versailles—his equally obvious hatred of England also helped the cause—and he let it be known throughout Parisian society that though he had been born a Virginian, France was his adopted home, just as the French people were his brethren in spirit, if not in blood. “I am much pleased with the people of this country,” he wrote in a typical expression of endearment, noting that their inherent civility and sophistication allowed one to “glide thro’ a whole life among them without a justle.”
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This was a sincere sentiment, an authentic expression of genuine affinity between the urbane and cosmopolitan side of his character and the almost sensual seductions of the cultural capital of Europe. But it coexisted alongside its diametric opposite. In letters to friends and colleagues back in America, or in advisory notes to Americans traveling in Europe, Jefferson described France, and Europe more generally, as a hopeless sinkhole of avarice, ignorance and abject poverty. Indeed, what Buffon had said about the inherently degenerative conditions of America, Jefferson turned against Europe and, inverting Buffon’s prejudices, developed a formulaic argument about European inferiority.

The argument tended to take the familiar Jeffersonian form of a dichotomy between moral polarities. “The comparison of our governments [in America] with those of Europe,” he wrote typically, “are like a comparison of heaven to hell”; England served as a kind of limbo or “intermediate station.” When George Wythe wrote him in 1786 to report the good news that the Virginia Assembly had finally passed his bill guaranteeing religious freedom, Jefferson reacted by contrasting what was possible in America with European hopelessness: “If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance and prejudices . . . , a thousand years would not place them on the high ground on which our common people are now setting out. . . . If any body thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness, send them here.” This became a common theme in his letters to American correspondents. “If any of our countrymen wish for a king,” he wrote to David Ramsay in South Carolina, “give them Aesop’s fable of the frogs who asked for a king; if this does not cure them, send them to Europe.” “The Europeans are governments of kites over pidgeons,” he reported to John Rutledge, adding cynically that “the best schools for republicanism are London, Versailles, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, &c.”
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In a privately circulated document entitled “Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe,” he criticized those tourists who were overly impressed with the art and monuments of European capitals, concluding that “they are worth seeing, but not studying” because they tended to distract attention from the real and deep social corruption of urban life throughout Europe. He urged young men who were embarking on some version of the grand tour to beware of the temptations and sexual traps they would encounter. (His own secretary, William Short, was engaged in a passionate affair with the beautiful young wife of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt.) The typical young traveler “is led by the strongest of all the human passions into a spirit for female intrigue destructive of his own and others happiness, or a passion for whores destructive of his health. . . .” Paris, he warned, was one huge fleshpot.
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The psychological agility required to sustain a sincere and highly visible affection for all things French, especially while simultaneously denouncing European decadence with equivalent sincerity, depended upon mysterious mechanisms inside Jefferson that prevented his different voices from hearing one another. In his letters he could modulate his message to fit his different audiences. The publication of his
Notes on the State of Virginia
created some intriguing problems on this score because, unlike private letters, one could not control its distribution; it could be read by anybody and everybody. Part travel guide, part scientific treatise and part philosophical meditation,
Notes
had been written in the fall of 1781, just after his unfortunate experience as governor of Virginia and just before the tragic death of his wife. He permitted publication of a French translation, albeit without his name on the cover and in a limited edition of two hundred copies, in order to enhance French knowledge of America, and this only after he had learned that an unauthorized version was already in press. Indeed, despite his effort at anonymity, the fact that the American minister to France was the author of
Notes
quickly became an open secret throughout Parisian society and contributed significantly to his growing reputation as the dominant voice of America in Europe. Abigail and John Adams read it in their coach riding to Calais on the way to their new post in London: “I thank you kindly for your Book,” Adams noted, adding that “it is our Meditation all the Day long. I cannot now say much about it, but I think it will do its Author and his Country great Honour. The Passages upon slavery are worth Diamonds. They will have more effect than Volumes written by mere Philosophers.”
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But Jefferson in fact was deeply worried about the effect his remarks on slavery might have on his reputation back in America, especially in Virginia. He confided to Madison that “there are sentiments on some subjects which I apprehend ought be displeasing to the country [and] perhaps to the [Virginia] assembly or to some who lead it. I do not wish to be exposed to their censure. . . .” Madison wrote back with a cautiously optimistic message and in a highly elliptical style designed to prevent snoopers at the respective postal offices, even if they managed to decode his cipher, from understanding what he was talking about: “I have found the copy of your notes . . . , looked them over carefully myself and consulted several judicious friends in confidence. We are all sensible that the
freedom of your
strictures on some
particular measures
and
opinions
will displease their respective abbetors. But we equally concur in thinking that this consideration ought not to be weighed against the
utility of your plan.”
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