American Sphinx (34 page)

Jefferson’s patronage dilemma grew out of the unprecedented political situation created by his election. He was the first leader of an opposition party elected to the presidency and the first recognized party leader to face the “loaves and fishes” problem with all the middle- and lower-level federal offices still occupied by the outgoing administration. In subsequent years it became common practice and a matter of mutual understanding that victory in a presidential election meant a wholesale changing of the guard along party lines. Nothing terribly principled or massively moral was at stake. Patronage was a simple by-product of political power. But the victorious Republican party had come to power believing in its own virtue and claiming to represent a restoration of principles that dispensed with politics as usual. As Henry Adams put it, “Such a state of things could never occur again, for only a new country could be inexperienced in politics.” It was awkward for Jefferson to start behaving like a party leader after a decade of denying that the Republicans were a political party at all.
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The practical resolution of this dilemma is less significant per se than for what it revealed about Jefferson’s inherently moralistic mentality. Throughout the 1790s he had described the Federalists as an evil faction of cryptomonarchists and closet-tories who had commandeered the original purpose of the American Revolution and carried the government to the brink of irreversible corruption. This highly charged diagnosis had never been factually accurate. Very few of the Federalists were outright monarchists. Indeed, if one were searching for such creatures, the top candidate would have been Burr, who was a Republican and Jefferson’s vice president to boot. The underlying issues separating Federalists and Republicans were not really moral so much as constitutional and strategic: The Federalists preferred a more consolidated federal government in which more power was allocated to the executive and judicial branches and America’s primary European ally and role model was England. The Republicans wanted a smaller and weaker federal government in which the House of Representatives was the dominant force; they looked to France as our chief European friend. While these were hardly incidental differences—they had their origins in fundamentally juxtaposed ideas about the proper allocation of political power in a republican government—they did not really translate into the kind of moral imperatives that Jefferson’s mind required to mobilize its political energies. Yet for Jefferson to mean what so many readers of his Inaugural Address thought he meant—that the differences between Federalists and Republicans were eminently negotiable—would have required him to acknowledge that his moral crusade of the 1790s had been misguided.

By the summer of 1801 Jefferson had reached his conclusion: There were Federalists and there were federalists. The former were unredeemable monarchists, “incurable monocrats” and “the desperadoes of the quondam faction.” He claimed to “wish nothing but their eternal hatred,” and if that were to cease, “I should become suspicious to myself.” The latter were misguided followers, who preferred a somewhat stronger executive but in their heart of hearts were really republicans and therefore “entitled to the confidence of their fellow citizens.” The beauty of this simplistic distinction was that it allowed Jefferson to retain his moral categories, indeed to focus his hatred even more intently on the surviving pockets of recalcitrant Federalist influence, especially in New England, while simultaneously adopting a conciliatory posture elsewhere and encouraging mass defections to the Republican party. In Connecticut, for example, he claimed that most citizens remained mesmerized by the vilest version of the Federalist persuasion: “Their steady habits exclude the advances of information and they seem exactly where they were when they separated from the Saints of Oliver Cromwell.” They were, he believed, willing to “follow the bark of liberty only by the help of a tow-rope.” Connecticut therefore demanded a “general sweep” of Federalists from office. Appointing a Federalist there was “like appointing an atheist to the priesthood.” Massachusetts was only slightly better, though Jefferson held out the hope that “as the Indian says, they are clearing the dust out of their eyes there also,” so that eventually “the republican portion will at length arise, and the sediment of monarchism will be left as lees at the bottom.” Until then, however, “a clean sweep” was necessary in Massachusetts too.
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Jefferson’s moral distinctions were lost on most Federalists, who regarded the mass removals in New England as a betrayal of his inaugural promise. “The truth is,” noted the editors of the
New York Evening Post,
“it has become ridiculous in Mr. Jefferson and his supporters to pretend that, in the present system of hunting the Federalists like wild beasts, they are governed by any principle or principles which will bear avowal or can be for a moment supported under any pretence whatsoever.” The real truth was that pretense was very important to the Republicans; they did not want to think of themselves as typical politicians who traded their principles for raw power upon entering office. As for Jefferson himself, the messy matter of patronage exposed how his mind was capable of moving on parallel tracks, one side fiercely vindictive and merciless, the other accommodating and charitable. It all depended on where one landed in the inherently moral world that was Jefferson country.
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The patronage episode also revealed how alien Jefferson was to the pluralistic ethos so central to modern-day political liberalism, which accords respect to fundamentally different values and defines integrity as a civil, if spirited, dialogue among opposing ideas. His was the more traditional and universalistic conviction: There was one truth, not many. He could be endlessly patient and pragmatic about minor differences, but once it was clear your views lay on the other side of the line, it was war to the death. What saved the bulk of the Federalists, it turned out, was not generosity of spirit so much as the fervent hope that they were really latent Republicans primed for conversion.

It was a characteristically Jeffersonian outlook, and it contributed to his paradoxical reputation as an extremely cool and serenely civil man of considerable grace who periodically unleashed sudden torrents of anger and hostility at his enemies. At the private level it gave his otherwise smooth and soft demeanor a dangerous edge, especially for those who mistook his reticent style for indifference and blundered into one of the deeply felt subjects. At the semipublic level, such as cabinet meetings or one-on-one sessions in the presidential office, it enhanced his authority by suggesting a subterranean region forever concealed from view and inhabited by fearful forces that, if inadvertently unlocked, would take no prisoners. At the public level the New England Federalists triggered the moral explosions, much as George III and then the Hamiltonians had done in previous years. But the most dramatic display of this Jeffersonian syndrome during his presidency, which also had the greatest consequence on domestic policy and subsequent American history, occurred in his treatment of Native Americans.

Jefferson’s attitude toward the Indian population of the United States has always seemed as profoundly paradoxical as his attitude toward slavery. On the one hand, he devoted an entire chapter in his
Notes on Virginia
to a celebration of the indigenous culture of America’s original inhabitants, recalling the impressive oratorical skills of tribal chiefs, recommending the serious study of the different Indian languages and dialects, even going so far as to contrast Indians favorably with blacks in terms of their mental and physical aptitude and their capacity for assimilation into white American society. As president he greeted visiting Indian delegations with becoming graciousness and visible respect. On several occasions he went out of his way to describe the Indian people of North America as a noble race who were the innocent victims of history: “Endowed with the faculties and rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence,” as he so eloquently put it, “and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed . . . they have been overwhelmed by the current, or driven before it.” One senses in so many of Jefferson’s observations on Indians an authentic admiration mingled with a truly poignant sense of tragedy about their fate as a people.
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On the other hand, it was during Jefferson’s presidency that the basic decisions were made that required the deportation of massive segments of the Indian population to land west of the Mississippi. In the language of the leading scholar on the subject, “the seeds of extinction” for Native American culture were sown under Jefferson. The essence of Jefferson’s thinking about Indian removal was expressed in a letter to the territorial governor of Ohio in 1803:

In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves, but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only.
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This is a striking statement in several senses: its casual sense of assurance about what history intended; its eerie mixture of charity and cruelty; its presumptive and paternalistic tone. In Jefferson’s mind the Indians occupied the same problematic space as the Federalists. They were a doomed species. Their dooming had not been his doing, but he had no compunctions or doubts about serving as the instrument of their destruction. And just as the rank-and-file Federalists should recognize that their political survival depended on embracing the central tenets of republicanism (as defined by the Republican party), so the Indians should recognize that their cultural survival depended upon abandoning their nomadic hunting societies—these required too much land—and adopting an agricultural way of life, eventually the English language, and gradually assimilating into white American society. In short, Indian culture could survive by ceasing to be Indian, just as the Federalists could survive by ceasing to be Federalists.
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Those Indians who resisted assimilation, again like the recalcitrant Federalist leaders in Connecticut and Massachusetts, deserved nothing less than extermination or banishment. Like the Federalist ideologues in New England, Indian leaders who clung tenaciously to tribal mores and insisted on inculcating “a sanctimonious reverence for the custom of their ancestors” must be shown no mercy. Jefferson believed that banishment to the currently unoccupied lands west of the Mississippi was only a temporary solution since the white migration would eventually overflow these lands too and pose the same questions at a later date. But he was not burdened by any doubts about what constituted the right answer. When James Monroe, in his capacity as Virginia’s governor, wrote him to raise the possibility of creating a western reserve for emancipated slaves, Jefferson opposed the idea on grounds that boded ill for Indians as well as blacks: “[I]t is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will . . . cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.” Just as he found it impossible to imagine a pluralistic American politics in which competing convictions about the meaning of the American Revolution coexisted, he had no place in his imagination for an American society of diverse cultures in which Native Americans lived alongside whites while retaining their own Indian values.
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WESTERN MAGIC

T
HERE WAS ALSO
a sharp line running through Jefferson’s constitutional thinking between foreign and domestic policy. Actually, to speak of “constitutional thinking” is a bit misleading since Jefferson’s mind preferred broader moral categories that hovered over the more conventional constitutional distinctions. In his own Jeffersonian way, however, he believed that the House of Representatives had primary responsibility for domestic policy and the executive had equivalent responsibility over foreign affairs, though he seemed to have embraced a somewhat fuzzy caveat during the debate over the Jay Treaty that gave the House veto power over foreign treaties. At any rate, it would be fair to say that Jefferson did not think that the office of president should be as inconspicuous or invisible to foreign nations as it should to American citizens.
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Only two months after his inauguration the Barbary pirates on the North African coast put this theory to the test when the pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States. (The pasha was incensed upon learning that the tribute he was receiving from the Americans was less than that which was being paid to Algiers.) This was an old story to Jefferson, who had argued unsuccessfully with Adams in their Paris years that paying bribes to these seafaring terrorists of the Muslim world was dishonorable. Now, as president, he was in a position to implement his long-standing preference for military action. “I am an enemy to all these doceurs, tributes and humiliations,” he explained to Madison, and “I know that nothing will stop the eternal increase from these pirates but the presence of an armed force. . . .” Fortunately, and with an irony that only Adams could have fully appreciated, the buildup of the American navy that Adams had insisted on during his presidency, despite the opposition of Jefferson and the Republicans, meant that a fleet of frigates was available for Jefferson to dispatch to the Mediterranean. With the consent of his cabinet—only Gallatin, whose job was to worry about the budget, objected on cost grounds—Jefferson ordered a naval squadron to patrol the North African coast.
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