Jefferson and Hamilton (49 page)

Hamilton was not so lucky. He fell ill on September 5, and Betsey contracted the illness a few days later. Like all the afflicted, both suffered excruciating headaches, nausea, chills, and aches. They were attended by Edward Stevens, the son of St. Croix’s Thomas Stevens, who had taken in young Hamilton when he was orphaned. Edward Stevens had eventually immigrated to the mainland and was now a Philadelphia physician. Most physicians prescribed purges, or rubbed their patients with ointments and wrapped them in blankets soaked with vinegar. Those treated by Stevens received quinine, cold baths, wine, a concoction to stop the vomiting, and laudanum, a painkiller consisting mostly of opium. At the height of the epidemic, Jefferson said that about two in three victims survived, and the Hamiltons not only pulled through but also were on the mend within five days, a far more rapid recovery than most experienced. Stevens’s therapies were of doubtful benefit. But because the Hamiltons could afford a physician, it is likely they were never dehydrated, and that was probably crucial in their deliverance.
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Jefferson was aware that Hamilton had been taken ill, but his hatred for his counterpart was so suffocating that he never sent a note of sympathy or well-wishing. In fact, he told Madison that he doubted the treasury secretary was actually suffering from yellow fever. Jefferson thought it possible that Hamilton might have caught cold, but more likely that he was merely a hypochondriac. In one of his cruelest utterances, Jefferson added that Hamilton “had been miserable several days from a firm persuasion he should catch it [the yellow fever]. A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phaenomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation in military occasions were genuine.”
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Jefferson finally left for Monticello in mid-September, six weeks into the epidemic. This was his planned autumn leave, though several days before his carriage rattled out of the city, the government had shut down. Jefferson remained at home for a month, where he scrupulously tended to his State Department correspondence, but never wrote a personal or partisan letter. It was the beginning of the end of this phase of Jefferson’s public service, and when he returned to Pennsylvania on November 1—to Germantown, actually, where the government met for several weeks—his pace seemed to wind down. In part, this was because Jefferson was initially challenged to find a space for his work; for two weeks he shared a public room in a tavern with
numerous other refugees. However, because of his stature, or perhaps because he could afford it, he secured a bed while most others slept on the floor.
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Jefferson’s final cabinet dustups with Hamilton occurred during his stay in Germantown. In June, the British government had issued an Orders in Council directing the captains of Royal Navy vessels to seize American ships bound for French ports with cargoes of grain. While Hamilton and Jefferson agreed that the United States must protest London’s action, Jefferson wanted Washington to denounce this malevolent action in the harshest tones in his annual State of the Union address. This was not their only dispute over the contents of the president’s address. Washington wished to report on a wide range of the administration’s actions since Congress’s adjournment in March, including the proclamation of neutrality and the dismissal of Genêt. The cabinet fought over both what Washington should say and, as he could not cover everything in an oral address, what documents—if any—should be made public. Hamilton insisted on keeping all documents secret, declaring that it would provoke a “serious calamity” should Washington divulge the French offer to negotiate a commercial accord. He also bristled over the language that Jefferson recommended in responding to the Orders in Council. His “draught … amounted to a declaration of war” against England, Hamilton asserted. Jefferson “whittled down the expressions” in the draft he had prepared for Washington, but they remained tough. No one was more surprised than Jefferson when Washington took his side. The president, Jefferson said, expressed “more vehemence” toward London “than I have seen him shew.” It was one of the first times that Jefferson could remember Washington siding with him against Hamilton.
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Making public Jefferson’s correspondence with Genêt vindicated him even in the eyes of some of his harshest critics, many of whom—taken in by Hamilton’s partisan assaults—had presumed the secretary of state had acted slavishly toward the French envoy. Even Hamilton’s close friend and confidant, Robert Troup, told the treasury secretary that having been made aware of Jefferson’s tenacity had “blotted all the sins … out of the book of our remembrance.” Doubtless to Hamilton’s consternation, Troup even expressed his “regret that he [Jefferson] should quit his post.”
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Jefferson’s final major act as secretary of state was to report to Congress on American commerce, an accounting that Congress had requested nearly three years earlier. In 1791, Hamilton had persuaded him to delay his report, lest it jeopardize negotiations over London’s yielding of its western posts. Thereafter, it was Jefferson who dragged his feet, awaiting a more friendly Congress. In December 1793, when the Congress that had been elected in 1792 finally assembled, he acted.

Jefferson’s report was the culmination of twenty years’ of his thinking, and the final salvo on behalf of much that he had sought to accomplish as secretary of state. The author of the Declaration of Independence was seeking to make the United States truly independent, to terminate the commercial dependence on Great Britain that had prevailed in the colonial era and continued despite the American victory in the Revolutionary War. Jefferson was privy to secret, and accurate, information from intelligence sources that the British ministry was unrelenting in its policy of denying American trade in the West Indies, and that it harbored malign intentions toward America’s shipbuilding and fishing industries. Armed with this knowledge, he saw little to lose through a more confrontational policy toward London. Indeed, he remained convinced that reciprocity offered the best hope of compelling Great Britain to trade more fully and equitably with the United States. Jefferson longed to break Britain’s commercial domination of Europe and North America. At the same moment, he looked for ways to forestall the evils that he imagined would ensue from Hamiltonian economics, to indefinitely sustain America’s agrarian republic, and to bring about closer relations with France. In one way or another, his commercial report was aimed at achieving these objectives.

Jefferson opened with statistical data calculated to show the dangerous degree to which Britain dominated American commerce. This was a prelude to the heart of his message: his call for free trade. Instead of the prevailing “piles of regulating Laws, Duties, and Prohibitions” that “shackles” world commerce, Jefferson dreamt of each nation being free “to exchange with others mutual surpluses for mutual Wants.” Free trade was crucial for the American economy, he said, but it was also “essential” as a “resource of Defence.” Free trade would not only lead to economic independence, it would also result in a robust commerce, which in turn would produce a flourishing commercial fleet that would serve as a nursery of sailors for the American navy. Some nations, he went on, wanted free trade, and in an accompanying letter he advised the Speaker of the House that France was ready to negotiate a commercial treaty “on liberal principles.” But for those nations such as Great Britain that would not abandon systems that discriminated against American commerce, he said, “it behooves us” to retaliate with countermeasures. Very nearly the last word that Jefferson uttered as secretary of state was that the United States should adopt similarly restrictive commercial policies toward Great Britain, imposing punishing taxes on English imports, or forbidding their importation altogether, until London agreed to admit American exports to British ports.
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With that, Jefferson was ready to go home. He had remained in Washington’s cabinet a year longer than he had wished, and he was not swayed when,
just before Christmas 1793, the president made a final attempt to persuade him to stay on. Jefferson told him that he was “immoveable.” With sadness, Washington relented. He wrote to Jefferson thanking him for his “integrity and talents,” and added that all the reasons that had led him to nominate his fellow Virginian to serve as secretary of state had been vindicated by the expertise “eminently displayed in the discharge of your duties.”
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On January 5, after visiting his Philadelphia barber for the last time and purchasing several items for Monticello, Jefferson set off for home and what Hamilton snidely called another “permanent” retirement. (Actually, to this point Jefferson and Hamilton had each “retired” twice.) Jefferson rode the public stage most of the way, and on the eleventh day after departing the capital, he reached his hilltop mansion. He was fifty-one and convinced that he would never again leave Monticello for any extended time. “The little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated,” he contended. The “length of my tether is now fixed for life from Monticello to Richmond,” he remarked two weeks after he came home, and in fact, during the next three years his longest journey was his lone trip to Richmond. Jefferson likely reasoned that he had about fifteen years left, perhaps twenty if he was especially fortunate. He was the leading light of what was coalescing into an organized political party, which had to have made him aware that someday he might be called on to stand for election to the presidency. Then again, that might never occur, for in 1794 it was far from certain how long Washington would occupy the office, and the feeling was widespread that Vice President Adams was the heir apparent.
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Jefferson’s happiness at escaping politics was readily apparent. Ten weeks after coming home he said that he had not seen a Philadelphia newspaper since he left the capital, and he had no wish to see one. Eight months into his retirement he was asked to serve as envoy extraordinary to Madrid. He declined, remarking that his only regret about retirement was that he had not entered into it years earlier. He added that every day increased his “inflexibility” about ever returning to public life. He did not write to Washington until he had been home for four months, and nearly the entirety of his letter was about farming, which he said he had embraced “with an ardour which I scarcely knew in my youth.” When he completed his initial year at home, Jefferson exclaimed that it had been the most tranquil of his life, one in which he had enjoyed excellent health, save for a brief but “violent attack of the Rheumatism.” At last, he was surrounded by his family. Maria, now fifteen, lived with him, and Martha, whose home was nearby, visited often, sometimes leaving her two children with their grandfather. Relatives and friends
called, especially in the summer when the roads were more likely passable. Serenity “becomes daily more and more the object of my life,” he proclaimed. “Master of my own time,” he now “look[ed] back with wonder and regret over my useless waste of time” in politics. Even Jefferson’s correspondence fell to a fraction of what it once had been. “I put off answering my letters now, farmerlike, till a rainy day, and then find it sometimes postponed by other necessary occupations.”
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Jefferson portrayed himself as a committed farmer who lived a simple life, telling friends that he had become “too much attached to the plough,” had his “hands full” with farming, and was “the most ardent farmer in the state. I live on my horse.”
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There was considerable truth in what he said. He boasted of rising daily before the sun. After a light breakfast (hot bread and cold ham, along with coffee or tea), he spent much of each day riding about his far-ranging estate, vetting his crops and shops, and supervising his laborers. He also rode for exercise, and if the weather permitted, he tried to spend a couple of hours each day in the saddle. His focus on a healthy lifestyle extended into other areas. He did not smoke and he avoided hard liquor. He usually drank a glass or two of wine with dinner and, though not a vegetarian, he insisted that vegetables be the staple of his diet. Like many in his time, he took just two meals a day, sitting down to dinner at three thirty in the winter, at five during the longer days of summer. It seemed like an unadorned life, but Jefferson was a walking contradiction. While some of his tastes were simple, he owned a capacious mansion stuffed with richly upholstered European furniture, a vast collection of art, and perhaps the nation’s largest collection of natural history artifacts. He dined on food prepared by a trained chef—James Hemings until late in 1795 and thereafter a chef that he had tutored—was waited on by slaves, and, when indoors, was never more than a few steps from one of the largest libraries in North America.
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The one dark cloud that intruded on Jefferson’s unruffled existence was his mounting indebtedness. It exceeded £8,500 in 1795, roughly a 15 percent increase since his return from France, despite his sale of land and slaves during every year that he had been home. He had even been driven to leasing portions of his estate. But now that he was home, Jefferson believed he could resolve his problem through his personal management of operations at Monticello. He instituted numerous changes, gradually transforming the plantation into a small industrial village where nails, textiles, and charcoal were made, and tinsmiths and coopers labored. The nailery was the largest of those enterprises. It was tended by about a dozen young males who toiled long hours over the blazing forge, making upwards of ten thousand iron nails daily, from which Jefferson grossed $2,000 in 1796. The nails were sold mostly
in Philadelphia and Richmond, and for a time Jefferson was able to boast that the nailery provided “completely for the maintenance of my family.” It generated sufficient profits every two months to pay for a year’s worth of luxury comestibles—coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar, molasses, rice, rum, and brandy—that he had shipped to Monticello.