Jefferson and Hamilton (68 page)

Hamilton had not lived to witness the sweeping transformation in America’s political and social fabric, but he lived long enough to understand that crucial aspects of the world he had inhabited were disappearing, and he understood the cause of the sea change all about him. In his last letter, written on the day before he was rowed to Weehawken, Hamilton wrote that “our real Disease … is DEMOCRACY.” He called it a “poison” and presciently foresaw it as certain to grow only “more violent.”
¹³

Had he lived to 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—he would have been seventy-one that year—Hamilton would have been aware of more than political and social change. Though Jeffersonian America was overwhelmingly agrarian, Hamilton would have seen evidence of the nation’s transformation into a modern capitalistic society. The number of towns with more than 2,500 inhabitants had more than doubled since 1800, banks had sprung up like toadstools (more than three hundred existed by 1800), and with investors at home and abroad seeding American enterprise, manufacturing was flourishing. There was hardly a cotton mill in America in 1800; within fifteen years there were nearly 250. Twenty years after Jefferson’s inauguration, one-fourth of the labor force in New England and the mid-Atlantic states worked in factories that churned out hats, shoes, textiles, and a great deal more. In rural townships such as Dudley and Oxford, Massachusetts, virtually every inhabitant had been a farmer in 1790; but fifty years after independence, residents were three times more likely to work in a factory than to own a farm. Factory towns seemed to materialize out of thin air, as did Slatersville, Rhode Island, which had not existed when Jefferson took office, but had a population of some 500 a dozen years later, and nearly all its residents worked in mills.
¹⁴

Hamilton would have been dismayed by much that he beheld, though he might not have been appalled at discovering that Americans, in the words of one historian, had become a “people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money.” If Hamilton might have thought his countrymen were on the right track, Jefferson was unhappy both with America’s emerging business culture and the volcanic exuberance for evangelical Christianity that had gathered force during his presidency. Though he never acknowledged it, both were the products of the democracy nourished by the American Revolution, and both had been unfettered by his revolution of 1800.
¹⁵

Jefferson had opposed much that he found in his world, and he knew that his successors would seek to change the world he had helped to make. “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their … ancestors,” he said late in life. While some things that were unsavory to him had taken root, as an old man he thought it “a good world on the whole.” He was especially buoyed by the conviction that “the flames” of the American Revolution “have spread over … much of the globe,” setting alight fires that threatened to consume tyranny. “[L]ight and liberty are on steady advance,” he proclaimed shortly before his death. In his final letter, Jefferson rejoiced that his countrymen still believed that the choice made in 1776 had been the proper one, and he remained confident that, in time, humankind everywhere,
inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution, would “burst the chains” of despotism and superstition, and secure the “rights of man.”
¹⁶

In his last years, Jefferson’s optimism was tempered by a disquieting recognition that his younger countrymen did not understand their elders who had made the American Revolution. The old Revolutionaries, he said, were “left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who knows not us.”
¹⁷
He was aware that Franklin and Adams had penned autobiographies, but Jefferson declared in 1816 that to “become my own biographer is the last thing in the world I would undertake.” With some truth, he told Adams that he liked “the dreams of the future better than the history of the past,” while in 1817, with an abundance of dissimulation, he informed another friend that the skills for writing history were “not to be found among the ruins of a decayed memory.”
¹⁸

Yet, Jefferson desperately wished to be remembered by posterity, and he wanted future generations to understand his side of the story of his life and times. He carefully preserved eighteen thousand letters he had written and another twenty-five thousand he had received, and he even indexed his correspondence. There can be no doubt that he hoped they would be published following his death.
¹⁹
Beginning in 1818, Jefferson also gathered together his journal entries and a collection of memoranda dating from his time in Washington’s cabinet down to late in his own presidency. In a lengthy introduction, Jefferson acknowledged that he had made a “calm revisal” of these records, and even that he had “cut out” portions. He was candid about his intent. Though he did not publish the “Anas,” as he called the aggregation, Jefferson knew that subsequent generations would see these documents and compare them with the papers left by Hamilton and Washington. Cautioning readers that “we are not to suppose that every thing found” in the materials left by those individuals “is to be taken as gospel truth,” he said that the availability of his “Anas” would enable subsequent generations to come to a more accurate understanding of the early years of the American Republic.
²⁰

Despite his earlier disclaimer, Jefferson in 1821 set to work on an autobiography, though he could not bring himself to call what he was writing by its real name. Instead, he said that he was making “some memoranda” for his “own more ready reference, and for the information of my family.” He carried the story down to his arrival in New York to join Washington’s cabinet, stopping there, as he evidently believed the “Anas” adequately recorded the years that followed.
²¹
But he feared that all of this might be insufficient for the preservation of his reputation. In one of his last letters, Jefferson beseeched Madison to “take care of me when dead.”
²²

Jefferson’s reputation would have been better served, and so would humanity,
had he devoted his last years to the eradication of slavery. Before the Revolution, he had acted nobly to terminate the foreign slave trade, a possible first step toward ending slavery in Virginia. His Declaration of Independence, with its lyrical passages on liberty, inspired many in his time, and later, to rethink slavery. Had Congress retained his paragraph attacking slavery, all of subsequent American history might have been different, as it also would have been had Congress approved Jefferson’s proposal in 1784 to prohibit slavery in the western territories. Jefferson did not seek to end slavery when modernizing Virginia’s legal code during the war. Manumissions increased Virginia’s free black population by sixfold in the 1780s, and the number of manumissions tripled in the twenty years after 1790, but this was also a period when slavery was “fixed more securely on the Virginians,” in the words of historian Robert McColley. Jefferson understood the times better than most, and he knew that any attempt to end slavery in Virginia during the 1780s was doomed to fail.
²³

Jefferson’s concerns about slavery were subsumed by other matters during his five years in France, and resisting Hamiltonianism became his overarching concern once he returned home. After 1784, not only did slavery consume less of his thought than it had a decade earlier, but also, in the wake of Santo Domingo’s bloody slave insurrection in the 1790s, Jefferson saw whites in slave Virginia in the proverbial position of the man riding the back of tiger. (Or, as he put it: “We have the wolf by the ear.”)
²⁴
In
Notes on the State of Virginia
, he had written that prejudice among whites, and a lust for revenge on the part of blacks, meant that emancipation would be followed by race conflicts, even racial extermination. The ghastly slaughters in the Caribbean slave revolts confirmed his fears. Thereafter, Jefferson felt that Virginia had two choices: maintain slavery as a means of race control or end slavery and banish all African Americans from Virginia.

He believed “the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe”—the tempest he had played a vital role in unleashing—was the cause of the slave revolt in the West Indies. He predicted that a “combustion must be near at hand” in Virginia, adding that “only a single spark is wanting to make that day tomorrow.” In 1797, he said that Virginia’s leaders must do something, and quickly, to prevent a catastrophe. If nothing was done, wrote Jefferson from his lonely mountaintop in an Albemarle County in which nearly 50 percent of the inhabitants were enslaved, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”
²⁵

Bringing slavery to a gradual end, followed by the expulsion of the freed slaves, was what he wanted done. But he did nothing toward that end in the 1790s. Furthermore, as president he declined to act in 1802 when the Virginia assembly, in response to the discovery and suppression of a planned slave
insurrection in Richmond, contemplated legislation calling on the United States to set aside western lands as an asylum for emancipated slaves. Though Governor James Monroe thought the idea might succeed with the backing of the president, Jefferson refused to entertain such a notion. Insisting that the West was for white yeomen only, he instead endorsed the notion of sending liberated slaves “out of the limits of the US,” an impractical expedient given both its cost and the revulsion with which it was greeted by many. (Jefferson himself estimated in 1824 that the joint cost of compensating slave owners who liberated their chattel and resettling a million and a half freedmen to the Caribbean would run some $900 million, at a time when the annual budget of the United States was merely a fraction of that amount.)
²⁶

Five years after Jefferson’s presidency, in 1814, Edward Coles, once Madison’s private secretary, appealed to Jefferson to speak out against slavery. Coles planned to free his slaves and give them land in the Illinois Territory, and he asked Jefferson to assist in the eradication of slavery by formulating and “getting into operation” a plan of emancipation. Although Jefferson acknowledged “our … moral and political reprobation” at not having already acted to banish slavery, he refused to take up the fight. In fact, he inexplicably told Coles that this battle was “an enterprise … for the young,” not for those of his generation. What is more, he insultingly, and dismayingly, lectured this ardent young man who was about to take a personally sacrificial step that Jefferson had never contemplated. Jefferson reproached Coles’s generation for not having “proved their love of liberty” by fighting to eradicate slavery, and he also heaped blame for slavery’s continued existence on the shoulders of Coles and his brethren.
²⁷

Despite his inaction, Jefferson told Coles that “love of justice” and “love of country” required that something be done to end the heinous institution.
²⁸
But five years later, in 1819, when the Missouri Crisis provided Jefferson with another chance to take a courageous stand against slavery, he failed to seize the moment. The crisis came about when a New York congressman introduced legislation providing for the gradual end to slavery in the new state of Missouri. Congress had previously prevented the expansion of slavery into territories, but it had never attempted to terminate its existence within a state. While the proposed legislation triggered talk of the South’s secession, John Adams, now eighty-four years old, believed that if Congress stopped slavery’s expansion, slavery—hemmed into a few southeastern states—would in time die out.

Acting on his conviction, Adams did something he had not done previously. He gently raised the slavery question with Jefferson. Adams hoped Jefferson would dare to risk his eminent standing, using his influential voice to
warn the South that slavery’s expansion posed a great danger to the future of the American Union. Jefferson understood the threat. He said that his reaction to the introduction of the slavery issue into the political arena was akin to being awakened by “a fire-bell in the night,” leaving him “filled … with terror” for the future of the United States. In his heart of hearts, Jefferson may even have suspected that the Union was doomed. Yet, he refused to denounce the spread of slavery, and in private he made it clear that he would stand with the South in defense of slavery.
²⁹

In recent years, Jefferson has been criticized by historians who have nearly unanimously concluded that he bore a greater responsibility than any other Founder for “having failed to place the nation on the road to liberty for all.”
³⁰
Though Jefferson could hardly have made the nation or the southern slaveocracy do his bidding, he was, with the exception of Washington, the Founder who might have spoken, and acted, against slavery with the greatest influence. Yet, despite his recognition that human bondage was wicked, and his acknowledgement of a moral imperative to end slavery, Jefferson steadfastly refused to consider emancipation during the half century following independence unless it was linked to the exile of the freedmen.

Worse, perhaps, Jefferson, refused to free his own slaves. An established lawyer, he might have freed his slaves during the American Revolution and lived comfortably from his law practice, as did his mentor, George Wythe, who liberated his chattel following his wife’s death. Like Hamilton, Jefferson in the 1780s and 1790s might have alternately held office and practiced law. Moreover, his salary as a government official after 1790 was substantial. He derived an annual salary of $3,500 as a member of Washington’s cabinet. His salary increased by about forty percent when he became vice president and multiplied another fivefold when he ascended to the presidency. During the fifteen years that he held national office between 1790 and 1809, Jefferson’s average annual salary was nearly sixteen thousand dollars, several times that of a skilled tradesmen in one of the more lucrative crafts.