Jefferson and Hamilton (69 page)

However, by the time Jefferson entered Washington’s cabinet, his independence was circumscribed. From the moment in 1773 that he accepted the fortune that John Wayles had bequeathed to his daughter, Jefferson was shackled by debt. Thereafter, it was infinitely more difficult for him to cut his ties to slavery, as his income as a planter offered his best hope of solvency. But there was something else. Coveting the accoutrements of wealth, he never attempted to live austerely. Like Washington, Jefferson made a conscious decision to keep others enslaved so that he might live the sumptuous life.
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Mystery surrounds Jefferson’s thoughts and actions concerning emancipation, though historians have offered abundant conjectures. It has been
asserted that he was never interested in ending slavery, and that he believed the denial of freedom to slaves offered the best chance of extending liberty and equality to all white Virginians. One historian has argued that in 1792 Jefferson came to the conclusion that the “births of slave children produced capital at the rate of 4 percent per year,” a transformative assessment that led him to abandon his earlier antislavery inclinations. It has also been suggested that while Jefferson thought slavery was morally repugnant, he believed that morality could not be imposed from the top down; therefore, he presumed that slavery would end only when the citizenry came to think of it as intolerable. Historian Jack Rakove has wisely reminded us that the past really is an unfamiliar place to succeeding generations, and that Jefferson was born into a world that was not only accustomed to slavery but also in which the most enlightened were “only beginning to understand that slavery was an evil of a kind radically different from the other wrongs of life.”
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Jefferson himself offered some clues concerning the decisions he made about slavery. He once said that the slavery debates in Virginia’s House of Burgesses before 1776 convinced him that “nothing was to be hoped” concerning slavery’s eradication in his lifetime. He additionally said that those who had sought to end the slave trade in Virginia in the 1760s had been “treated with the grossest indecorum.”
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Already buried under an avalanche of Federalist invective, he may have flinched in the 1790s at the thought of inviting even more personal attacks. Furthermore, just as many historians have remarked that one war was sufficient for the Founders, causing them to walk the extra mile for peace rather than face hostilities again with a major European power, it may have been that one American Revolution was enough for Jefferson. With his acute anxieties about race relations, he may have been unwilling to pry the lid off the Pandora’s box of slavery. What is more, good leaders need to have both a feel for what is possible and knowledge of how to prioritize their battles. During the 1790s, already embroiled in the fight against Hamilton, Jefferson must have shrunk from introducing other matters that would have increased his difficulties, possibly even assuring the success of Hamiltonianism.

When Jefferson came home at the conclusion of his presidency, a few years before Coles approached him, he was sixty-six years old, tired of politics, and eager for tranquility. He was also consumed with the plague of indebtedness, which eventually exceeded one hundred thousand dollars and forced him to sell his most treasured possession: his library of some 6,700 volumes. Had he freed his chattel, he would have lost Monticello, leaving him without “even a log hut to put my head into,” as he said it with considerable exaggeration.
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Those things may have accounted for his silence concerning slavery. But
something else may have played a role as well. James Callender, the newspaper scribbler whose lacerating pen Jefferson had once subsidized, turned on his patron in 1802, furious that he had not been rewarded with a comfortable federal job following the election of 1800. Beginning that September, Callender—writing in the
Richmond Recorder
, a Federalist paper—announced to the world that Jefferson “keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY…. By this wench Sally, our president has had several children.”
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Callender’s allegations about Jefferson and Hemings continued into the spring of the following year, and in addition, he broke the story of Jefferson’s improper advances toward Betsy Walker nearly forty years earlier. Both stories were picked up by other Federalist editors, who gleefully published them. While savagely attacking Callender, some Republican editors acknowledged that Sally Hemings was a slave living at Monticello who had borne children, though not by Jefferson.

Aside from one opaque denial, Jefferson maintained a stony silence concerning the sensational allegation about his relationship with Hemings.
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Callender’s revelations may also have silenced any inclination that Jefferson felt to speak out against slavery, as he must have feared that the public would inevitably interpret his remarks as confirmation of his protracted intimacy with one of his female slaves. Indeed, while Jefferson took steps to liberate some slaves in his final days, he shrank from emancipating Sally Hemings. In March 1826, Jefferson prepared his will, in which he stipulated that five of his slaves were to be freed. All were from the Hemings family, and two were sons borne by Sally. (Her other living children, both daughters, had left Monticello in 1822 with Jefferson’s apparent consent, going off to live as white people.) To prevent their banishment from Virginia, which after 1806 was required of those who were manumitted, Jefferson successfully appealed to the assembly for permission for the five to live within the state. However, he knew that if he petitioned the legislature on behalf of Sally Hemings, it would be interpreted by many as bearing out the stories that she had been his mistress. Instead, when he died, Sally, who was fifty-three, moved with her sons to Charlottesville and lived as a free person. Eight years later, she was freed by Jefferson’s daughter Martha.
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Jefferson was about to turn eighty-three when he drafted his will. He had lived at home in retirement for seventeen years, for the most part enjoying good health and delighting in the steady parade of admirers who came to the mountaintop to meet him. During all that time, he said, he followed a “regular routine of the day. From sunrise till breakfast only I allot for all my pen and ink work. From breakfast to dinner I am in my garden, shops, or on horse back in the farms, and after dinner I devote entirely to relaxation or
light reading.”
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Throughout those years he worked with his farm manager in the hope of making his plantation more profitable, but the place was unsuited to good farming. He invested heavily in two mills, expanded the manufacturing of cloth, and continued operations at the nailery, but while these enterprises increased his income, they contributed little toward the reduction of his indebtedness. During his presidency, Jefferson began construction of an octagonal getaway house in Bedford County, ninety miles away. Finally completed in 1816, he named it Poplar Forest and escaped to it from time to time in the final decade of his life. But he spent most of each year at Monticello, which he shared with Martha—who during her middle years largely lived apart from her husband—and his several grandchildren. His was a busy schedule for a retiree, and a part of it was given over to a voluminous correspondence, including the exchange of hundreds of letters with John Adams.

Jefferson largely avoided politics in these years, but he remained an active reformer, resuscitating the plans for education he had conceived forty years earlier. He drafted legislation for a state system of elementary, secondary, and college education, but once again his reach exceeded his grasp, though the assembly was willing to invest in higher education. For years, Jefferson had contemplated the creation of a university, and at about the midpoint of his retirement he surveyed property in Charlottesville and prepared architectural drawings of a novel “academical village,” as he called it. The assembly eventually approved the creation of the University of Virginia. As a member of its Board of Visitors, he was active in the hiring of its president and faculty, and even drew up plans of class schedules, faculty bylaws, and degree requirements. Classes commenced a year before he died, prompting this man who had spent a lifetime shaping the thought of others to remark that his last great act was to provide “for the instruction of those who are to come after us.”
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During the next twelve months, Jefferson’s health declined, and as spring faded into summer in 1826, he sensed that the end was near. He did not dread death. He believed that behind the creation of the universe and life there was “a conviction of design” by a “superintending power.” He expected “to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.” Though ready to go, he drew on the last reserves of his formidable willpower and managed to stay alive until July 4, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That same day, John Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts. They had outlived Hamilton, their nemesis, by twenty-two years.
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Hamilton and Jefferson had been major players in provoking substantive changes, though Hamilton, the outsider from the West Indies, had sought to
preserve much of the political and social contours of the world that he found when he alighted in America. He failed, of course, and in his final years he believed that his dreams for his country had come to grief. Indeed, nearly everything that he had stood for was being rejected by the American people. By the jubilee of independence in 1826, if not long before, few in the country mourned his absence. Late-nineteenth-century politicians, financiers, and industrialists would breathe new life into his economic programs, but by then much that Hamilton had stood for had become commonplace in the modern industrial states in Europe. One can wonder if the American economy from the Gilded Age forward might have taken the shape it assumed even had Hamilton never been the treasury secretary.

However, it would be a mistake to undermine Hamilton’s legacy. Next to Washington, Hamilton was the most important figure in the establishment of the American Republic. He played a key role in the Nationalists’ campaign to overthrow the Articles of Confederation, and his Herculean efforts helped secure the ratification of the Constitution. The consolidation he championed, the funding system he introduced, and the bank he fathered were pivotal in restoring the nation’s tattered credit, unfettering commercial activity, and returning prosperity to a new nation that had long endured a languid economy. Much of the capital that helped create the mills and factories that sprang up in the early nineteenth century was available because of Hamilton’s economic programs, as was the financial underpinning for the Erie Canal, which officially opened in 1825, linking the East and the West, the dream that Washington had cherished. There were perils in Hamilton’s vision, as Jefferson never tired of pointing out, but his financial system proved to be an amazing vehicle for the spread of wealth and opportunity, for enabling sons and daughters to achieve more than their parents had, and for the facilitation of the arts, philanthropy, inventiveness, and education on a scale that would have been unimaginable in Jefferson’s Arcadia.

That Hamilton achieved these ends was all the more remarkable in that his recommendations flew in the face of the accepted economic wisdom of his day, and that he espoused innovative commercial and industrial programs in a thoroughly agrarian country. He succeeded through nearly unmatched political aplomb and adeptness. However, with time his reactionary bent was more visible, and by the end of the 1790s his political instincts failed him in the wake of his support of the Alien and Sedition Acts, his lust for military glory, and his egregiously misguided attack on the president during the election of 1800. Even so, his successes as treasury secretary were decisive in bonding powerful northern merchants and financiers to the new national government with a glue that was indissoluble. Their attachment to the Union
was crucial in overcoming northern separatist movements that sprang to life up in the face of Jefferson’s election. What is more, his commitment to rapprochement with Great Britain was central to opening the West and preserving the peace, and both were absolutely critical to the preservation of the Union. Jefferson once called Hamilton “a colossus” to his party. It could be said that he was a colossus in the founding, shaping, and survival of the early Republic.

Jefferson was the more revolutionary of the two. He was drawn to the resistance movement against Great Britain at least in part by the hope of bringing fundamental political, social, and economic change to his native America. Sensing a historical significance in the revolutionary fervor in the colonies, Jefferson came to see the American Revolution as the dawning of a new era symbolized by fresh ways of thinking and the remodeling of the world. His Declaration of Independence was an eloquent expression of his revolutionary outlook. In a very few rhapsodic words, his majestic composition provided Americans with a sense of identity as would nothing else framed by any of his contemporaries or by leaders in succeeding generations, save perhaps for the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. Jefferson also saw his presidency as a voyage into new waters. He was looking forward, not backward, he declared, and on taking office he proclaimed the advent of a new era launched by the “mighty wave of public opinion,” a notion that would not have resonated with his predecessors.
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Jefferson may have been forward-looking, but it was Hamilton who sought to construct what later generations would see as the modern nation state. Jefferson resisted that trend, preferring a loose, decentralized union of states, sufficient for mutual protection against foreign predators and for the facilitation of commerce, and with just enough military clout to see to the opening of the West.