American Sphinx (31 page)

These, then, were the personal or private vibrations as well as the larger political speculations present in the Senate chamber when Jefferson turned to the audience and began to read his Inaugural Address. One feature of the legendary account is absolutely correct—his voice was so soft and inaudible that few listeners beyond the first row could hear what he said—but he had worked on his address with the same diligence he had once given to the Declaration of Independence. And this time the words were all his, unedited by intrusive committees or meddling delegates. What’s more, he had finished making his revisions in time to have the final draft available for the printers and the
National Intelligencer
on the day of its delivery, so it is possible that some members of the audience had advance copies that allowed them to follow his speech despite the poor projection of his voice. What they heard, or perhaps read, turned out to be one of the two or three most significant inaugural addresses in American history and, apart from the hallowed Declaration, the most artful and eloquent public document that Jefferson ever crafted.
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FIRST INAUGURAL

L
IKE ANY SEMINAL
statement in American history, though unlike the vast majority of inaugural addresses by other American presidents, Jefferson’s speech of March 4, 1801, can be read with profit on several levels. At the highest and most rarefied level, a place where Jefferson’s stylistic skills felt most comfortable and functioned with near-poetic felicity, his speech contained several passages that echo across the ages with memorable phrasings. As an eloquent statement of the becoming modesty joined with panoramic wisdom that we look for in a new president, for example, none has said it better:

I have learned to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it. . . . I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask for your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional; and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts.
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Or if one were searching for a classic rendering of the principle of free speech, no American statesman had ever put it so succinctly: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Or to take a final illustration out of several equally eloquent entries, there is this concise formulation of America’s domestic and foreign policy goals: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship, with all nations—entangling alliances with none.” It was Jefferson, not Washington, who coined the term “entangling alliances.”
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But the most oft-quoted words, which can also reach across time as a lyrical expression of transcendent truth, are in fact fully comprehensible only when seen within the context of American politics in 1801. Apart from the natural rights section of the Declaration of Independence, this is probably the most famous political statement that Jefferson ever made: “But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans—we are all federalists.” This was also the passage that virtually all the reporters and interested observers fastened upon at the time because it seemed to represent Jefferson’s clear, indeed grand, statement of conciliation and moderation. It signaled that the bitter party battles of the 1790s would not continue in the Jefferson presidency, that the incoming Republicans would not seek revenge for past Federalist atrocities like the Alien and Sedition Acts and, most significant, that Jefferson’s understanding of “pure republicanism” did not mean a radical break with Federalist policies or a dramatic repudiation of the governmental framework established in the Constitution. Hamilton spoke for the relieved Federalists who viewed the address as “a candid retraction of past misapprehensions, and a pledge to the community that the new President will not lend himself to dangerous innovations, but in essential points will tread in the steps of his predecessors.”
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But Jefferson did not really mean what Hamilton and all the other commentators thought they heard him say. Part of the problem was actually a matter of translation. In the version of his address printed in the
National Intelligencer
and then released to the newspapers throughout the country, the key passage read: “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists.” By capitalizing the operative terms, the printed version had Jefferson making a gracious statement about the overlapping goals of the two political parties. But in the handwritten version of the speech that Jefferson delivered, the key words were not capitalized. Jefferson was therefore referring not to the common ground shared by the two parties but to the common belief, shared by all American citizens, that a republican form of government and a federal bond among the states were most preferable. Since one would have been hard pressed to discover a handful of American citizens who disagreed with this observation, his statement was more a political platitude than an ideological concession. The impression that Jefferson had publicly retracted his previous statements about the party conflict as a moral struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness was, as it turned out, badly mistaken.

There were several suggestive passages that provided clues to Jefferson’s truly visionary version of “pure republicanism,” but most commentators were too transfixed by the apparent message of moderation to notice. John Marshall, who was presumably close enough to the podium to hear the speech as delivered, went straight back to his home and recorded his impression: “I have administered the oath to the President. . . . It [the Inaugural Address] is in direct terms giving the lie to the violent party declamation which had elected him; but it is strongly characteristic of his political theory.” Marshall was right, though he did not specify what he meant by “political theory.” But this was hardly the chief justice’s fault. A crucial component of Jefferson’s genius was his ability to project his vision of American politics at a level of generalization that defied specificity and in a language that seemed to occupy an altitude where one felt obliged to look up and admire without being absolutely certain about the details.
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One such passage in the Inaugural Address occurred when Jefferson was enumerating the natural advantages enjoyed by American citizens, who were “separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe” and had the good fortune to possess “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” Then he concluded the list of assets with what he called “one thing more”: “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them free to regulate their pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” This was Jefferson’s clearest statement of his minimalist theory of government. While Federalists were listening nervously for clarifications of his position on executive authority, the role of the judiciary and the proper jurisdiction of federal versus state law, Jefferson framed his answer at a level where all such distinctions dissolved. The very notion of government itself was the core problem. In that sense he remained true to the Whig tradition, which stigmatized all forms of political power as inherently corrupt, as well as to his own ideal of personal autonomy, which regarded any explicit exercise of authority that was not consensual or voluntary as inherently invasive. Though an old and venerable political tradition and a long-standing Jeffersonian conviction, this perspective assumed a novel shape in the Inaugural Address because it meant that Jefferson was declaring that his primary responsibility as president was to render ineffectual and invisible the very government he was elected to lead. On the face of it, this seemed to put him in a strange and anomalous position, much like naming Luther to head the Catholic Church.
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The obvious question that followed logically from this disavowal of a positive role for government was not lost on Jefferson himself. He raised it midway through his speech and made at least a glancing attempt at an answer:

I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may possibly want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it is the only one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.
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This is both the richest and most elusive passage in Jefferson’s Inaugural Address. It acknowledged, at least implicitly, that his election had prompted widespread apprehension about the dismemberment of the federal government and the resulting dissolution of the national union. But then Jefferson inverted the argument, claiming that his critics had been seized by a “theoretic and visionary fear.” This in fact was precisely the accusation being leveled against
him—
namely, that he was a naive visionary who lacked a realistic understanding of how much national stability depended upon an energetic federal government that he (not his Federalist critics, as he seemed to say) had pledged to dismantle. Jefferson had somehow transformed himself into the defender of a national government as “the world’s best hope”—a phrase Abraham Lincoln was to pick up and improve upon as “last, best hope” in his own First Inaugural—and consigned his critics to the role of skeptics who lacked his republican faith.

But the truly creative transformation, again more implied than asserted, was Jefferson’s suggestion that the true, indeed only source of energy in a republic was not the government per se but the voluntary popular opinion on which it rested. The traditional presumption, which was a bedrock conviction among all Federalists, was that an active federal government was necessary to embody authority and focus national policy. In the absence of such governmental leadership, it was assumed that the American republic would spin off into a series of factions and interest groups and eventually into separate regional units. Without a strong central government, in short, one could not have a coherent American nation. In Jefferson’s formulation, however, which must have seemed counterintuitive to the Federalists, the release of national energy increased as the power of government decreased. Whereas the Federalist way of thinking about government concerned itself with sustaining discipline, stability and balance, the Jeffersonian mentality bypassed such traditional concerns and celebrated the ideal of liberation. Lurking in his language about what makes a republican government strong was a belief in the inherent coherence of an American society that did not require the mechanisms of the state to maintain national stability.

In the weeks following the delivery and distribution of his Inaugural Address, Jefferson made a point of writing to surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as other colleagues from the Continental Congress who had also been “present at the creation,” to share his celebratory sense that the version of “pure republicanism” he had professed in his speech was a recovery of what they all had intended back in 1776. Whatever new and ideologically experimental ideas were lurking within the rhetorical recesses of the Inaugural Address, Jefferson was absolutely certain that his message represented a restoration of the vision shared by the original revolutionaries as “the antient and sacred truths” on which American independence had been based. He explained to Benjamin Rush, the old revolutionary gadfly in Philadelphia, that “these sentiments have been long and radically mine,” and Rush concurred that Jefferson’s address gave poetic expression to the values they all had thought they were fighting for in the glory days. Something magical and spiritual had happened at the founding moment, a kind of primal encounter with political purity that all the original participants experienced as a collective epiphany. Jefferson’s first instinct was to share with his fellow survivors and sharers of that experience—outsiders and the younger generation could not understand—that the true “spirit of ’76” was back. The sinners had at least been cast out of the temple, and the saints were once again in control.
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His emphasis on austerity and simplicity, both in the inaugural ceremony itself and in his prescriptions for a stripped-down federal government, represented his core conviction about the recovered meaning of what the American Revolution had been about and what his own election to the presidency had reestablished. Much like his fondness for “a little rebellion now and then” or for “sweeping away” the accumulated debris of history every generation, Jefferson regarded his ascendance to power as a mandate to purge the American government of all the excess institutional baggage it had acquired since its pristine birth a quarter century earlier. While his Federalist critics and even some of his moderate Republican supporters worried out loud how far Jeffersonian reform would go (did it include eliminating the national bank? the federal judiciary? the navy?), Jefferson’s own mind simply did not work at that level of specificity. His thinking about his presidential agenda, like his lyrical language in the Inaugural Address, hovered above such particulars. As he explained to John Dickinson, another of the revolutionary “band of brothers,” the American government was like a ship that had passed through some very rough seas: “We shall put her back on her republican tack, and she will show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.” Once the nation was put on its proper course, in short, forces as natural as the wind and tide would take over and carry America toward its destiny. God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars. If one could just align the ship of state with them again, all those minor squabbles about executive power or federal jurisdiction would become irrelevant and sink from sight. Those who kept raising nettlesome questions about such items were inadvertently confessing that they lacked the pure republican faith.
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