American Sphinx (32 page)

THE TEXTUAL PRESIDENCY

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might wish to locate God’s abiding presence, its political manifestation was very much on Jefferson’s side at the start of his presidency. As it turned out, Adams had been the perfect predecessor. His irascible and all too human executive style had contrasted unfavorably with the Olympian presence of the godlike Washington, thereby making Adams unpopular and lowering expectations for his own successor. What’s more, the most unpopular and unilateral act of the Adams presidency, to send an American delegation to Paris with instructions to negotiate an end to the “quasi war” with France, had proved to be a brilliant success. The terms of the new peace treaty arrived too late to help Adams in the presidential election of 1800 but in time to end the “quasi war” before Jefferson took office. And not only was America at peace with the European powers, but France and England had agreed to what was in effect an armistice in their seemingly perpetual struggle for the domination of Europe. Jefferson inherited the most stable and peaceful international scene since the United States had declared its independence.
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On the home front, providence proved just as kind. The much-despised Alien and Sedition Acts, which had allowed the Federalists to prosecute their most outspoken Republican opponents for treason, had in fact backfired, helping mobilize popular support for Republican candidates in the congressional elections of 1800. In the new Congress coming to Washington with Jefferson, the Republicans enjoyed a two-to-one majority in the House and a smaller but decided majority in the Senate. What’s more, the legislation that had created the Alien and Sedition Acts was due to lapse in the early months of Jefferson’s presidency, so he needed to do nothing on that score but wait. Add to this happy set of circumstances the resumption of a flourishing West Indian trade now that peace with France was restored, an overall expansion of American commerce with a now-peaceful Europe and an agrarian economy that was humming along at unprecedented levels of productivity, and Jefferson’s vision of a minimalist federal government—pursuing what he described as “a noiseless course . . . , unattractive of notice”—began to look like a sensible act of hands-off statesmanship. With history dealing out cards like this, who would not want to stand pat?
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As it turned out, even the most invisible and unobtrusive federal government required executive leadership, if for no other reason than to implement the principle of republican austerity. Here again Jefferson was the beneficiary of the Adams administration, but this time as a graphic example of how not to do it. “My wish is to collect in a mass around the administration all the abilities and the respectability to which the offices exercised here can give employ,” Jefferson explained, adding that he was determined to “give none of them to secondary characters.” Adams, not certain about how much discretion he possessed as incoming president, had felt obliged to retain Washington’s cabinet as his own. It proved to be the most disastrous decision of his presidency and the chief source of his political frustrations, since he inherited the “secondary characters” Jefferson was referring to, as well as a cabinet more loyal to Hamilton and to memories of Washington than to Adams himself. (Jefferson later recalled that Adams became so frustrated by the recalcitrance of his own cabinet that he ended up convening it in order to scream obscenities at its advice while stomping around the cabinet meeting room and “dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.”) The cabinet choices Jefferson made were governed by two criteria: proven ability and complete loyalty to the Jeffersonian version of republicanism. On this score he was extremely shrewd as well as blessed. His cabinet proved to be one of the ablest and the most stable collection of executive advisers in the history of the American presidency.
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The two most prominent and invaluable members were James Madison and Albert Gallatin. Madison had long been a foregone conclusion as secretary of state. He was Jefferson’s lifetime lieutenant and protégé, a fellow member of the Virginia dynasty, a battle-tested veteran of the party wars of the 1790s and the shrewdest student of the Jefferson psyche ever placed on earth. Gallatin was a Swiss-born émigré to America who had settled in Pennsylvania and quickly risen in the Republican ranks on the basis of his deft way with both words and numbers. He was short, balding and hawk-nosed, but his unimpressive appearance and lingering Genevan accent belied intellectual powers second to none among the rising generation of Republican leaders. Gallatin was only forty, and he was the one man in America capable of going toe-to-toe with Hamilton in debate over fiscal policy and comfortably holding his own. Since Jefferson’s considerable experience in foreign policy meant that—no offense to Madison’s extraordinary competence—he could and often would serve as his own secretary of state, Gallatin as secretary of the treasury was the most invaluable and strategically positioned member of the cabinet.
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The other members, if not “secondary characters,” were lesser figures. Levi Lincoln, the attorney general, was a respected lawyer from Massachusetts. Along with Henry Dearborn, secretary of war, who was from the Maine district of Massachusetts, Lincoln was that singular phenomenon, a New England Jeffersonian whose Republican credentials had proved themselves by surviving in the homeland of Federalism. “Both are men of 1776,” observed Gallatin, “and decided Republicans.” The same could be said of Gideon Granger, who as postmaster general was not officially a member of the cabinet but had important responsibilities dispensing patronage. Granger was that rarest of species, a Republican from Connecticut, where rumor had it that a Yale degree was a prerequisite for success in politics or the pulpit, and a vow of eternal hostility to the infidel from Monticello was a mandatory part of the Yale commencement ceremony. The eventual choice as secretary of the navy, after much unsuccessful lobbying of other candidates, was Robert Smith, a prominent Baltimore lawyer. Jefferson joked that he “shall have to advertise for a Secretary of Navy,” because of the widespread presumption, which proved correct, that the main mission of the job was to scuttle much of the infant American fleet in order to implement the Jeffersonian goal of republican austerity.
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Most students of the Jefferson presidency explain his leadership style in terms of the positive lessons he had learned from Washington and the negative ones learned from Adams. It is true that Jefferson himself referred to these obvious and opposing models as his guides, with the Adams model (i.e., sulking patriarch) less personally appealing and politically effective than Washington’s model (i.e., military commander-in-chief surrounded by staff officers). In one sense Jefferson’s organization of the executive branch represented an adaptation of the Washington scheme. All business had to go through the appropriate department heads first. On every working day each department head sent Jefferson a written summary of all decisions or issues in his area. Jefferson responded in writing, if possible on the same day, and also made himself available for individual conferences before his daily horseback ride at one o’clock. Unlike Washington, Jefferson preferred not to schedule regular meetings of the full cabinet, convening the entire group only when difficult decisions or a looming crisis required it. This arrangement made the president, as Jefferson put it, “the hub of a wheel” with the business of the nation done at the rim, conveyed through the departmental spokes but all supervised at the center. It was a system that maximized control while simultaneously creating necessary distance from details.
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Washington’s example certainly loomed large for Jefferson, but it is more correct to understand his executive style as a projection of his own experience and personality. After all, the symbolic significance of Jefferson’s inauguration was intended as a republican repudiation of courtly pomp and monarchial affectations, which were all a piece of the Washington model. And the military framework that Washington carried over from his experience as commander of the Continental Army was too explicitly authoritarian to fit with Jefferson’s temperament, which preferred a more indirect expression of authority and attempted to create a consensual context within which all decisions had at least the appearance of being voluntary. He had in effect been practicing this more indirect leadership style in different ways throughout his mature life. It was the diplomatic style of the elegantly elusive American in Paris. It was the political style of the invisible but effective party leader who honestly claimed to despise political parties. It was the paternalistic style of the plantation master who had designed Monticello so as to make slavery almost invisible. It was the domestic style of the benevolent patriarch surrounded by an extended family bonded together in seemingly perfect harmony by unalloyed affection. It was, finally, the republican style of the president-elect, declaring that his chief duty was to render the federal government over which he was to assume control unobtrusive and politically impotent. The common ingredient in all these contexts was Jefferson’s urge to cloak his exercise of power from others and from himself.

His own characterization of cabinet meetings, for example, emphasized the harmonious atmosphere; it borrowed from the sentimental language he customarily used to describe family gatherings. “There never arose, during the whole time,” he recalled in 1811, “an instance of an unpleasant thought or word between the members. We sometimes met under differences of opinion, but scarcely ever failed . . . to produce an unanimous result.” The consensual character of Jefferson’s cabinet meetings was real enough, in great part deriving from the fact that Jefferson had selected men who shared his views. But he also orchestrated events to prevent conflict. One reason he kept full meetings of the cabinet to a minimum was to avoid argumentative debates. “The method of separate consultations,” he explained, “prevents disagreeable collisions.” When a heated exchange occurred in one meeting, he asked Madison to maneuver behind the scenes and let his colleagues know that such unbecoming conduct would not be tolerated in the future: “Will you be so good as to endeavor, in an unsuspected way, to observe to the other gentlemen the advantages of sometimes resorting to separate consultation? To Mr. Gallatin may be remarked the incipient indisposition which we noted in two of our brethren on a late consultation; and to the others may be suggested the other important considerations in its favor.” Full-throated debate within the cabinet struck him as uncivil. He wanted his department heads to work out their disagreements in private so as not to contaminate cabinet meetings with a contentious spirit. If the democratic ethos welcomed a wide-open, deuces-wild brand of political jostling, Jefferson’s version of republican serenity was incompatible with it.
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He seemed to want the operation of the federal government to be noiseless, invisible and completely collegial. Soon after he formed his cabinet he instituted the practice of scheduling three dinner parties each week at the presidential mansion in order to bring together members of Congress and their wives with representatives of the executive branch and foreign diplomats stationed in Washington. Some of the most vivid physical descriptions of President Jefferson come from personal reminiscences of guests at these intimate (twelve to twenty people) social occasions. Edward Thornton, the British chargé, was struck by Jefferson’s almost theatrical effort “to inculcate upon the people his attachment to a republican simplicity of manners and his unwillingness to admit the smallest distinction, that may separate him from the mass of his fellow citizens.” Margaret Bayard Smith read his spare and unassuming social style as a mark of true humility. Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of John Quincy, saw it as an aristocrat’s clumsy effort to affect ordinariness. The most talked-about incident occurred in 1803, when the newly arrived British minister, Anthony Merry, raised a huge fuss about the awkward evening he and his wife spent at a presidential dinner. In his famous
History
Henry Adams made the episode into a delectably malicious set piece in which the courtly expectations and insufferable affectations of Mrs. Merry run hilariously into the Jeffersonian “pêle mêle” rules of etiquette, which struck her as a barbaric free-for-all for seating.
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But the contrasting descriptions of Jefferson’s social demeanor were merely another measure of how richly enigmatic Jefferson’s self-conscious republican style appeared to observers with different political agenda. The truly significant fact about the dinners was their underlying purpose. They imposed a huge social obligation on Jefferson, especially during the months when Congress was in session. He continued them throughout his presidency because they enhanced the prospects for creating personal bonds and emotional attachments that might help override political disagreements. If people sat down to dinner together and were obliged to observe the customary civilities, they were less likely to be at one another’s throats on the floor of Congress the next day. But the laudable intentions behind the presidential dinners were greatly diluted by the very motives that inspired them. Early on Jefferson established the rule, which must have struck some congressmen as bizarre, that explicitly political conversations were prohibited at the table. And after attempting to mix Federalist and Republican guests for a short while, he abandoned the experiment in order to avoid the threat of volatile exchanges or politically edged jokes about his French wine. Thereafter invitations were sent out strictly according to party affiliations. Even more than the cabinet meetings, the much-desired harmony of the dinner parties was highly orchestrated.
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The dinners served another purpose that needs noticing, especially because our modern-day assumptions about instant access to the images and sounds of our elected officials impedes a faithful recovery of the way it was back then. To put it simply, the dinners represented the primary occasion for seeing President Jefferson. (This was the chief reason why so many of the visual descriptions of Jefferson that survive came from dinner guests.) Apart from his daily horseback rides through the woods and on the bridle paths of semirural Washington, Jefferson made no public appearances whatsoever. This constituted a break with precedent, since both Washington and Adams had delivered periodic public addresses before crowds and had appeared before Congress at least once a year to deliver their annual messages. Jefferson discontinued the practice of presenting his Annual Message as a speech, claiming that a written version was more efficient. It also eliminated the spectacle of the presidential entourage parading up Capitol Hill in conspicuous imitation of European royalty, then placing the members of Congress in the position of subjects passively listening to his proclamation. Jefferson believed that a republican president should be inconspicuous. He wanted to institutionalize a self-consciously nonimperial presidency. As far as we know, the only two public speeches he delivered throughout his eight years in office were his two inaugural addresses.
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