Madison and Jefferson (47 page)

These events would transform American politics. No power in the United States was capable of calling in a favor with the government during this phase of the Revolution. Based on his intimate knowledge of French politics, William Short saw the Jacobins as demagogues. From his perch in The Hague, he predicted correctly that their reign would be brief: they knew how to inflame the mob but not how to cool it down.

He learned this firsthand. As his beloved Rosalie watched helplessly, her charitable husband, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, was dragged from their carriage, stoned, and slashed to death. Obtaining passports that permitted him to cross French and Austrian lines, Short left the Netherlands, where he continued to serve as U.S. minister, and sped to Rosalie’s side. He proposed marriage to the now-widowed duchess; she refused him but signed
over a large portion of the estate to her American lover, who successfully protected the majority of it from confiscation.
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The Marquise de Lafayette pleaded with President Washington to send an envoy to arrange her husband’s release from prison. Lafayette was under close guard, deprived of many necessities, and for the most part unaware of what was going on in the wider world. She was frustrated because, at this dire moment, the American president seemed inattentive. The marquis had been, as she wrote, “in the chains of the enemy” for six months and the marquise herself under virtual house arrest. She had been able to smuggle out of the country only the one letter to Washington, with the help of an English farmer. At once haunted and disbelieving, the marquise wondered where Washington was when Lafayette needed him: “I confess to you, Sir, that your silence … is perhaps of all our evils the most inexplicable to me.”

The president did the only thing he thought possible: he sent her money, in case it was needed. But he did not see that he had any other options. Upon receiving her first letter, he had asked Jefferson to draft a reply, offering “all the consolation I can … consistent with my public character and the National policy.” In its final form, it read: “Be assured that I am not inattentive to his condition, nor contenting my self with inactive wishes for his liberation. My affection to his nation & to himself are unabated, & notwithstanding the line of separation which has unfortunately been drawn between them, I am confident that both have been led on by a pure love of liberty & a desire to secure public happiness.” Jefferson enclosed a copy to Gouverneur Morris, reminding him to undertake “all prudent efforts” to aid Lafayette.
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War between England and France placed Americans in one of two camps—and for the next several years made political life especially challenging for the Madison-Jefferson coalition. The “rights of man” remained an attractive-sounding slogan, but those who had predicted a smooth course for the progress of liberty struggled now to find in the French experiment the obvious appeal it once had had. When Jefferson learned from William Short of the inhumanity displayed toward their celebrated friends, his instinct was to shame Short into recanting. “You have been … hurried into a temper of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen,” he lectured.

Jefferson counseled patience with the Jacobins, convinced that the French nation stood behind them. But his thinking was flawed insofar as he was unable to separate the fate of the French Revolution from the fate of republican principles in America. For Short he defined his domestic opponents: “characters of opposite principles; some of them are high in office, others possessing great wealth, and all of them hostile to France and fondly looking to England as the staff of their hope.” He claimed that these usurpers of the American republic were a “little party” but a dangerous one.

In the same letter, composed just after New Year’s Day 1793, Jefferson contributed to America’s political vocabulary his most unfortunately phrased maxim with respect to the cause of republicanism. Rather than watch the French Revolution fail, he said, “I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.” Gore Vidal has called this wording “raging melodrama.” In defense of the Jacobins, Jefferson was willing to accept the loss of the liberal aristocrats as martyrs in the struggle for a better world.

Conventional hyperbole aside, Jefferson could be mistaken about major matters, as he was here. His habitual hatred of monarchy combined with his compulsive fear that the Hamiltonians espoused republican government “only as a stepping stone to monarchy.” As Short remarked at the time of Jefferson’s death: “It was most difficult to make him change an opinion.” Madison knew this too: both he and Short found ways to accommodate Jefferson’s foible. But as a subordinate, Short could say only so much.
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Jefferson’s cavalier allusion to mass extermination can be explained, but it remains disturbing. He conceived of republican revolution as a global battle against the corrupting power of monarchy. Its success in France would ensure the survival of republicanism in America. Writing to Lafayette a short time before the marquis became a prisoner, he resorted to hyperbolic language when he praised the Frenchman for undertaking heroic efforts toward “exterminating the monster of aristocracy, and pulling out the teeth and fangs of it’s [
sic
] associated monarchy.” Jefferson compared the French beast to the “sect” of aristocrats and monocrats he faced in the United States. Not shying from the word
extermination
, though, Jefferson came dangerously close to condoning the actual murder of flesh-and-blood royalists.
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His point was that death was part of the price of freedom. It had always
been so. Revolution required purification, and sometimes innocent blood was sacrificed in the process. Because he had not yet discovered effective medicine to combat the political contamination introduced by Hamilton, he could envision only a macabre end to the American experiment.

His Adam and Eve allusion, at once a dystopian and a utopian nightmare, was not meant to sound quite as fatalistic as it does today. He summoned up the promise of republicanism, and not just the threat to it, when he called forth the Garden of Eden, a golden age of innocence, a return to first principles and first parents, a perfect, natural relationship untainted by the sins of the flesh. Republicanism required naked simplicity, a state of being in which time-honored virtue was transparent, artifice was stripped away, and even the proverbial lust for power could be overcome. The Enlightenment that Jefferson breathed sometimes took for natural science, or political science, what was in fact a romance of the mind. That deficiency—moralism masquerading as science—was what spawned his eccentricities, sanctioned his rationalizations, hardened his prejudices, and encouraged extravagant language.

Recall that in 1787 Jefferson had justified to Madison “a little rebellion now and then” in defense of Shays’s Rebellion, comparing it to the occasional disturbance caused by an ordinary storm. In six years that small storm had magnified into a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions when he suggested to Short that he was willing to tolerate “half the earth desolated” rather than the failure of the French Revolution. In fact, though, in pursuit of a romantic truth, Jefferson was mixing his biblical allusions, because the image of God decontaminating the earth has more in common with the story of Noah than the Garden of Eden. The metaphorical ark of Jefferson’s imagination contained, instead of animals, male and female representatives of every nation.

It is always hard to voice opinions in politics and achieve consistency. It was especially hard in an age of revolutions.

Toppling monarchy and aristocracy in faraway France was one thing. Responding to an incipient revolution in St. Domingue (now Haiti) was quite another. St. Domingue was the most valuable French outpost in the West Indies. Taking up approximately one-third of the island of Hispaniola, just slightly larger than the state of Vermont, it produced most of the sugar and
coffee that European and U.S. markets required, reducing Americans’ need to trade with the British and Spanish Caribbean colonies. This made it an important partner to the United States in the post-Revolutionary decades.

The alliance with France at the time of the American Revolution had opened up a thriving trade, which also made it possible for slavery to expand rapidly on the island. Power was concentrated in the hands of a ruthless planter elite, creating a stark demographic imbalance: 35,000 white residents, 30,000
gens de couleur
(those of mixed-race ancestry), and nearly half a million black slaves.
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This oppressive slave system was responsible for the rebellion that swept through the island colony in 1791, but events in France had a decisive impact too. After the French Assembly proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1790, the abolition society Amis des noirs organized a campaign, with the help of
gens de couleur
on both sides of the Atlantic, to grant political rights to free blacks on the island. When this effort failed, a mixed-race militant named Vincent Ogé, fresh from France and in possession of American arms, mounted an insurrection, which was crushed. But then a much larger slave revolt broke out, and hundreds of plantations were destroyed; blacks and whites alike were slaughtered.
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Secretary of State Jefferson kept a cautious eye on these events. He sensed that unilateral American action would be seen as interference, and he did not wish to offend the Revolutionary French government. But as news of the rebellion spread, and as whites’ accounts of death and destruction (many of them exaggerated to win outside support) reached both France and the United States, Jefferson changed his mind. He felt that the white planters of St. Domingue might turn to London for backing if their appeals were ignored. And if the British were to gain a foothold on the island, U.S. commercial interests would be seriously threatened.
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That change of mind is of consequence to the course of American history. “A man attacked by assassins will call for help to those nearest him,” Jefferson wrote to William Short, as grim reports came to his desk.
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Viewing this as the moment to extend meaningful assistance to the colonial government on St. Domingue, he argued that the law of self-defense applied to colonies as well as nations and that in an emergency the nearest ally should come to the aid of the endangered population. It was the early 1790s, and Jefferson was already laying the foundation for what would become known three decades later as the Monroe Doctrine. By identifying a sphere of influence in the Caribbean, he drew a line: America’s national interest was at stake wherever instability and violence appeared in its hemisphere.
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In a rare moment of agreement in the executive branch, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Washington all concurred that the United States should aid the island’s white colonists by selling arms and making money available to the colonial government. The amount expended would be deducted from Revolutionary War loans that the United States still owed France. It was a risky proposition. The French Assembly might reject America’s terms, and no one wished to become embroiled in an unpleasant diplomatic dispute with France over money. But Jefferson felt something had to be done. The white islanders were vulnerable and growing increasingly desperate. If they became “disgusted with either France or us,” he told Short, Great Britain waited in the wings and would take advantage.
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To prevent worse violence, Jefferson wished for the French Revolutionary government to negotiate a compromise with the St. Domingue rebels.
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Instead, Paris acted aggressively, sending fresh troops to the Caribbean while establishing a commission to oversee the colonial government. The head of that commission, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, was both a Jacobin and an antislavery advocate. His priority was to destroy royalism and defend French rule at all costs.

A majority of the white planters on St. Domingue were strongly opposed to French Revolutionary policies. Jefferson was correct in his assumption that as early as 1791, some of these planters viewed secession and an alliance with Great Britain as their only hope of retaining power. Sonthonax put down the first planter coup, deporting hundreds of whites in the process. Then after France declared war against England, and British forces made plans for an invasion, Sonthonax called on black insurgents to rally to his side and defend the French Republic. In the summer of 1793 he decreed that all slaves in the colony were free.
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Many white planters abandoned the island. Their refuge lay in the United States. Congressman Madison did not appear especially alarmed, but as he corresponded with Edmund Pendleton about the “gloomy” conditions on St. Domingue, the Virginia Assembly passed legislation prohibiting free blacks from entering the state. They feared, of course, that the contagion of rebellion might reach their shores.

Jefferson’s reaction to the white immigrants was mixed. He wrote to Monroe that the “fugitives (aristocrats as they are) call aloud for pity and charity.” But he preferred that the state governments, not the federal government, provide assistance to them. He claimed that as secretary of state, it was “with a bleeding heart” that he had resolved to deny the refugees any assistance. When a bill came before Congress to support them, Madison
took a different position. He did not believe that the Constitution sanctioned congressional funds for acts of charity, but he conceded that the government could draw on the existing U.S. debt to France to provide assistance to the royalist refugees. The bill passed, and money was charged against the debt.
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Jefferson was crying crocodile tears for the refugees when he called them “fugitives” (which, to him, connoted criminals of the state) and “aristocrats” (a term obviously indicating that he did not regard their arrival on American shores as a hopeful addition to the young republic). To his daughter Patsy, he was rather more blunt. Informing her that four hundred “aristocrats and monocrats” were to be sent to the United States, he snapped: “I wish we could distribute our 400 among the Indians, who would teach them the lessons of liberty and equality.” It is hard to resist smiling at Jefferson’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the royalist planters be humbled through an internment process and treated as political criminals to be reconditioned in camps run by Native Americans, whose equality was unsupported and whose liberty was routinely threatened.
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