Unfortunately both aspects of Jefferson’s initiative toward King came to naught. First, the Sierra Leone colony’s proprietors communicated that its internal situation was so unstable, its military resources were so puny, that it could not risk taking in the people Jefferson had in mind to send.17 Second, frustrated by his inability to persuade Secretary Madison to allow him to negotiate a revision and extension of the Jay Treaty’s commercial provisions, King resigned his post and headed back to America.18 In the end the president decided the obvious thing to do with slave insurrectionaries was to send them to Haiti. Nature, he said, intended Haiti “to become the receptacle of the blacks transplanted into this hemisphere.”19

  13

  Jefferson’s inauguration ushered in more than surface changes to American government, though it certainly brought those.1 When it came to policy formulation, Jefferson’s methods of politics would be highly personal. In later years he liked to recall that though he and the members of his Cabinet frequently discussed policy matters in detail, they had never come to significant disagreement. As Jefferson recalled his experience to a subject of Napoleon whom he quite admired a few years after the fact, “the [Jefferson] administration, which was of eight years, presented an example of harmony in a cabinet of six persons, to which perhaps history has furnished no parallel. there never arose, during the whole time, an instance of unpleasant thought or word between the members. we sometimes met under differences of opinion, but scarcely ever failed, by conversing & reasoning, so to modify each other’s ideas, as to produce an unanimous result.”2 (Jefferson perhaps erred in this judgment, as Gallatin could attest.)

  The new president also used social occasions at the president’s house differently from Washington. Republicans had come to see the first president’s twice-weekly levées as of a piece with what they saw as the monarchist tenor of Federalist policy. Stiff and formal, Washington’s experiment in republican interaction with the federal chief executive had looked more regal than would have been appropriate to, among others, Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin. A footman led the invited visitors into the presence of President and Mrs. Washington and arranged them in a semi-circle facing the formally dressed hosts in the front of the room. The president, stationary, then engaged each in turn in a brief snippet of conversation. Two or three times back and forth across the semi-circle, with Mrs. Washington having taken her turn with them as well, and the guests were led out of the room.

  When the Federal Government moved to the District of Columbia during President Adams’s closing weeks in office, Jefferson became part of the Capitol Hill boardinghouse culture. The night of his First Inaugural Address, he returned to his boardinghouse and sat at the end of the common table farther from the fireplace, after the egalitarian (republican) fashion. When he took up residency in the Executive Mansion (now known as the White House), he continued to strike a plebeian pose, for example by dressing informally as a matter of … well, if not of policy, certainly of calculation.

  At the upper reaches of his branch of the government, the situation would be novel in a way not often remarked. While Washington had chosen his Cabinet members largely on the basis of merit, with ratification-campaign Federalism another requirement, and while Adams’s decision to keep Washington’s Cabinet on yielded a situation in which Adams too had serious personnel problems atop his administration, Jefferson entered office with the intention to have only extremely able fellow Republicans among his top advisors. The less important Cabinet posts were one thing (the New Englanders chosen largely because they were New Englanders, the navy secretary selected virtually out of desperation), but Madison and Gallatin stood alongside their chief among the three ablest members of their party.3 If Jefferson, man of the Enlightenment, saw things in bright, clear colors, and Madison, a genius of political science, added occasional shading, Gallatin would be the numbers cruncher the other two could not.

  The president and his subordinates handled relations with Congress similarly. While on one hand Jefferson had drawn back from formal interaction by terminating the tradition of an annual in-person address relaying information on the state of the Union, on the other hand he substituted intimate interaction with rotating, selected members of Congress for Washington’s stilted, formally unrepublican levées. Those summoned before the general and his wife had enjoyed tightly limited opportunity for exchanging a few words with him, but now Jefferson’s guests stayed for lengthy dinners of French food and fine wine at the First Gourmand’s table—and on his nickel, no less. If the District of Columbia was a (not very) dignified cow pasture, dinner with Jefferson could one day reasonably be compared by President John F. Kennedy to a party with a score of the Western Hemisphere’s leading intellectual lights.4 Not only was Jefferson remarkably brilliant, but his chef had French training, and the host had the full Article II Executive Branch powers.

  A faulty speaker before a large assemblage, Jefferson shone at the dinner table. On one hand, conducting politics in this setting helped him avoid the ridiculousness of John Adams trying to ape George Washington. On the other, here he could display all of the ingratiating manners and copious knowledge he had picked up as a Virginia squire’s scion, a young man invited to frequent dinners at the colonial governor’s palace with Small and Wythe, and a diplomat in France during the waning days of ancien régime salon society.

  A leading scholar of the presidency described Jefferson’s dinners this way:

  As a method of cultivating the acquaintance of legislators without violating the norms of distance and decorum expected between the two elective branches of government, these dinners were both functional and unique. Their uniqueness flowed from the skill with which Jefferson pursued his political purposes while outwardly avoiding the merest breath of politics. The dinners gave every appearance of being purely social occasions, and Jefferson’s charm, hospitality, and his excellent taste in food and wine as well as in the selection of his guests managed to veil from all but the most detached of witnesses the full extent of political advantage that these evenings afforded their host!5

  The same author goes on to note that when Congress was in session, Jefferson typically alternated between Republicans-only and Federalists-only dinners, with the effects that the former group became more unified and the latter found themselves less stridently opposing the president. Federalists and perverse Republicans alike bemoaned the dinners’ effects, but still they attended. The president’s ingratiating ways struck everyone.6

  His contemporaries and scholars since have delighted in tales of Jefferson’s White House dinners, but not all participants were impressed. Massachusetts’s junior senator, John Quincy Adams, sometimes found Jefferson’s company pleasing, sometimes found it perplexing, on some occasions depicted the president as ridiculous, and in at least one instance seems to have taken a perverse pleasure in being unhelpful to his host. Fortunately Adams recorded some of his interactions with Jefferson in his voluminous diary.7 The felt imperative to maintain only “a cold and formal intercourse of official station” resulting from what Adams understood to have been Jefferson’s “perfidy in his personal relations with my father” colors his accounts.8

  Adams expressed perplexity concerning Jefferson’s remarking about the French Revolution in late 1804 “how contrary to all expectation this great bouleversement had turned out” [emphasis in the original]. Because the Republicans had earned their reputation in the 1790s as the party friendly to the French Revolution, including by using observances of its important anniversaries as party holidays, Jefferson’s comment struck Adams as somewhat astonishing. “It seemed,” he had Jefferson saying, “as every thing in that country for the last twelve or fifteen years had been a DREAM; and who could have imagined that such an ébranlement would have come to this? He thought it very much to be wished that they could now return to the Constitution of 1789, and call back the Old Family. For although by that Constitution the Government was much too weak, and although it was defective in having a Legislature in only one branch, yet even thus it was better than the present form, where it was impossible to perceive any limits.” No doubt anticipating that his reader would find it hard to believe an account of Jefferson coming to this conclusion, Adams closed the story by insisting that “I have used as near as possible his very words; for this is one of the most unexpected phases in the waxing and waning opinions of this gentleman concerning the French Revolution.”

  Adams found Jefferson ridiculous in a conversation in which the president first said, in Adams’s words, that he thought “both French and Spanish ought to be made primary objects of acquisition in all the educations of our young men.” That should pose no problem, the president hurried to add, because (again in Adams’s words) Spanish “was so easy that he had learned it, with the help of a Don Quixote lent him by Mr. Cabot, and a grammar, in the course of a passage to Europe, on which he was but nineteen days at sea.” Adams, who knew several foreign languages, considered this claim quite foolish, concluding with, “But Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.… You never can be an hour in this man’s company without something of the marvellous like these stories. His genius is of the old French school. It conceives better than it combines. He showed us, among other things, a Natural History of Parrots, in French, with colored plates very beautifully executed.”

  Adams also recorded a conversation in which Jefferson lamented the difficulty he had run into in trying to staff the territorial government of Louisiana. Francophone lawyers willing to go be judges in that newly American land had proven impossible to find, and Jefferson “would now give the creation” for an able, young one. After a few more details, the senator concluded his entry by saying, “I could easily have named a character fully corresponding to the one he appeared so much to want. But if his observations were meant as a consultation or an intent to ask whether I knew any such person I could recommend, he was not sufficiently explicit. Though if they were not, I know not why he made them to me.”

  Jefferson also innovated, shall we say, when it came to formal diplomatic dinners. In Europe, diplomats’ precedence depended on, among other things, particular countries’ status and a given diplomat’s rank. The third president resolved to turn this system upside down. He caused a diplomatic furor.

  As Secretary of State Madison related it, Jefferson’s new system “had gone on for three years without a whisper or a suspicion that it was disrelished” when Anthony Merry arrived as the new minister from the United Kingdom.9 The first time Merry and his wife were at the White House, when it came time for the party to remove to the dining table, the president as was his custom instead of taking Mrs. Merry by the hand selected a Cabinet member’s wife to accompany him. When the Merrys put in their first appearance at Madison’s house a few nights later, Madison followed Jefferson’s example. “It soon appeared that umbrage had been taken.”

  The Spanish minister found the resulting social tension irksome and intervened with Madison. Might not the American government follow the European custom of preferring foreign ministers over Americans? Madison thought that “the pêle mêle readily occurred as the most convenient in itself, and the most consonant to the principles of the Country.” On formal state occasions the ministers as a group would be afforded a particular space and left to sort out their arrangement for themselves.

  When Madison told Merry of these decisions, Merry went into an elaborate complaint about the treatment he had received, “some of which,” Madison scribbled, “had never been dreampt of.” Most notable to Merry was that on first meeting Jefferson, he found that although he had dressed in formal diplomatic garb of “deep blue coat with black velvet trim and gold braid, white breeches, silk stockings, ornate buckled shoes, plumed hat, and a large sword,” the president wore plain morning clothes: “not merely in an undress,” Merry reported to his superior, “but actually standing in slippers down at the heels, and both pantaloons, coat, and under-clothes indicative of utter slovenliness and indifference to appearances and in a state of negligence actually studied.” (He left out the awkwardness resulting from Jefferson’s not having been in the appointed office at the appointed time.)10 Madison replied that the only other foreign minister who had arrived in Washington during Jefferson’s tenure, the Dane, had been received in the same way. Merry answered that his higher rank meant he should have been shown greater respect than the Danish minister.

  Like Madison most historians breeze past the possibility that Jefferson’s insult to Merry, thus to Britain, was indeed “studied.” In light of the famous episode in which King George III had been notably rude on meeting then-Minister Jefferson for the sole time, it seems entirely possible that the president intentionally reciprocated the slight. Thomas Jefferson was not one to forget such an insult, particularly from that source.11

  Merry had several other complaints related to seating, reception, and guest lists on several occasions subsequent to his first meeting with Jefferson (particularly regarding having been invited to an event at which the French chargé, with whose country Britain was once again at war, had been in attendance). Madison, clearly perturbed by what he was describing, concluded that part of his account by saying that he had told Merry, “In this country people were left to seat themselves at table with as little rule as around a fire.”

  Perhaps the gravamen of Merry’s lengthy set of complaints centered on that having to do with the formalities (not) shown to his wife, who after the surprise of not having been taken by the hand by the president at the time for dinner found herself being ignored once again at Madison’s house a few days later. He had been told before departing England to expect better.

  Madison took pains to explain to Merry that the British diplomats back home who had told him what to expect must have briefed him on the old (Federalist) dispensation. Jefferson was of course at liberty to conduct such matters as he wanted, and Madison had to follow the president’s lead, whatever he might have done in private life. More important, usage was all in such matters. In Russia, military rank took precedence over diplomatic and noble; in Rome, ecclesiastical rank came first; in Prussia’s capital, domestic rank was favored over foreign; and in England, hereditary rank came first. Besides that, Jefferson and Madison had not treated Mrs. Merry any worse than “what had been experienced in the case of the American Minister on a farewell dinner given him & his lady by Ld. Hawksbury, at which Mrs. King was postponed to the lady of the ex Minister Dundas.” Even George III’s levies had a good portion of the pêle mêle about them.

  Madison’s account of the conversation included a very interesting passage in which, after telling Merry that although the American usages to which he objected had been created without very much thought, this trouble with Merry had led the administration to consider the difficulties in European courts concerning the different ranks of diplomats, the different prominence of the various kingdoms, and the endless trouble, sometimes extending even to war, that had arisen among the Old Continent’s powers over these issues. European disagreements of this type “were many of them unsettled to this day,” Madison wrote, and “[i]t was not to be expected that we should willingly enter into such a labyrinth.”

  Merry concluded by saying that although he thought he had been treated reasonably, “it was the standing duty of a public Minister to maintain his rights & his rank in every thing.” Therefore “he must retire (in what degree is not yet ascertained); but that if his Govt. should direct him to wave his pretensions, he & Mrs. M. would with the greatest readiness & pleasure return fully into society.” Madison said the British government must have known of the Jeffersonian ceremonial, as it had had Chargé Thornton on station here for years.

  Madison felt particularly unhappy with the likely impression upon people in Britain that he and Jefferson had been partial to France in all of this, when in fact “a marked attention was meant to be shewn” to Merry. He hoped Merry could stay in place, because “I really think favorably of him as a medium of conciliatory & useful communication,” despite the fact that this situation did not reflect well on him. Madison made “great allowances for” Mrs. Merry’s influence. Whatever else might have been made of this matter, Madison “blush[ed] at having put so much trash on paper.”

  Four weeks later Madison updated Monroe on the Merry kerfuffle.12 Madison had sounded out Merry regarding the likelihood Merry would dine with Jefferson alone, with little luck. The secretary took this as reflecting new British suspicion in the wake of the final adjustment of the Louisiana and other matters with France. Whatever Whitehall might hear from Merry, Madison hoped that Monroe could convince the British that America’s government recognized its natural interest in establishing friendly relations with the United Kingdom.

  Madison said the government intended to maintain its policy. Since the Spanish minister, the Marquis de Yrujo, had been joining Merry in all of his protests, they might be brought to the realization that prior to the Constitution, precedence had been given to foreign governments in the order in which they had recognized the United States—which obviously did not seem a policy Spain and Britain would wish the Americans had maintained. Where in his previous missive to Monroe he had closed by alluding to Mrs. Merry, this time his final statement was, “The manners of Mistress Merry disgust both sexes and all parties.”

  So said President Jefferson’s number-two man. Others saw Mrs. Merry entirely differently. Vice President Burr, who though elected to extremely high office as a Republican did not share Jefferson’s goal of establishing a particular kind of republican capital on the banks of the Potomac, found her quite impressive. Margaret Bayard Smith described Mrs. Merry’s attire, which was entirely out of place in the Spartan little village on the Potomac, after saying that it “attracted great attention,” as

  … brilliant and fantastic, with satin with a long train, dark blue crape of the same length over it and white crape drapery down to her knees and open at one side, so thickly cover’d with silver spangles that it appear’d to be a brilliant silver tissue; a breadth of blue crape, about four yards long, and in other words a long shawl, put over her head, instead of over her shoulders and hanging down to the floor, her hair bound tight to her head with a band like her drapery, with a diamond crescent before and a diamond comb behind, diamond ear-rings and necklace, displayed on a bare bosom.