Jefferson's Character

Thomas Jefferson's views of American Indians were formed not just in the peaceful study at Monticello and in the halls of the American Philosophical Society. They were also fashioned on horseback, in taverns, and in legislative chambers by a close observer of the almost endless war, diplomacy and treaty-making that accompanied Virginia's, and later the United States', efforts to obtain the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, whose foothills lay in a hazy blue line in western Albemarle County, just visible from Monticello. As Jefferson assumed increasingly important legislative and executive duties in his public life, he was inevitably required to involve himself seriously in Indian affairs.

"Indian Affairs"--the relations between the colonies, states, and federal government and Native Americans, who owned and occupied most of the eastern United States until their removal in the 1830s and 40s--were necessarily a major preoccupation of public servants in the early republic. Participants in public life were required to build, out of their own experience, practical policies toward the Indians and then craft philosophical views to rationalize these measures. Jefferson, the stiff, bookish country lawyer, the literary connoisseur with a flair for writing elegant prose--for saying "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd," adept at putting a philosophical gloss on the violently partisan, but not necessarily original, opinions he held on practically every subject, including the Indians.

In my view, the central paradox in Thomas Jefferson's character, a paradox that helps to account for at least some of the apparent contradictions in his beliefs and behavior toward Native Americans, is that he, the apostle of liberty, had a deeply controlling temperament.²³ It was a trait that he abhorred in others but could not recognize in himself. "How I wish," he once said, "that I had the power of a despot!"--a power that political enemies accused him of exercising all too freely.²⁴ He insisted that everyone he knew, and by extension everyone, be willing members of his happy family. He was both patriarch and queen bee, surrounded by workers and drones. It was he who decided what the happy family was and how its members should enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

At Monticello, the happy family was, centrally, his children and grandchildren, then the Hemings family of household slaves, and, by extension, his hundred or so other slaves, to whom also he applied the term "family." In Washington, the happy family was the circle of friends who joined him at dinner, where he carefully managed the flow of conversation, designating subject matter and seeing to it that each guest was given adequate time to speak. In his administration, he and his cabinet "were one family." On the national scene, the happy family was the citizenry, especially the virtuous farmers, devoted to his formulation of republican principles, capable of an orderly pursuit of happiness with minimal government because they had internalized his values.

Everyone in Jefferson's families had his proper place in the circle of happiness and had to know what that place was. Those who did not accept his definition of a happy family had to be coerced, just as one would force a wayward daughter to leave a religious school because she wanted to enter a nunnery, or flog a slave who persisted in running away. During his presidency, he was prepared to transport whole populations--blacks, Louisiana whites, Indians--across rivers, continents, and oceans to achieve a proper arrangement of the races. On the national scene during his administration, Federalists were purged from public service, even from the officers' corps in the military. And on the international scene, non-family members (particularly the monarchical, threatening Britishers) were banished beyond the pale, the despised objects of a virulent hate, suspected of plotting to dominate him and his. Indians in "the hunter state" who conspired with the British were also ineligible for the republican family. As Leonard Levy has pointed out, Jefferson was prepared to violate the Bill of Rights, shed blood, and give no quarter, in order to eliminate those who did not share his vision of "liberty."²⁵

Jefferson's language when contemplating the presence of men who threatened his freedom and the freedom of other American yeomen exploded into images of violence. In his famous letter of January 3, 1793, to William Short, celebrating the success of the French Revolution, he extravagantly mourned the death of so many victims: "My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, 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 it is now."²⁶ Such sentiments recall his comment on Shays' Rebellion of 1786-1787 in Massachusetts: "I like a little rebellion now and then...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."²⁷

Along with an intense desire to control and a willingness to trample on civil liberties and use force to achieve national goals, Jefferson displayed a relentless moralism. Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, in evaluating Jefferson's statecraft, have remarked on "his almost inveterate propensity to convert issues of interest into matters in which great moral principles were held to be at stake...he identified the pursuit of self-interest with the vindication of sacred right."²⁸ This "propensity" characterized his conduct of foreign policy and was a conspicuous element in his handling of Indian affairs, where he always justified his actions by declarations of virtuous, benevolent intention.

Despite repeated protestations to the contrary, Jefferson sought power and exercised it forcefully, always of course in the name of the liberty of "the people." "The people" were his alter ego, a projection of his own self, and when he wrote feelingly about the injustice of the colonies being enslaved by Parliament of George III, of American seamen being impressed by British men-of-war or Barbary pirates, of frontiersmen being slaughtered, captured, and tortured by "merciless savages," he was expressing his own abiding, if perhaps only partly conscious, fear of similar persecution.

For the flip side of Jefferson's insistence on having control was the fear of being controlled. Jefferson was dominated by the fear of being dominated, or even of being challenged, publicly or privately. He could not bring himself to address an audience of senators and congressmen as President, or even fellow members of the Virginia Assembly in earlier years. He was extremely shy of debate even in committee meetings, and he could not abide outspoken disagreements at cabinet meetings or private dinner parties, where he could, however, play the genial patrician host. Jefferson was more dedicated to freedom than to union, and this commitment placed him on the side of Indian-hating, riotous, even secessionist western frontiersmen rather than orderly, centralist eastern governments.

Thus Jefferson's character can be seen as driven by a desire to fend off some threat to his own freeedom of thought and action. But unlike some other independent-minded men and women, he identified with "the people" and projected his private drama onto a national, indeed a global, scene, demanding liberty for the downtrodden everywhere, to the point of being prepared to force freedom on the unwilling. He assumed personal responsibility for leading "the people," almost like a prophet of old, in the crusade to win back and defend the promised land of liberty from evil scheming monks and monarchists. This synthesis of his own ego with the world around him led to the familiar Jeffersonian contradictions between libertarian and authoritarian action--or inaction--and rhetoric.

Joseph Ellis has discussed these inconsistencies in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, for the most part sympathetically, accepting in him a propensity for simultaneously traveling along parallel mental paths, speaking in multiple internal voices but hearing only one at a time. Such contradictions have been most conspicuous in his handling of the issue of slavery and in his disregard of constitutional restrictions on executive power, when Madison's carefully crafted checks and balances hampered Jefferson's freedom of action. But they are also apparent in his conduct of Indian affairs.

Jefferson's vision of the world entailed a system of choices between sharing spaces and acquiringt (and defending) turf. First as a Virignian and then as President, he was deeply committed to the purchase and settlement of Indian lands in the Old West (between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi) and to making the internal improvements--roads and canals--necessary to connect these settlements with coastal markets. But he brought to this almost sacred cause a geopolitical mind that viewed places and events around the world in the light of a particular vision of American destiny. His mind's eye hovered, as it were, in stationary orbit above the earth, high enough to see the shores of Europe and Asia and the beginning outlines of Central and South America. This was a geopolitical vision not so much of an empire that embraced a diversity of nations, races, and cultures as of an ethnic homeland, European in origin and spirit, agrarian in economy, governed by republican institutions derived from old Anglo-Saxon and even pre-imperial Roman models. People of Indian ancestry could "incorporate with us" if they chose to accept "civilization." Those who preferred the hunter's life and the old ways of their ancestors would have to withdraw to the west, beyond the Mississippi, as game was depleted and hunting grounds were sold in the east. Eventually they too would have to adopt civilization or perish, as the Louisiana Territory itself and the lands beyond were settled.

In 1801, a few months after taking office as President, Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, then governor of Virginia, outlining his American dream. White settlers, sturdy independent farmers, would increase in numbers and eventually would "cover the whole northern, if not southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface."²⁹

The looseness of social control on the frontiers, implicit in Jefferson's ideology, went along with a certain vagueness about the role of ethnicity in a republic. The democratic philosophy that Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries embraced was a contradiction of the monarchical theory of society and therefore was seemingly egalitarian. But egalitarian ideals do not necessarily encourage diversity. The monarchical idea of empire, on the other hand, saw the realm as a hierarchy that embraced all men and women, from the lowliest slave to the king (and above the king the Divinity himself). All were subjects of the king, unequally assigned rights and duties according to their stations and goverened by a strict authoritarian rule that controlled speech, action, and belief. But the imperial mode of governance included a diversity of ethnic groups, whether defined by race, language, religion, historical experience, or national origin, over whom sovereignty had been extended by conquest, intimidation, or offer of protection from other enemies. The empire was hierarchical, authoritarian, and ethnically inclusive.

The ideal society of the Jeffersonians, of course, was neither hierarchical nor authoritarian (however authoritarian Jefferson might be in personal temperament). All men were created equal; they had inalienable rights. The best government was that which governed least, and its structure had to be a carefully designed system of checks and balances, so that no religion, party, faction, region, economic class, trade, profession, or lineage could establish a tyrannical dominance over others, and so that it faithfully represented the several interest groups in the whole community. Society was a congeries of free associations, a network of contracts freely entered. But on the matter of ethnicity, the theory of commonwealth was mute. Jeffersonians saw "the people" as a culturally homogeneous mass of equals, a national community sharing uniform political institutions and internalizing uniform moral values so thoroughly that no coercion would ever be required, all bound together by a republican social contract that required its participants to have achieved the state of civilization. Those residents who could not participate fully in the civilized republic, either because of gender (women were barred from voting or holding office), racial inferiority (in the case of black Africans and their slave descendants), or cultural incompatibility (as in the case of Native Americans who remained in 'the hunter state"), were excluded or marginalized. Noncivilized Indians would remove themselves to hunting grounds west of the Mississippi, in the short run; whites to the west of the Mississippi would be relocated in the eastern states; blacks would be removed to some island in the Caribbean or even sent back to Africa. The Jeffersonian state was not an empire; it was egalitarian, democratic, and ethnically exclusive.

This world view led immediately to the position that the Indian 'nations" still inhabiting the United States, and owning vast -amounts of its territory, were to be dealt with as quasi-foreign states (or, as Justice Marshall later put it, as "domestic dependent nations").³⁰ They were the objects of foreign policy, and interactions with them were not constrained by the legal or ethical imperatives of internal governance. Transactions with them were by treaties, and superintendence was managed by the secretary of war. Minimal government meant minimal government effort to restrain frontier populations from committing those invasions and atrocities that led to Native American retaliation, then military retaliation by the United States, and resultant land cessions. The Native Americans fell outside the pale of the Jeffersonian republic but inside the arena of Jeffersonian geopolitics--which was conducted by different rules. Thus eventually evolved the dual policy of obtaining land ("voluntarily") and restricting the Indians to reservations administered by a Bureau of Indian Affairs, while at the same time attempting to civilize as many as possible in preparation for admission to the republican family.

But there was a darker side to Jefferson's geopolitical vision. Ever in his thoughts (and to a great degree in reality) there were enemies--always the British, at times the French and Spanish--just outside the expanding circle of the American nation, threatening to block that "final consolidation" of the American world he sought to achieve. And in this view, all too often allied with these spoilers of the American dream, were the Indians, the "merciless savages" who had fought throughout his lifetime to block the westward march of the American folk. This image of Indians as savage murderers of innocent frontier farm families undoubtedly was implanted in his youth and was responsible for the rage that periodically boiled up into belligerence whenever Indians resisted his plans or threatened to break the peace.

Thus there was a degree of ruthlessness in Jefferson's dealings with the native peoples, the ruthlessness of a benevolent zealot who would do virtually anything to ensure that his new, free American republic survived and grew. As President of an expanding nation and as one personally committed to the purchase of Indian land, he knew from the Iroquois example that the civilization of the Indians would follow, not precede, the sale of hunting grounds. These hunting grounds already provided the cash crop--skins and furs--with which the tribes could purchase necessary hardware and dry goods. So the Jeffersonian program for inducing the Indians to sell their lands in preparation for civilization actually consisted of four steps: (1) run the hunters into debt, then threaten to cut off their supplies unless the debts are paid out of the proceeds of a land cession; (2) bribe influential chiefs with money and private reservations; (3) select and invite friendly leaders to Washington to visit and negotiate with the President, after being overawed by the evident power of the United States; and (4) threaten trade embargo or war.

The threat-of-war tactic was itself a four-stage process: (1) white encroachment and atrocity against Indians; (2) bloody Indian retaliation; (3) military invasion, or threat of invasion, of Indian country to protect innocent settlers and punish hostile savages; (4) and finally a peace treaty that required a cession of Indian land. The story of Logan and Lord Dunmore's War, precipitated in 1774 by the murder of Logan's family and followed by the Shawnee cession of trans-Appalachian land long coveted by the Virginians, epitomized the process by which Native Americans would be dispossessed of their land and white expansion across the continent would actually occur. It was a process now known as "ethnic cleansing." Jefferson was no doubt doing what he felt he had to do in the public interest; obtain lands by all means short of unprovoked wars of conquest, and his praise of Logan's Lament was his sentimental tribute to the noble red man and his dying way of life.

Perhaps "crocodile tears" is too harsh a metaphor for Jefferson's mourning for Logan. Perhaps "duplicity" is too strong a word to characterize the contrast between Jefferson's actual methods of obtaining lands and the apparent benevolence of the civilization policy, which every year he assured Congress was proceeding smoothly. Perhaps "hypocrisy" is unfairly critical of the contrast between the bellicose Jefferson threatening to "exterminate" unfriendly tribes and the gentle scholar celebrating Logan's rhetoric, praising Indian intelligence and egalitarianism, patiently collecting vocabularies, and nostalgically excavating Indian burial mounds. If Jefferson was guilty of insincerity, duplicity, and hypocrisy in Indian affairs, it must be conceded that this shiftiness, like his political ruthlessness, was a weapon in his struggle to ensure the survival of the United States as a republic governed by Anglo-Saxon yeomen.

Jefferson probably sincerely intended to carry out his civilization policy, even though it had been initiated by the Federalists, but it also functioned in his hand as a public relations device that provided a moral justification for land purchases, which were his primary interest. And the scholarly exercises displayed in Notes on the State of Virginia and supported at the American Philosophical Society, while they were certainly the product of genuine intellectual curiosity, also served a public relations function: to convince Europeans that America was already a civilized nation, whose white citizens were capable of a parting salute to a red race doomed to cultural, if not physical, extinction, a generous obituary from a compassionate American people. Logan, the Great Mingo, was their Vercingetorix, the Gallic warrior executed and then memorialized by Julius Caesar (whom Jefferson despised). "Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one." But there was one--Thomas Jefferson.