A Wilderness So Immense (4 page)

Among these liberal autocrats and philosophe kings, none was more able or eminent (or was now more elderly) than the king who came to the throne of Prussia three years before Jefferson was born. Frederick the Great had transformed Prussia into a world power by his military genius, administrative talent, and political skill. Renowned as a patron of the arts, music, and education, a talented flautist and prolific writer, a longtime friend of Voltaire and an admirer of George Washington, Frederick II had opened his reign in 1740 with the publication of his
Antimachiavell
(in which he denounced statecraft in favor of peaceful and enlightened rule) and the invasion of Austria. By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Frederick’s victorious armies in Europe (along with Britain’s great navy and its redcoats in North America) had entirely redrawn political boundaries on both sides of the North Atlantic. France had been forced to surrender Canada to England and Louisiana to Spain, while Prussia began to challenge the Austrian Habsburgs for domination of the German states on the Continent.

Thousands of miles from home, surveying the geopolitical prospects of Europe and the Americas in his remarkable letter to Archibald Stuart, Jefferson’s gaze quickly focused on Madrid, where Carlos III, king of Spain since 1759, was seventy years old. The realpolitik of Frederick the Great was important for the future peace of Europe, but it was Carlos III who controlled New Orleans and the vast watershed of the Mississippi.

Carlos Ill’s dominions sprawled from the Caribbean past California to the Philippines, north beyond the Missouri River, and south to the tip of Chile. On the map, the empire founded by his predecessors, the Castilian sponsors of Christopher Columbus, had never been larger. All of Mexico, Central America, and South America except the Guianas and Brazil answered to Spain. Of the major Caribbean islands, Spain held Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Trinidad. Of the territory that now
comprises the United States, Spain ruled Florida, southern Alabama and Mississippi, and almost everything west of the Mississippi River and south of Canada.

Spanish North America in 1794. Adapted from a plate in Robert Laurie and James Whittle’s
Imperial Sheet Atlas
(London, 1799), this map reflects Spain’s territorial ambitions on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase. Carlos III and his ministers regarded Louisiana as a borderland defensive buffer zone to keep foreigners away from the lucrative mines of Mexico, which produced half the annual revenue of the entire Spanish empire. An annual subsidy for the support of Louisiana was part of the operating budget of the province of New Spain, or Mexico.
(Courtesy Taqueria Corona, Magazine Street, New Orleans)

The Spanish empire was impressive on the map, but by the late eighteenth century it was less solid on the ground or when viewed from the royal treasury. In the two centuries since the loss of the great armada of
1588, Britain, France, and even the Netherlands had challenged Spain on the high seas, while France, Austria, and Prussia rivaled her influence on the Continent—but wounded beasts and ailing empires can be more dangerous than healthy ones.

Jefferson was less worried about Spain’s claws than her infirmities. Spain’s weakening grip on her colonies in North America excited international intrigue and frontier plots in the trans-Appalachian west, as well as commercial rivalries among the thirteen loosely confederated states whose gentle coalition he represented at the court of Versailles. Jefferson was confident that the United States, not Spain, was destined to be “the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled,” and to that end he advised Archibald Stuart that American frontiersmen

Jefferson feared that Spain’s weakness in the Mississippi Valley encouraged British expansion from Canada and tempted the French to reenter the continent from the Caribbean—and these fears had substance. The British still held forts around the Great Lakes that they had agreed to surrender after the American Revolution, and British fur traders and merchants plied the rivers of North America with little regard for boundary lines in the forest. And there were Frenchmen who dreamt of regaining Louisiana, and who kept that dream alive in confidential memoranda to Louis XVI and his ministers.

As was often the case for the savvy Virginian, while he did not want American frontiersmen pressing “too soon on the Spaniards,” he did not want foreign adventurers pressing on them at all. The United States in 1786 lacked the political, financial, or military capacity for decisive action in the vast interior of the huge continent, and the news from Stuart and others made it clear that the Atlantic states had troubles brewing in the backcountry. Anger was building in western Massachusetts. Hard times, high taxes, and foreclosures for debt would soon ignite an agrarian revolt led by Captain Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolution. If Shays’s Rebellion put frontier farmers and coastal merchants at each other’s throats over east-west differences within a single New England state, what might happen further south where the Appalachian Mountains posed a more formidable obstacle to trade and communication? Where
the navigable rivers drained west down the Ohio to the Mississippi? Sectional self-interest, compounded by the ever-increasing distances that separated frontier communities from their eastern capitals, posed a serious threat to the union. “The navigation of the Mississippi we must have,” Jefferson said. The survival, independence, and character of the nation depended on it. As Major Isaac B. Dunn, a Revolutionary War veteran from Pennsylvania, wrote from his new mercantile office in New Orleans, “when you have seen the situation of the people, added to the prodegious emigrations pushing to the western side of the Ohio from the eastern part of this continent—you will conclude … that nature Designed New Orleans to be the Mart of this country—and this country to be the richest in the World—the Period cannot be very distant.”
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Jefferson had read Stuart’s report that “a separation Betwixt the eastern and western parts of this state will be Proposed in this Assembly” with neither alarm nor surprise. Like most Virginians, he favored eventual statehood for Kentucky, whose residents had carried the Old Dominion’s economy and culture far inland from the seat of government at Richmond. The greater danger arose from the divergent “Interests of that country and the Atlantick States,” which were, at the moment, working against Kentucky statehood. The danger was not statehood
within
the union, but the specter of western independence and disunion. Stuart knew there was talk in the west of establishing a separate republic “Independent of the Atlantick States”—especially among settlers in the Ohio River Valley who saw their interests stymied in Congress and who worried (not without reason) that the maritime states of New England “are interested in locking up the Mississippi.” Stuart had heard Kentucky leaders boast that while Spain’s navy “could chastise the Atlantick States with a few vessels,” even their “Best appointed Army … could never reach the falls of Ohio.”
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An experienced revolutionary, Jefferson had witnessed plenty of conspiracy and intrigue, and these sentiments alarmed him. “I fear from an expression in your letter,” he replied, “that the people of Kentucké think of separating not only from Virginia (in which they are right) but also from the confederacy.” That, he believed, would be “a most calamitous event, and such an one as every good citizen on both sides [of the mountains] should set himself against.” Jefferson’s lifelong commitment to the American union was rooted in his confidence that the expanding republic would eventually look pretty much like rural Virginia. History would run its inscrutable course, Americans would inevitably force Spain to surrender her provinces “peice by peice,” and in the meantime Jefferson would quietly do everything in his power to make sure of it. His vision of the
future was clear—though not until 1803 with the purchase of Louisiana would he be able at last to safeguard the nation’s economic and political future.

On Thursday morning the skies were cloudy again, and the temperature in Paris was 47 degrees as Jefferson prepared to entrust Ezra Bates with his letters to Jay, Banister, Rittenhouse, and Stuart. In addition, draftsmen from the studio of the French architect and antiquarian Charles-Louis Clérisseau had finished the final measured drawings of Jefferson’s design for the new capitol of Virginia. Ezra Bates could deliver them as well, along with Jefferson’s detailed letter to William Buchanan and James Hay the supervising directors of the public buildings appointed by the legislature to move the state government from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1780 and arrange for government buildings there.

Even-tempered gentlemen of the Enlightenment were dubious about enthusiasm of any kind, but Thomas Jefferson was a self-described enthusiast about good design. “Architecture is my delight,” he told visitors to Monticello, his residential work-in-progress where perpetual renovation was among his “favorite amusements.” In public architecture, however, as in government generally, Jefferson was far more frugal than in his private experiments at Monticello, where he alone bore the costs of “putting up, and pulling down.” Aesthetics aside, Jefferson knew that well-designed buildings ultimately cost less to build, operate, and maintain than inferior ones—and a wise republic seized “every occasion when public buildings are to be erected” as an opportunity to furnish its citizens with worthy “models for their study and imitation.”
²⁶

Like his letter to Stuart, which mingled exalted geopolitical perspective with political realism, Jefferson’s letter to Buchanan and Hay addressed both sublime architecture and backroom politics. The proposed design, he explained, was based on a first-century
A.D.
Roman temple in the south of France, the Maison Carrée at Mines, “erected in the time of the Caesars, and … allowed without contradiction to be the most perfect and precious remain of antiquity in existence.”
²⁷
From the outset, the legislature had given Buchanan, Hay, and the others virtual autonomy over design and construction, and they gratefully deferred to Jefferson on matters of architecture. Funding depended entirely on legislative appropriations for the new capitol, however, and ripples from the sectional politics that troubled Stuart within Virginia suddenly threatened the whole capitol project as well.

In the last legislative session, delegates from a few tidewater counties
of eastern Virginia had come within a few votes of suspending the Richmond work altogether in favor of moving the seat of government back to Williamsburg. At the same time, a rival group of western delegates—“a strong party of the upland”—were clamoring to abandon both Williamsburg and Richmond and move the capital further west. The directors recognized a misadventure in the making—neither group was likely to succeed at anything but delay—and were rushing “to get the building so far advanced before the fall as to put an end to such experiments.” In March 1785 they had contracted with Edward Voss, of Culpeper, to lay one and a half million bricks on Shockoe Hill, high above the falls of the James River in Richmond. On August 18, 1785—five months before Jefferson consigned his final plans to Ezra Bates—they had the contractor set a cornerstone into place, hopeful that “the foundation of the capitol will silence the enimies of Richmond in the next October session.”
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The ploy worked. Proponents of relocating the capital did fall silent. Build it and they will stay.

As often happens when sound planning falls victim to stupidity or meddling, however, the ploy that helped keep the capital in Richmond had unforeseen consequences. During the 1785 building season, Voss and his masons laid some four hundred thousand bricks in a foundation that measured 148 by 118 feet. On the final plans that Jefferson consigned to Ezra Bates in January 1786, however, the required foundations measured only 131 by 75 feet. As Jefferson told Buchanan and Hay in his cover letter, “the body of this building covers an area but [three] fifths of that which is … begun,” and the smaller building “of course … will take but about one half the bricks.”
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Jefferson knew all too well from his endless remodeling at Monticello that “mortar never becomes so hard and adhesive to the bricks in a few months but that it may easily be chipped off.” Now that the larger foundation had served its political purpose, the necessary changes could readily be made. In addition to the aesthetic and functional superiority of the final design, he argued (with an eye toward shielding the directors from political criticism), “upon the whole the plan now sent will save a great proportion of… expence.” Working quickly and quietly in the spring of 1786—careful not to draw too much attention to the deception that had preempted efforts to move the capital somewhere else—Voss and his masons pulled down and rebuilt “one side wall and a few partition walls” to the dimensions of Jefferson’s final plans. By October “the pedestal Basement and the principal story were finished,” and by autumn 1788 the new capitol was in use.
³⁰
Had they waited for the final plans, the whole project might well have been lost. The great American democrat
and his friends were perfectly capable of evading opposition and pushing their projects to completion.