The Spanish might have title to Louisiana, the French might have interests in Louisiana, the British might have designs on Louisiana; the Spanish and French and Russians and British might be contemplating exercising vague titles to or otherwise meddling in Oregon; but in Jefferson’s mind it would all be part of the United States, in due course.
Most of his countrymen agreed with him. Like him, they thought big. Henry Adams described the American of 1801 in these words: “Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man.”13
Adams was generalizing, but he could have been describing Meriwether Lewis.
* * *
I. The generalization stretches, obviously—light, sound, a lightning bolt, a few animals for very short distances, and even some man-made objects such as rifle bullets, cannonballs, or arrows (for extremely short distances) moved faster than the fastest horse—but it doesn’t stretch by much.
CHAPTER FIVE
The President’s Secretary
1801–1802
On February 23, 1801, eleven days before his inauguration, President-elect Jefferson wrote Captain Lewis. He said he needed a secretary, “not only to aid in the private concerns of the household, but also to contribute to the mass of information which it is interesting for the administration to acquire. Your knolege of the Western country, of the army and of all it’s interests & relations has rendered it desireable . . . that you should be engaged in that office.”
The salary would be only five hundred dollars per year, scarcely more than the pay and rations that Lewis would have to relinquish, although Jefferson assured him that he would retain his rank and his right to promotion. Further, service as the president’s secretary “would make you know & be known to characters of influence in the affairs of our country, and give you the advantage of their wisdom.” He would live in the President’s HouseI “as you would be one of my family.”
Jefferson wrote a job description: “The office is more in the nature of that of an Aid de camp, than a mere Secretary. The writing is not considerable, because I write my own letters & copy them in a press. The care of our company, execution of some commissions in the town occasionally, messages to Congress, occasional conferences and explanations with particular members, with the offices, & inhabitants of the place where it cannot so well be done in writing, constitute the chief business.”1 The president’s secretary would be paid from the president’s private funds, and provided with a servant and a horse, also at the president’s expense. The post “has been solicited by several, who will have no answer till I hear from you.” He requested an immediate reply.2
It took almost two weeks for Jefferson’s letter to reach Lewis in Pittsburgh. On March 7, Lewis expressed his joy in a letter to his company commander, tent mate, and fellow Virginian, Captain Ferdinand Claiborne: “I cannot withhold from you my friend the agreeable intelligence I received on my arrival at this place [Pittsburgh] by way of a very polite note from Thomas Jefferson, the newly elected President of the United States, signifying his wish that I should except the office of his private Secretary; this unbounded, as well as unexpected confidence, confered on me by a man whose virtue and talents I have ever adored, and always conceived second to none, I must confess did not fail to raise me somewhat in my own estimation, insomuch that I have almost prevailed on myself to believe that my abilities are equal to the task; however be that as it may I am resolved to except it, and shal therefore set forward to the City of Washington in a few days; I deem the prospect two flattering to be neglected by a man of my standing and prospects in life.” He closed the euphoric letter with a hint of his instinct for politics, along with the air of self-importance that went with being the president’s secretary: “I shal take the liberty of informing you of the most important political occurrences of our government or such of them as I may feel myself at liberty to give.”3
The maddening delays and infrequency of the mails forced the eager young man to wait three days before he could post his reply to Jefferson. In a letter dated March 10, Lewis explained: “Not untill two late on friday last to answer by that days mail, did I recieve your’s of the 23rd Ult. . . . [asking] that I accept the place of your private Secretary.”
He immediately got to the point: “I most cordially acquiesce, and with pleasure accept the office.” After profuse thanks for the honor, Lewis promised “to get forward to the City of Washington with all possible despatch: rest assured I shall not relax in my exertions. Receive I pray you Sir, the most undisembled assureance, of the attatchment and friendship of Your most obedient, & Very Humble Servt., Meriwether Lewis.”4
He set off at once, but spring rains, a lame horse, and miserable roads conspired to slow his progress. It took him three weeks to get from Pittsburgh to Washington, where he arrived on the afternoon of April 1. Shortly thereafter, he wrote his friend Thornton Gilmer of Albemarle: “I feel my situation in the President’s family an extreemly pleasent one. I very little expected that I possessed the confidence of Mr. J. in so far as to have produced on his part, a voluntary offer of the office of his private secretary—however nothing is extraordinary in these days of revolution, and reform.”5
He was active in reform. Jefferson had a specific mission in mind when he offered the post to Lewis, who became a key participant in one of the president’s most important projects, one of the planks in his election campaign: reducing the size of the army.
In a letter of February 23, 1801, to General James Wilkinson, commanding general of the army, asking Wilkinson to release Captain Lewis from active service while allowing him to retain his rank and right to promotion, Jefferson had explained that he had chosen Lewis on the basis of “a personal acquaintance with him, owing from his being of my neighborhood.”6
But the president had something more specific in mind. He knew Lewis not only as a neighbor but as a solid Republican and as an army officer who, because of his responsibilities as paymaster, had traveled extensively throughout the trans-Appalachian region visiting the various army posts, and thus a man who knew the officer corps well. Jefferson’s somewhat cryptic reference to Lewis’s “knolege of the Western country, of the army and of all it’s interests & relations,” was a reference not to an upcoming exploration of the Missouri River country but to politics. What Jefferson wanted first of all from Lewis was help in reducing the grip of the Federalists on the army officer corps.
Jefferson intended to reduce the size of the army by one-half. This was good Republican principle and sound policy. The undeclared war with France was over, and relations with the British were quiet. Money could be saved by the government—also solid Republican principle—if the number of officers was cut back, something that made sense in any event because of the way John Adams and the Federalists had swelled the ranks of the officer corps during the war scare of 1798, and again through Adams’s midnight appointments in March 1801. If officers were going to be cut, Jefferson figured it should be done, at least to some extent, on the same basis according to which they had been given their commissions—partisan politics.
But Jefferson had never worn a uniform. He did not know even the senior, much less the junior officers in the army. He did not know which officers were competent, which were extreme Federalists, which were inferior, which superior. But his young friend Meriwether Lewis knew, and Jefferson could count on him to evaluate the officer corps with complete candor.
Thus Lewis’s first task as Jefferson’s secretary was to go through a roster from the War Department listing all commissioned officers. Using a simple code of symbols (+ + +, or 00, or #, etc.), Lewis passed a judgment on every officer in the army. There were eleven symbols in all. The first “denotes such officers as are of the 1st Class, so esteemed from a superiority of genius & Military proficiency.” The second showed “officers of the second class, respectable.” The third listed “th
e same. Republican.” The fourth covered officers whose politics Lewis could not “positively ascertain.” Fifth, officers without politics. Sixth, those “Opposed to the Administration, otherwise respectable.” Seventh, “More decisively opposed to the Administration.” Eighth, “Most violently opposed to the administration and still active in its vilification.” Ninth, professional soldiers without a political creed. Tenth, “Unworthy of the commissions they bear.” Finally, “Unknown to us.”
Jefferson did not take a meat ax to the Federalists on Lewis’s list. If one puts the list beside the names of the officers dismissed from the service, it is clear that in the winnowing process military qualifications were given much greater consideration than party preference. Federalist officers rated superior by Lewis retained their commissions; of those rated acceptable, seven of eighteen were retained. This was good politics as well as good military policy; Jefferson wanted to bring the country together, not make it more divided than it already was, and of course he hoped to win over at least some Federalists to his cause, so he had to keep some Federalists in the army. But all except one of those noted as “Most violently opposed to the administration” were dropped.7
Despite the purge, Federalist officers continued to outnumber Republicans by a majority of 140 to 38.8 The only senior officer thought to be sympathetic to the Republicans was Wilkinson—and he was notorious for swimming with the tide. Jefferson had not gone as far as his more extreme supporters wished. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn complained, “We have been much more liberal towards them [the Federalists] than they would be towards us, and in future I think we ought to give them measure for measure.”9 Jefferson put it well when he commented, “The army is undergoing a chaste reformation.”10 Lewis had been invaluable in bringing it about on a fair rather then an excessively partisan basis.
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Beyond his active role in the reduction of the army, Lewis’s duties were varied and not particularly exciting. He spent long hours at the writing desk, performing menial tasks, such as drawing up a list of all U.S. postmasters, with their locations and compensation, a total of twenty pages. He copied many other routine documents, including a list of prisoners in the Washington jail as of March 29, 1802; an extract of a letter of March 6, 1802; four pages of a report on the cost of a naval arsenal on December 4, 1802; and so on. He delivered messages from Jefferson to Congress.11 It was tedious work, but instructive.
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Abigail Adams, the first resident of the President’s House, called it the “great castle” and hated the place. It was too large—twenty-three rooms—and basically unfurnished and unfinished. Mrs. Adams complained that it took thirty servants to run the place. The roof leaked. The walls were unplastered. In the nearest stable, at Fourteenth and G Streets, John Adams told his successor, were seven horses and two carriages in the stables that were the property of the United States and available for the president’s use.
Jefferson ran the place with only eleven servants, brought up from Monticello. There were no more powdered wigs, much less ceremony. Washington and Adams, according to Republican critics, had kept up almost a royal court. Jefferson substituted Republican simplicity—to a point. He had a French chef, and French wines he personally selected. His salary was $25,000 per year—a princely sum, but the expenses were also great. In 1801 Jefferson spent $6,500 for provisions and groceries, $2,700 for servants (some of whom were liveried), $500 for Lewis’s salary, $3,000 for wine. And it turned out he had to buy his own horses; Congress, thinking it an outrage that the government should pay for the president’s horses, ordered that the ones Adams had turned over to Jefferson be sold. Adams was so mortified over this action that he left town before the inauguration.12
Jefferson was a widower. His two daughters were married and had their husbands, children, and own affairs to look after. Secretary of State James Madison and his wife, Dolley, stayed with Jefferson in the President’s House for several weeks in May 1801, and Dolley Madison often acted as hostess for dinner parties, but essentially the President’s House was a bachelor house in the years Lewis lived there.13 Other than the servants, Jefferson and Lewis were the only residents. On May 28, 1801, shortly after the Madisons took their own residence, Jefferson wrote his daughter Martha, “Capt. Lewis and myself are like two mice in a church.”14
They ate together, spent the evenings together—usually with guests—and worked closely together, especially on matters concerning the army. Jefferson came to know Lewis as well as he knew any man. He later praised Lewis for, among other attributes, “sound understanding and a fidelity to truth.” But he also noted, “While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind.” He had seen the same melancholy in Lewis’s father, and felt it was a malady that ran in the family: “Knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by what I had seen in the family.” Lewis’s depressions, in other words, did not unduly alarm the president, or last long—but Jefferson could not help noticing them.15
Lewis’s quarters were in what became the East Room. It contained almost no furniture and was damp, cold, drafty, and depressing. Abigail Adams had hung her wash in it. Life in the President’s House, however, was as exciting and rewarding to Lewis as life in the White House has been to most of the young people lucky enough to live or work there in the following two centuries.
First of all, there was that daily association with Jefferson. No American has ever surpassed Jefferson, and fewer than a handful have ever equaled him, as friend, teacher, guide, model, leader, companion. Dumas Malone, author of the definitive multivolume biography, called Jefferson “this extraordinarily versatile and seemingly inexhaustible man.”16 For Lewis, left fatherless as a child, thirty-one years younger than Jefferson, the president was all that and a father figure as well.
Lewis took his meals with the president, and was almost always present when he entertained, which was four or five nights a week. The dinner parties were small affairs, usually two or three guests, sometimes six to eight, never more than a dozen.
One of the guests, Mahlon Dickerson, four years older than Lewis, was a lawyer from Philadelphia and a politician who later became governor of New Jersey and then a Cabinet officer. He noted in a letter that Jefferson “is accused of being very slovenly in his dress, & to be sure he is not very particular in that respect, but however he may neglect his person he takes good care of his table. No man in America keeps a better.” “You drink as you please, and converse at your ease,” another guest reported.17
The table was an oval one, encouraging a general conversation. The talk flowed freely, on any subject that interested Jefferson, which meant practically all subjects. But the concentration was on natural science, geography, natural philosophy, Indian affairs, and of course politics.
Jefferson had promised Lewis that if he accepted the appointment he would “know & be known to characters of influence in the affairs of our country, and give you the advantage of their wisdom,” and that was exactly what happened. Lewis sat with the Republican high command, including such regulars as Madison, Dearborn, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, and Attorney General Levi Lincoln. Nonpolitical guests included the poet and journalist Joel Barlow, the artist Charles Willson Peale, the author Thomas Paine, the poet Philip Freneau, and other writers, scientists, and travelers.
Lewis and Dickerson, who met at Jefferson’s table, became good friends. Lewis visited him in Philadelphia, where young bachelor Dickerson moved in the highest social circles. Dickerson kept a diary, with such entries as “Frid. 14 [May 1802], A fine day—Capt. Lewis & others dined with me—went to see Rannie’s deceptions—much pleased.” Rannie was a magician and ventriloquist. “Wed. 19 [May], Cloudy & rainy part of the day—cold at evg.—spent the evg. at Madmoiselle Fries with Capt. L.” “Frid. 21. Clear in Morng. rained very hard PM.—rode out with Capt. L. to Dr. Logans—diner there—retd. at eveng.” George Logan was a physician and U.S. senator and a founder of the American Philoso
phical Society, in which Dickerson was active and Jefferson was a member.18
It was a feature of Jefferson’s personality that he reached out to men older and younger than he, men with different life experiences who could bring to his table perspectives and information foreign to him. Henry Adams wrote, “Three more agreeable men than Jefferson, James Madison, and Albert Gallatin were never collected round the dinner-table of the White House; and their difference in age was enough to add zest to their friendship.”19 Jefferson was fifty-eight years of age in 1801, Madison fifty, Gallatin forty, and Lewis twenty-seven.
Lewis’s activities with Dickerson added to the list of famous men with whom he visited. “Mon. 24. A charming day—rode with Capt. L. to Wilmington—on a visit to Jno Dickinson—he was from home—we put up at Craigs.” John Dickinson was the revolutionary pamphleteer who wrote the Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in 1768. That same week, Lewis and Dickerson dined with Pennsylvania Governor Thomas McKean, former member of the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence. On a visit to Philadelphia a year later, Lewis joined Dickerson for dinner with Henry Sheaff, a merchant who had been the provider of wine and sundries for President Washington when the capital was in Philadelphia.20 Clearly Captain Lewis was moving in elite circles.
In August 1802, Jefferson retired to Monticello for a two-month vacation. Lewis accompanied him and stayed at the clapboard house three miles east of Monticello on the estate called Franklin, home of Ben Franklin’s grandson William Bache. Being there allowed Lewis to visit his mother, brothers, and sister at Locust Hill, and to attend dinners at Monticello. One Albemarle planter, Lewis’s schoolboy friend Peachy Gilmer, called the company that gathered at Jefferson’s table “the most accomplished and elegant society that has been anywhere, at any time, within my knowledge in Virginia. Meriwether Lewis was, too, sometimes with us, sometimes absent.”21