Books: Decline in Detail

JEFFERSON IN POWER — Claude G. Bowers—Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Except for the administrations of Lincoln, the 2,922 days that Thomas Jefferson was President were probably the most turbulent in the history of the U. S. “It was a lusty period,” says Claude Gernade Bowers, “by no means so sedate as is the popular impression—a period of marching mobs, of rebellions more brazen than that of Shays, of backstairs gossip and back room intrigues, of whispering campaigns and political assassinations.” Last week Historian Bowers, whose current avocation is being U. S. Ambassador to Spain, offered a biography of Jefferson that threw little new light on the great Democrat, but much on the intrigues, incipient rebellions, factional fights that surrounded him. Subtitled The Death Struggle of the Federalists, most of the book’s 538 pages detail the decline of the brilliant party that, disregarding the warnings of Hamilton, went in for a suicidal policy of revenge, turned from an obstructionist campaign to forth right slander, from slander to treason, with “the destruction of the Union as a party policy.”

Jefferson in Power is thus typical of Ambassador Bowers’ five historical volumes. At his best in analyzing the maneuvers of factional leaders, fights over patronage, the ceaseless improvising of adroit politicians, he gives only limited and conventional portraits of the personalities involved. His Jefferson, Hamilton, Marshall, John Randolph, Madison, Gallatin, Monroe, Pickering, remain remote historic figures. Only Aaron Burr, about whom Author Bowers writes with a mixture of scorn and awed surprise, emerges as a bold, treacherous, ambitious, but clearly visualized individual.

Beginning his account with a description of Washington during Jefferson’s administrations, Author Bowers details the uncomfortable 11-day trip from New York by stagecoach, the hunting within the city limits, the horse-racing and card-playing that provided most of the entertainment for Washington dwellers, the strange mixture of physical discomfort and intellectual vitality that characterized the Capital’s society. There the 58-year-old Jefferson, scandalizing British Minister Merry by receiving him in comfortable, heelless slippers, created an international sensation when he dispensed with precedents at State functions. The relationship of Mrs. Merry to Irish Poet Tom Moore, the amours of Captain Zebulon Pike, discoverer of Pike’s Peak, the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte to Betsy Patterson of Baltimore, the domestic difficulties of the French Minister, who frequently beat his wife—such topics dominated the gossip of a provincial capital that was growing too worldly for its own good.

Jefferson’s conflicts as President began with a social squabble with the British Minister, grew to heroic proportions when his first calm, courteous message to Congress proposing repeal of the Naturalization Act and judicial reform constituted a tactful declaration against the Federalists. His superb choice of Cabinet officers had already placed them at a disadvantage, unified his party and deepened his personal popularity. With no constructive counterprogram to offer, the Federalists fell back on invective, attacking Jefferson as an atheist, a French agent, a Jacobin, a tyrant, growing more desperate and wild in their accusations as Jefferson’s hold on the common people grew stronger.

Despite the shrewd timing of Jefferson’s moves, his genius for conciliating rivals in his party, the dominant impression of his career conveyed by Jefferson in Power is that he took little action, while his enemies battered themselves to pieces against his unruffled confidence in his program, his personal integrity and goodness. In the same way that Minister Merry made a pompous fool of himself about Jefferson’s slippers, Aaron Burr was driven from one wild project to another. Defending the Embargo, Author Bowers calls it a “superb effort, in the utter collapse of all international law, to find, in economic pressure, a civilized substitute for the savagery of war.”