The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 / Edition 2

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

Overview

As controversial and explosive as it is elegant and learned, The Long Affair is Conor Cruise O'Brien's examination of Thomas Jefferson, as man and icon, through the critical lens of the French Revolution. O'Brien offers a provocative analysis of the supreme symbol of American history and political culture and challenges the traditional perceptions of both Jeffersonian history and the Jeffersonian legacy.

"The book is an attack on America's long affair with Jeffersonian ideology of radical individualism: an ideology that, by confusing Jefferson with a secular prophet, will destroy the United States from within."—David C. Ward, Boston Book Review

"With his background as a politician and a diplomat, O'Brien brings a broad perspective to his effort to define Jefferson's beliefs through the prism of his attitudes toward France. . . . This is an important work that makes an essential contribution to the overall picture of Jefferson."—Booklist

"O'Brien traces the roots of Jefferson's admiration for the revolution in France but notes that Jefferson's enthusiasm for France cooled in the 1790s, when French egalitarian ideals came to threaten the slave-based Southern economy that Jefferson supported."—Library Journal

"In O'Brien's opinion, it's time that Americans face the fact that Jefferson, long seen as a champion of the 'wronged masses,' was a racist who should not be placed on a pedestal in an increasingly multicultural United States."—Boston Phoenix

"O'Brien makes a well-argued revisionist contribution to the literature on Jefferson."—Kirkus Reviews

"O'Brien is right on target . . . determined not to let the evasions and cover-ups continue."—Forrest McDonald, National Review

"The Long Affair should be read by anyone interested in Jefferson—or in a good fight."—Richard Brookhiser, New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226616537
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/1996
Edition description:	1
Pages:	386
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917-2008) was a leading Irish intellectual of his generation and had a distinguished career in public life as a diplomat, politician, government minister, writer, newspaper editor, critic, and scholar. He published numerous books in subjects such as history, biography, politics, and religion.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

A Lonely American Thomas Jefferson, Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Louis XVI 1785-87

In this chapter we are looking at Jefferson's life in Paris at a time when most people, including Jefferson, were quite unaware that they were living in the last years of the Ancien Regime. In the next five chapters, we shall be looking quite closely at Jefferson's prolonged involvement with the French Revolution. Right now, we shall examine what is known of Jefferson, in relation to France and to America, in the period before the opening, in 1787, of what we retrospectively regard as the immediate prerevolutionary process.

On 2 May 1785, Jefferson received notification of his election by Congress to succeed Franklin as the Minister to the French Court. During the same month the Adams family left for London, where John Adams had become Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Saint James.

This was a sad and lonely period in Jefferson's personal life. He was a widower--since 1782--with three young daughters. The eldest, Martha ("Patsy"), had come with him to Paris, where she was a boarder in a convent. She was thirteen years old at the time when her father entered on his duties as Minister Plenipotentiary in Paris. The relationship cannot have brought unalloyed comfort to either party, at this time. Jefferson was a most conscientious father, but hardly much fun. The earliest known letter from him to Patsy, dated from Aix, was written in March 1787, when Patsy was fifteen years old. Dumas Malone, Jefferson's most comprehensive biographer (and a highly sympathetic one) writes:

This was an era when the habit of parental moralizing was strong, but if Patsy had been less aware of her father's limitless kindness she might have found some of his exhortations rather hard to bear. His standards of industry and resolution were no less appalling because he maintained them himself. In a single letter he said such things as these:

Of all the cankers of human happiness none corrodes with so silent, yet so baneful an influence, as indolence. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.

It is while we are young that the habit of industry is formed. If not then, it never is afterwards. The fortune of our lives, therefore, depends on employing well the short period of youth.

It is a part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate; to surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance. In Europe there are shops for every want; its inhabitants, therefore, have no idea that their wants can be supplied otherwise. Remote from all other aid, we are obliged to invent and to execute; to find means within ourselves, and not to lean on others. Consider, therefore, the conquering your Livy as an exercise in the habit of surmounting difficulties ...

Martha assured him that he might be at ease on the head of hysterics, for she was not that lazy, and she solemnly promised to try to follow his advice with the "most scrupulous exactitude." His later letters were less monitory. He told her--somewhat self-consciously--about climbing the cliffs of the Apennines, about listening to the feathered chorus at Vaucluse, about blissfully sailing on the Canal of Languedoc under cloudless skies. In her woman's sphere, which he always sharply distinguished from that of man, he wanted her to be industrious; he also wanted her to be aware of the incredible interest and richness of life as she went along.(1)

After Jefferson's wife died, his two younger children, Maria (Polly) and Lucy, were cared for by his in-laws, Elizabeth and Francis Eppes, and the children remained with the Eppeses at Eppington, Virginia, after Jefferson and Patsy had taken up residence in Paris. Later in 1784, Polly and Lucy, and the Eppes' daughter, also called Lucy, went down with whooping cough, then an extremely dangerous malady. On 13 October 1784, Elizabeth Eppes wrote to Jefferson:

Its impossible to paint the anguish of my heart on this melancholy occasion. A most unfortunate Hooping cough has deprived you, and us of two sweet Lucys, within a week. Ours was the first that fell a sacrifice. She was thrown into violent convulsions linger'd out a week and then expired. Your dear angel was confined a week to her bed, her sufferings were great though nothing like a fit. She retain'd her senses perfectly, called me a few moments before she died, and asked distinctly for water. Dear Polly has had it most violent, though always kept about, and is now quite recovered....

Be so good as to remember me most affectionately to my dear Patsy, and beg she will excuse my not writing until the gloomy scene is a little forgoten.(2)

Elizabeth Eppes' letter did not reach Jefferson until 6 May 1785, just four days after he learned of his appointment as Minister Plenipotentiary. The news of Lucy's death had, however, reached him several months before, through a weirdly casual passage in a prolix letter, conveyed to him by Lafayette, from the physician who attended the two Lucys in their last illness, Dr. James Currie. Dr. Currie wrote:

Where ever you may be I thank you Sir for your Synoptical View (given me in your letter) of the history of the Baloons, seemingly now forgotten here; and likewise for your friendly and genteel present of the Silver Casd. M. [Memorandum?] Book. Should any thing in the literary Way, which you think would be instructive or amazing to me Circumstanced as I am, your sending it me will be gratefully acknowledged and long remembered. The Politic business, &c. &c., in the publick way here, you'll have better information of by other channells than I could give, therefore, am silent on that head. I congratulate you on your quick passage to Europe. I hope it was a pleasant one, likewise, and that Miss Jefferson was not much disconcerted by her Nautical Journey. Mr. Eppes and family are now all Well. I am sincerely sorry my dear friend now to acquaint you of the demise of poor Miss L. Jefferson, ...(3)

In these distressing family circumstances, both Thomas Jefferson and Patsy were naturally anxious that Polly, now aged seven, should join them in Paris. Polly herself wanted to stay where she was. Her fourteen-year-old cousin, John Wayles Eppes (who was later to marry Polly), included the following sentence in a letter he wrote to Jefferson on 22 May 1786, when Jefferson's tenure as Minister Plenipotentiary in Paris was just one year old:

I am affraid that notwithstanding your great desire to have cousin Polly with you it cannott be effected without forceing her, for she seems very much averse to it.(4)

On the same day as her cousin's letter, Polly herself wrote to her father a letter which ran in full as follows:

Dear Papa

I long to see you, and hope that you and sister Patsy are well; give my love to her and tell her that I long to see her, and hope that you and she will come very soon to see us. I hope you will send me a doll. I am very sorry that you have sent for me. I don't want to go to France, I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes. Aunt Carr, Aunt Nancy and Cousin Polly Carr are here. Your most happy and dutiful daughter,

Polly Jefferson(5)

In the following year, Jefferson insisted that Polly must join him, whether she wanted to do so or not. Dumas Malone writes:

Her aunt and uncle kept hoping her father would countermand his orders since his promises to her seemed to be without effect. He was impelled to explain further to the adults why he was so insistent. She would have advantages in France, undoubtedly, but he was thinking chiefly of something else. He feared that, at her age, continued absence would weaken the tie between her and her father and sister and make them strangers to her throughout life. He was one who set great store by the family tie and his reasoning was entirely sound, though it did not greatly appeal to a little girl who was much more fearful of the weakening of her bond with the people she knew better at Eppington.

Jefferson learned of the stratagems which were finally employed to get his small daughter aboard a ship in a Virginia harbor. Her cousins visited the vessel with her for a day or two, romping with her upon its decks and in its cabins until she began to feel at home; once when she fell asleep the others silently crept away, and when she awakened the voyage had begun. This was in the month of May, 1787, and she was on the seas five weeks.(6)

A letter written by Jefferson during the month of Polly's enforced return reflects the anxiety he felt on the subject: "I say nothing of my dear Poll, hoping she is on her passage, yet fearing to think of it."(7)

Polly was not unaccompanied on her voyage. As Malone tells us: "As an attendant she had, not an old nurse as had been expected, but a young servant named Sally, sister of James whom Jefferson had brought to Paris, and this girl proved to be of little help."(8)

Dumas Malone did not find it necessary to provide Sally and James with a surname. A younger biographer fills in this detail. Polly Jefferson was "attended by a servant, Sally Hemings, less than twice [Polly's] age."(9) In reality the servant was one of Jefferson's house slaves. As Merrill D. Peterson (but not Malone) also records, Jefferson's relations with Sally Hemings later became the subject of gossip, and they afterward erupted into public scandal, when they were used against President Jefferson in 1802 by a former political employee turned personal enemy, blackmailer, and Federalist pamphleteer, James T. Callender (below, chapter 3, pp. 111-12). Peterson writes:

On September 1 there appeared in the Recorder a slanderous little piece, "The President Again," signed by Callender in the conviction that Jefferson would realize at least the heavy cost of his betrayal. "It is well known," the article began "that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves.... By this wench, Sally, our President has had several children.... The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello."

Thus was launched the prolific public career of a tale that had titillated Jefferson's enemies in the neighborhood of Monticello for years. The African Venus, Sally Hemings, was apparently the mulatto offspring of John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings, his concubine, and hence the half-sister of Jefferson's departed wife. Sally it was who had accompanied Polly to Paris in 1787. After her return she had a number of children, all light skinned, whose paternity some wanton men ascribed to Jefferson. Like most legends, this one was not created out of the whole cloth. The evidence, highly circumstantial, is far from conclusive, however, and unless Jefferson was capable of slipping badly out of character in hidden moments at Monticello, it is difficult to imagine him caught up in a miscegenous relationship. Such a mixture of the races, such a ruthless exploitation of the master-slave relationship, revolted his whole being.(10)

One of the "wanton men" who ascribed the paternity of Sally's children to Jefferson was himself one of those children: Madison Hemings. Madison Hemings was born on 19 July 1805. He was emancipated--as were Sally's other surviving children (except two, who had already escaped from slavery and apparently passed for white)-under Thomas Jefferson's will, when he reached the age of twenty-one. Having been trained as a carpenter, he went to Ohio to earn his living. He gave an interview to an Ohio newspaper, when he was sixty-eight years old. In his account--presumably based on what his mother had told him--he tells of the arrival of Maria and Sally in Paris and of the sequel:

Maria was left out here [United States] but was afterwards ordered to accompany him to France. She was three years or so younger than Martha. My mother accompanied her as her body servant. When Mr. Jefferson went to France, Martha was a young woman grown, my mother was about her age and Maria was just budding into womanhood. Their stay (my mother and Maria's) was about eighteen months. But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson's concubine and when he was called home she was `enceinte' by him. Soon after their arrival she gave birth to a child of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but for a short time. She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverley, Harriet, Madison (myself) and Ester.(11)

Madison Hemings's story is set out at length, and discussed, in the Appendix to this book. I happen to believe that story. But let us suppose that it is not true, and that the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings was perfectly chaste, as we are told we must believe, if we are not to be classed with "wanton men" and--still worse--biographers in quest of "titillation."(12) If the relationship was in fact a chaste one, it was stranger than that set out in the plain narrative of Madison Hemings. Whatever else she may have been, Sally Hemings was certainly the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife. She had been the property of her father, John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, who had bequeathed her to the Jeffersons, along with about 130 other slaves, including several other Wayles children. Even Virginius Dabney, the pious Jeffersonian author of The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, accepts that Jefferson (though not his wife) knew of the relationship.

Sally Hemings was a living reminder of that "mixture of the races ... exploitation of the master-slave relationship" which we are told "revolted [Jefferson's] whole being." If it did, why did he keep this living reminder of what revolted his whole being in close (if chaste) attendance on him, for the next three years in Paris, and afterwards as a familiar house slave at Monticello for the rest of his life? Sally had arrived supposedly in "place of the old nurse who had been expected." So why did Jefferson not send this living reminder packing?

It is clear from the known part of the pattern of Jefferson's conduct towards Sally Hemings that he did not have the horror of miscegenous relations between master and slave that his biographers ascribe to him. He had indeed, like other white Southerners, a lively---and punitive-(see below, p. 266) horror of miscegenation between black men and white women. But from the fact that Sally Hemings was acceptable as a member of his household, we have to infer that he felt no horror at the idea of miscegenation between white masters and black female slaves. So if he felt comfortable with what John Wayles had done, with his female property, why should he not do the equivalent himself, and sleep with Sally Hemings?

As I said, I believe Madison Hemings's story, and I think the Jefferson of the biographers--for whom such behavior would be unthinkable--is a fictional construct. Exceptional in so many ways, Jefferson was a typical Virginia slaveowner in others (below, pp. 256-76) and there is no valid reason to suppose that he disdained the sexual perquisites available to his caste, any more than his father-in-law had disdained these.

The question of Jefferson's relationship to Sally Hemings is relevant to the general subject matter of this book. It is relevant because that relationship is an important part of Jefferson's relation to the institution of slavery, and because that, in turn, is relevant to Jefferson's relation to the French Revolution: a question examined at length in chapter 7.

Polly arrived in London en route to Paris in late June. Dumas Malone writes:

Jefferson, recently back from his own trip [to the South of France] and facing an accumulation of three or four months' business, did not feel warranted in going to London for her, though events proved that this would have been the wisest course.... His solution of the problem was to send [Adrien] Petit, his trusted maitre d'hotel, but the child was afraid of a strange man who spoke an incomprehensible language.(13)

That "accumulation of business" is a Malone myth. Jefferson had taken a prolonged and leisurely holiday (below, p. 42) leaving his capable secretary, William Short, to run the Legation in his absence. Short could just as well have run it for another week or so, while Jefferson went to London to collect his daughter, as would have been natural. So why didn't he go to London? I believe that he was afraid to be in the same room with Sally and Abigail Adams.

Polly and Sally stayed with the Adamses in London. Abigail became fond of Polly (and Polly of her) but clearly did not quite know what to make of Sally (whom she does not name). In her first letter to Jefferson announcing Polly's arrival in London, Abigail writes: "The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended her, was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her, the Sister of the Servant you have with you." In a letter of the following day, Abigail again refers to "the Girl":

The Girl who is with her is quite a child, and Captain Ramsey is of opinion will be of so little Service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge. She seems fond of the child and appears good naturd.(14)

Jefferson did not come to London, and Captain Ramsay was not allowed to bring Sally back with him to America. Instead, a white servant of Jefferson's collected Polly and Sally and took them back with him to the Hotel de Langeac, Jefferson's splendid residence on the Champs Elysees.

The Adamses were clearly puzzled by these transactions.(15) They naturally expected their old friend to come in person, to meet and greet his daughter, after her very trying journey, and to renew their friendship. Indeed it was the obvious thing to do, professionally as well as personally: the American Minister in Paris and the American Minister in London had a lot to talk about. But the nature of the obstacle, in the way of Jefferson's travelling to London to collect his daughter, seems fairly obvious: Jefferson did not want to face questions from Abigail Adams about Sally Hemings.

The trouble, at this stage, was not about Jefferson's personal relations with Sally; if they became lovers at all, it was only at some time after Sally's arrival in Paris. The trouble, in June 1787, was with the Jefferson-Wayles-Hemings pattern of family relationships. Sally was a half-sister of Jefferson's wife. She was an aunt of Jefferson's daughter, Polly, whom she accompanied and attended as a slave. New Englanders were aware in general that such relations between families of masters and slaves were not uncommon in the South. And New Englanders disapproved. Abigail Adams, a strong-minded New England woman, detested such arrangements, as degrading to women in general, white as well as black. So it is understandable that Jefferson did not want to meet Abigail in the presence of his daughter, and of the young slave who was Polly's aunt.

To reiterate, I don't believe that Jefferson can have experienced anything like "horror" at the thought of master-slave miscegenous relationships. But I think that such relationships, both as a general feature of Virginian society and as affecting his own family, must have been, at the very least, a source of serious embarrassment to him, and probably also of shame and guilt.

Thomas Jefferson was a cultivated and travelled gentleman of his time. He mingled easily with the French nobility and cultural elite. Although he detested England, in the abstract, he had friendly relations with several members of the English radical elite. Although he was suspicious of the New England elite, his closest friends, during his Paris years, were John and Abigail Adams. Knowing all these people well, Jefferson had to know what they would think of the Jefferson-Wayles-Hemings pattern of family relations, if they knew of it.

In Paris--before the arrival of Polly and Sally--Jefferson had lived in close and friendly relations with John and Abigail Adams. But this could not have been so in Virginia; or even in Paris after the arrival of Sally and Polly. The patterns of Virginia and New England family relationships were simply too remote from one another to permit that. It was unthinkable that Abigail Adams could have had a half-sister who was her husband's slave or that--supposing the unthinkable to have happened--John Adams, after his wife's death, would have kept her half-sister in close and ambiguous attendance on him as a slave. Situated as he was, Jefferson had to be acutely aware of those New England unthinkabilities. And that awareness--and the emotions of shame and rage inseparable from it--had to affect his feelings about the relations between North and South, and also his feelings about how the French Revolution might change the balance of those relations to the benefit of the South (below, chapters to 7).

The relation of New England to that Virginian family pattern was necessarily more important to Jefferson than the views of any non-Americans. But French and English views and potential views were also of some importance, if only because they were closer to those of New England than to those of Virginia.

The English would think of such a family pattern as akin to the phenomenon of "going native" among white men in the colonies: something that entailed a loss of caste, and therefore of social status, for the white participants. The French would regard the phenomenon itself with tolerant amusement, as something giving openings for spicy and exotic anecdotes. The systematic cover-up that such practices required, in American society of the time, would be a ripe and derisory example of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.

But New England in the person of the Adamses must have been by far the most embarrassing potential spectator of the Jefferson-Wayles-Hemings relationship, from Jefferson's point of view. The Adamses were well aware of the kind of relations between masters and female slaves that prevailed on many Southern plantations, but they thought of their cultivated and sensitive friend, Thomas Jefferson, as being above all that. The knowledge that he was not as much above it as they thought must have tormented Jefferson from time to time. We shall consider some of the wider implications of all that in chapter 7. For the moment, let us just note both the relevance to the French Revolution and the general points that the need to divert outside opinion from certain Virginian realities made Jefferson adept at laying smoke screens and that this aptitude stood him in good stead in his political career. Polly arrived in Paris in the middle of July and her father then put her in the convent with Patsy. The children joined their father at weekends. Malone writes:

Polly proceeded with her accomplishments at the convent, but when she was at the Hotel de Langeac [Jefferson's Paris residence] it was Eppington that she most talked about. When she had been months in Paris her face kindled whenever she heard the name of her Aunt Eppes. That amiable lady proceeded to give birth to twins and her brother-in-law congratulated her on this double blessing and her obvious improvement in her trade [i.e. of wife and mother]. Continuing his letter, Jefferson said:

Polly is infinitely flattered to find a namesake [one of the twins] in one of them. She promises in return to teach them both French. This she begins to speak easily enough, and to read as well as English. She will begin Spanish in a few days, and has lately begun the harpsichord and drawing. She and her sister will be with me tomorrow.... I will propose to her, at the same time, to write to you. I know she will undertake it at once, as she has done a dozen times. She gets all the apparatus, places herself very formally with pen in hand, and it is not till after this and rummaging her head that she calls out, "Indeed, papa, I do not know what to say; you must help me," and, as I obstinately refuse this, her good resolutions have always proved abortive, and her letters ended before they were begun.

This is a rare and attractive glimpse of a Jefferson at home and at ease with his subject. We can almost see that little girl "rummaging her head." She will still not do what she's told, and her father accepts this, tenderly if ruefully. It might have been better if he could have brought himself to be less "obstinate" and give her the help she asked for, but his love for the child is altogether clear; and also, what is more rare, his respect for her individuality, even in rebellion.

Dumas Malone goes on:

She did not inherit his fluency, and continued to be reluctant to write letters, even to those she loved. Though notably generous he was an exacting father and often a strongly possessive one, but he was never so foolish as to attempt to sever the tie between his little girl and the pleasant white house at Eppington. As things turned out this tie was renewed and strengthened in later years, and, although Polly became devoted to him, she was never her father's daughter in the sense that Patsy was.

The coming of Polly greatly relieved Jefferson's mind and increased his happiness but, like a letter from an old friend, it probably had the immediate effect of increasing his nostalgia. Both of his daughters were in Paris when he wrote Dr. George Gilmer that he wished he could eat some beef and mutton at Pen Park with him and his good old Albemarle neighbors. "I am as happy nowhere else and in no other society," he said, "and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello. Too many scenes of happiness mingle themselves with all the recollections of my native woods and fields, to suffer them to be supplanted in my affection by any other. I consider myself here as a traveler only, and not a resident."(16)

It seems that about two years after the arrival of Polly, with Sally in Paris, Martha Jefferson attempted to enter a convent. Malone writes:

Beginning in late April [1789], his daughters were regular members of his establishment, for he then removed them from the Abbaye de Panthemont. According to a family tradition the immediate occasion for this action was an impulsive letter to him from Martha, then in her seventeenth year, saying that she desired to become a nun. If his immature daughter did write such a letter it was just the sort of intimate personal record he would have wanted to keep from prying eyes and would have destroyed. The mere existence of the tradition is an argument that there is some degree of truthfulness in the story, but he might easily have withdrawn the girls from the convent at this time for other reasons.(17)

In her novel Sally Hemings, Barbara Chase-Riboud offers a plausible fictional interpretation of the "convent" episode. In her reconstruction, Chase-Riboud represents Maria's attempt to enter a convent as prompted by her discovery that Sally had become her father's mistress, an event that if we accept Madison Hemings's account must have taken place about this time: Sally, according to Madison, was pregnant when the Jeffersons returned to America at the end of 1789. The Chase-Riboud hypothesis is worth bearing in mind, but we need not linger on it here.

II

After Jefferson's return to America, late in 1789, he soon came to be regarded, by friend and foe alike, as America's most ardent Francophile. But in his recorded writings, from the time when he was actually living in France, there are few traces of sympathy with the French way of life, or even of any strong personal interest in French affairs. Much of this correspondence is, in the nature of the case, that of a conscientious working diplomatist, dealing with the Court and with French opinion-makers, especially those with a friendly interest in America. It is only in his letters to American friends that Jefferson allows his personal feelings about France and the French to show. These feelings are those of an extremely homesick American.

Jefferson's closest friends in Paris, and almost his only ones, had been John and Abigail Adams, and their departure from Paris, at the beginning of his own stint as Minister Plenipotentiary, was a severe blow to him. As he wrote to John Adams, shortly after the Adamses left: "The departure of your family has left me in the dumps. My afternoons hang heavily on me."(18) To another American friend, James Monroe, he wrote in the following month, in a more explicitly nostalgic vein:

I sincerely wish you may find it convenient to come here. The pleasure of the trip will be less than you expect but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country, it's soil, it's climate, it's equality, liberty, laws, people and manners. My god! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy. I confess I had no idea of it myself.(19)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prelude—Four Americans in Paris, Circa 1785: Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson
1: A Lonely American: Thomas Jefferson, Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Louis XVI 1785-87
2: A Somewhat Clouded Crystal Ball: Jefferson as Witness of the Last Years of the Ancien Regime 1786-89
3: Bringing the True God Home: The French Revolution in American Politics after Jefferson's Return 1789-91
4: Approach and Advent of the French Republic, One and Indivisible: 1791-92
5: French Revolution in America: The Mission of Citizen Charles-Edmond Genet April 1793-January 1794
6: The Lingering End of the Long Affair: Jefferson and the French Revolution after Genet's Mission 1794-1800
7: A Thematic Overview: Liberty, Slavery, and the Cult of the French Revolution
Epilogue: Thomas Jefferson and the Impending Schism in the American Civil Religion
Appendix: Madison Hemings's Story
Notes
Sources
Index