Looking at Industrial England: Thomas Jefferson's Appreciation of Englishness.
Thomas Jefferson's anti-English and pro-French attitudes are well-known topics. He didn't like English chaps. To Jefferson's eyes, French lads suited better the role of Americans' best friends, the very harbingers of civilization. He envied French life and deemed there was widespread politeness in that country. In France "a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness." (TJ to Charles Bellini, Sept. 30, 1785) Every other country was embarrassingly rude, crude, and nude by comparison. After moving into the Hôtel de Langeac in the autumn of 1785, Jefferson became blissful. He had the impression of being eventually placed in an environment pervaded by kindness, temperance and order. "I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that their reformation must be worked…" (Ford, IV, 465) French are much superior. Especially during the 1780s, Englishness was constructed by Jefferson's imagination as a monstrous and primitive foe. Victim of their own greed and animal hunger, English men, especially merchants, took one half of the American exports, re-exported the greater part, prohibited what they pleased, monopolized the navigation, and left everything at the hazard of their decrees. To put it downright, while the French are palatably cooked, the British are dreadfully raw.
A number of letters might be provided to give examples of Jefferson's entrenched
impression that, as he said to Alexander McCaul, Americans were right to downgrade English men to the role of barbarian and ruthless "aggressors." (TJ to Alexander McCaul, April 19, 1786, Ford, V, 91). British are at present characteristically "in a frenzy," he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, "and will not be recovered from it till they shall have leaped the precipice they are now so boldly advancing to." (TJ to Richard Henry Lee, London, April 22, 1786, Ford, 5, 94) On May 4, from Paris, Jefferson wrote to John Page: "I returned but three or four days ago from a two months trip to England. I traversed that country much, and own both town & country fell short of my expectations. Comparing it with this [France], I found a much greater proportion of barrens, a soil in other parts not naturally so good as this, not better cultivated, but better manured, & therefore more productive. … The gardening in that country is the article in which it surpasses all the earth. I mean their pleasure gardening. This indeed went far beyond my ideas. The city of London, tho' handsomer than Paris, is not so handsome as Philadelphia. Their architecture is in the most wretched style I ever saw …" Jefferson's way of representing Englishness is emotionally charged and negativity usually takes hold: both the lowly and the better sort are fools, the English King is a fool, and they
would never recover from their animal, in turn raw hatred: "That nation hates us, their minister hate us, and their King more than all other men." (TJ to John Page, 4 May, 1786)
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Besides conjuring up dreadful images of English men as totally lacking self-control, eating too much meat, hating with brutality, and hence slaves to a primeval egoism, Jefferson deployed very opposite representations. Looking at some selected champions of Englishness, he constructed positive symbols of masculine control and order. Despicable though the English men were, the greatest champions of human race that have ever lived were, in turn, English. At the beginning of 1789, while in Paris, Jefferson commissioned John Trumbull to paint life-sized busts of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. He considered them as unsurpassed heroes and as nothing less than a "Trinity of Immortals" in the ongoing battle for civilization. Bacon, Locke, and Newton were, he wrote, "the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the physical and moral sciences." (TJ to Trumbull, Feb. 15, 1789) Jefferson wanted to put the three together on one large canvas. Trumbull, understandably, looked askance at the project and suggested three pictures of the same size to be hung together. Jefferson's artistic taste, Dumas Malone commented on this regard, "was not impeccable." (Malone, II:211) However, it is not the artistic taste to be at stake at the moment. Bacon, Locke, and Newton, Jefferson argued, have laid the "foundation" of those "superstructures" that the eighteenth century had fully developed or at least that are going to be fully developed. Note the words he used: "foundation/superstructure," which is amenable to the binary theory/practice or, also, to philosophical dream and practical, virile realization. Let me speculate a little bit about those terms. Of course, there is no direct cause-effect relationship, but undeniably Jefferson's first-hand acquaintance with some among the most modern and impressive superstructures took place during his two months trip to England. The encounter with those superstructures (bridges, canals, turnpikes, industries, engines) must have given Jefferson the evidence that the former nation of Newtons and Lockes has luckily become a nation of Boultons and Watts. And vice versa: Jefferson was confirmed in his appreciation of those seventeenth-century theoretical minds (Bacon, Locke, Newton) via the physical proof, gathered during the trip to England, that their ideas about the human mind's taking over raw and wild nature was feasible. To some extent at least, Jefferson ended up in the appreciation of Bacon, Locke and Newton because he met in England with the men who had walked in the footsteps of those seventeenth-century great philosophers and had successfully transformed theories into reality. This is just
speculation. The fact remains that in the same letter to John Page written right after he returned to Paris from his trip, Jefferson extolled the English for their being in command of the "mechanical arts" and stated clearly that in that country some champions have carried technology "to a
wonderful perfection." Even though Jefferson often used to imagine English chaps as stepping out of the pathway to civilization, there is no doubt that he believed that a very heroic, practical and virile progeny was living in that country. Thanks those heroes, England can aspire to represent the very embodiment of the principle of progress.
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Technology was a famous English staple that Jefferson was fond of. Technology had always ranked at the top of Jefferson's scale of values. First in Paris and later in England, he became acquainted, for instance, with new methods of raising water by steam. These methods must have made him aware of a good solution to bring water up to his home, in Monticello. Each time he mulled over the new technology based on the power of the steam, Jefferson appeared to be a blissful creature. "The power of this agent," he wrote from Paris, "tho' long known, is but now beginning to be applied to the various purposes of which it is susceptible." (December 17, Ford, 5:231) His eyes were
glimmering at the cheery prospect opened by technology and at his personal acquaintance with Boulton, the "famous" Boulton: "I have had a conversation on the subject of the steam mills with the famous Boulton, to whom those of London belong, and who is here at this time." (Ford, 5:234) Besides Mills, it was the process of making coins which also raised Jefferson's deepest interest. In 1786, on a business trip to Paris, Boulton and James Watt, accompanied by the young American Minister Thomas Jefferson, visited the Paris Mint, where they met the Engineer and Engraver, Jean Pierre Droz. Droz did a remarkable job at the Paris Mint, designing the mechanism by which incuse edge inscriptions could be added to coins while they were being struck. Coinage had long been a matter of interest to Jefferson, and he found the English technological heroes, once again,
unsurpassed. In Paris, during the summer of 1785, Jefferson had his "Notes on Coinage" printed. 100 copies of these Notes were sent to Charles Thomson to put in the hands of "every member of Congress when they should enter on the subject." Later on, in 1792, Jefferson eventually received a "set of copper promisory notes, and coins" made at Boulton's works. He duly submitted them to George Washington's inspection, noting their superiority "over any thing we can do here." (TJ to Washington, 16 November 1792)
It is true that when Jefferson toured England, in March and April 1786, a quite aristocratic "Boulton made a secret of his mill," and that Jefferson was permitted to see it only superficially. (TJ
too Charles Thomson, September 20) Nevertheless, in his battle to secure civilization, the "famous" Boulton must have appealed to Jefferson, and he must have thought of other "immortals," like Bacon, Locke, and Newton. Jefferson was of course enthused by technology. In America, men from all walks of life saw technological development as indicative of a cheery future. Technology was becoming the foremost buttress to the widely held belief in a hopeful future, both the cause and the effect of America’s glorious expansion. But, what is also interesting, Jefferson was fond of the type of the entrepreneur embodied, for instance, by Boulton: ingenious, practical, virile, and firmly in command. Boulton was playing the role of a second George Washington leading legions along their victorious march toward the future. Jefferson was not satisfied by an un-manly progress envisaged as the product of either God's providence or of some fortuitous circumstances. Jefferson wanted progress, but this member of the Virginia gentry also wanted someone, a man, firmly at the helm. An American, a provincial, a child of yesterday--but also an aristocratic who had been a member of an informal oligarchic body all along his life--Jefferson needed to identify with persons able to give the impression that the stream of events was firmly under control. To put it bluntly, Jefferson was fond of persons like Boulton.
Industry and technology had not just material consequences such as clearing the way to better mints, efficient steam engines, and more effective materials. As Roy Porter correctly noted, in the period "industry also was a prime instance of disciplined rationality." (Porter, "Matrix of
Modernity," 252) Nurtured by discipline and social hierarchy, Jefferson's praise of English
"wonderful perfection" reminds of a bygone (or soon-to-be bygone) ancien régime. (I am indebted to Peter Onuf, Venice Conference, December 2008, for this reference to Jefferson's "internalization of the ancien régime.") Jefferson bitterly criticized English licentiousness and, understandably, did not want to mingle with those who ate huge quantity of animal food. He always pleaded allegiance to figures towering above the crass appetite of the middling sort. Jefferson's praise of English heroes is rooted in a typical early eighteenth-century worldview, or maybe a seventeenth-century worldview, which is not democratic yet and which did not yield to a society of common men. Industry, Jefferson was convinced, would provide the foundation for happiness as long as it keeps being divested of the arbitrariness of the dog-eats-dog market: raw meat, once again. "The founding fathers," Gordon Wood correctly argues, "had thought that eminent men and imaginative minds were in control of events and caused things to happen." (Wood, Radicalism, 359) Whether a certainty or merely a pious wish, Jefferson was fully persuaded that eminent generals should be in control of events, and Boulton's industrialism did not speak of shifting social currents, and masses to be treated by statistics. The fact that nineteenth-century society--both in England and in the United States--was increasingly shaped by a chaotic multiplicity of busy persons chasing their
desires and rescued from aristocratic restraint, does not prove that Jefferson and Boulton planned to cast an assault on elites, causing the dispersion of authority. Jefferson obsession for reason, control, order, natural aristocracy, and his peculiar passion for measuring, weighing, observing, recording, cooking, gardening, and, in general, for every form of culture, betray a deep fear of social
revolution, a fear of loosing control, and showing off one's nakedness: raw meat, once more. Jefferson's praise of industrial England--that "wonderful perfection" which was undeniably classical--was fraught with aristocratic visions. Let me quote from Porter once again:
"Manufacturing, moreover, seemed to be producing a new breed of heroes, principally the 'captain of industry', the self-made man, raising capital for factories, forges and foundries, ploughing back profits, organising productive capacity, recruiting, training and deploying the workforce, calculating market opportunities." Despite the often told allegation that Jefferson was fond of democracy (to a large extent he was), he liked immortals like Boulton because that version of English industrialism (at first sight, at least) seemed to reinforce and not to jeopardize the social order. Despite the fact that he defended democracy, Jefferson always sought after a noble man who was virile enough to "surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance." (to Martha Jefferson, 28 March 1787, Ford, 5:266) An emblem of classical chivalry, such an utterance about "resolution and contrivance" is hardly a tribute to the common man. In the period, the industrialist could have been easily
trumpeted as a noble hero and a god-like general, à la Washington. Early industrialism, to draw on Jürgen Habermas (Structural Transformation, 15), was conservative and aimed at a way of doing business and managing production characterized by "honorable" gain. Industrialism was not a radical alternative to the feudal organization of agricultural production, but rather its most obvious enlargement. Under the hands of its English heroes, industrialism "stabilized the power structure of a society organized in estates."
The irony, or maybe the tragedy, lies in that industrialism unleashed those democratic forces that in the short run would dissolve that old, good society of honorable surmounting cavaliers. Jacksonian society was waxing, and men like Jefferson, Washington and Boulton were inexorably waning. However, what Jefferson wanted to see in the process of refinement of "mechanical arts," led by English generals, was a consoling and reassuring tale, maybe a children's tale. That tale recounted of a success attained, of discipline regained, civilization secured, and rudeness thwarted once and for all. One of the children's tales in Anna Barbauld's Evenings at Home: Or the Juvenile Budget Opened (1794), for instance, celebrated Sir Richard Arkwright's rise to fame and fortune (although we could easily put the name of Matthew Boulton in place). "This is what manufacturers can do," the tale goes. "Here man is a kind of creator, and like the great Creator, he may please himself with his work and say it is good." Yes, Jefferson was fond of cavaliers like Boulton.
