Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 108 / Number 3
ABSTRACT:
Private Correspondence for the Public Good: Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 26 January 1799
- Andy Trees, pp. 217–54
In late January, 1799, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Massachusetts native
Elbridge Gerry. Highlighting Jefferson's difficulties with the political landscape of
the late 1790s, this letter provides a window into the political culture of the early
republic, a world of complicated customs that profoundly affected the way men
such as Jefferson engaged their political peers. Even the simple act of writing a
letter could pose immense challenges, its conventions no less prescriptive, but
often quite different, than the principles shaping other forms of communication.
For Jefferson, this letter represented one of the only times during the late 1790s,
a period of heated political animosities, that he personally appealed to a politician
whose political loyalties were unclear, a situation that threw into bold relief the
political persona that he fashioned for himself as well as the difficulties that
persona created for him. For a number of practical political reasons, Jefferson
hoped to convince Gerry to aid the Republican cause. At the same time,
Jefferson feared being seen as a party intriguer. In an attempt to solve this
problem, he relied on a carefully constructed, non-partisan "natural" self
that enabled him to deny any untoward political maneuvering, invariably
collapsing his practical appeal into the supposedly non-political arena of
affective union. However, Jefferson's solution entangled him in larger problems.
By attempting to use a relationship supposedly based on affection for
instrumental purposes, Jefferson found his own sincerity at question. Worse, his
conception of union based on bonds of affection left no place for political
disagreement, providing the script not for the harmonious vision of his
imagination but for the political conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
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