“To become a Keeper of the Light House on Bald Head”

Commonplace published David E. Paterson’s article “Jefferson’s Mystery Woman Identified.”

It begins:

Historians have long wondered what prompted President Thomas Jefferson’s cryptic sentence in a note dated January 13, 1807, to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”

Given Jefferson’s opinion explicitly expressed elsewhere that women were best suited to domestic roles, not to boisterous public political forums, and not as actors in the halls and offices of government, scholars of the early republic and popular authors alike, since at least 1920, have tried to reconstruct the specific context in which the president made this comment. For the last twenty years, the consensus explanation has been that Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, unable to find enough qualified men to fill federal government jobs, proposed hiring women for those positions.

However, while Jefferson’s statement may reflect his thoughts on women as office holders in general, my recent research in federal records proves that Jefferson wrote the sentence in reaction to Gallatin’s proposal to appoint a specific woman to a specific job.

As Paterson says, Gallatin’s letter to the President and other pertinent documents don’t survive, so he had to work with other sources. One key bit of news:

The Wilmington (N.C.) Gazette of October 21, 1806, reported that five days earlier, a man named Joseph Swain, hunting deer and wild hogs on Bald Head Island, fired at a noise he heard in the bushes—only to find that he had killed his father-in-law, light-keeper Henry Long.

Paterson’s research also indicates that Gallatin; Timothy Bloodworth, the federal Customs Collector at Wilmington; and twelve local men were all willing to see a woman appointed to the office in question. Only President Jefferson deemed that “the public” wasn’t prepared for that.

Nineteen years later, President John Quincy Adams made the opposite call in regard to the same type of federal office.

For additional reading, here’s Kevin Duffus’s article for Coastal Review on the slain lighthouse keeper, Henry Long. It turns out he was born in the Palatinate in 1743. At the age of ten his family emigrated to Maine, the same region where Christopher Seider’s family first settled. His father, a schoolteacher also named Heinrich Lange, was still there in 1767, according to Jasper Jacob Stahl’s History of Old Broad Bay and Waldoboro.

As a young man, Henry Long moved to North Carolina, which had German-speaking Moravian communities. He became a river pilot, married, and had children. Entering his fifties, Long seems to have wanted a more stable job. In 1794 the Hooper family—who also had roots in the Massachusetts colony—recommended him to the federal government to tend the lighthouse off Cape Fear. And that went well for twelve years.

“It would mortify Mr. Adams and please Mr. Washington”

The Philadelphia Dancing Assembly planned to honor George Washington’s birthday with a ball on 22 Feb 1798, but then elections were scheduled on that Thursday. So the group postponed their event for a day.

Meanwhile, President John Adams had declined his invitation. On 23 February, the Aurora General Advertiser published that response with some editorial commentary about Adams’s “impolite & arrogant terms.” Its printer, Benjamin Franklin Bache, wrote sarcastically that he did not expect “that the president of the U. States would so far forget the dignity of his station as to mingle with shop keepers.”

Adams had privately written that one problem with such birthday balls was “those Things give offence to the plain People of our Country, upon whose Friendship I have always depended. They are practised by the Elegant and the rich for their own Ends, which are not always the best.” So each side was accusing the other of being elitist.

The dispute also had a personal dimension. Eliza Custis Law, Martha Washington’s eldest granddaughter, was in Philadelphia that month, urging all gentlemen to attend the birthday ball. The Federalists would normally have been happy to do so, but now that seemed disloyal to President Adams. Meanwhile, their Jeffersonian rivals were for once all about having a big party for Washington.

On the evening after the ball, the Swiss-born businessman Albert Gallatin (shown here) wrote to his wife about the situation:

Do you want to know the fashionable news of the day? The President of the United States has written, in answer to the managers of the ball in honor of G. Washington’s birthday, that he took the earliest opportunity of informing them that he declined going.

The court is in a prodigious uproar about that important event. The ministers and their wives do not know how to act upon the occasion; the friends of the old court say it is dreadful, a monstrous insult to the late President; the officers and office-seekers try to apologize for Mr. Adams by insisting that he feels conscientious scruples against going to places of that description, but it is proven against him that he used to go when Vice-President.

How they will finally settle it I do not know; but to come to my own share of the business. A most powerful battery was opened against me to induce me to go to the said ball; it would be remarked; it would look well; it would show that we democrats, and I specially, felt no reluctance in showing my respect to the person of Mr. Washington, but that our objections to levees and to birthday balls applied only to its being a Presidential, anti-republican establishment, and that we were only afraid of its being made a precedent; and then it would mortify Mr. Adams and please Mr. Washington.

All those arguments will appear very weak to you when on paper, but they were urged by a fine lady, by Mrs. Law, and when supported by her handsome black eyes they appeared very formidable. Yet I resisted and came off conqueror, although I was, as a reward, to lead her in the room, to dance with her, &c.; all which, by the by, were additional reasons for my staying at home. Our club have given me great credit for my firmness, and we have agreed that two or three of us who are accustomed to go to these places, [John] Langdon, [Richard] Brent, &c., will go this time to please the Law family.

Gallatin was pleased to have won the respect of his Jeffersonian colleagues, but he seems to have been equally eager to gain credit from his wife for resisting Law’s “handsome black eyes.”

The young, first-term Massachusetts Congressman Harrison Gray Otis explained the Federalist side of the controversy to his wife:

The Birth night ball of last evening was I am told respectably attended, tho by no means equal in splendour & numbers to the last. . . . The President did not attend, & his refusal has given considerable offence, even to some of the federal party.

To be sure his apology was rather formal, but I think he acted rightly upon principle. As President, he ought to know of no distinction among private citizens, whatever may be their merit or virtue; & having never received from the Philadelphians, the slightest mark of attention, he was in my mind quite excusable for declining to be the pageant, to do honor to another.

Many families who usually increase the flutter of the beau monde were absent. The Morrisites of course. The Binghams who have lately lost a relation, & the Chews on account of a Mrs. Pemberton who died last Sunday; I am told too that the whole house was very damp and believe I have not lost much.

Abigail Adams declared that by leaking her husband’s note the Jeffersonians had “defeated their own plans. as soon as it was known, it went through the city like an Electrical shock—and the Ball was meager enough, so much so, that tho it was by subscription I have heard but 15 Ladies were present.”

TOMORROW: What Jefferson himself thought of this all.

The Birth of the Recess Appointment

Article Two of the U.S. Constitution includes this clause, proposed by Richard Dobbs Spaight of North Carolina:

The President shall have power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

This language was modeled after a clause in the North Carolina constitution. It wasn’t part of the first draft of the new federal document, but the men of the Constitutional Convention—many of whom probably expected to be Senators—knew they wouldn’t want to spend all their time at the capital just in case an important position should become vacant.

No one dissented on this clause, and therefore there was no formal debate about its meaning. The Constitution doesn’t define the parameters of the Senate’s “recess” or “session” except to say that it can’t “adjourn for more than three days” without the House of Representatives’ consent or meet somewhere away from the House. The founders at the Constitutional Convention shared a basic understanding of how legislatures worked, so they didn’t think it worthwhile to spell that all out.

The 67th installment of The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, explained that clause this way:

The ordinary power of appointment is confined to the President and Senate jointly, and can therefore only be exercised during the session of the Senate; but as it would have been improper to oblige this body to be continually in session for the appointment of officers and as vacancies might happen in their recess, which it might be necessary for the public service to fill without delay, the succeeding clause is evidently intended to authorize the President, singly, to make temporary appointments “during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.”

Hamilton’s main goal in that essay, context makes clear, was to assure readers that the President could not appoint Senators, as some critics of the Constitution had evidently claimed. The actual workings of the recess appointment were only a minor consideration for him.

The first President to make a recess appointment was the first President, George Washington. He named officials in the very first break of the first Congress. Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison (also kind of an expert on the Constitution) also used this power. Jefferson, in fact, delayed his nomination of Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury so he could make a recess appointment; he didn’t submit Gallatin’s name to the Senate until almost eight months later in January 1802, when there was a Republican majority.

In fact, most of those early recess appointments were later confirmed by the Senate, or at least not rejected. But there was a notable exception. In June 1795 Washington named John Rutledge of South Carolina to be Chief Justice while the Senate was in recess. Less than three weeks later, Rutledge made a speech against the Jay Treaty negotiated by his predecessor, saying that he hoped Washington would die rather than sign it. This reduced his popularity within the administration.

Nevertheless, Rutledge presided over some court sessions that fall, and the President formalized his nomination in December 1795. By then, however, people were speaking openly about the new Chief Justice’s alcoholism, depressions, and failing mind. The Senate rejected the nomination, keeping its debate off the record. Rutledge went home to Charleston and attempted suicide. That didn’t work out, either.

Two days later, Rutledge wrote to Washington, resigning his commission as Chief Justice. Under the literal language of the Constitution, that commission was due to expire at the end of the Senate’s current session, or about five months later. Because Rutledge resigned, however, the country didn’t test the question of whether his commission should have ended as soon as the Senate had considered and rejected his appointment.

TOMORROW: Justice Joseph Story’s interpretation.

Thomas Jefferson and the Mystery Woman

Graham Dozier of the Virginia Historical Society made a mystery-filled public announcement earlier this year:

Historical research is often detective work. But even after the most dogged efforts of very smart historians, many questions remain unanswered about the people and events of the past. You do not have to go back to ancient history to be stumped by basic unknowns. Libraries and museums like those at the Virginia Historical Society contain numerous items not fully identified, such as unsigned letters, unidentified photographs, and other unexplained objects. Even more puzzling are greater unknowns scattered throughout the history of our country, some of them in the lives of even the most famous Americans.

The V.H.S. has created a feature on its web site to help resolve some of these conundrums. The Historical Mystery Prize will be given for the most persuasive argument made to answer the featured mystery, which consists of a particularly thorny unresolved issue from history.

The problem we pose for 2011-12 concerns a Thomas Jefferson letter. We do not know the answer; there may not be a winner. Perhaps it is an unsolvable mystery, but perhaps you can find an answer that makes sense. The person who submits the most cogent explanation by May 1, 2012, will receive a check for $1,000 at the annual VHS awards luncheon in July. . . .

On January 13, 1807, President Thomas Jefferson included a cryptic comment when he wrote a letter to his treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin. The relevant passage in the president’s letter reads, “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”

Historian Jon Kukla, author of Mr. Jefferson’s Women, describes this statement as Jefferson’s most candid reference on the subject of women and their public role. But Kukla was not able to find any comment in the Jefferson-Gallatin correspondence that would identify the woman in question or otherwise explain the president’s statement.

Can you solve this mystery? Was Jefferson referring to a specific woman? If so, who was she?

To follow the contest and submit your answer, visit the Virginia Historical Society.