It is commonly and frequently assumed that when Thomas Jefferson and James Madison travelled north in 1791 – the trip from which Jefferson famously wrote to his daughter Martha that “Lake George is without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw” – the two left the capital to reconnoiter the political landscape, to seek out potential allies and identify likely enemies in an impending power struggle with Alexander Hamilton.
Actually, the purpose of the trip was not to engage in politics, but to escape politics. It was a nature vacation, an self-guided botanical and horticultural tour in which they investigated the flora and fauna of a region different from their own, considered the impacts of climate on the variabilities to be found in nature and among peoples, sought remedies for an invasive species – the hessian fly – and became the new nation’s first lobbyists for the maple sugar industry.
The last truly partisan biography of Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America” by the progressive politician and journalist Claude G. Bowers, a volume in a trilogy completed during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed Bowers ambassador to Spain and Chile, does not mention the northern tour once.
In the journey’s surviving field notes and letters – the letter from Lake Champlain about Lake George and northern New York included – you will not find any reference to political schemes. Instead, you will read that: the mountain sides of Lake George “are covered with thick groves of thuja (cedar), silver fir (hemlock), white pine, aspen and paper birch down to the water-edge;” that the residents “are locked up in ice and snow for six months” and that the growing season is a short one and hence especially hot; that “strawberries here are in blossom, or just formed.”
To be sure, the Virginians’ rivals and detractors imputed political motives to their tour; as a British diplomat put it, they intended to “feel the pulse of the country,” especially as regards foreign policy.
Alexander Hamilton’s son thought their “botanical excursion” a mere pretext for their politicking. But they were not only bored with politics; history, even recent history, bored them. Although they visited the battlefields of the French and Indian War and the Revolution, they much “preferred the botanical objects’ they encountered, as Jefferson wrote his son-in-law.
Madison and Jefferson could not escape politics during the four weeks of their trip altogether; they discussed current issues with their friends, just as we do. And their interest in maple sugar was not limited to increasing the value of their portfolios. Small, self-sufficient family farms, freed from a dependence upon imported cane sugar, chimed with their vision of an agrarian, democratic republic. They remind us that politics, in the broadest sense, affects not only how we make a living, but how we live. And they also remind us that on occasion, in summer especially, we should just enjoy what nature gives us.
