The World полностью

In April 1803, uninhibited by his suspicion of presidential power and imperial diplomacy, Jefferson purchased Louisiana for $15 million: ‘It is the case of a guardian, investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; & saying to him, when of age, I did this for your good.’ Jefferson had doubled the size of America, swallowing what would be fifteen states and enabling the expansion of the nation into a continental power.^* Fascinated by the stories of Captain Cook, he formed a Corps of Discovery, dispatching an expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore the west and reach the Pacific. Soon afterwards, Jefferson met a rough, crude German immigrant whose trade in pelts, Chinese luxuries and Manhattan property would dovetail with American prosperity. The president thought the dour merchant, John Jacob Astor, aged forty, ‘a most excellent man’.

Son of a butcher in Walldorf, near Heidelberg, Astor first moved to London to trade in music instruments, then, following a brother who joined the British Hessian mercenaries to America, he set up a music shop in New York, switching to the lucrative trade in beaver, ermine, mink and otter furs.

Setting out by canoe and cart, Astor bought pelts from Native Americans around the Canadian border, sometimes winning them over by playing the flute, sometimes selling rum and weapons, earning 1,000 per cent profits when the furs sold in London. After marrying a well-off New Yorker, Sarah Todd, with whom he soon had a large family, he started to send a network of trackers into Jefferson’s newly opened lands and on to the Pacific, where California remained Spanish and where Russia had just claimed Alaska.

Astor, coarse, red-faced and avaricious, but a tireless organizer, lobbied politicians, lending money to Vice-President Burr and cultivating President Jefferson, who approved his plans. Often his trackers were massacred by Native Americans, but his American Fur Company prospered.

In April 1804, the president rushed home to Monticello where his daughter, Maria, was ailing. She died in his arms; but, while there, he conceived a child with Sally Hemings. When she gave birth to a son, Jefferson followed his tradition with Sally that each of their children were named after one of his friends: Dolley Madison, wife of the secretary of state, promised Sally a present if the son was named after her husband. No present ever arrived, but the boy was named James Madison Hemings.^*

Ironically, Jefferson’s best service to mankind was linked to his dubious attitude towards slavery. He was aware that the greatest killer was smallpox. In Paris he had had Sally Hemings and her brothers inoculated. In May 1796, an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, noticing that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, scraped pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox blister and injected it into a boy, who himself became immune: he called this vaccination, after vacca, cow. As with many advances, the discovery was not recognized by most doctors. It took amateurs and then leaders to deliver the benefits to the public, and that often required decades. In 1801, Jefferson heard about vaccination from a Harvard professor who – astonishingly – had received the vaccine by post across the Atlantic and sent it in a corked vial to the president. Jefferson realized there was ‘no discovery in medicine equally valuable’ and ‘inoculated about 70 or 80 of my own family … Our whole experiment extended to about 200,’ including some of his children and three slaves, of whom two, his butler Burwell Colbert and blacksmith Joseph Fossett, were immunized successfully. The shock of vaccination was that it was a medicine for people who were not yet sick, leading to an anti-vaxxing movement. ‘As mindboggling as it is to contemplate a sitting president conducting experimental drug trials in his spare time’, writes Steven Johnson, it was appropriate that a non-doctor should defeat anti-vaxxers and promote the most important cure of modern times. Jefferson publicized his findings, leading Congress to pass the Vaccine Act in 1813. It took forty years for Britain to catch up.