Dinner-Table Bargains: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Senses of Taste

Abstract

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison sat at the together in late spring 1790, while James Hemings--Jefferson's enslaved cook and Sally Hemings's older brother--prepared the was save the Union (Jefferson, Writings [W] 1: 275). The North and the South had been unable come an agreement on the issue of states' debts, and Jefferson, seeking to find some temperament the present fever, had invited the opposing sides a little at his house (Jefferson, Papers [PTJ] 17: 206, 27: 782). As he later recalled in his autobiographical Anas, thought it impossible that reasonable men, consulting together coolly, could fail, by some mutual sacrifices of opinion, form a (W 1: 275). The worked out over the meal--that the South would support the federal assumption of states' debts in exchange the promise of relocating the nation's capital from its temporary home in New York City the shores of the Potomac--would become known as the Dinner-Table Bargain, what historian Jacob Cooke has called one of the most important bargains in American history (523). However, scant evidence the famous dinner, other than Jefferson's retroactive account, can be found. Madison makes no note of the in his journals or letters, and if James Hemings ever recalled aspects of its preparation-for he could write and read well--his account was certainly not preserved. Several twentieth-century analyses of the congressional record have determined that the North had already obtained sufficient votes support debt assumption by the time that the dinner supposedly took place. (1) In light of this research, it is almost certain that the Dinner-Table Bargain, as described in the Anas, did not take place in the way Jefferson so precisely recalled. That Jefferson insisted on a version of events that set the bargain at the attests his belief in the act of eating as emblematic of his republican ideals. Early in his tenure as minister France, in 1785, Jefferson acknowledged the of the table as a set of experiences, both gustatory and aesthetic, that could unite taste with temperance {PTJ 8: 569). Anticipating the formulation of the great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who in The Physiology of Taste (1835) distinguishes between the pleasure of eating [as] the actual and direct sensation of satisfying a need and the of the [as] a reflected sensation which is born from the various circumstances of place, time, things, and people who make up the surroundings of the meal (182), Jefferson identifies the pleasures of the as an essential means of cultivating the French quality of bon gout. (2) But when circumstances--namely, the fracturing of aristocratic rule that would culminate in the French Revolution--required that Jefferson author a declaration of culinary independence, he sought infuse the taste of the French with additional aspects of a distinctly American sensibility. (3) He began cultivate, in his garden in Paris, a variety of indigenous American ingredients for the use of [his] own table (PTJ 12:135). (4) He also developed a serving style after the American manner, in which plates were placed directly on the and guests served themselves, reflecting the virtuous simplicity of the republican citizenry (W 1: 156). His use of a round or oval and his insistence on seating his guests pell-mell were intended both express the egalitarianism inherent in the nation's founding and foster the respectful exchange of ideas that would sustain its future growth. (5) The good taste and abundance which Jefferson's would soon become renowned-what I will term Jefferson's republican taste-was thus on full display during the dinner that purportedly resulted in the famous compromise (qtd. in Fowler 19). (6) But the more complex bargain brokered at that table, and at every that Jefferson served, was a more internal affair: an attempt reconcile a sense of taste that expressed the ideals of the republic with a taste food prepared by the men and women he enslaved. …