Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

In pursuit of his ends, Jefferson sought, acquired, and wielded power, which is the bending of the world to one’s will, the remaking of reality in one’s own image.

Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

In the nineteenth century, South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chesnut noted something about white women that was equally true in the eighteenth: “Any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own.41 Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.

Viewed in terms of philosophy, the contradictions between Jefferson the nationalist and Jefferson the nullifier seem irreconcilable. Viewed in terms of personality and of politics, though, Jefferson was acting in character. He was always in favor of whatever means would improve the chances of his cause of the hour. When he was a member of the Confederation Congress, he wanted the Confederation Congress to be respected. When he was a governor, he wanted strong gubernatorial powers. Now that he disagreed with the federal government (though an officer of that government), he wanted the states to have the ability to exert control and bring about the end he favored. He was not intellectually consistent, but a consistent theme did run through his politics and statecraft: He would do what it took, within reason, to arrange the world as he wanted it to be.

The presidency Jefferson left in 1809 was rich in precedent for vigorous, decisive, and often unilateral action. It is not too much to say that Jefferson used Hamiltonian means to pursue Jeffersonian ends. He embraced ultimate power subtly but surely.

In the end Jefferson could see slavery only as tragedy. He may have believed it to be “a hideous blot,” as he wrote in September 1823, but it was not a blot he felt capable of erasing.9 The man who believed in the acquisition and wielding of power—political power, intellectual power, domestic power, and mastering life from the fundamental definition of human liberty in the modern world down to the smallest details of the wine he served and the flowers he planted—chose to consider himself powerless over the central economic and social fact of his life.

Here again, though, and in dramatic relief, we see that Jefferson the practical politician was a more powerful persona than Jefferson the moral theorist. He was driven by what he had once called, in a 1795 letter to Madison, “the Southern interest,” for the South was his personal home and his political base.17 He could not see a pragmatic way out of the conundrum, so he did what politicians often do: He suggested that the problem would be handled in the fullness of time—just not now. He did not believe full-scale colonization was feasible. “I do not say this to induce an inference that the getting rid of them is forever impossible,” he wrote in 1824.18 “For that is neither my opinion nor my hope. But only that it cannot be done in this way.

Beginning with George Washington himself, contemporaries and later historians have treated Jefferson’s fears of monarchy as fanciful, paranoid, or at best exaggerated to the point of unseriousness. Based on my reading of Jefferson’s papers and archival explorations in the United States and in Britain, however, I contend that the threat of a revival of British authority in the United States was as fundamental to Jefferson’s thought and actions as the cold war with the Soviet Union was to American presidents from Truman to George H. W. Bush.