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Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma. Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic. To realize his vision, he compromised and improvised. The willingness to do what he needed to do in a given moment makes him an elusive historical figure. Yet in the real world, in real time, when he was charged with the safety of the country, his creative flexibility made him a
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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.
The nation, he said in his first inaugural address in 1801, was “the world’s best hope.”34 He thought Americans themselves capable of virtually anything they put their minds to. “Whatever they can, they will,” Jefferson said of his countrymen in 1814.35
once created his own version of the Gospels by excising the New Testament passages he found supernatural or implausible and arranging the remaining verses in the order he believed they should be read.45
He was the father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of the American West. He led the first democratic movement in the new republic to check the power and influence of established forces. And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country’s finest hours lay ahead. The story of Jefferson’s
is this the violent democrat, the vulgar demagogue, the bold atheist and profligate man I have so often heard denounced by the Federalists?”
Jefferson lived and governed in a Fifty Years’ War.78 It was a war that was sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but was always unfolding. It took different forms. There were traditional battlefield confrontations from 1775 to 1783 and again from 1812 to 1815. There were battles by proxy with Loyalists and British allies among the Indians. There were commercial strikes and counterstrikes. There were fears of political encroachment within the United States that could be aided by British military movements from Canada, Nova Scotia, or Britain’s western posts (posts they declined to surrender after
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Jefferson did not trust the old mother country, and he did not trust those Americans who maintained even imaginative ties to monarchy and its trappings—aristocracy of birth, hereditary executives, lifetime legislatures, standing armies, large naval establishments, and grand, centralized financial systems. When Jefferson sensed any trend in the general direction of such things, he reacted viscerally, fearing that the work of the Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention was at risk. The proximity of British officials and troops to the north of the United States and the strength of the
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conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.
well-founded worries that the American republic might meet the dismal fate all other republics had ever met—Jefferson’s sense of Britain as a perennial foe is unsurprising and essential to understand. He thought he was in a perennial war. And if we are to understand what he was like, and what life was like for him, then we must see the world as he saw it, not as how we know it turned out.
in Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.72 Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.… The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”
Shadwell, with its sixty-six slaves and at least 2,750 acres (which included the thousand-acre tract that became Monticello).
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.…1 Nothing is required for this enlightenment … except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. —IMMANUEL KANT, “What Is Enlightenment?”
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote.21 “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.” This was Small’s message to his charges at William and Mary. Jefferson was entranced, later giving Small the noblest of accolades when he recalled that Small was “to me … a father.”22
To follow Jefferson in the 1760s and early 1770s is to see how the American Revolution took shape, and why. The definition of liberty and the nature of representative government—fundamental human questions—were consuming concerns in the America of Jefferson’s young adulthood.5
London held power over the American colonies. The British Navigation Acts controlled trade and transportation; merchants in Philadelphia or farmers in Albemarle County were subject to an economic system in which they had no real political voice. Royal governors could convene colonial assemblies such as the Virginia House of Burgesses. The governors could also veto any legislation and were empowered to dissolve the sessions at will. No directly elected representatives of the British in North America sat in the British Parliament. Such issues were to grow
the American story of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was inextricably linked with the story of England in the seventeenth.8,9
British politician and writer Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Jefferson believed history was “philosophy teaching by examples.”11 History, then, mattered enormously, for it could repeat itself at any time in any generation.12 And if that history brought tyranny, it was to be fought at all costs.
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Britain in the seventeenth century, the people, including many aristocrats, had rebelled against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuart kings, leading to chaos. There was the execution of Charles I, the commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of the Stuarts (which led to more political and religious strife), and finally the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William of Orange and his wife, Mary, were crowned to preside over a balanced constitution. As a condition of kingship, William and Mary agreed to uphold an English Declaration of Rights that limited the monarchy’s power to
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Jefferson and his fellow American Revolutionaries took the positions they did—positions that led to war in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776—partly because they saw themselves as Englishmen who were being denied a full share of the benefits of the lessons of English life. In the decade between 1764 and 1774—between a protest over taxation to the eve of revolution—Jefferson and like-minded Americans were guarding against the abridgement of the personal liberties or of the representation Englishmen had won for themselves as a result of the Glorious Revolution.21 Every proposal
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Empires are expensive, and the one London controlled at the end of the Seven Years’ War was of remarkable scope.23 Simply put, London needed revenue and believed the American colonies should bear more of the cost of maintaining the British dominions.24 About ten thousand British troops were to remain in North America; the redcoats represented a pervasive sense of threat.25 Armies that could liberate and protect could also conquer and subjugate.
The South and West were angry about the lands and the Indians; the Northeast was uneasy about the writs of assistance. And the whole of the colonies was infuriated by what was known as the Sugar Act of 176431, which included mechanisms for strict enforcement. Though the bill actually lowered the tax on molasses, it imposed duties on other items (including Madeira wine, a favorite of the young Jefferson).33,32 The Sugar Act was also an attempt to establish a principle and a precedent in these post–Seven Years’ War days: that, in the words of the legislation, it was “just and necessary that a
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Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world. In 1766, Jefferson helped bring a Maryland publisher, William Rind, to Williamsburg to create a Virginia Gazette to rival the one that was controlled by Joseph Royle, John Dixon, and Alexander Purdie.64 “Until
He learned to write with grace, with conviction, and—important in a revolutionary time—with speed.
Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think. Everyone wants to believe that what they have to say is fascinating, illuminating, and possibly even epochal. The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: “one of the choice ones of the earth.”69 A grandson described Jefferson’s tactical
English poet William Shenstone, a writer much interested in mourning and in the virtues of rural seclusion, Jefferson
Setting out in the spring of 1766, Jefferson, always concerned with combating and controlling diseases, stopped at Philadelphia to see Dr. William Shippen, Jr., to be inoculated against smallpox. Jefferson continued on to New York, where, in a sign of the intimacy of the American elite, he boarded in a house along with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a future Revolutionary friend and ally.81
Under the law of nature, all men are born free [and] everyone comes into the world with the right to his own person which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.2 —JEFFERSON in the Howell slavery case, 1770
“measures should be taken in their distressed situation for preserving the true and essential interests of the colony.”46 By the next day the Virginians had a plan.47 They would not import or consume anything from Great Britain.48 When Jefferson left Williamsburg after his inaugural session, he was already steeped in the politics of protest and of power.
“Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.” The line means “Carry on, and preserve yourselves for better times.”59
1769,
From about this period until his death, according to the historian Lucia Stanton’s research, Thomas Jefferson would own more than 600 slaves.61 He inherited 15062 (from his father and his father-in-law) and bought roughly 2063; most of the others were born into slavery on his lands.64 From 1774 to 182665, Jefferson tended to have about 200 slaves at any one time (the range ran from 165 to 225). When he served at the highest levels as a diplomat, as a member of George Washington’s cabinet, as vice president, as president, and, in his retirement at Monticello, as an American sage, Jefferson was
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“Much better … if our companion views a thing in a light different from what we do, to leave him in quiet possession of his view.17 What is the use of rectifying him if the thing be unimportant; and if important let it pass for the present, and wait a softer moment and more conciliatory occasion of revising the subject together.”
Ambition creates a hunger for action and acclaim, and those who crave applause have a particular aversion to criticism. His
After the third Mrs. Wayles died in February 1761, Elizabeth Hemings, now about twenty-six years old, was “taken by the widower Wayles as his concubine,” said Madison Hemings.38 Beginning in 1762, Elizabeth Hemings bore five children to Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law: Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, and Peter.39 In 1773 came a sixth: Sarah, who was to be known by the nickname Sally.40 Such arrangements were not uncommon in slave-owning states. In the nineteenth century, South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chestnut noted something about white women that was equally true in the eighteenth: “Any lady
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How is a man, as an intrinsically social animal, to live in relative peace and charity with his neighbors in a world given to passion and conflict?
“Non solum nobis, sed patriae”: “Not for ourselves only, but for our country.”21
It was a rich man’s revolution, and Jefferson was a rich man. It was a philosophical revolution, and Jefferson was a philosophical man. The intersection of economic and ideological forces created a climate in which well-off, educated Virginians saw a clearer, more compelling, and more attractive future if they could successfully separate themselves from London.
Taxes, the presence of British troops, trade regulations, the disposition of western lands, and relations with Indian tribes, among other matters, were all seen as grasps for power by London, power that Jefferson and others believed rightly belonged to them (or at least to them within a constitution in which they played a much larger role). Absolutism was always just a step away; subjugation an imminent possibility.
For Jefferson, the decision to base a revolutionary appeal on religious grounds was expedient, reflecting more an understanding of politics than a belief that the Lord God of Hosts was about to intervene in British America. Though not a conventional Christian, Jefferson appreciated the power of spiritual appeals. To frame an anti-British argument in the language of faith took the rhetorical fight to the enemy in a way that was difficult to combat.
Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.1 —KING GEORGE III, on the American colonies
The threat of war seemed to grow in the autumn of 1774. In New England, British troops took control of powder magazines and cannons to secure them from colonial militias and asked London for more troops in expectation that bloodshed was at hand.25 London’s response to this request, and to the First Continental Congress, was to offer the British military commander in North America, General Thomas Gage, a clear instruction: “Force,” the government advised Gage, “should be repelled by force.”26
In Massachusetts, British troops and American colonists clashed at Lexington and Concord on Wednesday, April 19, 1775.28 By the end of the day, after gunfire along a shifting sixteen-mile front, there were 273 British and 95 American casualties.29,30 The exact sequence of the battle is unclear, but the meaning of the bloodshed was unmistakable.31 As Jefferson wrote after hearing the reports, any “last hopes of reconciliation” were now gone.32 “A frenzy of revenge,” he added, “seems to have seized all ranks of people.”33 The painter John Singleton Copley wrote his
April 20, 177539, became Friday, April 21, royal marines removed fifteen half barrels of gunpowder from the public magazine at Williamsburg to the HMS Magdalen, effectively disarming the Virginians.40 A furious crowd of colonists gathered outside the Governor’s Palace, ready for anything.41
April 22, 1775, Dunmore announced that “by the living God” he would “declare freedom to the slaves, and reduce the city of Williamsburg to ashes” should there be further “injury or insult” to the royal establishment.46 Reaction was swift and predictable.47 From Pennsylvania, a colonist wrote a friend overseas: “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than his design of emancipating our slaves.”48 Colonists with slaveholding sympathies either began or accelerated their preparations for war, Jefferson among them.
Dunmore’s seizure of the gunpowder and his statements about the slaves inflamed matters in Jefferson’s immediate world.
Dunmore was the particular manifestation of a universal truth.53 The British were unbending, apparently uninterested in even affecting an air of respect toward the Americans. The bolder the Americans grew, the surlier the British seemed. Ever sensitive to slights and conscious of the alchemy
As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.1 —THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775
looked over Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for “Articles of confederation and perpetual Union.”5 He recorded the “Financial and Military Estimates for Continental Defense.”6 In a way, he had been preparing for this hour and for this work since he first stood in the lobby of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, listening, rapt, to Patrick Henry a decade before.
Since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British had occupied large sections of Canada, once known as New France. In the face of American invasion in 1775, Montreal surrendered but Quebec held out.19 The failure to conquer the whole territory effectively left it in British hands, and Canada became a haven for Loyalists. After the war, Canada was, in the American mind, a possible staging ground for a reassertion of British force and influence in the new United States. Jefferson found an infectious
