Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which was adopted by the Congress on Thursday, July 6, 1775.22

If Britain were to come to dominate the seaboard colonies militarily, Jefferson mused, there was another option. Perhaps the hardiest of Virginians might move “beyond the mountains,” which suggested that Jefferson had been party to conversations about an extreme scenario in which the colonists devoted to the American cause might move to the interior of the continent. It is an early example in Jefferson’s papers of his envisioning the West as a source of liberty and a theater for reinvention. The

frigates bound for the middle colonies.64 One target: Virginia. And more specifically, Virginia planters. The naval forces, Jefferson said, were coming “at the express and earnest intercessions of Lord Dunmore, and the plan is to lay waste all the plantations of our river sides.”65 Little seemed cheering. On Sunday,

November 7, 1775,

From his shipboard quarters at Norfolk, Dunmore declared martial law and directly challenged white Virginia, ordering that any slave or indentured servant who took up arms against the American Revolutionaries would be granted their freedom.76,77,78 Frightened white Virginians—and sympathetic whites in other colonies—suddenly saw their most fevered visions of slaves turning against masters threatening to become real.79 The

As the session of the Congress drew to a close, Jefferson was named to a committee “to Ascertain Unfinished Business before Congress.”85 He found twenty-seven separate matters that required attention, from reports on currency and Indian affairs to the making of salt. A second Jefferson task: service on a panel charged with planning the powers of a proposed committee to govern during the congressional recess.

end of the first week of June 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the “United Colonies” were “absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”18

In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was to be both poetic and prosaic, creating sympathy for the larger cause while condemning Britain in compelling terms. His purpose, he said, was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of … but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we were compelled to take.”33 As he sat to

Jefferson’s influences were manifold.42 Locke, Montesquieu, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment were among them, as was James Wilson’s pamphlet Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Authority of the British Parliament and George Mason’s Declaration of Rights, written for the Virginia constitution.43,44

The denunciation of slavery was also eliminated. “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving [of] the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and to Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it,” said Jefferson.50 “Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”

With the power of the pen, he had articulated a new premise for the government of humanity: that all men were created equal. He basically meant all white men, especially propertied ones, but the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, for one, recognized the import of the document adopted in Philadelphia. Attacking the declaration from London, Bentham scoffed at the idea that every man had a natural, God-given right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; such assertions, Bentham said, were “absurd and visionary,” and he likened the American political thinking to

It is error alone that needs the support of government.2 Truth can stand by itself. —THOMAS JEFFERSON, on freedom of religion

In political terms, Jefferson believed it unjust (and unwise) to use public funds to support an established church and to link civil rights to religious observance. He said such a system led to “spiritual tyranny.”27

It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up. Dissenters across

in the end, in 1786, a statute for religious liberty from Jefferson’s pen became law.33 The bill, Jefferson said, was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”34

Nelson had written Jefferson in January 1777.54 “They play the very Devil with the girls and even old women to satisfy their libidinous appetites.55 There is scarcely a virgin to be found in the part of the country that they have passed through.”

Like many legislators, Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power—until he bore executive responsibility. He emerged from his wartime governorship with a different view of authority than the one he had held on first accepting the office, and with a deeper appreciation of the perils and possibilities of command.

Jefferson’s willingness to do whatever it took for the sake of security was already on record. In May 1778 he had drafted a bill of attainder—an automatic conviction of an individual by legislative fiat—for a man named Josiah Philips

Jefferson’s bill was an extraordinary expression of power and the work of a pragmatic politician.14 Essentially it denied Philips the rights the Americans said they were fighting for. For Jefferson, the practical need to end the Philips insurrection outweighed the ideal application of the

Diplomacy, grace, and mercy had their place. So did steel, vengeance, and strength.

December 29, 1780, Benedict Arnold, the American general who had become a traitor, selling himself to the British, led an invasion of Virginia.38 Word of the British attack off the Virginia capes reached Richmond on New Year’s morning, 1781.39

The states will go to war with each other in defiance of Congress; one will call in France to her assistance; another Great Britain, and so we shall have all the wars of Europe brought to our own doors.2 —THOMAS JEFFERSON, on his fears about a weak national government

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

second Jeffersonian objection was that a hereditary society was out of harmony with the spirit of a republic based on what Jefferson called the “natural equality of man.” Washington appears to have taken Jefferson’s counsel seriously.42 The general pressed the Society to end the granting of honorary memberships, a category Jefferson had written “might draw into the order all the men of talents, of office and wealth; and in this case would probably procure an ingraftment into the government.”43

Ordinance of 178448 is significant in that it left many of the details of organization to the future states themselves. They were, however, to “forever remain a part of this confederacy of the United States of America” and “their respective governments shall be republican.”49,50

Jefferson supported banned the expansion of slavery into the new territories.51 The plan failed by a single vote in the Congress (a delegate from New Jersey was too ill to attend, dooming the bill).52,53 Reflecting on the closeness of the decision, Jefferson wrote: “Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.”54 After an early legal and legislative life attempting to abolish slavery, Jefferson, now at midlife, made a calculated decision that he would no longer risk his “usefulness” in the arena by pressing the issue.55 (There was a partial victory later: The Northwest Ordinance of 178756 prohibited slavery north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi rivers.) In all, though, for Jefferson public life was about compromise and an unending effort to balance competing interests. To have pursued abolition, even when coupled, as it was in Jefferson’s mind, with deportation, was politically lethal. And Jefferson was not going to risk all for what he believed was a cause whose time had not yet come.

We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce.

“The politics of Europe render it indispensably necessary that with respect to everything external we be one nation only, firmly hooped together,” he wrote Madison in February 1786.37 “And it should ever be held in mind that insult and war are the consequences of a want of respectability in the national character.”

“If they approve the proposed Convention in all its parts, I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes that they will amend it whenever they shall find it work wrong.”

“There are indeed some faults which revolted me a good deal in the first moment: but we must be contented to travel on towards perfection, step by step,” he wrote in May 1788.

I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists.” Reiterating his positions, he said: “My great wish

National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written by Lafayette.53 This central document of the French Revolution had been influenced by the Declaration of Independence, and Jefferson had counseled Lafayette during its drafting.54,55

The medium of philosophy: Madison is saying that Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the revolutionary nature of the rights of man in Europe was an enthusiasm divorced from the realities of governing in America.

In the late summer of 1791, Leopold II, the Holy Roman Emperor (and brother of Marie-Antoinette), in company with Frederick William II of Prussia, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz in defense of the French royal family.29,30 In turn, in the spring of 1792, the French revolutionaries declared war on Austria, thus opening a thirteen-year series of wars between revolutionary (and later Napoleonic) France and monarchical Europe.31,32 The violence of the French Revolution, including the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (in 1793) and the institution of the Terror (in 1794), drew Britain and Spain into war with France.33 The conflicts of the Old

Hamilton favored a strong national government and to a degree sought to emulate the basic British financial and commercial systems. His was a rational and coherent vision of public life, and he believed his vision the best course for the United States.

After his experience of the ancien régime in France, though, and given his anxiety about British designs on America, Jefferson found the discovery of a quasi-monarchical culture growing up around President Washington unsettling. Jefferson believed in a powerful republican government.

Hamilton as the embodiment of the deepest of republican fears: as a man who might be willing to sacrifice the American undertaking in liberty to the expediency of arbitrary authority. And Hamilton came to see Jefferson as a man who might be willing to throw everything the Americans had built to the revolutionary winds blowing from France. It was an extreme, overheated view of Hamilton (as of Jefferson), but it was a time of extreme and overheated views. Such was the political reality of the day, and Hamilton and Jefferson were politicians.

Hamilton had argued for a national financial system in which the central government would fund the national debt, assume responsibility for all state debts, and establish a national bank.73 Money for the federal government would be raised by tariffs on imports and excise taxes on distilled spirits.

The consolidation of debts at the federal level would create the need for federal taxes to pay down the debts, and the power to tax was, as ever, the most fundamental and far-reaching of all the powers of government, with the possible exception of the war-making power (which is actually also partly about taxes, since wars are so costly).

The assumption proposal, however, instantly divided the nation.78 Four states (Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland) had already been fiscally responsible and paid off much of their Revolutionary debts. Others (chiefly Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Connecticut) had not, and were therefore quite happy to send their bills to Hamilton in New York. The more fiscally responsible states believed that they would inevitably end up paying federal taxes to bail out their lagging neighbors. On Monday, April 12, 1790,

planned American campaign against the Shawnee and Miami Indians to be led by Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory.12 An important issue arose: Should the Americans tell the British about the operation at the risk of having the British pass along advance word to the Indians, their allies in harassing Americans along the frontier? Jefferson told Washington that the Americans should keep the Indian mission a secret.13 What neither the president nor the secretary of state knew was that Alexander Hamilton had already informed England through a British envoy named George Beckwith, who had played a role in turning Benedict Arnold away from the American cause.14,15

The proposal for a national bank, however, precipitated a significant debate about the role of the federal government and the relative influence of Hamilton and Jefferson in Washington’s orbit.28 Hamilton wanted the bank to be funded by federal deposits but run, in part, for the benefit of private investors. Jefferson and Madison objected.29 They feared that the Hamiltonian program would enable financial speculators to benefit from commercial transactions made possible by government funds.

strict construction—that any power not specifically mentioned in the Constitution was reserved for the states, not the federal government. “To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition,” Jefferson wrote in February 1791.31 An improviser and a nationalist, Jefferson would not

Hamilton replied brilliantly, arguing that “an adherence to the letter of [the Constitution’s] powers would at once arrest the motions of government.”33,34

Jefferson was a working politician and diplomat who believed in an effective central government—his experience in the Virginia governorship and during the Confederation years had convinced him of that—and often asserted the need to project power. There was, however, a foundational point on which Jefferson never compromised, a conviction that drove much of his political life from 1790 until his death. He feared monarchy or dictatorship, which is different from fearing a strong national government, though Jefferson is often thought to have believed them the same thing. One of the terms he used to describe his opponents—“Monocrats”—is telling, for the word means government by the one.

Trumpocrats?

The Jefferson of the cabinet, of the vice presidency, and of the presidency can be best understood by recalling that his passion for the people and his regard for republicanism belonged to a man who believed that there were forces afoot—forces visible and invisible, domestic and foreign—that sought to undermine the rights of man by reestablishing the rule of priests and nobles and kings.

Where some saw hypocrisy, others saw political agility. As long as a political leader has some core strategic belief—and Jefferson did, in his defense of republicanism—then tactical flexibility can be a virtue. Even Alexander Hamilton recognized Jefferson’s commitment to the nation,

In 1790 and in 1791, on the island of St. Domingue (now Haiti), slaves and their free allies rose in rebellion against their French imperial masters.56 In bloody warfare that was to last well over a decade, the blacks of the island, deeply affected by the promises of the French Revolution, fought to win the liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.57 For slaveholding Americans, the war on St. Domingue seemed a glimpse of what could come to the United States should the slaves rise en masse.

Throughout the 1790s slaveholding Americans feared that the example of St. Domingue would lead to the long-dreaded slave war, possibly with the explicit help of refugees from the island.60

the triumph of the blacks, under the leadership of Toussaint-Louverture, would so fatally weaken France in the New World that Paris would one day reassess its ambitions along the American borders.63,64