Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

President Madison sent a war-preparation message to Congress on Tuesday, November 5, 1811.150 He argued that the depredations along the borders and on the oceans were too much to bear. The time had come to put the question of America’s permanent independence to the test. “We are to have war then?151 I believe so and that it is necessary,” Jefferson wrote Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. “Every hope from time, patience and the love of peace is exhausted, and war or abject submission are the only alternatives left us.” On the last day of 1811, Jefferson offered warm words to Madison. “Your message had all the qualities it should possess, firm, rational, and dignified.…152 Heaven help you through all your difficulties.”

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.1 —THOMAS JEFFERSON

We dont reason any more it is all about the feels.

Another battle was done, too: that between Jeffersonian Republicans and unrepentant Federalists in New England. At a meeting in Connecticut—it was known as the Hartford Convention of 1814–15—the Federalists issued aggrieved resolutions amid some renewed talk of secession.7 News of the gathering, though, came as word of the peace with Britain spread, thus casting the Federalists in an extreme and unpopular light. “The cement of the Union is in the heartblood of every American,” said Jefferson.8 “I do not believe there is on earth a government established on so immovable a basis.” By the middle of 1815, then, the America Jefferson had long envisioned and fought for was at last largely secure from external enemies.

“My fundamental principle would be … that we are to be saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power.” Jefferson believed in the existence of a creator God and in an afterlife. Most significantly, he defended the moral lessons of the life and teachings of Jesus, whose divinity Jefferson rejected but whose words and example he embraced. In his presidential years he had completed a forty-six-page work entitled The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth extracted from the account of his life and doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.59,60 In retirement he returned to the project, privately creating a more ambitious work he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.61 “The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknowledged,” Jefferson wrote the Unitarian Jared Sparks in 1820.62 “Thinking men of all nations rallied readily to the doctrine of one only God [sic], and embraced it with the pure-morals which Jesus inculcated.”

To John Adams, Jefferson wrote: “The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words.66 And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.” Jefferson had a fairly detailed vision

That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself is the sum of religion.68

“The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave,” he wrote a correspondent that year.74 A powerful one from the West was coming fast.

Jefferson saw the issue in terms of power. If the federal government began regulating slavery within the states, then a precedent would be established, for regulation could finally lead to abolition.

DECALOGUE OF CANONS FOR OBSERVATION IN PRACTICAL LIFE. 1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. 3. Never spend your money before you have it. 4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold. 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. 8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened. 9. Take things always by their smooth handle. 10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.