Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

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.

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.

To his friends, who were numerous and devoted, Jefferson was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying. Yet to his foes, who were numerous and prolific, Jefferson was an atheist and a fanatic, a demagogue and a dreamer, a womanly Francophile who could not be trusted with the government of a great nation.

By force of nearly two and a half centuries of habit, we tend to view our history as an inevitable chain of events leading to a sure conclusion. There was, however, nothing foreordained about the American experiment. To treat it as a set piece pitting an evil empire of Englishmen against a noble band of Americans does a disservice to both, for it caricatures Britain and minimizes the complexities that Jefferson and his contemporaries faced in choosing accommodation or rebellion.

To Jefferson, little in America was secure, for the military success of the Revolution had marked only the end of one battle in a larger, half-century war. From Alexander Hamilton’s financial program to John Adams’s weakness for British forms to the overt New England hostility toward his presidency, he judged political life in the context of the British threat to democratic republicanism. In retrospect, Jefferson’s fears about the British may seem overheated—they surely did to some who lived through the same years and the same pressures—but they were real to him.

“The most fortunate of us all in our journey through life frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us,” Jefferson once wrote, and “to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.”79

Jefferson valued his education—and education in general—above all things, remarking that, given the choice, he would take the classical training his father arranged for him over the estate his father left him.108

Jefferson said things or proposed courses of action that could conceivably have led to the end of a slave society. The Howell brief suggests a Jeffersonian openness to such an eventuality, but for him abolition was always to be an eventuality for future generations, not a reality that he would ever see.

Even among the elite, childbirth was dangerous and could be fatal to both mother and infant. Jefferson was to learn this well: All but two of the six children born to Patty and Thomas Jefferson were fated to die in infancy or childhood.

For the colonists, the decision to revolt was not solely economic, but it was surely informed by concerns over money.34 In Virginia the impetus to rebel came from the propertied elements of society; the middle and lower classes were slower to follow the lead of men such as Jefferson. It was a rich man’s revolution, and Jefferson was a rich man. It was a philosophical revolution, and Jefferson was a philosophical man.

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.

he told his nephew that religion required careful thought, not reflexive acceptance. “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.20 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.”

We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”24

So which was the real Jefferson—the philosopher advocating the end of binding laws, or the politician who believed “that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time”? The likely truth is that these competing Jeffersons were both real. He thought one way in one era and another way in other eras—and sometimes he thought differently more or less simultaneously, a common human trait, particularly among the curious and the intellectually active.

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. Skeptical about the durability of republican institutions based on broad suffrage and regular elections—as any student of history and human nature would be; there was nothing like America in the world—Hamilton was more open than Jefferson was to the adaptation of old-world features to American government. And Hamilton was willing to entertain the possibilities of a hereditary (or at least lifelong) presidency or Senate. In a speech to the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton had spoken of a possible American monarch who would be “capable of resisting the popular current.”70 More immediately, Hamilton advocated a strong relationship with Britain, which, given the realities of the day, meant the United States would be a subordinate power to London.

As the Washington administration unfolded, Jefferson came to see 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.

There is much truth in the tendency to encapsulate the competing traditions of the early American republic as a contest between Jefferson and Hamilton.47 For partisans of each man, it was then—and has been ever since—convenient to caricature the other, with Hamilton as the scheming proto-Brit bent on monarchy and Jefferson as the naïve proto-Frenchman intoxicated by visions of excessive democracy. Inevitably, though, such shorthand is incomplete. In the first hours of the decade and sporadically throughout, Jefferson sometimes found himself in agreement with Hamilton (and with Washington and Adams as well), for 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. Jefferson fretted over the prospect of the return of a king in some form, either as an immensely powerful president unchecked by the Constitution of 1787 or in a more explicitly monarchical or dictatorial role.

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. His opposition to John Adams and to Alexander Hamilton, to the British and to financial speculators, grew out of this fundamental concern.

The battle between Jefferson and the men he saw as “Monocrats” (and the “Monocrats” believed Jefferson an American Jacobin who would not have minded the erection of a Parisian guillotine in Philadelphia) was interesting not least because they were implacable foes who could—and did—agree and cooperate from time to time, and who, even in their hours of starkest hostility, served in the same cabinet, dined at the same tables, and moved through the same intimate American world. Wars are often fought between brothers.

Washington took a sensible view of the conflict between his top two lieutenants. “For I will frankly and solemnly declare that I believe the views of both of you are pure, and well-meant; and that experience alone will decide with respect to the salubrity of the measures which are the subjects of dispute,” he wrote Jefferson on Thursday, October 18, 1792.50 It was an understandable way for a president, who saw the whole picture, to frame the issue. “Why, then,” Washington continued, “when some of the best citizens in the United States—men of discernment—uniform and tried patriots, who have no sinister views to promote, but are chaste in their ways of thinking and acting are to be found, some on one side, and some on the other of the questions which have caused these agitations, should either of you be so tenacious of your opinions as to make no allowances for those of the other?”

To Jefferson, to be for the French Revolution was to be a republican and friend to liberty; to be against it, or to have reservations about it, was to be a monarchist and a traitor to freedom.

“I have not the arrogance to say I would refuse the honorable office you mention to me; but I can say with truth that I would rather be thought worthy of it than to be appointed to it,” he wrote Cocke.110 For “well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.”

“In every free and deliberating society, there must from the nature of man be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these for the most part must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time,” he wrote John Taylor in June 1798.65 “Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch and debate to the people the proceedings of the other.… A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight.”

He was more of a chess player than a traditional warrior, thinking out his moves and executing them subtly rather than reacting to events viscerally and showily. In Washington, in fact, he found himself in need of a book he had left at Monticello: a work of strategy by the chess master François-André Danican Philidor. It was important enough to him that he recalled its place precisely: “You will find [it]37 in the book room, 2nd press on the left from the door of the entrance,” he wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr.

To Jefferson, Hamilton had represented the most dangerous of tendencies. As president, however, Jefferson did little to destroy the system Hamilton had built. “We had indeed no personal dissensions,” Jefferson later said of Hamilton.79 “Each of us, perhaps, thought well of the other as a man, but as politicians it was impossible for two men to be of more opposite principles.”

Jefferson was the first president to advocate a broad program of public works, calling for a constitutional amendment to authorize the financing of “education, roads, rivers, canals,” and other projects.13,14,15 “By these operations,” he said in his Sixth Annual Message, “new channels of communication will be opened between the States; the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties.”16

“I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the county under such regulations as would secure their safe return in due time,” he said.

By the time they died in 1826, Jefferson and Adams had exchanged a total of 329 letters in their lifetime, with a substantial number—158—coming from 1812 until the end.142

“Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” he wrote in 1816.40 They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions … but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.…

“When I contemplate the immense advances in science, and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation; and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been, as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches,” he wrote in retirement.

As a politician and a devotee of republicanism, Jefferson hoped that subjecting religious sensibilities to free inquiry would transform faith from a source of contention into a force for good, for he knew that religion in one form or another was a perpetual factor in the world.65 The wisest course, then, was not to rail against it but to encourage the application of reason to questions of faith. The more rational that men became about religion, Jefferson believed, the better lives they would lead; in turn the life of the nation would become more stable and virtuous.