Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Judged by the raw standard of the winning and the keeping of power, however, Thomas Jefferson was the most successful political figure of the first half century of the American republic.

Jefferson believed the will of an educated, enlightened majority should prevail.

“It is a charming thing to be loved by everybody,” he told his grandchildren, “and the way to obtain it is, never to quarrel or be angry with anybody.”

Like his father, he believed in the virtues of riding and of walking, holding that a vigorous body helped create a vigorous mind.26 “Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded,” Jefferson once said.27 In fact, Jefferson believed the rainier and the colder the better. “A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet,” he said. “It is but taking a cold bath, which never gives a cold to any one. Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed.”

The motto at Williamsburg’s popular Raleigh Tavern had it right: “Jollity, offspring of wisdom and good living.”33

In 1754, when Jefferson was not yet twelve years old, at a convention in Albany, New York, the American colonists made a proposal, known as the Albany Plan of Union.6 It was a bid to become a largely self-governing province under a national royal governor. Its author, Benjamin Franklin, noted that the plan collapsed because Americans thought it too autocratic and the British found it too democratic.

He immersed himself in the subtle skills of engaging others, chiefly by offering people that which they value most: an attentive audience to listen to their own visions and views.

Virginians owed at least £2.3 million to British merchants, nearly half the total owed by all the American colonies.26,27

Dunmore decided that the enemy of his enemy was his friend—that the slaves whom the whites often feared were Britain’s natural allies in Virginia.

On Saturday, 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

In truth the British demands on the colonists were hardly outrageous. The expense of defending the borders was considerable; American wealth was substantial; and Edmund Burke made a compelling case in London for “virtual representation”—the argument that the king and Parliament were stewards of the whole empire whether particular colonists could vote for members of the House of Commons or not.

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

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.”

Paine and Jefferson became friends and longtime correspondents; they shared a vision of a new, enlightened world—though Jefferson never forgot that it was foolhardy to sacrifice real progress, however compromised, to the dreams of the ideal.

“It is impossible to increase taxes, disastrous to keep on borrowing, and inadequate merely to cut expenses,” Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Louis’s finance minister, told the king in an August 1786 memorandum.

Alexander Hamilton was said to believe the “most plausible shape” of a reunion with Great Britain would be “the establishment of a son of the present monarch … with a family compact.”

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

One of Madison’s many services to the republic was the mediating role he played in Jefferson’s life, often protecting Jefferson from himself.

He was both an unflinching political warrior and an easily wounded soul. He always would be.

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.

His sister Mary’s husband, John Bolling, was apparently alcoholic and abusive. “Mr. B.’s habitual intoxication will destroy himself, his fortune and family,” he wrote to Polly.41 “Of all calamities this is the greatest.” Jefferson was practical, even cold, about the matter. “I wish my sister could bear his misconduct with more patience. It might lessen his attachment to the bottle, and at any rate would make her own time more tolerable. When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable.”

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.

From Pennsylvania, Governor Thomas McKean saw every possibility. “Interest, character, duty, love of country all conspire to insure [Jefferson’s election]; but I have been told that envy, malice, despair and a delight in doing mischief will prompt the Anglo-Federalists to set all other considerations at nought, and that it is intended to so manage as to keep the states equally divided, in order that Congress may in the form of a law appoint a President for us until a new election shall take place.”

From war making to economic life to territorial acquisition to federal spending to subpoenas and the sharing of information with Congress and the courts, Jefferson maintained or expanded the authority of the presidential office.

It is not too much to say that Jefferson used Hamiltonian means to pursue Jeffersonian ends.

“What sort of government is that of the U.S.?” Napoleon once asked a French traveler who had just returned from spending time with President Jefferson.25 “One, Sire,” the traveler said, “that is neither seen or felt.”

The man who had, as secretary of state, argued against broad construction in the case of the establishment of the Bank of the United States, found that his own powers as president benefited from the broadest kind of construction.

John Quincy Adams was right when he told his diary that political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. “The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense,” Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term.

Jefferson’s decision to acquire Louisiana without seeking a constitutional amendment expanded the powers of the executive in ways that would likely have driven Jefferson to distraction had another man been president.

In his years in office he turned the presidency—and the President’s House—into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, a vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.

To Jefferson it was the worst of hours. He knew slavery was a moral wrong and believed it would ultimately be abolished. He could not, however, bring himself to work for emancipation.

“There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity,” he wrote in 1814, but that was not true.11 He was not willing to sacrifice his own way of life, though he characteristically left himself a rhetorical escape by introducing the subjective standard of practicability.