Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton are sometimes depicted as wiser, more practical men than the philosophical master of Monticello. 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.

James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.) This unofficial and little-noted Jeffersonian dynasty is unmatched in American history.

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

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.

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

an antecedent of american exceptionalism, rhetoric that is popular with conservatives today. contrast with Hamilton's skepticism

He admired the letters of Madame de Sévigné, whose correspondence offered a panoramic view of the France of Louis XIV,

Afterward, “filled with wonder,” the guest asked the landlord who this extraordinary man was. When the topic was the law, the traveler said, “he thought he was a lawyer”; when it was medicine, he “felt sure he was a physician”; when it was theology, “he became convinced that he was a clergyman.” The landlord’s reply was brief. “Oh, why I thought you knew the Squire.”

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 tr...

he was drawn to the world beyond Monticello, endlessly at work, as he put it, “to see the standard of reason at length erected after so many ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles.”

“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.”

Rather than recalling the Revolutionary War in its traditional way—as the armed struggle that lasted from Lexington and Concord in 1775 until the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781—it is illuminating in considering Jefferson to think of the struggle against Great Britain and its influence in American life as one that opened in 1764 and did not end until the Treaty of Ghent and the Battle of New Orleans brought the War of 1812 to a close in 1815.77

Charles Francis Adams, who observed: “More ardent in his imagination than his affections, he did not always speak exactly as he felt towards friends and enemies. As a consequence, he has left hanging over a part of his public life a vapor of duplicity, or, to say the least, of indiscretion, the presence of which is generally felt more than it is seen.”

1763–89 (Chicago, 1977). Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), is a landmark work on the role of deeply held notions of liberty and of the pervasiveness of conspiracy.