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.

Jefferson believed the will of an educated, enlightened majority should prevail. His opponents had less faith in the people, worrying that the broad American public might be unequal to self-government. Jefferson thought that same public was the salvation of liberty, the soul of the nation, and the hope of the republic.

He believed in America, and in Americans. 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

A philosopher and a scientist, a naturalist and a historian, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge. He adored detail, noting the temperature each day and carrying a tiny, ivory-leaved notebook in his pocket to track his daily expenditures.

And the world—or at least much of it—found him charming, brilliant, and gracious. Engaged in a constant campaign to win the affection of whoever happened to be in front of him at a given moment, Jefferson flirted with women and men alike. “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.”64 He hated arguing face-to-face, preferring to smooth out the rough edges of conversation, leading some people to believe Jefferson agreed with them when, in fact, he was seeking to avoid conflict.65 He paid a price for this obsession with congeniality among those who mistook his reticence for duplicity.

Jefferson did not limit his sensuous appetites to the beauties of art, the power of music, or the splendor of landscapes. He pursued two women before he met his future wife; his marriage was the source of more than a decade of domestic happiness. Her death devastated him into insensibility, and he wandered the woods of Monticello in a grief that led him to thoughts of suicide.

It is the strong in body who are both the strong and free in mind.

“My father’s education had been quite neglected; but being of a strong mind, sound judgment and eager after information,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “he read much and improved himself.”25 Self taught, Peter Jefferson became a colonel of the militia, vestryman, and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.

“from the time when, as a boy, he had turned off wearied from play and first found pleasure in books, he had never sat down in idleness.”64

“At 14 years of age the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on my self entirely, without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me,” he later wrote to a grandson.

That her eldest son grew to become just such an unflinching, resilient aristocrat is no surprise. Thomas Jefferson’s bravery in the face of domestic tragedy and his determination to have his own way on his own land among his own people could owe something to the example of a mother from whom he learned much about negotiating the storms of life.

“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

Conversant with the thought of Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Small introduced Jefferson to the key insight of the new intellectual age: that reason, not revelation or unquestioned tradition or superstition, deserved pride of place in human affairs.19,20

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote.21 “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.”

For Jefferson laziness was a sin. “Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence,” he told one of his daughters.24 Time spent at study was never wasted. “Knowledge,” Jefferson said, “indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.”25

“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.”

Jefferson was always asking questions. With “the mechanic as well as the man of science,” a descendant recalled, Jefferson learned all he could, “whether it was the construction of a wheel or the anatomy of an extinct species of animals,” and then went home to transcribe what he had heard.29 He would soon be known as a “walking encyclopedia.”

At his round dining table at Monticello, in the salons of Paris, and in the common rooms of boardinghouses and taverns in Philadelphia and New York, and finally at the President’s House in Washington, D.C., Jefferson craved talk of the latest in science and the arts and adored conversation with the beautiful women, politicians, and men of affairs who made the world run on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was a political man in the purest sense of the term. He lived among others, engaged in the business of living in community, and enjoyed being at the center of everything no matter what the everything was: He was a happy member of the FHC (or Flat Hat Club) at William and Mary, a secret society that, as Jefferson put it, “had no useful object.”

he compared himself to Job and wondered, “Is there any such thing as happiness in this world?” His answer: “No.”65 About a month later, in January 1763, writing from Shadwell, Jefferson was still gloomy. “All things here appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner and supper and go to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same: so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day,” he wrote John Page.

Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.

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. Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think. Everyone wants to believe that what they have to say is fascinating, illuminating, and possibly even epochal.

Young and bright, beloved and respected by his teachers in Williamsburg, popular in the aristocratic circles of Virginia, and with the Rebecca Burwell debacle fading from his memory, Jefferson thought the world a largely happy place. Then, on Tuesday, October 1, 1765, his sister Jane died, reminding him anew, in the manner of his father’s death and of the failed romance with Burwell, of the fragility of life.

At different moments in his legislative and public life, 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. The reaction to the Bland bill and of the court in Howell could not have failed to leave an impression, too, on the young lawyer-legislator so anxious for popularity. Wounded by the defeats of his progressive efforts on slavery, Jefferson was finally to retreat to a more conventional position.

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. Self-evidently an ardent lover, Jefferson also proved an attentive husband and father. His memorandum book notes the purchase of “breast pipes,” glass devices that facilitated the breastfeeding of infants.10

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.

“It is neither our wish nor our interest to separate from” Great Britain.62 Yet the demands were great. “Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”

The work of his conscious life had been the accumulation of knowledge, the broadening of his mind, and the formation of ideas about liberty, law, and how one ought to live. Under William Small, under George Wythe, alongside Dabney Carr and John Page, Jefferson had come to believe that reason, not hereditary right, should govern human affairs. Tyranny was tyranny, whether practiced by kings or priests. He knew, too, that he was risking everything—and everything of his young family’s.

Wichtig

His celebrity grew as his pamphlet circulated. John Adams thought it “a very handsome public paper” that demonstrated “a happy talent for composition.”76 Because of the play of his mind and the formation of his convictions, Jefferson was something of a prophet in the summer and fall of 1774, a figure who, from a mountaintop, looked deep into the nature of things and told his countrymen what he had seen. The Summary View was an act of courage driven by conviction offered to a people in search of a creed.

Henry spoke brilliantly.14 “Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace—but there is no peace,” Henry said.15 “The war is actually begun!” In a transporting climax, Henry cried: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me—give me liberty, or give me death!”

Jefferson interrupted himself at one point to say: “But for God’s sake where am I got to? Forever absorbed in the distresses of my country I cannot for three sentences keep clear of its political struggles.”49

Jane’s death disoriented her son. Already immersed in the most difficult and fearful of political enterprises—revolution and the creation of a new form of government—Jefferson was brought face-to-face with one of the deepest personal crises a man can experience. In their parents, children ideally have sources of protection and comfort and love. Parents can also be sources of irritation, fear, and anxiety. Their deaths thus represent both loss and liberation.

The parent is gone, which means the child himself, at whatever age, is compelled to assume a measure of the weight of the world commensurate with the passing of time and the increase in responsibility. Though living a crowded and consequential life, Jefferson may have been a lonelier man on the day his mother died than he had ever been.

At moments of intense emotional distress Jefferson often suffered what he would call an “attack of my periodical headache,” a migraine headache so debilitating and vicious that he once said he was “obliged to avoid reading, writing, and almost thinking.”6,7 Before 1776, his last known bout had come in the wake of his heartbreak over Rebecca Burwell. With the death of Jane Randolph Jefferson, the blood and nerves in his brain gave him nothing but anguish. The force of her death was almost more than he could stand. The pain would not stop.

It was a strange time for Jefferson, who lived with the headache, the mourning, and the uncertainty about America’s next step.8,9 He tried to stay engaged in the life of the plantation, paying a midwife to deliver Elizabeth Hemings’s son John.10 He tried, too, to stay engaged in life beyond Monticello, collecting money for powder for Virginia and for the relief of the poor of Boston.

He left Monticello for Philadelphia on Tuesday, May 7, 1776, arriving seven days later.12,13 Patty stayed in Virginia. “I am here in the same uneasy anxious state in which I was the last fall without Mrs. Jefferson who could not come with me,”

As Adams recalled the ensuing conversation with Jefferson, the Virginian suggested that Adams himself write the draft.32 “I will not,” Adams said. “You should do it,” Jefferson said. “Oh! no.” “Why will you not? You ought to do it.” “I will not.” “Why?” “Reasons enough.” “What can be your reasons?” “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.” “Well, if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.” “Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.”

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.”

Independence

Yet Jefferson had to stay to keep Virginia’s quorum.25 He hated it. “I am under the painful necessity of putting off my departure, notwithstanding the unfavorable situation of Mrs. Jefferson’s health,” he told John Page in August.

The hope from the 1750s to 1776 was that somehow the sovereign would put things to rights. It is a measure of the confidence Jefferson had in this possibility, for instance, that he maintained a tone of respect and deference to George III in his 1774 Summary View. And it is a measure of the depth of his sense of betrayal and disappointment in the king that the Declaration of Independence struck such virulent antimonarchical notes.

Jefferson loved his family; he loved Virginia; he loved his nascent nation. Raised in a tight-knit universe of kith and kin, accustomed to spending his hours reading in his father’s first-floor library, singing on the banks of the Rivanna with his sister Jane, and learning to supervise his lands at his mother’s side, he cherished his domestic worlds while being simultaneously drawn to politics. In the fall of 1776, he could not have both in France; he could in Virginia.

He was a tough man. Years later, after severely burning his leg in an accident, Clark watched a parade of Kentucky militia out the window of the doctor’s office where he was undergoing an amputation.23 Listening to the martial music, he endured the brutal operation, reportedly turning to the doctor only afterward, asking, “Well, is it off?”24 Clark was the kind of man Jefferson needed: a bold commander who could execute the vision Jefferson formulated and fought for in the political world.

The lessons Jefferson was learning—painfully—in Virginia would help him immensely in later years when his responsibilities were even larger. Boldness and decisiveness were sometimes virtues in a leader. Having failed to be either bold or decisive during the invasions of Virginia, he gained valuable experience about the price of waiting. At the time, however, he could not have known that one day he would owe something of his presidential success to his failures of 1781.

He also knew that pressing ahead was the only way to leave the past behind. There was no other way to do it, unless one chose to retire forever, which could make things worse, for then there was no opportunity to leave marks large enough to overshadow the marks of failure. Given that adversity itself was an intrinsic element of the political life Jefferson had chosen, the test of such a life came when one had to choose which path to take in adversity’s wake.

The personal and political miseries of 1781 and 1782—the invasions by the British, the aspersions on his character, and the death of his wife—might well have sent lesser men back to their plantations in bitterness and in anger at the injustice of it all. Not Jefferson. He chose advance over retreat.

The year 1783 had much in common with 1774: It was a time of twilight, an hour when the answers to great questions were unclear. In 1774 the issue was war. In 1783 it was peace—or, more precisely, whether Americans could emerge from the conflict and govern themselves as a sovereign power.

A power of central, national, and binding force was the only answer.27 The task was clear: Jefferson and his contemporaries had to lay their “shoulders to the strengthening of the band of our confederacy and averting those cruel evils to which its present weakness will expose us.”28

The problems would persist for much of the 1780s. “I have long thought and become daily more convinced that the construction of our federal government is fundamentally wrong,” John Jay wrote to Jefferson in 1786.29 “To vest legislative, judicial and executive powers in one and the same body of men, and that too in a body daily changing its members, can never be wise.”

In two largely neglected pieces published anonymously in The Pennsylvania Journal, or, Weekly Advertiser in this period, Madison made an impassioned case for a strong national government—a case that, as Mason’s views indicated, was failing to resonate broadly.

Concerned about his friend, Jefferson rapidly replied with warmth and empathy: “I sincerely lament the misadventure which has happened from whatever cause it may have happened.…39 No event has been more contrary to my expectations, and these were founded on what I thought a good knowledge of the ground. But of all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable.”

Madison