Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

“So ask the travelled inhabitant of any nation,” he wrote later in his autobiography, “in what country on earth would you rather live?” The first answer, he said, would be in one’s own.29 But the second? France, of course, always France.

Jefferson had been subtly investigating how much the other countries gave “to purchase their peace.”32 No one wanted to tell him, he wrote to James Monroe, “yet from some glimmerings it appears to be very considerable”—somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 a year.33 “Surely our people will not give this,” he continued.34 “Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty? If they refuse, why not go to war with them?…We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honorable occasion or with a weaker foe?”

Lucy’s death made a difficult season even worse. “Mr. J. is a man of great sensibility, and parental affection,” Abigail and John Adams’s daughter Nabby Adams wrote in her journal.47 “His wife died when this child [Lucy] was born, and he was in a confirmed state of melancholy; confined himself from the world, and even from his friends, for a long time; and this news has greatly affected him.”

As much as Jefferson loved France, residence abroad gave him a greater appreciation for his own nation. “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy,” Jefferson wrote Monroe.49 “I confess I had no idea of it myself.”

We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy.1

Head. I wished to make you sensible how imprudent it is to place your affections, without reserve, on objects you must so soon lose, and whose loss when it comes must cost you such severe pangs. Remember the last night. You knew your friends were to leave Paris today. This was enough to throw you into agonies. All night you tossed us from one side of the bed to the other. No sleep, no rest.… To avoid these eternal distresses, to which you are forever exposing us, you must learn to look forward before you take a step which may interest our peace. Everything in this world [is] a matter of calculation. Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand. Put into one scale the pleasures which any object may offer; but put fairly into the other the pains which are to follow, and see which preponderates.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it. The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which he is beset. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.… A friend dies or leaves us: we feel as if a limb was cut off. He is sick: we must watch over him, and participate of his pains. His fortune is shipwrecked: ours must be laid under contribution. He loses a child, a parent, or a partner: we must mourn the loss as if it was our own.

“We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy,” he had written—as the Heart, not the Head. “It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.” Jefferson believed that the future could be better than the past. He knew, though, that life was best lived among friends in the pursuit of large causes, understanding that pain was the price for anything worth having.

“I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine,” he wrote Short.27 “What more can man ask of heaven? If I should happen to die at Paris I will beg of you to send me here, and have me exposed to the sun. I am sure it will bring me to life again.”

Jefferson did not like the omission of a declaration (or bill) of rights to guarantee “freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury.”66

Jefferson could hardly have been leading a more complicated life. His work was urgent, his life in Parisian intellectual and social circles busy and dizzying. He was trying to raise his two daughters. He feared for his young, vulnerable republic, and he had been engaged in a flirtation with a married woman, slipping in and out of hired carriages in the shaded suburbs of Paris and strolling through the romantic forests of the city. From Versailles to the city’s theaters and opera, he was living vibrantly and fretting constantly. Any hour could bring devastating news about America—about her security, her stability, her standing.

Sex, Jefferson himself once remarked, was “the strongest of the human passions,” and he was not a man to deny himself what he wanted.9 Sally Hemings, for her part, was “light colored and decidedly good-looking,”

Jefferson was unaccustomed to encountering resistance to his absolute will at all, much less from a slave. His whole life was about controlling as many of the world’s variables as he could. Yet here was a girl basically the same age as his own eldest daughter refusing to take her docile part in the long-running drama of the sexual domination of enslaved women by their white masters.

On Tuesday, August 25, 1789, Lafayette asked Jefferson to “break every engagement to give us a dinner tomorrow, Wednesday.52 We shall be some members of the National Assembly—eight of us whom I want to [coalesce] as being the only means to prevent a total dissolution and a civil war.” The next day the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written by Lafayette.53 This central document of the French Revolution had been influenced by the Declaration of Independence, and Jefferson had counseled Lafayette during its drafting.

One might think that a man who so hated “criticisms and censures” would indeed withdraw from the scene of affairs and live out his days relatively safe from conversational and political condemnation. Such a withdrawal, however, would have been unnatural for Jefferson—a denial of his essential character, a character at once human and heroic. He was both an unflinching political warrior and an easily wounded soul. He always would be.

Though he tried to make himself pleasant, Jefferson found New York politically uncomfortable. He suffered, he recalled, from “wonder and mortification” at the prevailing Federalist climate in governing circles.

The assumption proposal, however, instantly divided the nation.78 Four states (Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland) had already been fiscally responsible and paid off much of their Revolutionary debts. Others (chiefly Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Connecticut) had not, and were therefore quite happy to send their bills to Hamilton in New York. The more fiscally responsible states believed that they would inevitably end up paying federal taxes to bail out their lagging neighbors.

Yet Jefferson also believed in compromise. He advised his daughter Patsy to approach all people and all things with forbearance. “Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love,” Jefferson wrote in July 1790.92 “All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.” It was sound counsel for life at Monticello—and at New York.

Hamilton had privately asked Beckwith to tell the British authorities that Washington’s government was open for business with London. “I have always preferred a connection with you, to that of any other country,” Hamilton said to Beckwith, continuing: “we think in English, and have a similarity of prejudices and of predilections.”17 It was a clear effort to become part of Britain’s sphere rather than France’s—the opposite of the course Jefferson favored.

the Nootka episode’s possible enormousness, its suddenness, and its coming at such an early hour in the life of the government helped create a habit of mind that persisted through the years. The world was rife with danger, any particular event could produce universal calamity, and the Old World—especially Britain, France, and Spain—remained threats to American serenity and security.

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.

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 British system of government. In the candlelight, Adams said that in his view “if some of its defects and abuses were corrected, it would be the most perfect constitution of government ever devised by man.”5 Jefferson sat in a kind of predictable horror, listening to this paean to a nation that perpetuated the role of hereditary power.

Jefferson believed that members of Congress had a vested interest in the Hamiltonian financial system. It “will be the instrument for producing in future a king, lords and commons, or whatever else those who direct it may choose,” he told Washington.31 The aim of the “Monarchial Federalists” was to use “the new government merely as a stepping stone to monarchy.”

“I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the union into two or more parts,” Jefferson said, yet if northern interests were to predominate, it would become impossible to say what might happen.

Jefferson confided his fears to Lafayette. “Too many of these stock jobbers and King-jobbers have come into our legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become stock jobbers and king-jobbers.”

Hamilton’s system, Jefferson said, “flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature.”

“Should Congress adopt a Prince of the House of Brunswick for their future President or King, the happiness of the two nations would be interwoven and united—all jealousies removed and the most durable affections cemented that perhaps ever were formed between two independent nations,” the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, wrote in August 1792—the

Support for the French Revolution had once been a unifying factor in American politics. “We were all strongly attached to France—scarcely any man more strongly than myself,” recalled John Marshall.65 “I sincerely believed human liberty to depend in a great measure on the success of the French Revolution.” Despite some Federalist misgivings from the start, common wisdom held that the French struggle for liberty was of a piece with the American Revolution. From the autumn of 1792 forward, though, as the French Revolution became ever bloodier, American opinion came to be divided—especially after extremists fomented ever-deadlier riots and purges, forced Lafayette abroad, and took Louis XVI to the scaffold in January 1793.

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.

in a cry of frustration, he cataloged the irritations he felt and the sense of futility that sometimes seized him. “Worn down with labors from morning till night, and day to day; knowing them as fruitless to others as they are vexatious to myself, committed singly in desperate and eternal contest against a host who are systematically undermining the public liberty and prosperity,” he was, he said, “giving everything I love, in exchange for everything I hate, and all this without a single gratification in possession or prospect, in present enjoyment or future wish.”

Profound

“The President was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.…37 Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives.… That by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet that they were charging him with wanting to be a king.” The meeting was effectively over.

I THINK IT IS MONTAIGNE who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head,” Jefferson wrote a friend from Monticello in February 1794.

His decision, he wrote in April 1795, was no. He would not stand for the office. “The little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set still less store by a posthumous than present name.”76 That was not strictly true, but Jefferson liked to tell himself it was. Public men were not to be seen as anxious for office or place, and Jefferson frequently denied his self-evident drive to shape the era in which he lived.

In the last days of the 1796 election, Jefferson had drafted a kind letter to Adams. After the usual disclaimers (“I have no ambition to govern men”), Jefferson wrote that the presidency was “a painful and thankless office.”

During the vice presidential years Jefferson became more philosophical about criticism, seeing it as an inevitable feature of political life, something to be endured—like storm or fire—if one wished to prevail in the public arena.

“A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good humor, will go far towards securing to you the estimation of the world,” he wrote to Patsy’s son Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

Good humor, Jefferson added, “is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment’s consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!”

Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves dispassionately what we hear from others standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, “never to contradict anybody.”

“I am among those who think well of the human character generally,” he wrote twenty-one months before becoming president.25 “It is impossible for a man who takes a survey of what is already known, not to see what an immensity in every branch of science yet remains to be discovered.”

Astronomy, botany, chemistry, natural history, anatomy: These were “branches of science … worth the attention of every man,” Jefferson said, adding that “great fields are yet to be explored to which our faculties are equal, and that to an extent of which we cannot fix the limits.”26 It was “cowardly” to think “the human mind is incapable of further advances.”

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.”

Gut

“Can such an army under Hamilton be disbanded?”

Jefferson admired Washington’s gifts in the art of leadership but could not help but see the first president as what he had become: a Federalist icon whose party, Jefferson thought, was moving the United States in the wrong direction.

“Perhaps no man in this community has equal cause with myself to deplore the loss,” Hamilton said after Washington’s death.23 “I have been much indebted to the kindness of the General, and he was an Aegis very essential to me.”

At Monticello, he fell into existential worry. “I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all,” Jefferson wrote in a private memorandum.60 “I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them perhaps a little later.”

You always had the people and now have the government on your side, so that the prospect is as favorable as could be wished.2 At the same time it must be admitted you have much trouble and difficulty to encounter. —JAMES MONROE

A social creature, Jefferson nevertheless lived in relative domestic isolation in Washington. Only Meriwether Lewis kept house with him in the unfinished mansion. Jefferson said that they lived like “two mice in a church.”

He felt lonely early in his tenure. His colleagues were slow to assemble. “I am still at a great loss,” he said as he settled in.