Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Here are so many wants, so many affections and passions engaged, so varying in their interests and objects, that no one can be conciliated without revolting others.2 —THOMAS JEFFERSON, on the political culture of Washington, D.C.

He worked from ten to thirteen hours a day at his writing table, doing paperwork and receiving callers from early morning until midday; that gave him, he figured, “an interval of 4 hours for riding, dining and a little unbending.”4 At noon he tried to leave the President’s House for a ride or a walk before returning to be “engaged with company till candle-light.”5,6 It was only at night—and it was the rare night—that he spent time on the “mechanics, mathematics, philosophy etc.”7 that he loved.

Tagordnung

The news of the cession of Louisiana.…1 forms an era in our history, and of itself must render the administration of Jefferson immortal. —SAMUEL HARRISON

As frightening as the moment was, Jefferson approached it with confidence: The success of his first year in office buoyed him for the struggle with Napoleon. The story of the Louisiana Purchase is one of strength, of Jefferson’s adaptability and, most important, his determination to secure the territory from France, doubling the size of the country and transforming the United States into a continental power. A slower or less courageous politician might have bungled the acquisition; an overly idealistic one might have lost it by insisting on strict constitutional scruples. Jefferson, however, was neither slow nor weak nor overly idealistic.

Now that Napoleon was in the picture, Jefferson understood what had to be done. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”12 With national interests at stake, Jefferson was willing to shift his sympathies from Paris to London—or at least be seen that way to improve America’s negotiating power.

The president and James Madison weighed the possibilities and, in what Dolley Madison called “a most important piece of political business,” decided to ask their fellow Virginian James Monroe to travel to France as a presidential envoy.17 “In this situation we are obliged to call on you for a temporary sacrifice of yourself, to prevent this greatest of evils in the present prosperous tide of our affairs,” Jefferson wrote Monroe, who agreed to the assignment.

Jefferson believed, too, that sociability was essential to republicanism.5 Men who liked and respected and enjoyed one another were more likely to cultivate the virtuous habits that would enable the country’s citizens to engage in “the pursuit of happiness.” An affectionate man living in harmony with his neighbors was more likely to understand the mutual sacrifice of opinion of which Jefferson had spoken, and to make those sacrifices.

“How I wish that I possessed the power of a despot,” Jefferson said one day, surprising his guests.12 “Yes,” he went on, “I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifices to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor.” A guest asked, “And have you not authority to save those on the public grounds?” “No,” said Jefferson, “only an armed guard could save them.13,14 The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder, [and] it pains me to an unspeakable degree.”

The conversation was “earnest and animated,” but one guest, who had lived in Europe for a time, sat “silent and unnoticed,” apparently feeling overwhelmed by the high-powered company.25,26,27 He began thinking himself “a stranger in his own country [who] was totally unknown to the present company.”

With a stroke of grace, Jefferson had transformed an unnoticed guest into what Mrs. Smith called “a person of importance,” and the president fulfilled the most fundamental duty of a host: He showed respect to those under his roof, making them feel comfortable and cared for.32 To Jefferson, each guest who came into his orbit was significant, and he had little patience—no patience, in fact—with the trappings of rank.

Dolley Madison learned the news directly from Jefferson. “A letter from the President announced the death of poor [Polly] and the consequent misery it has occasioned them all—this is among the many proofs … of the uncertainty of life!” Mrs. Madison wrote her sister.67 “A girl so young, so lovely—all the efforts of her father, doctors and friends availed nothing.”

Exhausted and grieving, Jefferson returned to Washington. “I arrived here last night after the most fatiguing journey I have experienced for a great many years,” Jefferson wrote Patsy, now his last surviving child with his late wife, from Washington on May 14.

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.”

Thinking of France and England, Jefferson tried to make the best of a troubling hour. “What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit at this instant,” Jefferson wrote in January 1806.139 “Our wish ought to be that he who has armies may not have the dominion of the sea, and that he who has dominion of the sea may be one who has no armies. In this way we may be quiet, at home at least.” Jefferson had to face the inevitable question: How long would the quiet last—how long could it last?

By late March 1807, Burr was under arrest. Jefferson paid careful attention to the proceedings.63 “No man’s history proves better the value of honesty,” Jefferson wrote.64 “With that, what might he not have been!” Unfortunately his headache, he said, “leaves me but an hour and a half each morning capable of any business at all.”

There were also the usual complaints and stresses. “I am tired of an office where I can do no more good than many others who would be glad to be employed in it,” he wrote his old Revolutionary colleague John Dickinson in early 1807.73 “To myself personally it brings nothing but unceasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.”

History has not been kind to Jefferson’s embargo; it is commonly seen as bad policy that delayed but did not prevent war and left America weaker.49 There is much to this criticism, but the options Jefferson had were such that the embargo, as he himself put it, may not have been a good idea, but it was the least bad. The country was not ready for war with Britain (or with France) either politically or militarily, and the politics of the moment worked against attempts to strengthen the army and the navy. Prevailing opinion held that standing armies were bad and that naval establishments were invitations to—rather than defenses against—war, as well as incredibly expensive. These were Jefferson’s opinions, too, in the abstract,

He had, he believed, done his duty. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight,”

“I suppose indeed that in public life a man whose political principles have any decided character, and who has energy enough to give them effect, must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles,” Jefferson wrote.

The target? Jefferson himself. “I became of course the butt of everything which reason, ridicule, malice and falsehood could supply,” he said.

“Three alternatives alone are to be chosen from. 1. Embargo. 2. War. 3. Submission and tribute. And, wonderful to tell, the last will not want advocates.” There were no good choices. “Here, everything is uncertain,” Jefferson wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., from Washington in December.

He generally got five to eight hours of sleep a night, always reading for half an hour or an hour before bedtime, using eyeglasses.15,16 As he grew older he had difficulty hearing different voices speaking at the same time.17 He enjoyed good health, suffering from extremely rare fevers.18 The headaches that had plagued him in times of stress seemed “now to have left me” once he was free of the clamor of office.

In the wintertime, when the days were short, Jefferson would sit with his family before a fire in the late afternoon. This was the hour, a granddaughter said, “when it grew too dark to read,” and so “in the half hour before candles came in, as we all sat round the fire, he taught us several childish games, and would play them with us.”71 There was “Cross Questions and Crooked Answers” and “I Love My Love with A,” a pastime in which successive players had to come up with attributes throughout the alphabet.

The arrival of candles signaled an end to games and a resumption of reading.74 Everything fell quiet as Jefferson “took up his book to read, and we would not speak out of a whisper lest we should disturb him, and generally we followed his example and took a book—and I have seen him raise his eyes from his own book and look round on the little circle of readers, and smile and make some remark to mamma about it.”

His sense of the needs of others was part of his nature—a nature, one granddaughter said, “so eminently sympathetic, that with those he loved, he could enter into their feelings, anticipate their wishes, gratify their tastes, and surround them with an atmosphere of affection.”81 A patriarch’s love is rather like a politician’s skill. Both are about perceiving what others want, and trying, within reason, to provide it. That had been the work of Jefferson’s public life and now, in retirement, it was that of his personal life, too.

An anonymous writer praised him as the greatest of men: “You have, in your public capacity, been to me a father, a protector, a preserver.86 For these services I will forever render you the tribute of a grateful heart.” An old friend from France offered him the highest flattery: “Though I am convinced that Mr. Madison, your friend and your student, will govern according to the same principles as you have, I cannot help regretting that you did not want to retain the presidency for four more years,” Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours wrote Jefferson in June 1809.

One thing was very clear as he settled back into life on the mountain: He loved, he said, the “ineffable luxury of being owner of my own time.”

Reassured and surprised by the warm report from the Virginians, Adams changed his tone about Jefferson, displaying, Coles said, “an exalted admiration of his character, and appreciation of his services to his country, as well during the Revolution as subsequently.” Adams then criticized the press for its harshness toward Jefferson, adding: “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

“No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty,” Jefferson wrote John Wayles Eppes in 1814.5 “Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only.”

he learned that Abigail Adams had died. He wrote warmly to John Adams, noting that words could do little in such an hour of grief, a lesson Jefferson had learned, he said, “in the school of affliction.”18 Still, “mingling sincerely my tears with yours,” Jefferson said, “it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

Despite all, Jefferson struggled to be optimistic. “I think, with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us,” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1816.

Adams was always less sanguine. “I dare not look beyond my nose into futurity,” he wrote Jefferson.

He loved the spirit of innovation. “The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.”41 The future was full of infinite possibilities. “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.

He invested the enterprise with the highest of stakes, writing: “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.47 This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

University

Education had been a perennial interest. “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people,” Jefferson had written George Wythe in the 1780s.48 “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”

“My fundamental principle would be … that we are to be saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power.”

The doctrine that bears Monroe’s name—that the United States opposes all European intervention in the Western Hemisphere—owes much to the work of Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who was instrumental in the formulation of the policy. But it was also at least partly of Jeffersonian inspiration. In Jefferson’s case, it was fitting that a man who had spent his life in pursuit of control would extend it as far as he could in the service of his nation, leaving a kind of last declaration of independence. This time it was a matter of policy, not of revolution. It was a declaration all the same.

How to live a virtuous life? “Adore God,” he wrote. “Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.”

A DECALOGUE OF CANONS FOR OBSERVATION IN PRACTICAL LIFE. 1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. 3. Never spend your money before you have it. 4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold. 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. 8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened. 9. Take things always by their smooth handle. 10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

He wanted as much control as possible. “Mrs. Randolph afterwards told me this was his habit—that his plan was to fight old age off, by never admitting the approach of helplessness,” Lee wrote.15 After he left the bedroom for the main part of the house, Lee never laid eyes on Jefferson again.

“He lives and will live in the memory and gratitude of the wise and the good, as a luminary of science, as a votary of liberty, as a model of patriotism, and as a benefactor of humankind.”48 The professor of ancient languages at the University of Virginia said: “He ought to be revered by all who enjoy the advantage of being educated in his University, and ever remembered as one of the great men whom Virginia has produced.49 His great deeds are recorded in the epitaph which he wrote for his own tomb.”

Had he been only a philosopher he would not have endured as he does. Had he been only a legislator, or only a diplomat, or only an inventor, or only an author, or only an educator, or even only a president he would not have endured as he does.

He endures because we can see in him all the varied and wondrous possibilities of the human experience—the thirst for knowledge, the capacity to create, the love of family and of friends, the hunger for accomplishment, the applause of the world, the marshaling of power, the bending of others to one’s own vision. His genius lay in his versatility; his larger political legacy in his leadership of thought and of men.

Yet because of his flaws and his failures he strikes us as mortal, too—a man of achievement who was nonetheless susceptible to the temptations and compromises that ensnare all of us. He was not all he could be. But no politician—no human being—ever is.

Saluting Jefferson’s “transforming genius,” Reagan said: “The pursuit of science, the study of the great works, the value of free inquiry, in short, the very idea of living the life of the mind—yes, these formative and abiding principles of higher education in America had their first and firmest advocate, and their greatest embodiment, in a tall, fair-headed, friendly man who watched this university take form from the mountainside where he lived, the university whose founding he called a crowning achievement to a long and well-spent life.”

Reagan said.16 “Indeed, as a leader of a rebellion, he was himself an architect, if you will, of disorder. But he also believed that man had received from God a precious gift of enlightenment—the gift of reason, a gift that could extract from the chaos of life meaning, truth, order.” Jefferson would have been hard put to describe the matter more clearly.