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Jefferson believed the will of an educated, enlightened majority should prevail.
He knew Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish.
decades-long liaison with Sally Hemings, his late wife’s enslaved half sister
The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy, and Virginian. Money was to be made, property to be claimed, tobacco to be planted and sold.
Jefferson believed history was “philosophy teaching by examples.”11 History, then, mattered enormously, for it could repeat itself at any time in any generation.12 And if that history brought tyranny, it was to be fought at all costs.
Elizabeth Walker was what he wanted. She was the bride of his friend John Walker, a man he had known virtually all his life. The connections between the two men were old and deep.
Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.1 —KING GEORGE III, on the American colonies
From his shipboard quarters at Norfolk, Dunmore declared martial law and directly challenged white Virginia, ordering that any slave or indentured servant who took up arms against the American Revolutionaries would be granted their freedom.76,77,78 Frightened white Virginians—and sympathetic whites in other colonies—suddenly saw their most fevered visions of slaves turning against masters threatening to become real.79 The announcement drove a number of those who had been previously lukewarm about independence into the Revolutionary camp.
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.2 —American motto suggested by Jefferson
It is error alone that needs the support of government.2 Truth can stand by itself. —THOMAS JEFFERSON, on freedom of religion
He would, he assured his dying wife, never marry again. Among the reported witnesses to that pledge was Sally Hemings, Patty’s half sister, who was not quite ten years old.
At Mrs. House’s lodgings, Jefferson played a supporting role in the domestic drama of the thirty-two-year-old Madison’s wooing of fifteen-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Floyd.16 The beautiful daughter of the New York congressman William Floyd, Kitty won the solemn Madison’s heart. Jefferson joined what he called the household’s “raillery” as it charted the romance.
There were ten major provisions, among them a generous grant of territory and a promise by the British to return confiscated property (including slaves). Critical, too, was article 10, concerning process: The treaty had to be ratified within six months of its signing, which had occurred in Paris on Wednesday, September 3, 1783. Though Jefferson’s committee moved the ratification of the treaty, there was still no quorum in the Congress.15 No quorum, no action. Jefferson hated the feeling of powerlessness.
“A high-flying politician,” Hopkinson wrote, “is I think not unlike a balloon—he is full of inflammability, he is driven along by every current of wind, and those who will suffer themselves to be carried up by them run a great risk that the bubble may burst and let them fall from the height to which a principle of levity had raised them.”6
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. One of the terms he used to describe his opponents—“Monocrats”—is telling, for the word means government by the one.
Jefferson had decorated the walls of his quarters with a collection of portraits that included Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, all men of the Enlightenment.7 Hamilton asked Jefferson who they were.8 “I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them,” Jefferson recalled.9 Taking this in, Hamilton paused, thinking.10 After a moment, he broke his silence. “The greatest man that ever lived,” Hamilton said, “was Julius Caesar.”11
He was thinking of the calamitous possibility of southern secession to protest Federalist dominance. “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.33
Viewed in terms of personality and of politics, though, Jefferson was acting in character. He was always in favor of whatever means would improve the chances of his cause of the hour. When he was a member of the Confederation Congress, he wanted the Confederation Congress to be respected. When he was a governor, he wanted strong gubernatorial powers.
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.
Building a new American future required redeeming the excesses of the Federalist past, and Jefferson issued presidential pardons for some of the printers convicted under the Sedition Act.98 The case of his old ally James Thomson Callender, who had been convicted, fined, and imprisoned, was the most personal for him; Callender’s pardon was dated Monday, March 16, 1801.99
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.”
“The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”
Jefferson coolly recorded the births of Hemings’s children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops.110 He was apparently able to consign his children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they grew up in his midst. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children,” said Madison Hemings, who added that Jefferson was, however, “affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”111,112
By the time they died in 1826, Jefferson and Adams had exchanged a total of 329 letters in their lifetime, with a substantial number—158—coming from 1812 until the end.142
That there is only one God, and he all perfect. 2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments. 3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself is the sum of religion.68 His own faith, he told Adams, “is known to my God and myself alone.69 Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.” As a young man, Jefferson recalled with pride, he had been “bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led,
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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.
A New Englander, Webster was unhappy about the rise of Andrew Jackson in the West. Jefferson apparently shared at least some of Webster’s fears. “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President,” Jefferson said, according to Webster.51 “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws or constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible.”
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.
With the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming in the summer of 1826, organizers of the Washington celebrations were eager to bring Jefferson back to the capital for the day.64 He was too ill to consider it, but in his sun-filled cabinet he drafted a letter to commemorate the occasion.
