Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Anxious and unhappy, Jefferson was, he wrote to his eldest daughter, “worn down here with pursuits in which I take no delight, surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word which falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.”18 His fate was in the hands of other men, the last place he wanted it to be. He hated the waiting, the whispers, the not knowing. But there was nothing he could do. And so Thomas Jefferson waited.

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.

Jefferson did not trust the old mother country, and he did not trust those Americans who maintained even imaginative ties to monarchy and its trappings—aristocracy of birth, hereditary executives, lifetime legislatures, standing armies, large naval establishments, and grand, centralized financial systems. When Jefferson sensed any trend in the general direction of such things, he reacted viscerally, fearing that the work of the Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention was at risk. The proximity of British officials and troops to the north of the United States and the strength of the British fleet exacerbated these anxieties.

Jefferson learned the importance of endurance and improvisation early, and he learned it the way his father wanted him to: through action, not theory. At age ten, Thomas was sent into the woods alone, with a gun.13 The assignment—the expectation—was that he was to come home with evidence that he could survive on his own in the wild. The test did not begin well. He killed nothing, had nothing to show for himself. The woods were forbidding. Everything around the boy—the trees and the thickets and the rocks and the river—was frightening and frustrating.

Later Jefferson boarded with the Reverend James Maury, whom he described as “a correct classical scholar.”

Turkey Island plantation.

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.”

Small, Wythe, Fauquier, and Peyton Randolph established the standards by which Jefferson judged everyone else. They represented a love of engaging company, a devotion to the life of the mind, and a commitment to the responsible execution of political duties for the larger good. “Under temptations and difficulties,” he told a grandson, “I would ask myself—what would Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph do in this situation? What course in it will ensure me their approbation?”

With Henry’s rhetorical flight ending, a divided House took up the resolutions. The struggle on the floor, Jefferson said, was “most bloody.”49 Records of the deliberations are scant, but the formulation at issue seems to have been this, which was apparently framed as the “Fifth Resolution” put forward by Henry: Resolved Therefore that the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony and that every attempt to vest such power in any other person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as AMERICAN FREEDOM