Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

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.

“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.”

Jefferson was to be always guided by experience and example, thinking about what men of the world—men he respected and loved—might do,

Our minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country.1 —THOMAS JEFFERSON

“No liberty, no life.”

Whigs were oriented more toward the Parliament and the people, Tories toward the king.

Politicians often talk too much and listen too little,

Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton on New Year’s Day 1772. He was twenty-eight; she was twenty-three.

Overall, about a fifth of white American colonists in these years, or 20 percent, sided with England.

For Jefferson, the decision to base a revolutionary appeal on religious grounds was expedient, reflecting more an understanding of politics than a belief that the Lord God of Hosts was about to intervene in British America.

Tyranny was tyranny, whether practiced by kings or priests.

As 1774 drew to a close, Jefferson—at thirty-one years old, a husband, father, lawyer, planter, legislator, and thinker—had moved to a new, higher rank of political skill.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.1 —THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775

At Roxborough around four o’clock, Peyton Randolph suffered a stroke—Jefferson called it “apoplexy”—and lingered about five hours, dying at the Hills’ at nine o’clock that evening.67

The Jefferson of the summer of 1776 was shaped by the tensions and contests of 1775.

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 declaration was introduced on Friday, June 2848, 1776, and debate began on Monday, July 1.

It was a crime in Virginia not to baptize infants in the Anglican church; dissenters were denied office, civil or military; children could be taken from their parents if the parents failed to profess the prescribed creeds. It was said that James Madison heard Baptist ministers preaching from prison in these years.

In political terms, Jefferson believed it unjust (and unwise) to use public funds to support an established church and to link civil rights to religious observance.

It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.

Edmund Pendleton and Robert Carter Nicholas—“honest men, but zealous churchmen,” as Jefferson called them—supported the established church.32 It took incremental legislation and several years, but in the end, in 1786, a statute for religious liberty from Jefferson’s pen became law.

Jefferson was never able to move public opinion on slavery. His powers failed him—and they failed America.

I would like to know if Lincoln considered Jeffersons work when he was considering what to do about slavery?

“I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,

‘Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.

that “you are too well informed a politician, too good a judge of men, not to know that the ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get.

And as he watched the St. Domingue rebellion from his vantage point as secretary of state, Jefferson could not know that the triumph of the blacks, under the leadership of Toussaint-Louverture, would so fatally weaken France in the New World that Paris would one day reassess its ambitions along the American borders.

According to Jefferson, Hamilton said that while he believed a British form of government would be a stronger one, “since we have undertaken the experiment, I am for giving it a fair course, whatever my expectations may be.

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

Washington said he intended to leave the presidency after four years both because of his age (“he really felt himself growing old”) and for fear of appearing greedy for place (“were he to continue longer, it might [give] room to say that having tasted the sweets of office he could not do without them

“I told him that no man had ever had less desire of entering into public offices than myself: that the circumstance of a perilous war, which brought everything into danger, and called for all the services which every citizen could render, had induced me to undertake the administration of the government of Virginia” and that he had twice refused diplomatic appointments before “a domestic loss … made me fancy that absence, and a change of scene for a time, might be expedient for me,” which led him to accept the assignment in France.

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

1792.36 At the table with John Jay, Jefferson recalled that he and Jay “got, towards the close of the afternoon, into a little contest whether hereditary descent or election was most likely to bring wise and honest men into public councils.” Jefferson argued for democracy; Jay for aristocracy.

“There might be desires, but he did not believe there were designs to change the form of government into a monarchy,” Jefferson recalled Washington telling him in July 1792. It was hardly a full-throated reassurance.

“I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.

“This is an object worthy [of] the attention of Great Britain and which many of the most temperate men of the United States have in contemplation.

One reported an after-dinner conversation with Hamilton in which the Treasury secretary said, “there was no stability, no security, in any kind of government but a monarchy.

In late 1792 there were revelations of an affair between Hamilton and a married woman, Maria Reynolds, whose husband, James, colluded in the seduction of the Treasury secretary—a seduction which, by Hamilton’s own account, was not difficult.56 The couple blackmailed Hamilton, and word of the affair, embellished by rumors of financial impropriety, led a delegation of lawmakers to investigate. They found Hamilton guilty of adultery but nothing else.

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.

After being driven from his homeland, Lafayette spent five years in captivity in Europe, the prisoner of Austrian and Prussian powers.

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.

The unmarried Ann Cary Randolph, a sister of Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (and thus Jefferson’s daughter Patsy’s sister-in-law), was apparently impregnated by her brother-in-law, Richard Randolph. Ann, called Nancy, delivered the baby (though she may have suffered a miscarriage), while on a visit to a neighboring plantation with her brother-in-law and her sister. The dead infant was taken outdoors; no corpse was ever found. The story was so mysterious and tantalizing that it rapidly spread, leading to a trial at which Richard Randolph was defended by lawyers that included John Marshall and Patrick Henry.

He believed in the virtues of civility, understanding that they were the most required when they were the least convenient.

In this battle of wills, the secretary of state, as usual, refused to give way.

Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists Rufus King and William Smith “had secured an asylum to themselves in England” should the Jefferson faction prevail in the government.

they understand that they may go on boldly, in their machinations to change the government, and if they should be overset and choose to withdraw, they will be secure of a pension in England as Arnold

A sign of public dissatisfaction with the Federalist leadership in New York came with the organization and popularity of what were called Democratic-Republican societies, which were led by the working and middle classes and which had a strong immigrant presence.36 The groups’ rhetoric about republicanism and the threat of aristocracy enraged Washington, who lost his temper at a cabinet meeting after Henry Knox alluded to popular abuse of the president.

“Let a conviction of my most earnest prayers for your happiness accompany you in your retirement.

“covered with glory; the public gratitude may one day force you from that retreat, so make no rash promises, lest like other great men you should be tempted to break them.”

John Adams was more succinct, noting the marvel of how well political plants grow in the shade.

MONTAIGNE who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head,”