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“To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.
“In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia,” said Madison Hemings.
“Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists.”
“My great wish is to go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty: to avoid attracting notice and to keep my name out of newspapers, because I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.”36
On Wednesday, June 17, 1789, the frustrated Third Estate of commoners successfully designated itself the National Assembly, effectively igniting what history calls the French Revolution.44
“The spirit of philosophical legislation has never reached some parts of the Union, and is by no means the fashion here, either within or without Congress,” he wrote Jefferson.74
It was a fair point, and the exchange offers an example of Madison’s utility to Jefferson as an affectionate, respectful, discreet check on his episodic flights of philosophy.
“Being now advanced into the evening of life, it is with particular gratitude I look back and reflect that I have been spared to see the human species improved, religious intolerance almost extinguished, the eyes of the lower ranks of men opened to see their rights; and nations panting for liberty that seemed to have lost the idea of it.”
Samuel Harrison Smith, he was “lofty and erect; his motions flexible and easy; neither remarkable for, nor deficient in grace; and such were his strength and agility.”47
“His information was equally polite and profound, and his conversational powers capable of discussing moral questions of deepest seriousness, or the lighter themes of humor and fancy,” wrote an English traveler named John Bernard.
A tilt toward the monarchical in form might, he feared, precede a move toward the autocratic in fact.
The beginning of wisdom, Jefferson thought, might lie in a meeting of the principals out of the public eye. So he convened a dinner.85 Jefferson believed things could be worked out, he said, for “men of sound heads and honest views needed nothing more than explanation and mutual understanding to enable them to unite in some measures which might enable us to get along.”86
“To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition,” Jefferson wrote in February 1791.31
mind. Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, “We are ruined, Sir, if we do not over-rule the principles that ‘the more we owe, the more prosperous we shall be,’ ‘that a public debt furnishes the means of enterprise,’…etc.38 etc.”
Jefferson disagreed strongly, telling Madison that his remarks had been “meant for the enemies of the government, to wit those who want to change it into a monarchy.”45 He added that he believed Hamilton was attacking him with vigor: “I have reason to think [Hamilton] has been unreserved in uttering these sentiments.”
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 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.
Intermarriage with noble families in America and Europe, Adams believed, would lead to trouble, and to the United States repeating the mistakes and miming the bad habits of the Old World. “In short, my dear friend, you and I have been indefatigable laborers through our whole lives for a cause which be thrown away in the next generation, upon the vanity and foppery of persons of whom we do not now know the names perhaps.”51
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.”
“Whether these measures be right or wrong abstractly,” Jefferson said of the Hamiltonian program, “more attention ought to be paid to the general opinion.”77
exaggerating the threat of monarchy, but he was not inventing it. “Should Congress
Jefferson’s endorsement of the excise-tax proclamation.54 “This is an object worthy
“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 1794.3
From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it.
Politics was not only what Thomas Jefferson practiced. It was part of who he was, even if he himself sometimes failed to see it.
Given the tasks facing the next president, he said the vice presidency might be preferable to winning the presidency itself. “Few will believe the true dispositions of my mind on that subject,” Jefferson wrote.14 “It is not the less true however that I do sincerely wish to be the second on that vote rather than the first.”
Jefferson spent the cold weeks after the election ruminating on politics. “I knew it was impossible Mr. Adams should lose a vote North of the Delaware, and that the free and moral agency of the South would furnish him an abundant supplement,” he wrote.27 “On principles of public respect I should not have refused [the presidency]: but I protest before my God that I shall, from the bottom of my heart, rejoice at escaping.”
“A few individuals of no fixed system at all, governed by the panic or the prowess of the moment, flap as the breeze blows against the republican or the aristocratic bodies, and give to the one or the other a preponderance entirely accidental,” he wrote Burr in June 1797.66
No, I think a party is necessary in a free state to preserve its freedom—the truly virtuous should firmly unite and form a party capable at all times of frustrating the wicked designs of the enemies of the doctrine of equality and the rights of man.1 —Jefferson friend JOHN PAGE
Such was the “Quasi-War,” a series of naval attacks that pitted the United States against its first and most important ally in a brutal if undeclared war.
The alien laws collectively invested the president the authority to deport resident aliens he considered dangerous. The sedition bill criminalized free speech, forbidding anyone to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”16
I should be unfaithful to my own feelings were I not to say that it has been the greatest of all human consolations to me to be considered by the republican portion of my fellow citizens, as the safe depository of their rights.1 —THOMAS JEFFERSON
“If bad men will dare traitorously to destroy or embarrass our general government and the union of the states, I shall conceive it my duty to oppose them at every hazard of life and fortune; for I should deem it less inglorious to submit to foreign than domestic tyranny.”
“Many declare you an atheist,” Scales wrote to Jefferson, “but be it so, I much rather a liberal atheist should govern the people, than a bigoted saint, who knows not God.”71
Politics had brought them together, and politics had now driven them apart. And yet they still found it in themselves to treat one another with outward grace.
The “duty of the chief magistrate,” Jefferson once said, was “to unite in himself the confidence of the whole people” to “produce a union of the powers of the whole, and point them in a single direction, as if all constituted but one body and one mind.”83
the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.31 Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.… Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.
There is usually a moment in the life of a new president when he begins to see himself not as an aspirant desperate to win but as a statesman above the squalor and the sweat of actual vote getting. Rising men do not like to be reminded of the smell of the stables; dignitaries dislike recollections of the dust through which they have come.
The president had to be able to trust lawmakers with insights and opinions that he might not offer a broader audience, creating a sense of intimacy and common purpose. Making speeches at other politicians—or appearing to be only making speeches at them—was not the best way to enlist their allegiance or their aid, nor to govern well.
He was more of a chess player than a traditional warrior, thinking out his moves and executing them subtly rather than reacting to events viscerally and showily.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”57
‘Cease from your political labors your kingdom is not of this world. Read my epistles. In no part of them will you perceive me aiming to depose a pagan emperor, or to place a Christian upon a throne. Christianity disdains to receive support from human governments.’ ”
“The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense,” Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term.12
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 SMITH
The fame of your political wisdom is now so permanently established, that it is past the power of a disappointed faction ever to diminish it.2 —HORATIO GATES, on learning of the Louisiana Purchase
“A thousand joys to you, my dear Maria, on the happy accession to your family,” Jefferson wrote on Sunday, February 26, 1804, using the name Polly had taken for herself in November 1789.55
it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of popular frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of a demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.”94
the people will keep a man in the chair after he becomes a dotard, that reelection through life shall become habitual, and election for life follow that.
“Something now occurs almost every day on which it is desirable to have the opinions of the heads of departments,” Jefferson wrote Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin in July 1807.2 The
“If there be a God, and he is just, his day will come.95 He will never abandon the whole race of man to be eaten up by the leviathans and mammoths of a day.”
