Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

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.”

he said in 1822, “the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.”

Jefferson believed in the existence of a creator God and in an afterlife. Most significantly, he defended the moral lessons of the life and teachings of Jesus, whose divinity Jefferson rejected but whose words and example he embraced. In his presidential years he had completed a forty-six-page work entitled The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth extracted from the account of his life and doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

To John Adams, Jefferson wrote: “The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words.

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.”

Jefferson wrote Monroe.42 “Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second—never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with [cross]-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own.” 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.

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 spoke of death in philosophical, even colloquial, terms. “He alluded to the probability of his death—as a man would to the prospect of being caught in a shower—as an event not to be desired, but not to be feared.”

It was over. At ten minutes before one o’clock on Tuesday, July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died in his bed, three miles from Shadwell, where he had been born a subject of the British Empire eight decades before.41

On his own deathbed some of John Adams’s final words were said to be about his old rival and friend: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”78 And so he does.

He was not all he could be. But no politician—no human being—ever is.

Jefferson was like so many of us: a bundle of contradictions, competing passions, flaws, sins, and virtues that can never be neatly smoothed out into a tidy whole.

The slave owner was thus being drafted to serve as an emblem of liberty not only for white men but for blacks. Such, in Lincoln’s view, was the core of the Jefferson vision, and he hailed the author of the Declaration of Independence for turning the ideal into the real amid the war and chaos of the Revolution. “All honor to Jefferson,” said Lincoln, “to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

The little graveyard sits on the western side of the mountain. When dusk comes, darkness seems to fall slowly.20 To the east shadows lengthen over the Rivanna and over Shadwell. They fall over Monticello itself and over Mulberry Row. They fall over his pavilions and his gardens. Only then do the shadows fall over the remains of Thomas Jefferson, a man who always loved the light.

survey of the current state of Jefferson scholarship will find it in the essays collected by editor Francis D. Cogliano in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, a new volume published as one of the Blackwell Companions to American History.