Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

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.

we tend to view our history as an inevitable chain of events leading to a sure conclusion. There was, however, nothing foreordained about the American experiment.

Rather than recalling the Revolutionary War in its traditional way—as the armed struggle that lasted from Lexington and Concord in 1775 until the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781—it is illuminating in considering Jefferson to think of the struggle against Great Britain and its influence in American life as one that opened in 1764 and did not end until the Treaty of Ghent and the Battle of New Orleans brought the War of 1812 to a close in 1815.

Anything that happened in either foreign or domestic politics was interpreted through the prism of the ongoing conflict with Britain.

Thomas Jefferson came of age with the confidence that controlling the destinies of others was the most natural thing in the world. He was born for command. He never knew anything else.

Jefferson emerged from his childhood devoted to avoiding conflict at just about any cost. It is possible his years at Tuckahoe set him on a path toward favoring comity over controversy in face-to-face relations.

Anxious for school to be over, Thomas slipped away, hid, and repeated the Lord’s Prayer in hopes of hastening the end of school. His prayer went unanswered. He would come to believe that orthodox Christianity was not all it was said to be.

Jefferson valued his education—and education in general—above all things, remarking that, given the choice, he would take the classical training his father arranged for him over the estate his father left him.

Conversant with the thought of Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, 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.

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?”

Americans who knew their British history—and since most Americans were provincial Britons, most of them did—understood political life to be a constant struggle to preserve individual liberty from encroachments of Crown and courtier.

Jefferson and his fellow American Revolutionaries took the positions they did—positions that led to war in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776—partly because they saw themselves as Englishmen who were being denied a full share of the benefits of the lessons of English life.

When it came to the spoken word, Jefferson knew that he could not compete in such arenas with such men. Armed with this insight, he cultivated alternative means of influencing others. He studied the folkways of deliberative bodies. He learned to write with grace, with conviction, and—important in a revolutionary time—with speed.

He immersed himself in the subtle skills of engaging others, chiefly by offering people that which they value most: an attentive audience to listen to their own visions and views.

Everyone wants to believe that what they have to say is fascinating, illuminating, and possibly even epochal. The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: “one of the choice ones of the earth.”

His first journey outside Virginia foreshadowed much in his life: his ability to conceal anxiety beneath a cool veneer and his urge to engage the world of politics.

For Jefferson, the story of the Stamp Act had begun in the lobby of the House of Burgesses. That it ended for him when he was on the road gave him his first tactile evidence that the American story, and the American cause, was larger than Williamsburg and larger than Virginia. His conception of the American nation may owe something to the celebrations he watched on the Maryland shore.

Wounded by the defeats of his progressive efforts on slavery, Jefferson was finally to retreat to a more conventional position.

Her experience with her father’s wives was unhappy enough that she never wanted her own children to face the possibility of having a stepmother.21 On her deathbed she reportedly extracted a promise from Jefferson never to marry again.

Jefferson needed a woman who shared his passion for music and all that music represented—sophistication, transcendence, and the life of the imagination and the heart, as well as that of flesh and blood. Patty Wayles Skelton was such a woman.

For the colonists, the decision to revolt was not solely economic, but it was surely informed by concerns over money.34 In Virginia the impetus to rebel came from the propertied elements of society; the middle and lower classes were slower to follow the lead of men such as Jefferson. It was a rich man’s revolution, and Jefferson was a rich man. It was a philosophical revolution, and Jefferson was a philosophical man.

Taxes, the presence of British troops, trade regulations, the disposition of western lands, and relations with Indian tribes, among other matters, were all seen as grasps for power by London, power that Jefferson and others believed rightly belonged to them (or at least to them within a constitution in which they played a much larger role). Absolutism was always just a step away; subjugation an imminent possibility. The Americans were not wrong to think this way, for the history they knew—and the politics they were experiencing—tended to favor the Crown and its adherents rather than the people as more broadly defined.

The Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution of Tuesday, May 24, 1774, was one in a series of lessons in the politics of revolution that, from the unseasonably frosty May of 1774 through June and July of 1776, offered Jefferson opportunities to manage and marshal the American mind.

Though not a conventional Christian, Jefferson appreciated the power of spiritual appeals. To frame an anti-British argument in the language of faith took the rhetorical fight to the enemy in a way that was difficult to combat.

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

In the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution, the Albemarle resolves, and the Summary View, Jefferson had appealed to his audience’s sense of justice, which one would expect in the litigation of grievances, but also to its sense of destiny.

Jefferson mastered the art of rhetorical political leadership by appearing at once concerned about the needs of his people and attentive to their innate need to be part of a larger drama that imbues daily life with mythic stakes.

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. The Summary View and his other pieces demonstrated a capacity to reflect and advance the sentiments of his public simultaneously, giving his audience both a vision of the future and a concrete sense that he knew how to bring the distant closer to hand, and dreams closer to reality.

“I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution,” their fellow Revolutionary Benjamin Rush wrote Adams in February 1812.16 “Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.”

Jefferson rarely spoke in large assemblies, preferring to make his mark in different ways. As accomplished a student of politics and of history as John Adams believed Jefferson benefited enormously from holding his tongue in debate. From all that Adams had read and all that he had experienced firsthand, he had learned, he said, “eloquence in public assemblies is not the surest road to fame and preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great reserve.”

To write public papers or to negotiate quietly, away from the floor of an assembly or even away from a largish committee, enabled a politician to exert his will with less risk of creating animosity.

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.

History’s trumpets were sounding, but only in the distance.

In sum, Jefferson’s draft was a political undertaking with a philosophical frame. It was produced in a particular moment by a politician to satisfy particular concerns for a particular complex of audiences: undecided Americans, soldiers in arms, and potential global allies.

The denunciation of slavery was also eliminated. “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving [of] the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and to Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it,” said Jefferson.50 “Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” He had tried anew on slavery and fallen short anew. His political instinct to fight only those battles he believed he could win now took even firmer hold.

He believed Indians a noble race. At his core, though, Jefferson shared the prevailing views of white landowners: that Indian lands were destined to belong to whites, and the Indians themselves should be inculcated in the ways of the whites.

Jefferson understood a timeless truth: that politics is kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting, and the morning’s foe may well be the afternoon’s friend.

In truth the British demands on the colonists were hardly outrageous. The expense of defending the borders was considerable; American wealth was substantial; and Edmund Burke made a compelling case in London for “virtual representation”—the argument that the king and Parliament were stewards of the whole empire whether particular colonists could vote for members of the House of Commons or not.

It seems most convincing, though, to think of Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism (via the Renaissance), the Great Awakening, the promise of capitalism, and the hatred of debt (and the British merchants and banks who were owed the debts) as tributaries that all helped form the larger rushing river of the American Revolution.

The debate over declaring independence took on such significance in part because a permanent break with London was not foreordained. For years colonists chose to believe that the monarchy was in the hands of nefarious, anti-American ministers. The hope from the 1750s to 1776 was that somehow the sovereign would put things to rights. It is a measure of the confidence Jefferson had in this possibility, for instance, that he maintained a tone of respect and deference to George III in his 1774 Summary View. And it is a measure of the depth of his sense of betrayal and disappointment in the king that the Declaration of Independence struck such virulent antimonarchical notes.

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

Recalling the episode in his retirement at Monticello after he served as president, Jefferson wrote, “It was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition [of emancipation and deportation], nor will it bear it even at this day.”36 Jefferson took a bleak view. “Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow,” he wrote in retirement, reflecting on the General Assembly days.37 “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

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

By any standard, Jefferson’s rise had been rapid, and the man who took over the governorship of Virginia in the early summer of 1779 was ambitious but not blindly so. Power meant much to him, but he cloaked his driven nature with a mien of intellectual curiosity and aristocratic confidence.

The approval and esteem that led to election rarely endured, and Jefferson knew that few men left office with the standing they enjoyed on entering it.

As with Josiah Philips and with Henry Hamilton, Jefferson took the fight straight to the enemy. Diplomacy, grace, and mercy had their place. So did steel, vengeance, and strength. Thomas Jefferson was quite capable of deploying whatever weapon he thought best to defend those entrusted to his care.

The tragedy of the British invasion of Virginia in the spring of 1781 was that no patriot leader rose to the occasion to repel Arnold, Cornwallis, or Tarleton. The war was too diffuse, the circumstances too fluid to be in anyone’s control—even Jefferson’s, and he had devoted the previous two years to working on the military defense of Virginia’s borders.

Jefferson was rich, celebrated, and charming. But he gave his promise.12 He would, he assured his dying wife, never marry again.

The personal and political miseries of 1781 and 1782—the invasions by the British, the aspersions on his character, and the death of his wife—might well have sent lesser men back to their plantations in bitterness and in anger at the injustice of it all. Not Jefferson. He chose advance over retreat.