Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Later in his career Jefferson was able to draw on the experience of wartime Virginia and the collapse of the mid-1780s national structure to become a disciple of a unitary (but accountable) executive.

Contemplating the situation in the Confederation Congress of 1783, Jefferson worried about nothing less than anarchy. Now that the Revolutionary War was won, what was to keep state from turning on state, or region on region?

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

Life is of no value but as it brings us gratifications. Among the most valuable of these is rational society. It informs the mind, sweetens the temper, cheers our spirits, and promotes health.”

After an early legal and legislative life attempting to abolish slavery, Jefferson, now at midlife, made a calculated decision that he would no longer risk his “usefulness” in the arena by pressing the issue.

In all, though, for Jefferson public life was about compromise and an unending effort to balance competing interests. To have pursued abolition, even when coupled, as it was in Jefferson’s mind, with deportation, was politically lethal. And Jefferson was not going to risk all for what he believed was a cause whose time had not yet come.

Countries earned respect by appearing strong and unified. Jefferson wanted America to be respected. He, therefore, took care to project strength and a sense of unity. The cause of national power required it, and he was as devoted to the marshaling of American power in Paris as he had been in Annapolis.

Jefferson never forgot that it was foolhardy to sacrifice real progress, however compromised, to the dreams of the ideal.

Jefferson believed that the future could be better than the past. He knew, though, that life was best lived among friends in the pursuit of large causes, understanding that pain was the price for anything worth having.

There is no question that Jefferson’s experience in France gave his politics a more democratic cast than they had had when he left America for Paris.

Liberty, he was saying, requires patience, forbearance, and fortitude. Republics were not for the fainthearted. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

To Jefferson, a nation that was to stand among the powers of the earth had to do so on its own. Alliances were always chancy.

This was a key element of Jefferson’s vision: He wrote beautifully of the pursuit of the perfect, but he knew good when he saw it. He would not make the two enemies.

He thought one way in one era and another way in other eras—and sometimes he thought differently more or less simultaneously, a common human trait, particularly among the curious and the intellectually active.

It often fell to him to absorb raw Jefferson thoughts. One of Madison’s many services to the republic was the mediating role he played in Jefferson’s life, often protecting Jefferson from himself.

“I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations,” he wrote a French friend in April 1790.57 “To be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements and under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promotes in the long run even the interests of both: and I am sure it promotes their happiness.”

As the Washington administration unfolded, Jefferson came to see Hamilton as the embodiment of the deepest of republican fears: as a man who might be willing to sacrifice the American undertaking in liberty to the expediency of arbitrary authority. And Hamilton came to see Jefferson as a man who might be willing to throw everything the Americans had built to the revolutionary winds blowing from France. It was an extreme, overheated view of Hamilton (as of Jefferson), but it was a time of extreme and overheated views. Such was the political reality of the day, and Hamilton and Jefferson were politicians.

“All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.”

For partisans of each man, it was then—and has been ever since—convenient to caricature the other, with Hamilton as the scheming proto-Brit bent on monarchy and Jefferson as the naïve proto-Frenchman intoxicated by visions of excessive democracy.

In the first hours of the decade and sporadically throughout, Jefferson sometimes found himself in agreement with Hamilton (and with Washington and Adams as well), for Jefferson was a working politician and diplomat who believed in an effective central government—his experience in the Virginia governorship and during the Confederation years had convinced him of that—and often asserted the need to project power. There was, however, a foundational point on which Jefferson never compromised, a conviction that drove much of his political life from 1790 until his death. 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. He did not oppose the wielding of power. He was a good-hearted, fair-minded student of how best to accumulate it and use it. In romantic moments, he dreamed of a future of virtuous yeomen living in harmony. In realistic ones, he suspected the America of which he was an architect could be yet another short-lived chapter in the story of the tyranny of the few over the many. “We were educated in royalism: no wonder if some of ...

The Jefferson of the cabinet, of the vice presidency, and of the presidency can be best understood by recalling that his passion for the people and his regard for republicanism belonged to a man who believed that there were forces afoot—forces visible and invisible, domestic and foreign—that sought to undermine the rights of man by reestablishing the rule of priests and nobles and kings. His opposition to John Adams and to Alexander Hamilton, to the British and to financial speculators, grew out of this fundamental concern.

Like significant politicians before and after him, Jefferson was devoted to an overarching vision, but governed according to circumstance. Committed to the broad republican creed, supported by allies in politics and in the public who believed him to be an unshakable advocate of liberty under the law, Jefferson felt himself free to maneuver in matters of detail.

Where some saw hypocrisy, others saw political agility. As long as a political leader has some core strategic belief—and Jefferson did, in his defense of republicanism—then tactical flexibility can be a virtue. Even Alexander Hamilton recognized Jefferson’s commitm...

Particularly anxious about the resistance to this tax on distilled spirits, Hamilton drafted a harsh proclamation to be issued by the president. Washington took care to include Jefferson in the consultations and won the secretary of state’s signature on the document.53 The president wanted the appearance of a unified administration, even if it were, in fact, an administration at war with itself.

“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

Giles’s amendment passed; Dexter’s failed.53 Both efforts illuminated the emotional issues shaping American politics—Republican fear of the prospect of hereditary power and the Federalist anxiety about the strength of slaveholders.

Drama, Jefferson knew, was one of the prices one paid for democracy.

There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.

When Jefferson went on to win the presidency four years later, his Federalist critics would disparage him as the “Negro President” because of his dependence on the three-fifths clause. The battles over slavery were thus rooted not only in the debate over the morality of abolition but in the practical political reality that every additional slave state (ironically and tragically) increased the power of white office seekers from those states.

But in stating prudential rules for our government in society I must not omit the important one of never entering into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument.

The Kentucky draft was a purely Republican document, though Jefferson went far down the path to endangering the Union he loved so. In the resolution he endorsed the idea of nullification—the right of a state to refuse to comply with federal laws that it deemed unconstitutional. Here was the great advocate of a stronger, more effective national government proposing a mechanism for chaos and almost certain disunion.

He was not intellectually consistent, but a consistent theme did run through his politics and statecraft: He would do what it took, within reason, to arrange the world as he wanted it to be.

Jefferson admired Washington’s gifts in the art of leadership but could not help but see the first president as what he had become: a Federalist icon whose party, Jefferson thought, was moving the United States in the wrong direction.

Jefferson harbored a real hope in the good sense of the people. His belief in democracy was not a pose, but a conviction: Educate the public, he believed, and by and large a majority would find its way to the right place.

Like the warfare on St. Domingue, Gabriel’s conspiracy underscored Jefferson’s view that there was no sustainable future in a society in which blacks and whites lived freely in proximity to one another.

“Well, I understand that you are to beat me in this contest,” Adams told Jefferson, “and I will only say that I will be as faithful a subject as any you will have.” “Mr. Adams, this is no personal contest between you and me,” Jefferson recalled himself saying. To Adams, he continued: Two systems of principles on the subject of government divide our fellow-citizens into two parties. With one of these you concur, and I with the other. As we have been longer on the public stage than most of those now living, our names happen to be more generally known. One of these parties therefore has put your name at its head, the other mine. Were we both to die today, tomorrow two other names would be in the place of ours, without any change in the motion of the machine. Its motion is from its principle, not from you or myself. “I believe you are right that we are but passive instruments,” said Adams, “and should not suffer this matter to affect our personal dispositions.”

Taking advantage of the hour, then, the Congress approved, and President Adams signed, a bill that increased the number of federal judicial officers, strengthened and expanded the circuit courts, and reduced the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five, thus depriving any Republican president of at least one appointment. “The Judiciary bill has been crammed down our throats without a word or letter being suffered to be altered,” wrote Senator Stevens Thomson Mason of Virginia, a Republican.

An evangelical minister, William Scales, took a more optimistic view: “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.”

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 presidency Jefferson left in 1809 was rich in precedent for vigorous, decisive, and often unilateral action. It is not too much to say that Jefferson used Hamiltonian means to pursue Jeffersonian ends. He embraced ultimate power subtly but surely.

Open political warfare was not for him; he preferred to impress himself on the course of events without bombast or drama, leading so quietly that popular history tends to make too little of his achievements as president.

A social creature, Jefferson nevertheless lived in relative domestic isolation in Washington. Only Meriwether Lewis kept house with him in the unfinished mansion. Jefferson said that they lived like “two mice in a church.”

Jefferson preferred to project power without being showy about it. “What sort of government is that of the U.S.?” Napoleon once asked a French traveler who had just returned from spending time with President Jefferson.25 “One, Sire,” the traveler said, “that is neither seen or felt.”26 That was precisely what Jefferson wanted the world to think.

It was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is seeking power. The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing. Jefferson had achieved something that his Federalist foes would not have thought possible: He was, to some, no longer Republican enough. Jefferson was, in other words, a man who had displeased the extremes of his day—a sign that he had been guided not by dogma but by principled pragmatism.

To seize power grandly would threaten the democratic ethos of the country—an ethos he thought essential. Better to work through allies in Congress, he thought, than to risk appearing monarchical—even if the control he sought was the kind a Federalist president might want, too. It was the method of a practical man.

“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest,” he wrote after he left office.14 “The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”

They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions … but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

“Were I to be the founder of a new sect, I would call them Apiarians, and, after the example of the bee, advise them to extract the honey of every sect,” he said.58 “My fundamental principle would be … that we are to be saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power.”

As a politician and a devotee of republicanism, Jefferson hoped that subjecting religious sensibilities to free inquiry would transform faith from a source of contention into a force for good, for he knew that religion in one form or another was a perpetual factor in the world.65 The wisest course, then, was not to rail against it but to encourage the application of reason to questions of faith. The more rational that men became about religion, Jefferson believed, the better lives they would lead; in turn the life of the nation would become more stable and virtuous.

Missouri, Jefferson said, was “like a fire bell in the night … the knell of the Union.”