Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

By his own admission, Jefferson’s solution for the problem of slavery was too complex to be executed. “The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be,” he wrote.4 “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

Jefferson saw the issue in terms of power. If the federal government began regulating slavery within the states, then a precedent would be established, for regulation could finally lead to abolition.

In the end Jefferson could see slavery only as tragedy. He may have believed it to be “a hideous blot,” as he wrote in September 1823, but it was not a blot he felt capable of erasing.9 The man who believed in the acquisition and wielding of power—political power, intellectual power, domestic power, and mastering life from the fundamental definition of human liberty in the modern world down to the smallest details of the wine he served and the flowers he planted—chose to consider himself powerless over the central economic and social fact of his life.

Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson’s sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform. “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity,” he wrote in 1814, but that was not true.11 He was not willing to sacrifice his own way of life, though he characteristically left himself a rhetorical escape by introducing the subjective standard of practicability.

Rendering moral judgments in retrospect can be hazardous.14 It is unfair to judge the past by the standards of the present. Yet we can assess a man’s views on a moral issue—which slavery unquestionably was—by what others in the same age and facing the same realities thought and did. Beginning with Robert Carter, the planter who freed his slaves in 1791, some Virginians of Jefferson’s class recognized that the blight of slavery had to go and did what was within their power by emancipating their slaves.

Jefferson was wrong about slavery, his attempts at reform at the beginning of his public life notwithstanding. Here again, though, and in dramatic relief, we see that Jefferson the practical politician was a more powerful persona than Jefferson the moral theorist. He was driven by what he had once called, in a 1795 letter to Madison, “the Southern interest,” for the South was his personal home and his political base.17 He could not see a pragmatic way out of the conundrum, so he did what politicians often do: He suggested that the problem would be handled in the fullness of time—just not now. He did not believe full-scale colonization was feasible. “I do not say this to induce an inference that the getting rid of them is forever impossible,” he wrote in 1824.18 “For that is neither my opinion nor my hope. But only that it cannot be done in this way.”

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.

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.

“If Jefferson was wrong,” wrote the biographer James Parton in 1874, “America is wrong.6 If America is right, Jefferson was right.”

He endures because we can see in him all the varied and wondrous possibilities of the human experience—the thirst for knowledge, the capacity to create, the love of family and of friends, the hunger for accomplishment, the applause of the world, the marshaling of power, the bending of others to one’s own vision. His genius lay in his versatility; his larger political legacy in his leadership of thought and of men.

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

“The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” Lincoln wrote.9 “And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success.… Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”