Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.

the central question of politics: How is a man, as an intrinsically social animal, to live in relative peace and charity with his neighbors in a world given to passion and conflict?

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

To project a vision of what might be and to inspire people to share that vision was, and is, an essential element of statesmanship.

Jefferson had made a common political mistake. He had followed the people rather than led them.

the British press had exaggerated American instability for so long that “the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.”

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

Part of the reason for his largely genial mien lay in the Virginia culture of grace and hospitality; another factor was a calculated decision, based on his experience of men and of politics, that direct conflict was unproductive and ineffective.

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.

Jefferson had long cared about two things: American liberty and American strength.

A politics of personal liberty created a sense of free inquiry. A man liberated from monarchical or hereditary limitations stood a greater chance of possessing a mind free to roam and to grow and to create and to innovate in a climate in which citizens lived together in essential harmony and affection.87 This was Jefferson’s ideal republic—and he was committed to making it real.

mobocracy,—the worst of all possible governments.”

“How I wish that I possessed the power of a despot,” Jefferson said one day, surprising his guests.12 “Yes,” he went on, “I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifices to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor.” A guest asked, “And have you not authority to save those on the public grounds?” “No,” said Jefferson, “only an armed guard could save them.13,14 The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder, [and] it pains me to an unspeakable degree.”

He loved the spirit of innovation. “The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.”

In the wake of the British army’s burning of the roughly 3,000 books belonging to Congress at Washington, Jefferson offered to sell the nation his own collection.42 There were 6,487 volumes in Jefferson’s hands; in the words of the National Intelligencer, the library “for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond

all price.”43,44 They formed the core of the new Library of Congress.

The real 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.