Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

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.”26

Classing Jefferson with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were also reluctant to speak at length in public, Adams said, “A public speaker who inserts himself, or is urged by others into the conduct of affairs, by daily exertions to justify his measures and answer the objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the public, and unavoidably makes himself enemies.”27

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. So, too, was the capacity to exert one’s will in the legislative arena, convincing other politicians to enlist in a cause.

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

In 1782 the issue had been framed pithily and well. “What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer.31

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.”

In a series of articles for a Dutch publication, he invented a fictitious French officer in whose mouth Jefferson put a pro-American argument designed to counter the British propaganda.39 “I have fought and bled for [America] because I thought its cause just,” Jefferson wrote in the officer’s voice. Once home, however, “the Frenchman” found his friends offering “condolences … on the bitter fruits of so prosperous a war.” How could such good people, Jefferson’s officer wondered, be so misinformed?

As much as Jefferson loved France, residence abroad gave him a greater appreciation for his own nation. “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy,” Jefferson wrote Monroe.49 “I confess I had no idea of it myself.” This was the voice of the republican Jefferson, the political philosopher who recoiled at the idea that the United States might one day meet the same fate that led so many nations of the Old World into monarchy, priestly authority, and corruption.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it. The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which he is beset. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.…

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.

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.22 But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.… Do not be too severe upon [the people’s] errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind.

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.”24

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection in Massachusetts.

“If they approve the proposed Convention in all its parts, I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes that they will amend it whenever they shall find it work wrong.”

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.

Jefferson called Adams’s proposal “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of.38 It is a proof the more of the justice of the character given by Dr. Franklin of my friend: ‘Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.’ ”

wrote an English traveler named John Bernard.48 “Nothing could be more simpler than his reasonings, nothing more picturesque and pointed than his descriptions. On all abstract subjects he was plainness—a veritable Quaker; but when conveying his views of human nature through [that] most attractive medium—anecdote—he displayed the grace and brilliance of a courtier.”

Washington privately asked Jefferson for his view on the bank bill’s constitutionality.30 Jefferson replied with an argument for strict construction—that any power not specifically mentioned in the Constitution was reserved for the states, not the federal government. “To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition,” Jefferson wrote in February 1791.31

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.

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.

“The motion of my blood,” he said, “no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.”32

As Jefferson read the treaty, he saw that Hamilton had successfully managed to legislate through Jay’s diplomacy. “A bolder party-stroke was never struck,” Jefferson told Madison.93 “For it certainly is an attempt of a party, which finds they have lost their majority in one branch of the legislature, to make a law by the aid of the other branch and the executive, under color of a treaty, which shall bind up the hands of the adverse branch from ever restraining the commerce of their patron-nation.” The treaty was nevertheless narrowly ratified. Washington believed, as did a bare two-thirds majority of the Senate, that the pact was preferable to going to war.

Jefferson’s reply was at once clear and equivocal. “I have not the arrogance to say I would refuse the honorable office you mention to me; but I can say with truth that I would rather be thought worthy of it than to be appointed to it,” he wrote Cocke.110 For “well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.”

Good humor, Jefferson added, “is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment’s consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!”

It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, “never to contradict anybody.”

When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable.”

“Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch and debate to the people the proceedings of the other.… A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight.”

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.

“As to the future, thou art to be the principal Actor,” wrote his Revolutionary colleague John Dickinson.80 “Perhaps we are the selected people upon Earth, from whom large portions of Mankind are to learn, that Liberty is really a transcendent blessing, as capable by its enlightened energies of calmly dissipating its internal enemies, as of triumphantly repelling its foreign foes.”

He was to spend his presidential years, he said, “pursuing steadily my object of proving that a people, easy in their circumstances as ours are, are capable of conducting themselves under a government founded not in the fears and follies of man, but on his reason.…42 This is the object now nearest to my heart.”

Whether seeking the approval of his father, his mother, his teachers, his contemporaries, or his countrymen, Jefferson had moved through life at once exhilarated and exhausted by the role of patriarch. Raised to be responsible for the lives and welfare of others, he knew nothing else. He had thought much about human nature and human government, and he believed it his duty to bring what in his inaugural he had called “harmony and affection” to the life of the American nation.

“I am sensible how far I should fall short of effecting all the reformation which reason would suggest and experience approve, were I free to do whatever I thought best,” he wrote.83 “But when we reflect how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society, how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right, we see the wisdom of Solon’s remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear, and that will be chiefly to reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it, and improve some little on old routines.”

Albert Gallatin had candidly written of his wife at the time of their marriage.22 “Her understanding is good; she is as well informed as most young ladies; she is perfectly simple and unaffected; she loves me and she is a pretty good democrat.”

By this wench Sally, our president has had several children.1 There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it. —JAMES CALLENDER, the Richmond Recorder, September 1802

Jefferson’s strategy was sound. Believing in the promise of democratic republicanism and in his own capacity for transformative leadership, he took a broad view: “There is nothing to which a nation is not equal where it pours all its energies and zeal into the hands of those to whom they confide the direction of their force.”10

In 1806 Thomas Moore, an Irish poet, published verses mentioning the rumors about Jefferson and Sally Hemings.61 The weary statesman for repose hath fled From halls of council to his negro’s shed, Where blest he woos some black Aspasia’s grace, And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace!

“Every face wears a smile, and every heart leaps with Joy,” Andrew Jackson wrote Jefferson from the West.34 “The thing is new in the annals of the world,” wrote another correspondent.35 “The great matter now is to make the wonderful event a blessing to the human race.”

Jefferson’s decision to acquire Louisiana without seeking a constitutional amendment expanded the powers of the executive in ways that would likely have driven Jefferson to distraction had another man been president.

In 1803, writing to William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, Jefferson said that he believed the Indians “will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States or remove beyond the Mississippi.”58 He threatened to retaliate against any attacking tribes by “seizing … the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace.”59

On Saturday, March 2, 1805, Vice President Burr took his leave of the capital with a paean to the Senate, which he called “a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of popular frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of a demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.”94

“Our Constitution is a peace establishment—it is not calculated for war,” Jefferson said.134 “War would endanger its existence.” In Jefferson’s reading of history, war was about armies and navies and debt and honors, all of which had played their part in the fall of republics and the rise of empires.

avoiding overt conflict was a Jeffersonian specialty.

and Albert Gallatin articulated its inherent flaws best. “In every point of view, privations, sufferings, revenue, effect on the enemy, politics at home, etc., I prefer war to a permanent embargo,” Gallatin told Jefferson on Friday, December 18.32 Moreover, “Governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves.”

he wrote Gallatin; “we have, therefore, only to find out what will be least bad.”33 Jefferson was guided in part by republican ideology: The end of war and the reign of reason was a dream of the age. War led to monarchy and aristocracy and evils that tended to destroy the liberty of the many while empowering the few. Yet Jefferson was no pacific purist. He had waged war in the Mediterranean, and he was willing to wage it against Britain and possibly against France.

I know too well from experience the progress of political controversy, and the exacerbation of spirit into which it degenerates, not to fear for the continuance of your mutual esteem. One piquing thing said, draws on another, that a third, and always with increasing acrimony, until all restraint is thrown off, and it becomes difficult for yourselves to keep clear of the toils in which your friends will endeavor to interlace you, and to avoid the participation in their passions which they will endeavor to produce.”

A patriarch’s love is rather like a politician’s skill. Both are about perceiving what others want, and trying, within reason, to provide it. That had been the work of Jefferson’s public life and now, in retirement, it was that of his personal life, too.

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.”

The mission, in Jefferson’s words, was to “form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity, and individual happiness are so much to depend.”46 He invested the enterprise with the highest of stakes, writing: “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.47 This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”