Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Education had been a perennial interest. “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people,” Jefferson had written George Wythe in the 1780s.48 “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”

I trust that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.”56 (On the other side of the prediction ledger, Jefferson correctly foresaw the rise of coffee. The coffee bean, he wrote, “is become the favorite beverage of the civilized world.”57) He was also closer to the mark—though, given the perennial popularity of traditional Christianity and Judaism, still wide of it—when he mused about the spread of less conventional spiritual beliefs. “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.”

Jefferson was, as he once put it, “of a sect by myself, as far as I know.”63,64 Though he fought against the establishment of religion, he understood and appreciated the cultural role faith played in the United States. 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.

Writing to a correspondent who asked him to devise a way to free the slaves of Virginia, Jefferson demurred. “This, my dear sir,” Jefferson said, “is like bidding old Priam to buckle the armor of Hector.…10 This enterprise is for the young.… It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.”

How is it possible to explain the disorienting contradiction between his harsh views of “amalgamation” and his own paternity of such children? Perhaps Jefferson felt, as he often did, that if he were in control—which he was, in his eclectic domestic sphere—then he would be able to keep matters in hand. He felt this way about his debts, and he had felt this way about the country writ large when he was seeking and held the presidency. The human products of “amalgamation,” to use his term, were thought to be sources of chaos in the world beyond his own mountain. In his domain, though, he could have convinced himself that his centrality made Monticello the exception to what he supposed to be the rule in other realms.

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.

In the early days of April 1859, from Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln wrote to a group in Boston declining its invitation to speak to a Jefferson birthday celebration. The moment gave Lincoln the chance, though, to link Jefferson to the cause of freedom in an hour of danger for the Union. “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.”