Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  —JEFFERSON in the Howell slavery case, 1770

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN ADULTERY, but Jefferson was too much in love (or thought he was) to care. Attractive and virile, a powerful and charismatic man, he wanted what he wanted, and he did not give up easily.

  Elizabeth Walker was what he wanted. She was the bride of his friend John Walker, a man he had known virtually all his life. The connections between the two men were old and deep. Peter Jefferson had made Walker’s father one of his own executors: Dr. Thomas Walker of Castle Hill was among those who had watched over young Thomas. The two boys followed a similar path, boarding at James Maury’s school before going to the College of William and Mary. “We had previously grown up together at a private school and our boys’ acquaintance was strengthened at college,” John Walker recalled of his friendship with Jefferson. “We loved (at least I did sincerely) each other.”

  Elizabeth Moore, known as Betsy, was a granddaughter of a royal governor and daughter of Bernard Moore, the master of Chelsea, a Tidewater plantation in King William County. Two of her brothers attended William and Mary with Jefferson and her future husband. In January 1764—a period in which he remained gloomy about Rebecca Burwell—Jefferson had reported his friend’s impending marriage. “Jack Walker is engaged to Betsy Moore,” Jefferson wrote John Page from Williamsburg, “and desired all his brethren might be made acquainted with his happiness.”

  There is irony in the phrasing, and perhaps envy. Still smarting from his rejection by Rebecca, Jefferson was in no mood to celebrate another man’s romantic good fortune. His melancholy was exacerbated by the absence of his horses, which he had sent “up the country.” Without them he felt marooned, he said, for it was now “out of my power to take even an airing on horseback at any time.” The letter to John Page was dated from “Devilsburg,” Jefferson’s dark rendering of a Williamsburg that had not given him the bride he thought he wanted. The world seemed bleak. Even poor John Walker, Jefferson thought, would have to forgo the joys of a pretty wife for a while longer: “But I hear he will not be married this year or two.”

  Jefferson was wrong. Less than five months later, in the first week of June 1764, Betsy Moore and John Walker were married at her home at Chelsea. Jefferson was in attendance, John Walker recalled, as “the friend of my heart” and as a groomsman. By 1768 the Walkers were living, with an infant daughter, in a house known as Belvoir only five or so miles from Shadwell. Like Jefferson, Walker was a rising man in Virginia politics. Soon Walker agreed to join a delegation bound for Fort Stanwix, in New York, for Indian negotiations.

  In the will John Walker made before he left, he appointed “Mr. Jefferson … my neighbor and fast friend” as “first among my executors.” Walker’s delegation departed for New York in early summer.

  Jefferson had just turned twenty-five, and Betsy Walker was about two years younger. In the warm months of 1768, in visits to Belvoir, he found himself in her exclusive company, and he seems to have fallen in love with his old friend’s new wife.

  Given the risks he was taking, the intensity of the passion Jefferson felt must have been acute. The young wife resisted, but Jefferson did not give up the chase. And though she kept Jefferson’s advances secret, she allowed her anxiety to manifest itself to her husband indirectly. As John Walker recalled, his wife began to object to Jefferson’s serving as Walker’s executor, “telling me that she wondered why I could place such confidence in him.”

  Over the next few years Jefferson kept up his quiet campaign. On a visit of the Walkers to Shadwell, Jefferson “renewed his caresses” toward Betsy, slipping a note into the cuff of the sleeve of her gown. The letter, John Walker later recalled, was “a paper tending to convince her of the innocence of promiscuous love.”

  Perhaps from the hour of his humiliation in the Apollo Room with Rebecca Burwell, Jefferson knew he expressed himself better in writing. To write Mrs. Walker an argued love letter—one attempting to change her mind, “to convince her”—was in character. The ploy failed on this occasion: Mrs. Walker said that she “on the first glance tore [Jefferson’s note] to pieces.”

  Later, at a house party at the plantation of a mutual friend, John Coles, a noted hunter, Jefferson watched for a chance to steal a few moments with Betsy. One evening when the women retired for the night, Jefferson saw his opportunity. “He pretended to be sick, complained of a headache and left the gentlemen among whom I was,” John Walker recalled.

  Slipping away, Jefferson found Betsy’s room, where, her husband said, “my wife was undressing or in bed.” Jefferson failed again. “He was repulsed with indignation and menaces of alarm and ran off,” said John Walker.

  Decades later, Jefferson confirmed the Walker story. It had come to light after a political break between Jefferson and John Walker, who had learned in the intervening years of his friend’s pursuit of his wife. It had been, Jefferson said, an incorrect thing to do.

  Frustrated by his failure with Mrs. Walker in the summer of 1768, Jefferson took solace in a glorious autumn of plays and politics in Williamsburg. Some years before, the Reverend Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian clergyman, had chastised Virginia for its love of drama, saying “plays and romances” were “more read than the history of the blessed Jesus.” Offerings in the capital in the spring had included Joseph Addison’s Drummer, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, and Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved and The Orphan. Now Jefferson watched performances by William Verling’s Virginia Company of Comedians and of John Home’s Douglas and Henry Carey’s farce The Honest Yorkshireman. Meanwhile, Jefferson was playing the part of patron to the arts, bringing the Italian musician Francis Alberti from Williamsburg to Albemarle; Alberti taught Jefferson on the violin.

  The Wythe-Jefferson circle lost its most powerful member when Francis Fauquier died at the Governor’s Palace in March 1768. In his will, Fauquier expressed regret that his slaves would have to be sold after his death, and he took the then-unusual step of allowing his dozen adult slaves to choose their new masters and stipulating that the women were not to be separated from their children. A man of the Enlightenment to the end, he also suggested that his body be autopsied should the cause of death be uncertain. His hope, he said in his will, was that he “may become more useful to my fellow creatures by my death than I have been in my life.”

  Fauquier’s burial five days later in the north aisle of Bruton Parish Church, not far from Wythe’s house, marked the end of an era for Jefferson, Wythe, and the other Fauquier intimates at the Palace—the guests who had enjoyed the royal governor’s hospitality and listened with pleasure to Jefferson’s performances on the violin in the big rooms—as well as the end of a period of temperate local imperial governance. In later years Jefferson came to think of Fauquier as “the ablest man who had ever filled that office.”

  Norborne Berkeley, 4th Baron Botetourt—popularly referred to as Lord Botetourt—succeeded Fauquier as governor, and he was determined to make himself pleasant. A family of Jefferson’s friends were spending an evening singing on the steps to their Williamsburg house when they heard a passerby call out: “Charming, charming! Proceed for God’s sake, or I will go home directly.” It was Botetourt, who happily joined them.

  The good cheer could not last. On the same day The Virginia Gazette reported Fauquier’s death in a heavily black-bordered box, the paper published the eighth installment of a series of Farmer’s Letters by John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian who argued that should London ignore American concerns, “let us then take another step, by withholding from Great Britain all the advantages she has been used to receive from us.… Let us all be united with one spirit, in one cause.”

  With Fauquier dead, one world was beginning to end, and another was being born.

  At the same time Jefferson was creating chaos at Belvoir and living a cosmopolitan life in Williamsburg, he was building a new home for himself two miles—or l
ess than a half hour’s ride—from his mother’s house. He named it Monticello, Italian for “little mountain.” On Monday, August 3, 1767, Jefferson noted the grafting of cherry trees on the property; on Sunday, May 15, 1768, he reached an agreement to “level 250 ft. square on the top of the mountain at the N.E. end by Christmas” in exchange for 180 bushels of wheat and 24 bushels of corn (12 of those would not be due until the corn was harvested). If solid rock had to be dug, Jefferson noted in his garden book, then they would ask “indifferent men to settle that part between us”—“indifferent” in this context meaning “impartial.” What is striking about Jefferson’s attention to the possibility of hitting what he called “solid rock” is not that it might present insuperable obstacles but that he was prepared to do whatever it took to have his way. He had decided to build there, and build he would.

  The Virginia Gazette of Thursday, December 15, 1768, reported Thomas Jefferson’s election to represent Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses. He was twenty-five years old.

  He would serve with Dr. Thomas Walker, John Walker’s father and Betsy Walker’s father-in-law. The campaign consisted largely of buying drinks and cakes for the landowners who had the suffrage. Over the next forty-one years Jefferson was rarely out of public office. Even without formal duties, he was never far from the contentions of his times.

  Since the Stamp Act debates and repeal, Parliament had, beginning in 1767, passed the Townshend Acts, taxes and duties named in honor of the chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend. Massachusetts led the opposition for the colonies. In Boston in February 1768 the Massachusetts legislature approved a circular letter protesting the acts and calling on other colonies to follow suit. This was the political climate when the Burgesses first sat with Jefferson as a member on Monday, May 8, 1769.

  There was a sense of urgency in Williamsburg. London had ordered Botetourt to dissolve the House if the Burgesses joined Massachusetts in protesting the Townshend Acts. Within days Botetourt had the opportunity to obey the imperial command.

  The colonial lawmakers had passed a resolution in support of Massachusetts. At noon on Wednesday, May 17, 1769, therefore, Botetourt summoned the Burgesses to the Council Chamber. “I have heard of your resolves, and augur ill of their effect,” Botetourt told them. “You have made it my duty to dissolve you; and you are dissolved accordingly.”

  Jefferson had been seated in the House for not quite ten days. The very opening hours of his elective career, then, were suffused with conflict, crisis, and a creative search for a path forward that gave Americans, rather than distant authorities, control over their lives.

  With his colleagues he left the Council Chamber and walked to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, the same place where he had once stammered before Rebecca Burwell. As the Burgesses passed beneath the lead bust of Sir Walter Raleigh above the front door of the two-story tavern, they were, in the words of the Journal of the House, to decide which “measures should be taken in their distressed situation for preserving the true and essential interests of the colony.” By the next day the Virginians had a plan. They would not import or consume anything from Great Britain.

  When Jefferson left Williamsburg after his inaugural session, he was already steeped in the politics of protest and of power.

  On Thursday, February 1, 1770, Jefferson was playing his accustomed role as head of the family, accompanying his mother on a visit to a neighbor, when word of disaster reached them: Shadwell had burned.

  Jefferson was devastated. His first question to the slave who brought the news was whether his library had been rescued from the flames. The books were all burned, the slave replied, adding: “But, ah! we saved your fiddle!”

  For a man who prized physical objects—he was to prove an inveterate collector, a tangible manifestation of his curious mind—the ash and the smoke and the ruins were especially galling and dispiriting. Fire was a reminder of those things—those many things—that lay beyond human control. Jefferson had spent almost a decade in the study and the practice of law, an undertaking based on the premise that men could, with some limitations, construct an order that enabled them to exert some power over the affairs of the world. The destruction of Shadwell was an example of how little control Jefferson—or any man—really had.

  Nearly everything was gone. The burned books amounted to £200, Jefferson guessed, but that did not bother him so much. “Would to God it had been the money … [that would have] never cost me a sigh!” he wrote to John Page.

  The real pain came from the loss of his books and his legal papers, including notes he had prepared for his work as a lawyer during the coming court term. Without them he was no longer master of the work at hand. He was desperate, even frantic, dispatching news of the fire and pleas for advice and reassurance. He contemplated moving from the neighborhood altogether—a remarkable thought for a man so engaged by his sense of place.

  Another measure of Jefferson’s grief at the fire is that the loss of his notes evoked a speech of Prospero’s in The Tempest, one of the landmark tragic set pieces in Shakespeare, whom Jefferson had first encountered in his father’s now-charred library. He bleakly alluded to it in the wake of the Shadwell disaster:

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  It was a time of testing for the young scholar and aspiring statesman. It was easy enough to read of tragedy and to explore it philosophically, turning over the problems of the spirit and the nature of things with glasses of wine in hand at warm hearths. The ability to apply what one thought in order to shape how one felt, however, was another, more difficult thing. Thomas Jefferson had this ability: His head and his heart were contiguous regions of his character with open borders. Plenty of philosophical men live in abstract regions, debating types and shadows. The rarer sort is the reader and thinker who can see the world whole. In the ashes of Shadwell, Jefferson managed to do just that.

  In the spring, he turned to the future, which to him meant Monticello. The summit of his mountain was now cleared. On the southeastern hillside he created an orchard of pears, apples, nectarines, pomegranates, and figs. “You bear your misfortune so becomingly,” George Wythe wrote his pupil, “that, as I am convinced you will surmount the difficulties it has plunged you into, so I foresee you will hereafter reap advantages from it several ways.” Wythe added a tag from Virgil: “Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.” The line means “Carry on, and preserve yourselves for better times.”

  In an advertisement Jefferson placed in The Virginia Gazette for a runaway slave in 1769, he wrote:

  RUN away from the subscriber

  in Albemarle, a Mulatto slave called Sandy,

  about 35 years of age, his stature is rather low,

  inclining to corpulence, and his complexion light;

  he is a shoemaker by trade, in which he uses his

  left hand principally, can do coarse carpenters

  work, and is something of a horse jockey; he is

  greatly addicted to drink, and when drunk is inso-

  lent and disorderly, in his conversation he swears

  much, and his behaviour is artful and knavish. He took with

  him a white horse, much scarred with traces, of which it is ex-

  pected he will endeavour to dispose; he also carried his shoe-

 
makers tools, and will probably endeavour to get employment that

  way. Whoever conveys the said slave to me in Albemarle, shall

  have 40 s. [shillings] reward, if taken up within the county,

  4 l. [pounds] if

  elsewhere within the colony, and 10 l. if in any other colony, from

  THOMAS JEFFERSON.

  From about this period until his death, according to the historian Lucia Stanton’s research, Thomas Jefferson would own more than 600 slaves. He inherited 150 (from his father and his father-in-law) and bought roughly 20; most of the others were born into slavery on his lands. From 1774 to 1826, Jefferson tended to have about 200 slaves at any one time (the range ran from 165 to 225). When he served at the highest levels as a diplomat, as a member of George Washington’s cabinet, as vice president, as president, and, in his retirement at Monticello, as an American sage, Jefferson was to embody the slave-owning interest.

  In the beginning of his public career, though, Jefferson was more willing to work to reform slavery than he was to prove in later decades. In 1769 in the House of Burgesses, Jefferson recalled, “I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected.” Two words in Jefferson’s recollection are key: He was making an effort for the “permission of” emancipation, not for the kind of broad emancipation that Abraham Lincoln would declare nine decades later.

  For Jefferson, it was a question of power. In that first session, in 1769, he crafted a bill that shifted control of emancipation from the General Court to slave owners themselves. The legislation would have given the individual Virginia slave owner the unilateral authority to free a slave.

  In his mind’s eye, Jefferson envisioned a Virginia in which he and others like him were beyond the reach of the governor and council who, under current law, decided requests for emancipation based on how they—not the planter, but the judges—chose to define “meritorious services.” Jefferson asked Richard Bland, a cousin, to take the lead on the legislation. The reaction from the House was swift and certain. Bland, Jefferson recalled, was “treated with the grossest indecorum.”