Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Following in the tradition of his kinsman John Randolph, the attorney general who lived in a beautiful house, Tazewell Hall, on a ninety-nine-acre estate on South England Street in Williamsburg, Jefferson was fascinated by gardening. Randolph, a Loyalist, owned perhaps the best violin in Virginia—Jefferson long envied it—and had written a book, A Treatise on Gardening by a Citizen of Virginia. The works of William Shenstone and of Thomas Whately also influenced Jefferson’s understanding of gardening and landscaping—an understanding centered on the idea of creating and controlling the illusion of wildness and of the natural.

  In the summer of 1775, his Loyalist cousin John Randolph was on Jefferson’s mind for reasons other than gardening. Writing to Randolph that August, Jefferson opened pleasantly, expressing regret that Randolph was leaving America for England and reminding him of his enduring admiration for Randolph’s violin.

  Then Jefferson moved to the real business of the letter: enlisting Randolph as an asset for the American cause. The British, Jefferson believed, were suffering from two fundamental misunderstandings of the American position. The first was that the discontent was concentrated within “a small faction” and was not shared by the broader population. Here Jefferson was shaping reality to suit his purposes. The American movement, while not limited to the elite, was still working its way through the social ranks.

  The second matter on Jefferson’s mind was visceral. “They have taken it into their heads too that we are cowards and shall surrender at discretion to an armed force,” he said, adding, with a reserved pride, “The past and future operations of the war must confirm or undeceive them on that head.” In sum, Jefferson wanted Randolph to present the colonists as a broad, united, and brave force that deserved more respect from London.

  Jefferson was thinking in plain political terms. If America were thought to be divided and cowardly, then the British would have no incentive to negotiate. Weakness in the New World would create contempt in the Old.

  Jefferson drafted but deleted an interesting threat from the Randolph letter. If Britain were to come to dominate the seaboard colonies militarily, Jefferson mused, there was another option. Perhaps the hardiest of Virginians might move “beyond the mountains,” which suggested that Jefferson had been party to conversations about an extreme scenario in which the colonists devoted to the American cause might move to the interior of the continent.

  It is an early example in Jefferson’s papers of his envisioning the West as a source of liberty and a theater for reinvention. The specificity of the suggestion in the crisis of 1775 shows that he was thinking hard about the practical implications of rebellion and was open to the most dire of contingencies should things go badly.

  He did not want to leave Randolph with angry words. That would defeat the purpose of the letter, which was to use his departing kinsman as a conduit to influential people in London. In closing, Jefferson parted on a warm note: “My collection of classics and of books of parliamentary learning particularly is not so complete as I could wish. As you are going to the land of literature and of books you may be willing to dispose of some of yours here and replace them there in better editions. I should be willing to treat on this head with anybody you may think proper to empower for that purpose.”

  The subtext: We may be political opponents, but we are men of culture who share a love of common things. It was a shrewd touch of Jefferson’s. The opening about the violin and the conclusion about the books made the intervening political assessments and assertions appear to be part of a natural conversation.

  John Randolph read it as such. “Though we may politically differ in sentiments, yet I see no reason why privately we may not cherish the same esteem for each other which formerly I believe subsisted between us,” Randolph wrote Jefferson on August 31, 1775. “Should any coolness happen between us, I’ll take care not to be the first mover of it. We both of us seem to be steering opposite courses; the success of either lies in the womb of time.”

  Jefferson’s letter served its purpose, finding its way from John Randolph to William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, the British secretary of state for the colonies. Jefferson had accomplished what he had set out to achieve: present his views to the imperial powers in London.

  Jefferson spent much of September 1775 at Monticello with his family. The interlude was tragic: His daughter Jane, only a year and a half old, died. After her loss his letters home while he was away were marked by an obsessive concern for Patty and for little Patsy, now his only living child.

  The demands of his sense of public obligation, however, were great. He left the mountain for the Congress in Philadelphia on Monday, September 25, 1775.

  Boarding again on Chestnut Street, Jefferson returned to the work of the Congress, but his mind was on Patty and Monticello. He depended on his wife, confiding in her on political matters. He wrote to her, too, of military affairs. Yet for him there was nothing but silence from home in this Philadelphia autumn. She was ill.

  By Tuesday, October 31, 1775, he was even more worried about Patty. “I have set apart nearly one day in every week since I came here to write letters,” he told his friend John Page. “Notwithstanding this I have never received the scrip of a pen from any mortal breathing.”

  Eight days later he was more desperate. “I have never received the scrip of a pen from any mortal in Virginia since I left it, nor been able by any enquiries I could make to hear of my family,” he wrote a brother-in-law. “The suspense under which I am is too terrible to be endured. If anything has happened, for God’s sake let me know it.”

  Jefferson’s anxiety about his personal world extended to the political one as well. There were reports of gathering British strength—cannons en route from the Tower of London, two thousand troops from Ireland, frigates bound for the middle colonies. One target: Virginia.

  And more specifically, Virginia planters. The naval forces, Jefferson said, were coming “at the express and earnest intercessions of Lord Dunmore, and the plan is to lay waste all the plantations of our river sides.”

  Little seemed cheering. On Sunday, October 22, 1775, an invitation for Jefferson to dine at Roxborough, the country house of the Philadelphia wine merchant Henry Hill, may have promised some shelter from the storms. It was a congenial company, headed by Peyton Randolph, whom Jefferson adored.

  At Roxborough around four o’clock, Peyton Randolph suffered a stroke—Jefferson called it “apoplexy”—and lingered about five hours, dying at the Hills’ at nine o’clock that evening.

  For Jefferson, the emblem of a whole world—a world Jefferson had known forever and which he aspired to lead—was dead at an hour of great danger. Peyton Randolph had dominated Virginia from the House of Burgesses to the Raleigh Tavern to St. John’s Church to the Pennsylvania State House. Jefferson always kept Randolph’s example in mind, admiring the blend of conviction and amiability that enabled the man Jefferson called “our most worthy Speaker” to survive and thrive in the arena.

  Peyton Randolph was dead, Patty Jefferson was sick, and a daughter had died: Jefferson was beset from seemingly every side. Then, in the middle of the last week of October 1775, at Hampton, near Norfolk, Virginia, the British tried to land armed parties from British vessels. Dunmore was in command of Norfolk, which gave the British a strategic base in a critical point of access. To the north, colonial troops under Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery were undertaking expeditions against Canada. And in Virginia, the Virginia Convention, which was governing in the wake of Dunmore’s dissolution of the House of Burgesses, created a Committee of Safety, a civilian body to oversee the state’s military.

  All that Jefferson loved was in peril. The eleven months preceding the Declaration of Independence were a contentious time in which nothing was certain in his family except Patty’s ill health and in politics except conflict with overwhelming British force.

  In Philadelphia, Jefferson a
bsorbed account after account, written by his most intimate friends, of the depredations of a superior military force against Virginia. “We care not for our towns, and the destruction of our houses would not cost us a sigh,” John Page wrote Jefferson, unconsciously echoing Jefferson’s remark to him five years earlier after the Shadwell fire. “I have long since given up mine as lost.”

  Jefferson’s political colleagues in the Pennsylvania State House were suffering the same fears over events in their own states. The human element of Jefferson’s service in Philadelphia is sometimes minimized, with more attention paid to textual investigations of his resonant state papers. Yet the personal and the philosophical were intimately connected: The Jefferson of the summer of 1776 was shaped by the tensions and contests of 1775. What he read of the deteriorating relations with Dunmore and of the bloodshed and fears in Virginia steeled him for the war ahead.

  November 7, 1775, is a forgotten date in the popular memory of the American Revolution, but the events of that autumn Tuesday in Virginia had much to do with those that culminated in the passage of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia the next year.

  From his shipboard quarters at Norfolk, Dunmore declared martial law and directly challenged white Virginia, ordering that any slave or indentured servant who took up arms against the American Revolutionaries would be granted their freedom. Frightened white Virginians—and sympathetic whites in other colonies—suddenly saw their most fevered visions of slaves turning against masters threatening to become real. The announcement drove a number of those who had been previously lukewarm about independence into the Revolutionary camp.

  Jefferson thought instantly of his family. If Dunmore succeeded in inspiring an army of slaves and indentured servants, then Monticello might not be safe. Jefferson made plans for Patty and his family to escape in the event of violence, plans that included his joining them in presumably safe territory. “I have written to Patty a proposition to keep yourselves at a distance from the alarms of Lord Dunmore,” he wrote a brother-in-law in November.

  As Jefferson crafted emergency measures for his family, word of Dunmore’s strike swept up and down the eastern coast. In late November, John Page was both defiant and pleading. “For God’s sake endeavor to procure us arms and ammunitions,” Page wrote Jefferson from Virginia. Page feared the British—and he feared “an insurrection of the negroes.”

  There was something else, too: the sense that the property of Virginia’s elites would fall into the hands of the British. “Some rascals, all foreigners, are already looking out for places and handsome seats,” Virginia statesman Robert Carter Nicholas wrote Jefferson in late 1775. “No country ever required greater exertions of wisdom than ours does at present,” Nicholas wrote Jefferson on November 25, 1775. “I fear no time is to be lost.”

  As the session of the Congress drew to a close, Jefferson was named to a committee “to Ascertain Unfinished Business before Congress.” He found twenty-seven separate matters that required attention, from reports on currency and Indian affairs to the making of salt. A second Jefferson task: service on a panel charged with planning the powers of a proposed committee to govern during the congressional recess.

  It was an instructive exercise, for it required Jefferson to analyze the role the Congress had been playing and discern which functions were essential. In a draft dated December 15, 1775, he listed nineteen duties he saw as crucial, ranging from supplying “the Continental forces by sea and land” to gathering “intelligence of the condition and designs of the enemy” to ensuring “the defense and preservation of forts and strong posts and to prevent the enemy from acquiring new holds.” The emphasis on practical military matters was consistent with what had chiefly occupied Jefferson for so long now.

  With even his own family in possible danger, he wanted to make it clear that the Americans were ready to exact an eye for an eye. Responding to reports that the American officer Ethan Allen had been captured in the Canadian campaign and was to be “sent to Britain in irons, to be punished for pretended treasons,” Jefferson, in a draft declaration for Congress, said British prisoners would be held accountable for anything that happened to Allen. “We deplore the event which shall oblige us to shed blood for blood, and shall resort to retaliation but as the means of stopping the progress of butchery,” he said—but Americans would do what had to be done.

  In the end, though the Congress deferred any decision to George Washington, the threatening draft shows that Jefferson saw the world as it was, not as he would have liked it to be.

  Leaving Philadelphia on Thursday, December 28, 1775, he reached Monticello in the middle of January. It was a new year when he rode up the mountain.

  There were outward signs of life as usual. He opened a cask of 1770 Madeira and began to think about taking his wife back with him to Philadelphia to be inoculated against smallpox. But the enveloping crisis could not be kept at bay. On Sunday, February 4, 1776, he received a new pamphlet entitled Common Sense. “The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind,” wrote Thomas Paine. Jefferson could not have agreed more.

  NINE

  THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS

  For God’s sake declare the colonies independent at once, and save us from ruin.

  —JOHN PAGE to Thomas Jefferson, spring 1776

  The bells rung all day and almost all night. Even the chimers chimed away.

  —JOHN ADAMS, describing the reaction to the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, 1776

  AT ABOUT SEVEN O’CLOCK on the morning of Sunday, March 31, 1776, Jefferson’s mother, Jane, fifty-five years old, was stricken with a stroke and succumbed within an hour.

  Jefferson asked the Reverend Charles Clay to preside over the funeral. Jane Randolph Jefferson was buried at Monticello. In seeing that his mother was put in ground he held sacred, near others he loved, Jefferson made certain that she would always be part of his home, and part of him.

  Jane’s death disoriented her son. Already immersed in the most difficult and fearful of political enterprises—revolution and the creation of a new form of government—Jefferson was brought face-to-face with one of the deepest personal crises a man can experience. In their parents, children ideally have sources of protection and comfort and love. Parents can also be sources of irritation, fear, and anxiety. Their deaths thus represent both loss and liberation.

  The mix of the two emotions can be changeable depending on the hour or the year, but one thing is constant: The parent is gone, which means the child himself, at whatever age, is compelled to assume a measure of the weight of the world commensurate with the passing of time and the increase in responsibility. Though living a crowded and consequential life, Jefferson may have been a lonelier man on the day his mother died than he had ever been.

  As he turned away from the graveyard, though, he was not leaving his mother behind. At moments of intense emotional distress Jefferson often suffered what he would call an “attack of my periodical headache,” a migraine headache so debilitating and vicious that he once said he was “obliged to avoid reading, writing, and almost thinking.” Before 1776, his last known bout had come in the wake of his heartbreak over Rebecca Burwell. With the death of Jane Randolph Jefferson, the blood and nerves in his brain gave him nothing but anguish. The force of her death was almost more than he could stand. The pain would not stop.

  It was a strange time for Jefferson, who lived with the headache, the mourning, and the uncertainty about America’s next step. He tried to stay engaged in the life of the plantation, paying a midwife to deliver Elizabeth Hemings’s son John. He tried, too, to stay engaged in life beyond Monticello, collecting money for powder for Virginia and for the relief of the poor of Boston.

  He left Monticello for Philadelphia on Tuesday, May 7, 1776, arriving seven days later. Patty stayed in Virginia. “I am here in the same uneasy anxious state in which I was t
he last fall without Mrs. Jefferson who could not come with me,” Jefferson told his fellow Virginia politician Thomas Nelson, Jr. On May 23 he took quarters at a three-story house owned by the bricklayer Jacob Graff, Jr., on the southwest corner of Seventh and Market streets in Philadelphia.

  He initially felt out of phase with the other delegates. They were speaking of matters he had missed while he had been in mourning at Monticello.

  But he soon found himself at the center of everything.

  At the end of the first week of June 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the “United Colonies” were “absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

  At last, the hour of decision was at hand. The debate over independence began the next day.

  Congress was not chiefly concerned about the rights of man or even the shape of an American polity. History’s trumpets were sounding, but only in the distance. The clatter that dominated the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia was about domestic politics and international relations at their most practical.

  Some representatives argued that a precipitous declaration of independence might provoke some if not all of the middle colonies (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and New York) to secede from the American cause. If there were such a domestic crack-up, Jefferson reported, “foreign powers would either refuse to join themselves to our fortunes, or having us so much in their power … they would insist on terms proportionately more hard and prejudicial.”

  John Adams, Richard Henry Lee, George Wythe, and others marshaled the evidence in favor of declaring independence. First, they noted that “no gentleman had argued against the policy or the right of separation from Britain, nor had supposed it possible we should ever renew our connection: that they had only opposed its being now declared.”