Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Depressed and harried, Jefferson could find little good news. “Our camps recruit slowly, amazing slowly,” he told Richard Henry Lee in July. “God knows in what it will end.”

  In the context of the time—the drafting of the declaration, which was treason, and the ongoing, not particularly successful military operations—the atmosphere in America was charged. On learning that he had received the fewest votes of any Virginia incumbent in his reelection to the Continental Congress, Jefferson assumed that he had been criticized and undermined at home. “It is a painful situation to be 300 miles from one’s country, and thereby open to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defense,” he said.

  Jefferson believed the work of his hands would vindicate him. “If any doubt has arisen as to me, my country will have my political creed in the form of a ‘Declaration etc’ which I was lately directed to draw.”

  Virginians were particularly frustrated by a war with the Cherokees. Jefferson’s views of Native Americans were a bit more nuanced than those of many of his fellow white contemporaries, but only a bit. Fascinated by Indian language and culture, Jefferson often sought artifacts and information to satisfy a genuine curiosity about America’s original inhabitants. He believed Indians a noble race. At his core, though, Jefferson shared the prevailing views of white landowners: that Indian lands were destined to belong to whites, and the Indians themselves should be inculcated in the ways of the whites.

  Tribes who allied with Britain (or with any of the other European powers) were direct threats to the Revolutionary enterprise. In August 1776, Jefferson reacted viscerally to word of Cherokee assaults to the south. “Nothing will reduce these wretches as soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country,” Jefferson wrote. “But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi.” It was a telling reaction, one that foreshadowed the fate of a race.

  In the summer of 1776 Jefferson spent time planning for the difficult work of government. In one case he wrote a proposed constitution for Virginia. In another, he closely followed the Congress’s debates over a national government and the content of what Jefferson referred to as “the articles of confederation.”

  Jefferson also helped draft rules of procedure for the Congress. His suggestions speak to a hunger for order and the appearance of civility: “No Member shall read any printed paper in the House during the sitting thereof without Leave of the Congress.” Another: “No Member in coming into the House or in removing from his Place shall pass between the President and the Member then speaking.” And another: “When the House is sitting no Member shall speak [or whisper] to another as to interrupt any Member who may be speaking in the Debate.”

  Jefferson believed civility an important political virtue, and he largely practiced what he preached. He and John Adams once disagreed on the floor over a proposal to call for a day of prayer. Though he had seen the good uses of public appeals to religious sentiments in Virginia, Jefferson grew ever more uncomfortable with frequent political resorts to orthodox belief. “You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments from a gentleman whom you so highly respected and with whom you agreed upon so many subjects, and that it was the only instance you had ever known of a man of sound sense and real genius that was an enemy to Christianity,” Benjamin Rush recalled to Adams years later. “You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.”

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

  His wife’s health remained such a concern that Jefferson sought to leave Philadelphia to return to Patty in Virginia. “I receive by every post such accounts of the state of Mrs. Jefferson’s health, that it will be impossible for me to disappoint her expectation of seeing me at the time I have promised, which supposed my leaving this place on the 11th of next month,” he wrote Richard Henry Lee. The letter finished, Jefferson added a postscript begging Lee to come relieve him.

  Yet Jefferson had to stay to keep Virginia’s quorum. He hated it. “I am under the painful necessity of putting off my departure, notwithstanding the unfavorable situation of Mrs. Jefferson’s health,” he told John Page in August.

  There is no mistaking how significant Jefferson and his colleagues believed the scale of the American struggle to be. One of Jefferson’s duties in Philadelphia was the design of a seal for the new nation, a task he shared with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

  Reacting to a proposal of Franklin’s that invoked the parting of the Red Sea, Jefferson suggested: “Pharaoh sitting in an open chariot, a crown on his head and a sword in his hand passing through the divided waters of the Red Sea in pursuit of the Israelites: rays from a pillar of fire in the cloud, expressive of the divine presence, and command, reaching to Moses who stands on the shore and, extending his hand over the sea, causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh. Motto: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The Founders were Moses; George III was Pharaoh; Americans were the Israelites being led from bondage.

  In truth the British demands on the colonists were hardly outrageous. The expense of defending the borders was considerable; American wealth was substantial; and Edmund Burke made a compelling case in London for “virtual representation”—the argument that the king and Parliament were stewards of the whole empire whether particular colonists could vote for members of the House of Commons or not.

  So why did the colonists take such extreme steps—arming themselves and putting their lives and their families’ lives at risk? There is no single answer. The intellectual and political legacy of the English Civil War was vital, for it was both a beacon and a warning. John Locke and others articulated what became known as the liberal tradition—the collection of insights and convictions that emphasized individual freedom in civic, economic, and religious life. The classical republican ethos that centered on virtue, harmony, balance, and fear of corruption had come to the Anglo-American world through Renaissance Florence, where Machiavelli and others sought to preserve the best of the ancient republics. The revivals of the First Great Awakening were critical, too, for the preaching of the mid-eighteenth century tended to focus on the centrality of the individual soul in relation to God. It was a Protestant movement, and for all its variations, Protestantism was largely about the importance of all believers, not the importance of priests and bishops and eccleisastical systems. Then there was capitalism and its discontents. Americans were blessed with enormous natural resources and endless economic energy, yet many—including Jefferson—found themselves in perpetual debt to British creditors.

  Scholars often wish to isolate one of these phenomena as the origin of the Revolution. It seems most convincing, though, to think of Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism via the Renaissance, the Great Awakening, the promise of capitalism, and the hatred of debt (and the British merchants and banks who were owed the debts) as tributaries that all helped form the larger rushing river of the American Revolution.

  The debate over declaring independence took on such significance in part because a permanent break with London was not foreordained. For years colonists chose to believe that the monarchy was in the hands of nefarious, anti-American ministers. The hope from the 1750s to 1776 was that somehow the sovereign would put things to rights. It is a measure of the confidence Jefferson had in this possibility, for instance, that he maintained a tone of respect and deference to George III in his 1774 Summary View. And it is a measure of the depth of his sense of betrayal and disappointment in the king that the Declaration of Independence struck such virulent antimonarchical notes.

  Jefferson’s service in the Congress in 1776 left him thoroughly versed in the ways and means
politics. He had defined an ideal in the declaration, using words to transform principle into policy, and he had lived with the reality of managing both a war and a fledgling government. A politician’s task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled. It was a task that Jefferson, at the age of thirty-three, had found that he liked. He had found out something else, too. He was good at it.

  The leaves were just beginning to turn as Jefferson rode from Philadelphia to Monticello in the early autumn of 1776. At home on the mountaintop, he was relieved to be with his wife and with little Patsy, who celebrated her fourth birthday in the last week of September.

  The action, though, was elsewhere—in Philadelphia, of course, and in Williamsburg, where state delegates were at work on creating a new government for Virginia. Jefferson had long been exultant about the prospect of building a new Virginian order. He longed to be in the thick of shaping the government once led by Peyton Randolph and mastered by Wythe.

  Torn between the joys and demands of family and the demands and excitements of statecraft, he quickly found that his thoughts and emotions changed with the hour: I must go home; I must engage; I must go home; I must engage, and back and forth, and back and forth. His wife was still in precarious health, her frequent pregnancies exacerbating matters.

  In Williamsburg, meanwhile, there was the remaking of Virginia; in Philadelphia, the making of a nation; and everywhere there was war.

  His contemporaries believed Jefferson essential. The Virginia lawyer Edmund Pendleton looked forward to having Jefferson back in Williamsburg as the work of the new government began. “I hope you’ll get cured of your wish to retire so early in life from the memory of man, and exercise your talents for the nurture of our new constitution, which will require all the attention of its friends to prune exuberances and cherish the plant,” Pendleton wrote. Virginia needed him.

  Jefferson decided he could serve in Williamsburg and still be attentive to his family. He and Patty accepted an offer from George and Elizabeth Wythe to use the Wythe house on the green in Williamsburg. This meant that Jefferson could take his family with him to Williamsburg, an arrangement that was not possible in far-off Philadelphia. The young family settled into the handsome brick house, giving Jefferson a rare hour of balance between his public and private lives. He spent his nonworking hours with Patty and Patsy. They slept upstairs, entertained on the first floor, and enjoyed the symmetrical gardens.

  It was perfect.

  But only for a moment.

  ELEVEN

  AN AGENDA FOR LIBERTY

  It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, on freedom of religion

  IN WILLIAMSBURG, Jefferson soon faced a new decision. The Congress needed reliable men to represent America’s interests in France and elected a delegation to go to Paris to make an alliance between the French and the Americans. On the floor of the Pennsylvania State House, the representatives chose to entrust the mission to Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, to Silas Deane of Connecticut—and to Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.

  Without a successful alliance with France, the outmatched Americans were likely to lose the war. Britain was simply too strong. There were worries, moreover, that Russia might dispatch troops to aid the British, overwhelming the patriots. Writing as president of the Congress, John Hancock assumed Jefferson’s acceptance of the mission to France, asking him “to acquaint me, by the return of the express … at what time and place it will be most convenient for you to embark.” The express reached Jefferson in Williamsburg, where he was with his family and at work on the new government of Virginia.

  He asked the messenger to await his reply.

  Thus began three days of agony. One of the benefits of being in Williamsburg was that Patty could be with him. Given her health, she could not go to France. If he went to Paris, he would be making a decision that would separate them once more. How could he sail the Atlantic, and possibly never see her again?

  Yet how could Jefferson say no to one of the great assignments—one of the great honors—of the age? Power, drama, glamour were at hand; all could be savored while he engaged in serious, essential public service. He had traveled the world in his imagination for so long. Here was the opportunity to do it not only in dreams but in fact.

  The messenger waited. It was temptation on a sweeping scale. Jefferson loved the esteem the selection implied. “It would argue great insensibility in me could I receive with indifference so confidential an appointment from your body,” he would write Hancock. “My thanks are a poor return for the partiality they have been pleased to entertain for me.” He veered back and forth, talking himself first into one decision, then into another. He could not leave his family; might he bring them with him after all?

  Not, he thought, with Patty’s health. As excruciating as it was, he made his choice.

  Jefferson loved his family; he loved Virginia; he loved his nascent nation. Raised in a tight-knit universe of kith and kin, accustomed to spending his hours reading in his father’s first-floor library, singing on the banks of the Rivanna with his sister Jane, and learning to supervise his lands at his mother’s side, he cherished his domestic worlds while being simultaneously drawn to politics.

  In the fall of 1776, he could not have both in France; he could in Virginia.

  He called the messenger. “No cares for my own person, nor yet for my private affairs would have induced one moment’s hesitation to accept the charge,” he wrote in a note to Hancock. “But circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my family, such as neither permit me to leave nor to carry it, compel me to ask leave to decline a service so honorable and at the same time so important to the American cause.”

  Jefferson spent the period after the writing of the Declaration of Independence learning how to translate ideas about human nature into political action. Like the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution during the Stamp Act crisis, the declaration had taught him the power of language in the art of leadership. 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.

  October 1776 marked the beginning of Jefferson’s pursuit of a remarkable legislative agenda for liberty in Virginia. With Patty in Williamsburg with him, he fought to transform the promise of the Declaration of Independence into reality in a series of bills in the new General Assembly.

  For him politics was informed by philosophy, but one could achieve the good only by putting philosophy into action. To do so required the acquisition of power. He moved carefully in Williamsburg, first introducing bills in order to test “the strength of the general pulse of reformation.” Satisfied that the lawmakers were, in fact, interested in a new order, Jefferson pressed on—but only after becoming sure of his ground.

  As a delegate to the General Assembly in Williamsburg and through his consistent work among his fellow Virginians, cajoling and seeking to convince, Jefferson put himself in a position to effect genuine change—to make the world into something it had not been before.

  Jefferson’s first significant initiative in Williamsburg in the fall of 1776 was a strike against entail and primogeniture, ancient conventions under which large landowners were compelled to pass their property to a single heir, creating, in Jefferson’s words, “a distinct set of families, who, being privileged by law in the perpetuation of their wealth were thus formed into a patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments.” Jefferson had benefited from just this system but believed the greater good demanded reform.

  No part of the legal code governing life in Virginia went unexamined. There were bills altering criminal justice by ending the harshest of
punishments (including limiting the death penalty to murder and treason); for creating a system of general public education to broaden opportunities for many white Virginians; for speeding the naturalization of the foreign-born into citizens (Jefferson favored a two-year residence requirement).

  As he worked, Jefferson took note of a newcomer on the political scene, a young, diminutive man who had grown up near Orange, Virginia, about thirty miles northeast of Charlottesville. He was twenty-five; Jefferson was thirty-three. He was small; Jefferson was tall. He was assiduously understated; Jefferson was given to making grand pronouncements.

  The newcomer, James Madison, was to become Thomas Jefferson’s most trusted and invaluable counselor. Born in 1751 to tobacco-growing gentry, Madison had gone north to be educated at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Quiet, intense, and tireless, Madison “acquired a habit of self-possession, which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous and discriminating mind, and of his extensive information, and rendered him the first of every assembly afterwards, of which he became a member,” Jefferson recalled.

  When Madison became Jefferson’s successor as president of the United States three and a half decades later, the writer Washington Irving would describe him as “but a withered little apple-John.” In Madison’s case appearances were misleading. Despite his small stature, Madison possessed a powerful political personality. As Jefferson once observed: “Never wandering from his subject into vain declamation, but pursuing it closely, in language pure, classical, and copious, soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of expression,” Madison rose to national greatness—and through loyal and wise counsel, Madison was an invaluable architect of Jefferson’s own career.

  Their first battle together was waged in Virginia over freedom of religion. As a student of William Small’s at William and Mary, Jefferson had become a reader of several Enlightenment-era skeptics about traditional Christianity. (Madison shared Jefferson’s convictions about the necessity of freedom of conscience.) Jefferson had come to believe the apostolic faith was superstitious and therefore unreasonable—one of the most damning of Jeffersonian indictments.