Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Ultimately, though, the George Rogers Clark expedition to Detroit was deemed too dangerous. Jefferson told Washington that “the want of men, want of money, and difficulty of procuring provisions” made the mission impossible for now. He reported the decision with regret. (Nearly a quarter of a century later, Jefferson was to entrust a journey to the Pacific to George Rogers Clark’s brother William Clark and Meriwether Lewis.)

  Jefferson soon needed Clark for another project: putting down Loyalists. “There is reason to apprehend insurrection among some discontented inhabitants (Tories) on our South-Western frontier,” he wrote Clark in March 1780. “I would have you give assistance on the shortest warning to that quarter.… Nothing can produce so dangerous a diversion of our force, as a circumstance of that kind if not crushed in its infancy.” Jefferson was in no humor to be merciful.

  As with Josiah Philips and with Henry Hamilton, Jefferson took the fight straight to the enemy. Diplomacy, grace, and mercy had their place. So did steel, vengeance, and strength. Thomas Jefferson was quite capable of deploying whatever weapon he thought best to defend those entrusted to his care.

  It had been the coldest winter anyone could remember. The rivers were frozen so solid as 1779 became 1780 that horses and wagons could cross the James and the Potomac rivers.

  In the thaw of spring, Jefferson and his colleagues made a historic move, shifting the capital of Virginia from Williamsburg to Richmond. They believed they would be safer farther inland.

  As Jefferson settled his family in a house on Richmond’s Shockoe Hill, borrowed from an uncle by marriage, he had every reason to believe he was acting in a climate of extreme emergency.

  Charleston fell to the British on Wednesday, May 10, 1780. Jefferson was surrounded, and he knew it. “While we are threatened with a formidable attack from the northward on our Ohio settlements and from the southern Indians on our frontiers convenient to them,” Jefferson said in June 1780, “our eastern country is exposed to invasion from the British army in Carolina.”

  There was another Tory uprising on the New River in Montgomery County in southwestern Virginia over the summer as well as more Indian violence. Elected to a second yearlong term as governor on Friday, June 2, 1780, Jefferson had no relief from bad news.

  In the closing weeks of August, Lord Cornwallis routed the American general Horatio Gates and the Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina militias at Camden, South Carolina.

  Jefferson was despondent. Citing the “disaster which has lately befallen our Army,” he summoned the council to help him formulate “an immediate and great exertion to stop the progress of the enemy.” He knew his options were limited: “The measures most likely to effect this are difficult both in choice and execution.”

  At last, the most serious blow came. Beginning on Friday, December 29, 1780, Benedict Arnold, the American general who had become a traitor, selling himself to the British, led an invasion of Virginia. Word of the British attack off the Virginia capes reached Richmond on New Year’s morning, 1781.

  Living as long as he had in an era of exaggeration and of flawed reports, Jefferson was slow to credit the intelligence. A series of invasion rumors since 1777 had led to popular discontent and ambivalence about a summons to arms. To call out the militia, Jefferson said in December 1779, created “disgust” when the militiamen “find no enemy in place.”

  For two days in 1781, then, he declined to summon the militia. A messenger found him at the house on the hill in Richmond, calm and collected—too calm and collected.

  As the days passed, it became clear that the invading forces were quite real. By then Jefferson had issued the proper orders, but it was too late to field a serious opposition.

  With the British troops moving toward Richmond on Friday, January 5, 1781, Robert Hemings and James Hemings drove Patty and the rest of the Jefferson family to safety at a piece of property Jefferson owned on Fine Creek, west of the capital.

  At about one o’clock on the afternoon of January 5, the British arrived at Richmond, formed a line, and launched cannon fire into the city. One shot took off the top of a butcher’s house near Jefferson’s Shockoe Hill quarters. According to Isaac Granger Jefferson, “In ten minutes not a white man was to be seen in Richmond; they ran hard as they could” to a camp of American soldiers on Bacon’s Quarter Branch in northern Richmond.

  It was chaos. “The British was dressed in red,” Isaac Granger Jefferson recalled; he “saw them marching.” Thomas Jefferson had left the governor’s residence to avoid capture and spent the hours of the invasion circling Richmond in efforts to secure supplies and to rendezvous with American officers.

  He was right to leave the center of the action. The British had brought along handcuffs in expectation of arresting the author of the Declaration of Independence.

  Reaching the house on Shuckoe Hill, a British officer asked where Jefferson was. “He’s gone to the mountains,” said George Granger, Isaac’s father, protecting the master.

  “Where is the keys to the house?” the officer asked, in Isaac’s recollection. Isaac’s father handed over the keys.

  “Where is the silver?” the officer asked.

  “It was all sent up to the mountains,” George Granger said. It was a lie: As Isaac recalled it, his father had “put all the silver about the house in a bed tick and hid it under a bed in the kitchen and saved it too.”

  Benedict Arnold soon removed himself back to the coast. The British, meanwhile, seized a large number of Jefferson’s slaves, including Isaac Granger Jefferson. As they were marched out of Richmond, they heard the sounds of war—one blast, Isaac Granger Jefferson recalled, was “like an earthquake.”

  Would it have made a difference to the defense of Richmond if the call for militia had gone out earlier? Writing from Richmond a month after the invasion, Jefferson himself believed that “men of enterprise and firmness” would have been able to capture Arnold “on his march to and from this place.” Presumably, then, an activated militia would have been of military value. Jefferson had plenty of strength in his soul, but on this occasion he misjudged the moment.

  By waiting, Jefferson had made a common political mistake. He had followed the people rather than led them. Many of the Virginians who did the actual fighting in militias were unhappy and skeptical about the elite that Jefferson embodied and represented. The culture of Virginia was not conducive to rapid military deployment in the best of times; now, in wartime, militias were even more difficult to muster. “Mild laws, a people not used to war and prompt obedience, a want of the provisions of war and means of procuring them render our orders often ineffectual, oblige us to temporize and when we cannot accomplish an object in one way to attempt it in another,” Jefferson told a French newcomer in March 1781—the Marquis de Lafayette, who had reached Virginia to take command of Continental troops.

  It may not have been fear of the British that kept Jefferson in check for those two days. It is possible that he feared mobilizing a public when he could not be sure the threat was real, thus risking the wrath of the people. By hesitating, he failed to bring his constituents along to the place they needed to be.

  The lessons Jefferson was learning—painfully—in Virginia would help him immensely in later years when his responsibilities were even larger. Boldness and decisiveness were sometimes virtues in a leader. Having failed to be either bold or decisive during the invasions of Virginia, he gained valuable experience about the price of waiting. At the time, however, he could not have known that one day he would owe something of his presidential success to his failures of 1781.

  THIRTEEN

  REDCOATS AT MONTICELLO

  Such terror and confusion you have no idea of. Governor, Council, everybody scampering.

  —BETSY AMBLER, daughter of Rebecca Burwell

  JEFFERSON’S VIRGINIA WAS TEETERING in the face of British force
. Lord Cornwallis and Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who was noted for his ferocious tactics, turned their attention toward the state in the late spring of 1781. Fearing the conquering redcoats, Governor Jefferson and the Virginia General Assembly retreated from Richmond to Charlottesville, but even there the legislature could barely muster a quorum.

  In this difficult period the Jeffersons endured a by-now all-too-familiar tragedy: the death of yet another child—three of their children had now died. This one, Lucy Elizabeth, not quite six months old, died at about ten o’clock on an April morning in 1781. Jefferson chose to stay with Patty the next day, declining to attend a meeting of the state council. The weather was bad in any event, Jefferson wrote his colleagues, “and there being nothing that I know of very pressing, and Mrs. Jefferson in a situation in which I would not wish to leave her, I shall not attend today.”

  His day with Patty as they grieved together was a rare moment of domestic communion, for there were now few respites from the press of business. By Monday, May 28, 1781, Jefferson knew a reckoning was at hand. British troops were advancing inland, toward Charlottesville. There were riots over a draft for militiamen across Virginia. Jefferson was reduced to asking George Washington for the general’s personal assistance.

  As things stood, Jefferson wrote to Washington, with an inadequate militia facing British regulars, “the minds of the people” could conceive of “no human power … to ward off” the inevitable victory of British forces. Only Washington’s “appearance among them, I say, would restore full confidence of salvation, and would render them equal to whatever is not impossible.”

  Jefferson wrote these words on the twenty-eighth, and he intended to stand down as governor at the expiration of his term a few days hence, on June 2. As he told Washington, his “long declared resolution of relinquishing [the governorship] to abler hands has prepared my way for retirement to a private station.”

  To speak of private stations and the end of one’s burdens (what he called “the labors of my office”) in such an emergency does not put Jefferson in a flattering light. With the assembly on the run and the state in jeopardy, one wishes Jefferson had transformed himself into a heroic savior on horseback, rallying Virginians to the field to stop the British.

  He was not, however, a savior on horseback. The tragedy of the British invasion of Virginia in the spring of 1781 was that no patriot leader rose to the occasion to repel Arnold, Cornwallis, or Tarleton. The war was too diffuse, the circumstances too fluid to be in anyone’s control—even Jefferson’s, and he had spent the previous two years working on the military defense of Virginia’s borders.

  He spent Saturday, June 2, 1781 at Monticello with his family and houseguests, including the speakers of the Virginia House and Senate. The lawmakers were availing themselves of Jefferson’s hospitality as they waited for the legislative session scheduled to take place in Charlottesville on Monday, June 4. Jefferson’s successor was to be elected at this meeting.

  Jefferson’s considered counsel to his colleagues in the government was that they elect Thomas Nelson, Jr., a man with political and military experience. It was time, Jefferson said, for a “union of the civil and military power in the same hands”—a move that the previous two years had taught him “would greatly facilitate military measures.”

  Unbeknownst to the party at Monticello, Cornwallis had ordered Tarleton to pursue the government to Charlottesville. Riding fast, the British dragoons passed the Cuckoo Tavern in Louisa on Sunday, June 3, 1781. It was late—somewhere between nine and ten p.m.—when the British rode by. A giant of a Virginia militiaman named Jack Jouett (said to be six foot four and 220 pounds) was in Louisa. Realizing that the enemy was en route to capture Jefferson, Jouett broke away for a daring nighttime ride of forty miles.

  Mounted on a horse said to be “the best and fleetest of foot of any nag in seven counties,” Jouett crashed through the wilderness. Careering through woodlands and along ridges, Jouett avoided well-known roads in order to stay clear of the enemy. According to one account, his face was “cruelly lashed by tree-branches as he rode forward, and scars which are said to have remained the rest of his life were the result of lacerations sustained from these low-hanging limbs.” The British broke their march at a plantation around eleven p.m. There they rested for about three hours, thus giving Jouett a bit of time. Tarleton stopped again deep in the night to set fire to a wagon train of supplies en route to confronting the rebel troops.

  Jouett arrived at Monticello just before dawn and told Jefferson of the impending strike. Coolly, Jefferson ordered breakfast served to the household, summoned a carriage for his family, and bade farewell to the legislators, who descended the mountain back to Charlottesville. Patty and the two children and a number of slaves set out in search of safety at neighboring plantations.

  At Monticello, Jefferson was largely alone. At least two slaves were still there—one was Martin Hemings—and were hiding silver in anticipation of the raid. Jefferson tried to rescue his documents; “In preparing for flight, I shoved in papers where I could.”

  He then did something in character. He decided to see things for himself. His instincts for control and for action drove him from Monticello to a neighboring peak known both as Montalto and as Carters Mountain. He took his spyglass with him. Looking out at Charlottesville he did not note anything extraordinary. He turned to go, but realized that his sword cane had slipped to the ground. As he retrieved it, his curiosity got the better of him. He peered through his glass again.

  That was when he saw the British.

  Back at Monticello, Jefferson mounted his best horse, Caractacus, and took off after his family. The redcoats arrived five minutes after he left. One cocked a pistol, aimed it at Martin Hemings’s chest, and demanded to be told where Jefferson was or he would fire. “Fire away, then,” Hemings said.

  There would be no gunfire at Monticello during its brief occupation by the British, nor would there be any looting. (One exception: The redcoats drank some of Jefferson’s wine; legend has it that they used it to toast George III’s birthday.) Cornwallis was far less circumspect about Jefferson’s other plantations, especially Elk Hill, where the British scattered his slaves and burned crops. Twenty-three of Jefferson’s slaves ran away from his plantations amid the Tarleton-Cornwallis invasion; at least fifteen of these died of disease in British camps at Yorktown or Portsmouth.

  Riding away from Monticello, Jefferson caught up with Patty and the children, and they ultimately sought refuge at Poplar Forest, the family’s Bedford County estate. His family was safe, and he was safe.

  His reputation was not.

  On Tuesday, June 12, 1781, the legislature, now meeting at Trinity Church in Staunton, Virginia, expressed its gratitude to Jack Jouett with a brace of pistols and a sword—tokens to honor his brave journey through the darkness. It also passed a resolution that cut Jefferson to the core:

  Resolved, That at the next session of the Assembly an inquiry be made into the conduct of the Executive of this State for the last twelve months.

  Jefferson could imagine nothing worse. His courage and his competence were both in the dock. It was bad enough that such calamities had struck while he was in office. Though he might not have admitted it even to himself as he played and replayed recent history in his mind, he must have known that two invasions and the chasing of the state government from Charlottesville to Staunton were debacles to be charged to his political account. Those he could probably handle. George Washington’s standing had survived defeats. What he needed was time—time to decide in tranquillity how best to serve the cause in which he so believed.

  Instead he was now forced into a fight over his own past. He did not bother to conceal his anger. In a tart note, Jefferson wrote that since the motion “could not be intended just to stab a reputation by a general suggestion under a bare expectation that facts might be afterwards hunted up to bolste
r it, I hope you will not think me improper in asking the favor of you to specify to me the unfortunate passages in my conduct which you mean to adduce against me.”

  In the same Trinity Church session in which the lawmakers voted to investigate Jefferson, they debated a motion that implicitly suggested the fault for the chaos of the invasions lay not with the officeholder but with the office itself. It was argued that the time had come for a “dictator … who should have the power of disposing of the lives and fortunes of the citizens thereof without being subject to account.”

  Patrick Henry spoke in favor of the “dictator” measure, saying that executive, whatever he was called, needed to be “armed with such powers … necessary to restrain the unbridled fury of a licentious enemy.” The motion and the debate tend to exculpate Jefferson, suggesting as they do that those closest to the events believed the problems of authority were structural. The problem had been the governorship, not the governor. (The motion failed, narrowly.)

  Accounts of Jefferson’s terrible time as governor often fail to try to reconcile the two votes. The first, the vote for an inquiry, amounted to an indictment of Jefferson’s conduct. Yet the second, the vote for new powers for Jefferson’s successors, amounted to a tacit admission that Jefferson had not possessed authority commensurate with the challenges of the time. To blame Jefferson for failure in an executive office while simultaneously attempting to reform that office logically shifts responsibility from the individual to the institution.

  Logic, however, is rarely a big part of politics. Jefferson’s foes saw an opportunity to embarrass him. Though the house inquiry was short-lived—the assembly ended up commending, not condemning, Jefferson—the episode lived on in the mind of Jefferson and in the memories of his political opponents. His bitterness at the charge that he had been derelict in his duty was palpable. There was, Jefferson said, “no foundation” for any official aspersion.