Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Jefferson was eager to get away—the farther the better—but neither the British nor the weather was cooperating. He and Patsy expected to sail from Baltimore with the French minister on the frigate Romulus. The ship was frozen in a few miles below Baltimore, so Jefferson remained in Philadelphia reacquainting himself with the national political scene he had left six years before. He and his daughter took rooms at Mary House’s establishment at Fifth and Market.

  Mrs. House’s boardinghouse offered charming political company (including Madison) and provided the grieving Jefferson with what he had always needed (and, since his friendship with his sister Jane, had always had): a connection with a sympathetic woman—in this case, Eliza House Trist, the daughter of his landlady. Eliza Trist came to play a sustaining role in Jefferson’s life as a longtime admiring friend.

  At Mrs. House’s lodgings, Jefferson played a supporting role in the domestic drama of the thirty-two-year-old Madison’s wooing of fifteen-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Floyd. The beautiful daughter of the New York congressman William Floyd, Kitty won the solemn Madison’s heart. Jefferson joined what he called the household’s “raillery” as it charted the romance.

  In addition to spending time among colleagues old and new, Jefferson took detailed notes on a “Secret Journal of Foreign Affairs” kept by Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress. Jefferson studied the diplomatic correspondence between the Congress and Benjamin Franklin in France, John Jay in Spain, and John Adams in Holland. He reviewed instructions to commissioners to foreign states and the appointments of envoys to Vienna, Russia, Prussia, and Tuscany. He read Madison’s paper Observations Relating to the Influence of Vermont and the Territorial Claims on the Politics of Congress and considered documents related to Spanish-American disputes over the lands east of the Mississippi.

  Attuned to how others saw the world—and understanding that most of them saw it with themselves at the center—Jefferson reached out to his future colleague John Jay, then an American diplomat in Europe: “Had I joined you at a more early period I am sure I should not have added to the strength of the commission and, coming in at the eleventh hour, I can propose no more than to avoid doing mischief.” It was a disarming note, designed to allay any jealousies or annoyances at the late arrival of a new diplomat. Jefferson was taking care to cultivate those around him.

  And those above him, too: He wrote George Washington an ingratiating letter. Washington’s preeminence in the life of the nation was clear. In war Jefferson had maintained the most cordial of relations with him. At the possible approach of peace, he wanted to make himself pleasant to Washington, and perhaps useful. He offered Washington “my individual tribute to your Excellency for all you have suffered and all you have effected for us.”

  Then came news that concluded Jefferson’s mission before it had begun: Jay and the incumbent American representatives in France had completed a draft of the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain, the document officially ending the Revolutionary War. The text of the pact was en route to the United States, where the Congress would have to ratify it.

  Jefferson returned to Virginia, a reluctant private citizen once more, yet made his ambitions clear to James Madison. He wanted to be in the action again. “Should the call be made on me, which was sometimes the subject of our conversation,” Jefferson wrote, he would enthusiastically return to the national stage.

  It did not take long. On Friday, June 6, 1783, Jefferson was elected to the Congress. Edmund Randolph’s report of the news to Madison was succinct: “Mr. Jefferson was placed at the head of the delegation not without his approbation.”

  Jefferson had been without a public position for less than a month.

  The Congress to which Jefferson was elected was the only institution of national government. Created by the Articles of Confederation, it was an inherently weak body. There was neither a separate executive nor a judicial branch—only the Congress. A state could not be represented without two members. A majority of nine of the thirteen states had to agree on most large questions, limiting the government’s effectiveness. Even if there were a quorum present and in agreement about major issues, the Congress had little power: It could not tax, regulate national trade, or create a military (though it was authorized to declare war). There was no means of enforcement; the states were essentially sovereign nations, which left the national government ill-equipped to create coherent foreign and commercial policies that might strengthen the young country.

  The year 1783 had much in common with 1774: It was a time of twilight, an hour when the answers to great questions were unclear. In 1774 the issue was war. In 1783 it was peace—or, more precisely, whether Americans could emerge from the conflict and govern themselves as a sovereign power.

  Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s 1775 proposal for an “Articles of Confederation,” Jefferson had been thinking about the practicalities of governing at the national level. He served on the committee to consider Franklin’s paper and was appointed to another panel in 1783 to devise a “visible head of the government during vacations of Congress.” The result was a Committee of the States, and Jefferson was a persistent advocate of more, rather than less, central control.

  The committee failed. “This was then imputed to the temper of two or three individuals,” Jefferson recalled, “but the wise ascribed it to the nature of man.” Later in his career Jefferson was able to draw on the experience of wartime Virginia and the collapse of the mid-1780s national structure to become a disciple of a unitary (but accountable) executive. History offered no contrary examples. “Our plan best, I believe, combines wisdom and practicability, by providing a plurality of counselors, but a single arbiter for ultimate decision,” he said of the American presidency.

  Contemplating the situation in the Confederation Congress of 1783, Jefferson worried about nothing less than anarchy. Now that the Revolutionary War was won, what was to keep state from turning on state, or region on region?

  A power of central, national, and binding force was the only answer. The task was clear: Jefferson and his contemporaries had to lay their “shoulders to the strengthening of the band of our confederacy and averting those cruel evils to which its present weakness will expose us.”

  The problems would persist for much of the 1780s. “I have long thought and become daily more convinced that the construction of our federal government is fundamentally wrong,” John Jay wrote to Jefferson in 1786. “To vest legislative, judicial and executive powers in one and the same body of men, and that too in a body daily changing its members, can never be wise.” The same year Jefferson told James Monroe, “There never will be money in the treasury till the confederacy shows its teeth. The states must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them.”

  Without a powerful union, he expected the worst.

  The question was not only of political science or of law but of character. The prospects for the survival of the new nation lay with the people themselves. In 1782 the issue had been framed pithily and well. “What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer.

  Jefferson had been trying to answer that query for several years, albeit with a provincial, not a national, focus. In 1780, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, secretary of the French legation in America, had sent Jefferson a series of questions about Virginia. The result was Jefferson’s most sustained literary effort, a book—not published until a few years later, in Paris—entitled Notes on the State of Virginia. Organized as answers to the specific questions posed by Marbois—from “An exact description of the limits and boundaries of the state of Virginia?” to “The particular customs and manners that may happen to be received in that state?”—the work is precise but eclectic, formal yet conversational.

  His pride in his native land is evident; the text is full of rhapsodic descriptions of the natural beauties of Virginia. He was a
lso realistic about the difficulties of governing in a time of revolution. The government of his state was an unusual combination of elements. “It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies.”

  What was true in Virginia, Jefferson was to find, was also true in America more broadly. The search for the point of temperate power between competing elements of life—the national government and the states, the states and the people—was far from over.

  In an evening’s conversation on a rainy journey home to Orange, James Madison sounded fellow Virginian George Mason out on the questions of the day, discovering only one real example of “heterodoxy”: Mason, Madison told Jefferson, was “too little impressed with either the necessity or the proper means of preserving the confederacy.”

  In two largely neglected pieces published anonymously in The Pennsylvania Journal, or, Weekly Advertiser in this period, Madison made an impassioned case for a strong national government—a case that, as Mason’s views indicated, was failing to resonate broadly.

  Madison was having problems of a personal nature, too. Kitty Floyd broke off their engagement, crushing him. Concerned about his friend, Jefferson rapidly replied with warmth and empathy: “I sincerely lament the misadventure which has happened from whatever cause it may have happened.… No event has been more contrary to my expectations, and these were founded on what I thought a good knowledge of the ground. But of all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable.”

  Jefferson’s words of consolation came from a good friend, one who knew sadness and who tried to take—as of old—a philosophical view of life’s disappointments. He had experienced heartbreak and desolation, and he had—painfully and arduously—kept his own emotional machinery working well enough to propel him forward despite all. He believed Madison would, too.

  Jefferson, meanwhile, could never know too much. Ten days after his election to the national Congress, he asked a delegate to the Virginia General Assembly at Richmond to keep him minutely informed about state politics. “Parliamentary news is interesting and I hear little or nothing of it,” he wrote the delegate on Tuesday, June 17, 1783. “What have you done? What are you doing? What are the maneuvers of your leaders? Who are they? What the dispositions of the two houses? etc.”

  Information, as ever, was power.

  SIXTEEN

  A STRUGGLE FOR RESPECT

  Foreign civil arrangement, and foreign treaties. Domestic civil arrangement. Domestic peace establishment of arsenals and posts. Western territory. Indian affairs. Money.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, listing the issues facing postwar America

  THE CONGRESS WAS HOMELESS as well as largely powerless. Seated in Philadelphia, slated to move to Annapolis later in 1783, the lawmakers were driven out of Pennsylvania in the third week of June when four hundred Continental soldiers mutinied, storming the Congress to demand pay. Pennsylvania officials, who had jurisdiction over the city, refused to intercede, prompting the Congress to evacuate Philadelphia for Princeton, in New Jersey.

  The national government, in other words, was on the run from its own people.

  Appearances mattered much at this delicate hour. James Madison reported a strong inclination among the national lawmakers to leave Princeton and return to Philadelphia even at the risk of physical danger in order to “prevent any inferences abroad of disaffection in the mass of so important a state to the revolution or the federal Government.”

  The Congress nevertheless remained at Princeton until it moved to Annapolis in November 1783. Though uncertain where the Congress would be sitting by the time his term began in the autumn, Jefferson had asked Madison to secure him a room—of any size—with Mrs. House if in Philadelphia, and he sought Mrs. Trist’s counsel on schooling for Patsy, who was to stay in that city no matter where the legislature held its sessions.

  Jefferson left Monticello on Thursday, October 16, 1783. Traveling through Philadelphia, he arrived in Princeton to take his seat on November 4. It was the briefest of stays. On the evening of Jefferson’s arrival there, the Congress adjourned to Annapolis. Princeton had offered “scanty accommodations.” Madison dismissed it as a “village where the public business can neither be conveniently done, the members of Congress decently provided for, nor those connected with Congress provided for at all.”

  To achieve order required authority, which the states wanted but the Congress needed. Neither a reflexive nationalist nor a states’-rights purist—categories that were already taking form—Jefferson was grappling with the distribution of power in a country of diverse interests.

  His view of the role of the Confederation Congress in 1783–84 was in keeping with his thinking in the wake of his governorship. Whoever was in charge needed to be clearly and certainly in command. As “the United States in Congress assembled represent the sovereignty of the whole Union,” he wrote, “their body collectively and their President individually should on all occasions have precedence [over] all other bodies and persons.” Even if he were referring only to ceremonial occasions, the point was clear. To be effective, the Congress had to be granted pride of place.

  Annapolis was quiet—too quiet, Jefferson believed, for the seat of the Congress of a victorious nation. “It is now above a fortnight since we should have met, and six states only appear,” he wrote Madison in December 1783. They needed nine to form a quorum and proceed. “We have some hopes of Rhode Island coming in today, but when two more will be added seems as insusceptible of calculation as when the next earthquake will happen.” Franklin, Adams, and Jay—the commissioners abroad—wrote that “the riot of Philadelphia and departure of Congress thence made the most serious impressions in Europe, and have excited great doubts of the stability of our confederacy, and in what we shall end,” Jefferson said.

  The business at hand was momentous: The Congress had only a limited amount of time to ratify the Treaty of Paris, the pact ending the Revolutionary War and granting America recognition as an independent nation. On Saturday, December 13, 1783, Jefferson was appointed to a committee to consider the treaty.

  There were ten major provisions, among them a generous grant of territory and a promise by the British to return confiscated property (including slaves). Critical, too, was article 10, concerning process: The treaty had to be ratified within six months of its signing, which had occurred in Paris on Wednesday, September 3, 1783.

  Though Jefferson’s committee moved the ratification of the treaty, there was still no quorum in the Congress. No quorum, no action. Jefferson hated the feeling of powerlessness.

  It was a troubling Christmas Eve. He was not feeling well, and he was worried. “I cannot help expressing my extreme anxiety at our present critical situation,” Jefferson wrote a Virginia correspondent on Wednesday, December 24, 1783. There was now only “a little over two months” to ratify the treaty and return it to Paris. “All that can be said is that it is yet possible,” Jefferson wrote, hoping for action before Britain attempted to force new changes should the ratification not come in time.

  On New Year’s Day 1784 Jefferson was gloomy and sick. “I have had very ill health since I have been here and am getting rather lower than otherwise,” he told Madison.

  If the Congress did not act quickly, the United States would humiliate itself abroad by failing to ratify and deliver the treaty in time. If it acted without the nine states, though, the national government risked the appearance of usurpation.

  Jefferson sought a compromise, some means of preserving—establishing, actually—the nation’s international reputation without exposing the Congress to charges of overreaching. With lawyerly precision, Jefferson drafted a motion that took advantage of an earlier vote and extended its authority to the finished treaty. The means of saving the day were secured. (In the
end, Connecticut and New Jersey at length arrived, and the treaty was ratified by nine states.)

  For the moment, the system had succeeded in ratifying the treaty that, in turn, ratified the Revolution. Jefferson drafted a proclamation to announce the news. In it he called on “all the good citizens of these states” to draw on “that good faith which is every man’s surest guide” to respect, and to fulfill the articles of peace “entered into on their behalf under the authority of that federal bond by which their existence as an independent people is bound up together, and is known and acknowledged by the nations of the world.”

  There was much work to be done. Jefferson thought “that were it certain we could be brought to act as one united nation” on trade policy, then Britain “would make extensive concessions.” As it was, however, “she is not afraid of retaliation.”

  Still, the resolution of months of tension and uncertainty lifted Jefferson’s spirits and may have improved his health. “I have been just able to attend my duty in the state house, but not to go out on any other occasion,” he told Patsy. The day after ratification, however, he said he was “considerably better.” The author of the Declaration of Independence had declared the peace, affirming anew the national—not sectional—identity of the country.

  With its attention to the occupation of forts, the treaty raised issues about the future of the American West, a longtime interest of Jefferson’s. His was an obsession romantic, scientific, and practical. He loved the image of endless forests—in this vision he was like a Saxon of old, dwelling in primordial liberty—and he was fascinated by what he called “the different species of bones, teeth, and tusks of the Mammoth” and other natural specimens. The French naturalist the Comte de Buffon, who argued that animal and plant life in the New World was inferior, was always on Jefferson’s mind. In Philadelphia in 1784 Jefferson would buy an “uncommonly large panther skin” to show Buffon.