Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  The financial and political difficulties facing the monarchy and the French nation were immense. Taxes were unequal and haphazardly collected; the heaviest burden of the cost of the Crown and its expensive ways and wars fell less on nobles or clergy, who were largely exempt, and more on commoners, creating understandable tension and popular hostility. “It is impossible to increase taxes, disastrous to keep on borrowing, and inadequate merely to cut expenses,” Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Louis’s finance minister, told the king in an August 1786 memorandum. At Calonne’s urging, the king summoned an Assembly of Notables—the first in more than a century and a half—to consider a plan of reform. “Of course it calls up all the attention of the people,” Jefferson wrote to John Jay in January 1787. Still, Jefferson was no hothead, arguing that dealing with such large problems required a deft hand.

  “Should they attempt more than the established habits of the people are ripe for, they may lose all, and retard infinitely the ultimate object of their aim,” Jefferson wrote a friend in March 1787.

  The Assembly of Notables failed, leading to calls—including one from the Marquis de Lafayette—for an Estates-General, a institution of nobles, clergy, and commoners created in the Middle Ages to advise the monarchy. Its last meeting had been held in 1614.

  Hope for large-scale reform began to quicken. One member of a liberally minded club captured the spirit of the hour as the Estates-General approached, writing: “We talked about the establishment of a new constitution for the state, as [if it were] an easy job, a natural event.” He continued, “In the ecstasy of those days of hopes and celebration, we scarcely cast a glance at the obstacles to be overcome, before laying the first bases of freedom, before establishing the principles rejected by the spirit of the court, the privileged orders, the great corporations, and the old customs.”

  While the French were dealing with an authoritarian state, the Americans had the opposite problem. “The inefficacy of our government becomes daily more and more apparent,” John Jay had written Jefferson in October 1786. “Our credit and our treasury are in a sad situation, and it is probable that either the wisdom or the passions of the people will produce changes.”

  Which of the two—the wisdom or the passions—was the question. In New England, a group led by Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary veteran, rose up to protest a lack of debt relief. “A spirit of licentiousness has infected Massachusetts,” Jay wrote Jefferson.

  John Adams sought to reassure Jefferson about Shays in November 1786. “Don’t be alarmed at the late turbulence in New England,” Adams wrote. “The Massachusetts assembly had, in its zeal to get the better of their debt, laid on a tax, rather heavier than the people could bear; but all will be well, and this commotion will terminate in additional strength to government.”

  Jefferson was relieved. “I can never fear that things will go far wrong where common sense has fair play,” he told Adams.

  Then the inevitable issue: Would Britain use the moment to cause trouble for the United States? Jay wrote Jefferson that there might be Canadian designs on America through an “understanding between the insurgents in Massachusetts and some leading persons in Canada.” Jay also fretted that Britain could capitalize on an “idea that may do mischief”: the notion that “the interests of the Atlantic and Western parts of the United States are distinct” and “the growth of the latter tend[s] to diminish that of the former.”

  Writing to a correspondent in America with the expectation that his views would be shared at home, the powerless congressman of 1783 to 1784 was now taking a softer, more sanguine tone about authority and order. There is no question that Jefferson’s experience in France gave his politics a more democratic cast than they had had when he left America for Paris. Jefferson wrote:

  The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.… Do not be too severe upon [the people’s] errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind.

  Jefferson showed his grasp of politics and his understanding of the nature of both governor and governed in a letter to Madison on Tuesday, January 30, 1787.

  There were, he said, three kinds of societies: those without government (“as among our Indians”); those “wherein the will of everyone has a just influence”; and those “of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics.” It was fine to think of the first as ideal, Jefferson said, but it was impractical where there was “any great degree of population”; he thus dispensed with an Edenic vision of free men dwelling together “without government.” The second was where men should focus their attention and their care. “The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils too: the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.”

  Liberty, he was saying, requires patience, forbearance, and fortitude. Republics were not for the fainthearted. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

  Leaving Paris in late February 1787, Jefferson set out alone on a journey through the south of France and the north of Italy. “Architecture, painting, sculpture, antiquities, agriculture, the condition of the laboring poor fill all my moments,” he wrote William Short. At Aix-en-Provence he swooned at the beauty of the countryside, the excellence of the food, the joy of the wine. “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine,” he wrote Short. “What more can man ask of heaven? If I should happen to die at Paris I will beg of you to send me here, and have me exposed to the sun. I am sure it will bring me to life again.” He loved the Roman ruins, the old bridges, the aqueducts, and the Maison Carée at Nîmes, the first-century Roman temple, which inspired his design of the state capitol in Richmond. He was back in Paris on Sunday, June 10, 1787.

  The world to which he returned seemed bright. In America, the Constitutional Convention had begun in May. Following the action in Philadelphia as closely as he could, Jefferson was skeptical of a proposal to give the federal Congress the authority to veto any individual act of a state legislature that concerned national affairs. Knowing human nature—and knowing the Congress, which was human nature writ large—he understood that the Congress would not be able to keep themselves from abusing their power by deciding that everything concerned the national interest.

  On Tuesday, June 26, 1787, Polly Jefferson, age eight, arrived in London. Handed over to the care of Abigail Adams, Polly did not want to part with the man who had commanded the ship on which she had traveled, a man named Ramsey, and Captain Ramsey did not want to part with Sally Hemings. “The old nurse whom you expected to have attended her was sick and unable to come,” Abigail Adams wrote Jefferson. “She has a girl about 15 or 16 with her, the sister of the servant you have with you.”

  There are no known images of Sally Hemings. From what little evidence we have, the fourteen-year-old Sally who accompanied Polly Jefferson into the Adamses’s London house appeared nearly white and was “very handsome, [with] long straight hair down her back.” There may have been some resemblance, more and less pronounced as the years went on, to the Wayles side of the family—which is to say Sally could well have shared some characteristics with her late half sister, Mrs. Thomas Jefferson. It is also possible that at around fourteen Sally Hemings was we
ll developed: Abigail Adams guessed she was a year or two older than she was.

  We know, too, that Captain Ramsey was hoping to take an unchaperoned Hemings back across the Atlantic with him, and it seems safe to assume he was not chiefly interested in her conversation. It is a reasonable surmise that the Sally Hemings who arrived in Europe in the summer of 1787 was physically desirable.

  Polly, it emerged, was a bright child capable of uncomfortable candor. In London she sobbed when taken from Ramsey, who had become a familiar and probably fond figure during the voyage. Mrs. Adams tried to calm her by invoking the girl’s sister, Patsy. “I tell her that I did not see her sister cry once,” Mrs. Adams wrote Jefferson. “She replies that her sister was older and ought to do better, besides she had pappa with her.” Mrs. Adams then told Jefferson: “I show her your picture. She says she cannot know it, how should she when she should not know you.”

  Jefferson, Mrs. Adams said, should come fetch his younger daughter and perhaps bring Patsy along, for that might “reconcile her little sister to the thoughts of taking a journey.” At the end of the day, Abigail reported: “Miss Polly … has wiped her eyes and laid down to sleep.”

  A night of rest did wonders for the little girl. On Wednesday the twenty-seventh, she was, Abigail said, “as contented … as she was miserable yesterday. She is indeed a fine child.”

  Mrs. Adams was less sure about Sally, who seems to have flummoxed her. “The girl who is with [Polly] is quite a child, and Captain Ramsey is of [the] opinion will be of so little service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge. She seems fond of the child and appears good natured.”

  Jefferson thanked Abigail profusely on Sunday, July 1, 1787, dispatching his French maître d’hôtel, Adrien Petit, to fetch Polly and Sally. He claimed that the crush of work—the “arrearages of 3 or 4 months all crowded on me at once,” as he put it—kept him from coming personally.

  In London, Polly was beside herself when she realized her father had delegated the duty of collecting her. Crying and “thrown into all her former distresses,” Polly clung to Abigail, who wrote Jefferson: “She told me this morning that as she had left all her friends in Virginia to come over the ocean to see you, she did think you would have taken the pains to have come here for her, and not have sent a man whom she cannot understand.” Lest Jefferson think Abigail was being too rough on him, she added: “I express her own words.”

  Polly Jefferson and Sally Hemings arrived in Paris on Sunday, July 15, 1787. “She had totally forgotten her sister,” Jefferson wrote, “but thought, on seeing me, that she recollected something of me”—reversing the impression she had given Abigail Adams in London.

  With Polly safely in hand, Jefferson sat down to thank his sister-in-law for all she and her husband had done for his little girl. “Her reading, her writing, her manners in general show what everlasting obligations we are all under to you,” Jefferson wrote Elizabeth Eppes. “As far as her affections can be a requital, she renders you the debt, for it is impossible for a child to prove a more sincere affection to an absent person than she does to you.”

  Thinking of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Jefferson warmly wrote John Adams, “It is really an assembly of demigods.”

  One of the demigods, James Madison, was fretful. “Nothing can exceed the universal anxiety for the event of the meeting here,” Madison wrote Jefferson. Virginia was particularly unsettled. “The people … are said to be generally discontented.” Things had not yet gone as far as they did in Massachusetts, but a drought had wrecked the corn crop and “taxes are another source of discontent.” Several prisons, courthouses, and clerk’s offices had been “willfully burnt.”

  A fear of Jefferson’s—one made all the stronger the more time he spent in proximity to the court of Louis XVI—was that the United States might tack toward hereditary power, up to and including the installation of a monarch.

  Such rumors were in the air. “The report of an intention on the part of America to apply for a sovereign of the house of Hanover has circulated here; and should an application of that nature be made, it will require a very nice consideration in what manner so important a subject should be treated,” Lord Sydney wrote Lord Dorchester from London on Friday, September 14, 1787. Alexander Hamilton was said to believe the “most plausible shape” of a reunion with Great Britain would be “the establishment of a son of the present monarch … with a family compact.”

  Dorchester reported the failure of all such enterprises, sending London a report in 1788 saying that an alleged plan of Hamilton’s “that had in view the establishment of a monarchy, and placing the crown upon the head of a foreign prince … was overruled, although supported by some of the ablest members of the convention.”

  In the year of the Constitutional Convention, a British agent, probably George Beckwith, sent word of nascent American royalism to the British foreign secretary in London. “At this moment there is not a gentleman in the states between New Hampshire and Georgia, who does not view the present government with contempt, who is not convinced of its inefficacy, and who is not desirous of changing it for a monarchy.” The letter continued:

  They are divided into three classes.

  The first class proposes a federal government somewhat resembling the Constitution of the State of New York, with an annual Executive, Senate, and House of Assembly.

  The second wish to have a sovereign for life with two triennial Houses of Parliament.

  The third are desirous of establishing an hereditary monarchy with a form of government as nearly resembling Great Britain as possible.

  Of the first class many look up to General Washington; those of the second and third classes cast their eyes to the House of Hanover for a Sovereign, they wish for one of the king’s sons.

  The third class is the most powerful, and is composed of some of the most ablest men in the States.…

  From other sources of information it is understood that men of ability in the states are in general strongly impressed with the necessity of establishing a monarchy; they find their present government neither efficient nor respectable; they are greatly divided in opinion on this subject, whether they shall raise an American to this dignity, or procure a Sovereign from Great Britain or from France.

  Fearful of royal control, Jefferson nevertheless remained interested in strength, without which there could be no liberty. In 1787 he watched a crisis in the United Netherlands that he believed instructive for the United States. In a conflict between the stadtholder (backed by England) and a patriot party (backed by France), the stadtholder prevailed when Frederick William II of Prussia intervened against the patriots, and France failed to honor its commitments. “It conveys to us the important lesson that no circumstances of morality, honor, interest, or engagement are sufficient to authorize a secure reliance on any nation, at all times and in all positions,” Jefferson wrote Jay in November 1787.

  To Jefferson, a nation that was to stand among the powers of the earth had to do so on its own. Alliances were always chancy. “We are, therefore, never safe till our magazines are filled with arms,” he wrote Jay.

  On the day after the Constitutional Convention ended in Philadelphia, George Washington dispatched a copy of the draft Constitution to Jefferson in Paris. Benjamin Franklin sent one along, too, and letters about the Constitution flowed into Jefferson’s Hôtel de Langeac. After reading a copy of the draft, John Adams told Jefferson that he thought it “seems to be admirably calculated to preserve the Union, to increase affection, and to bring us all to the same mode of thinking.”

  Adams asked Jefferson: “What think you of a Declaration of Rights? Should not such a thing have preceded the model?”

  Jefferson believed so. On first reading the document, he reacted badly. “How do you like our new constitution?” he wrote Adams. “I confess there are things in it which sta
gger all my dispositions to subscribe to what such an assembly has proposed.”

  The details of the presidency troubled him. “He may be reelected from 4 years to 4 years for life,” Jefferson said. “Reason and experience prove to us that a chief magistrate, so continuable, is an officer for life. When one or two generations shall have proved that this is an office for life, it becomes on every succession worthy of intrigue, of bribery, of force, and even of foreign interference.”

  He blamed the British for features he did not like, arguing that the British press had exaggerated American instability for so long that “the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.” Jefferson continued:

  We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion [in Massachusetts]. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection in Massachusetts.

  Jefferson acknowledged he was being hyperbolic. “The want of facts worth communicating to you has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation. We must be contented to amuse, when we cannot inform.”

  To Madison, on Thursday, December 20, 1787, he reacted to the Constitution in specific terms. Jefferson liked the division of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and he was impressed that the federal government would have sufficient autonomy and power to be effective “without needing continual recurrence to the state legislatures.” He was pleased, too, by “the power given to the Legislature to levy taxes; and for that reason solely approve of the greater house being chosen by the people directly.”