Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  The next act remained uncertain. “The heat of this city is as yet too great to give entire credit to this, and they continue to arm and organize the Bourgeoisie.” By the following day, the seventeenth, Jefferson was telling Thomas Paine that “a more dangerous scene of war I never saw in America, than what Paris has presented for 5 days past.”

  He confronted the prevailing terror with grace. Writing Maria Cosway, he said that “here in the midst of tumult and violence,” the “cutting off heads is become so much a la mode, that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders.”

  On Tuesday, August 25, 1789, Lafayette asked Jefferson to “break every engagement to give us a dinner tomorrow, Wednesday. We shall be some members of the National Assembly—eight of us whom I want to [coalesce] as being the only means to prevent a total dissolution and a civil war.” The next day the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written by Lafayette. Not only was this central document of the French Revolution influenced by the Declaration of Independence, but Jefferson had given counsel to Lafayette during its drafting.

  That evening, dinner began at four at the Hôtel de Langeac, and conversation continued until ten. For six hours, he was, Jefferson recalled, “a silent witness to a coolness and candor of argument unusual in the conflicts of political opinion; to a logical reasoning, and chaste eloquence, disfigured by no gaudy tinsel of rhetoric or declamation, and truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogue of antiquity, as handed to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and Cicero.” At Jefferson’s table, the group had agreed to a structure for the new republic and “decided the fate of the [French] Constitution.”

  Expectations for revolutionary success ran high. Lafayette, who had sent George Washington the key to the Bastille, was in charge of the security of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, hoping to preserve order as the revolution moved forward. Patsy Jefferson recalled standing at the window with some friends looking out into the streets of Paris as the king and queen rode by under the protection of her father’s colleague and friend. First came the royal coach, and a chamberlain bowed to her. Next the young women heard cries that resembled “the bellowings of thousand of bulls.” They were cheers for Lafayette. “Lafayette! Lafayette!” cried the crowds, and the young Frenchman, noticing Patsy watching from the window, bowed to her—a mark of respect she never forgot. All her life she kept a tricolored cockade, the symbol of the early days of the Revolution, as a memento.

  Jefferson himself was to remain cheerful despite violence and threats of violence. “So far it seemed that your revolution had got along with a steady pace: meeting indeed with occasional difficulties and dangers, but we are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed,” Jefferson would tell Lafayette.

  In early September 1789, fighting illness, Jefferson wrote a long letter to James Madison. He composed it in the fevered context of the French Revolution, and by his own account his thinking sprang from particular events in Europe. “I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” A little later, he added: “The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years [the Jeffersonian definition of a generation].”

  Taken literally, these musings are a prescription for chaos. If there were no authority from precedent, no laws governing property or examples to guide us, then society would be reduced to a state of nature in which the strong could thrive most effectively, taking advantage of the disorder to consolidate power.

  A key question is whether Jefferson meant posterity to follow his thoughts to the letter, or whether, as he so often did, he was sharing the churnings of an eager mind in a time of change. The latter possibility is most likely, for while he long held to the idea of the exaltation of the present rather than the reflexive preservation of the past, he did not seriously press for the expiration of all laws at generational intervals. In 1789 in particular, he was thinking of the world in which he had lived for the past five years: the French nation in which individual and institutional destinies were determined largely by hereditary station. “This principle that the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive application and consequences, in every country, and most especially in France [emphasis added].”

  Writing to the Reverend Charles Clay within months of returning to the United States in 1790, Jefferson was decidedly earthbound. Clay was seeking a congressional seat at the time. Jefferson wrote that “you are too well informed a politician, too good a judge of men, not to know that the ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get.”

  So which was the real Jefferson—the philosopher advocating the end of binding laws, or the politician who believed “that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time”?

  The likely truth is that these competing Jeffersons were both real. He thought one way in one era and another way in other eras—and sometimes he thought differently more or less simultaneously, a common human trait, particularly among the curious and the intellectually active.

  As a political man he was able to operate on these sundry levels yet always returned to the arena from the mountaintop to take up governing an imperfect world—in his phrase, eternally pressing forward for what is yet to be had. (In France, he was soon back on the issue of rifle manufacturing—a sign he remained tethered to reality.)

  Madison took care with his reply to Jefferson’s rhapsodic letter. It often fell to him to absorb raw Jefferson thoughts. One of Madison’s many services to the republic was the mediating role he played in Jefferson’s life, often protecting Jefferson from himself.

  This was such an occasion, and Madison was gently but frankly skeptical. “The spirit of philosophical legislation has never reached some parts of the Union, and is by no means the fashion here, either within or without Congress,” he wrote Jefferson. “Besides this … our hemisphere must be still more enlightened before many of the sublime truths which are seen through the medium of philosophy, become visible to the naked eye of the ordinary politician.”

  The medium of philosophy: Madison is saying that Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the revolutionary nature of the rights of man in Europe was an enthusiasm divorced from the realities of governing in America. It was a fair point, and the exchange offers an example of Madison’s utility to Jefferson as an affectionate, respectful, discreet check on his episodic flights of philosophy. Madison would always be there for Jefferson, reminding him—deftly—of his own core convictions about the limits of politics, the imperfections of government, and the realities of human nature.

  On the last Sunday in September 1789, Thomas Jefferson left Paris with his daughters and Sally and James Hemings to return to America. At Le Havre and Cowes, he showed others how to measure the width of a river and tutored Polly in Spanish. He also set out “roving through the neighborhood of this place to try to get a pair of shepherd’s dogs,” he wrote. “We walked 10 miles, clambering the cliffs in quest of the shepherds, during the most furious tempest of wind and rain I was ever in.” No dogs, but on the walk he encountered a disturbing scene. “On our return,” he wrote, “we came on the body of a man who had that moment shot himself. His pistol had dropped at his feet, and himself fallen backward without ever moving. The shot had completely separated his whole face from the forehead to the chin and so torn it to atoms that it could not be known. The center of the head was entirely laid bare.” The day after the storm and the discovery of the suicide, Jefferson found a dog t
o buy, purchasing “a chienne bergere big with pup.” He thought sheepdogs “the most careful intelligent dogs in the world.”

  He soon set sail. Aboard the ship, Sally Hemings was among those in service to Jefferson and his family, as she would remain until the day he died, thirty-seven summers later.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A NEW POST IN NEW YORK

  In general, I think it necessary to give as well as take in a government like ours.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  JEFFERSON WAS AT EPPINGTON, his sister-in-law’s estate on the Appomattox River in Chesterfield County, south of Richmond, when the official request arrived. With his daughters Polly and Patsy and with Sally and James Hemings, he had enjoyed an excellent crossing from France aboard the Clermont in “fine autumn weather,” reaching Norfolk, Virginia, on Monday, November 23, 1789, at a quarter to one in the afternoon. Slowly making their way to Monticello, they had stopped at the Eppeses’, not least to give Polly the chance to reunite with the aunt and uncle she loved.

  Friday, December 11, 1789, brought an offer from the president—one that had been mentioned in the newspapers in circulation when Jefferson arrived in Virginia from Paris. Would Jefferson become secretary of state?

  Jefferson sent Washington an inconclusive reply. Believing the State Department was to be responsible for many domestic as well as all foreign affairs, Jefferson was daunted, and said so, admitting that he feared the “criticisms and censures of a public just indeed in their intentions, but sometimes misinformed and misled, and always too respectable to be neglected.”

  He was trapped in a familiar paradox. Devoted to the stage and anxious for applause, Jefferson feared failure and disapproval. In times of trial and hours of public attack, he could eloquently articulate his longing for retirement from politics. Yet what repelled him about public life was of a piece with what drew him to it. He longed to be great, and felt greatly. His will to serve and sacrifice was as ferocious as the anguish he experienced when those whom he was serving and for whom he was sacrificing found him wanting.

  One might think that a man who so hated “criticisms and censures” would indeed withdraw from the scene of affairs and live out his days relatively safe from conversational and political condemnation. Such a withdrawal, however, would have been unnatural for Jefferson—a denial of his essential character, a character at once human and heroic. He was both an unflinching political warrior and an easily wounded soul. He always would be.

  Washington left the tactical work of bringing Jefferson aboard to James Madison, who came to Monticello at the end of 1789 to talk things over and correct Jefferson’s mistaken view of the duties of the office. The secretary of state was not to be in charge of all domestic affairs; he was, rather, to serve as the president’s chief foreign-policy adviser. “All whom I have heard speak on the subject are remarkably solicitous for [Jefferson’s] acceptance,” Madison wrote to Washington, “and I flatter myself that they will not in the final event be disappointed.”

  The prospect of broad approval resonated with Jefferson and reassured Washington that Jefferson was worth the back-and-forth over the post. After conferring with Madison in New York in mid-January, Washington wrote Jefferson, making a strong case for the cabinet over returning to France to resume his work there.

  Washington told Jefferson that “in order that you may be the better prepared to make your ultimate decision on good grounds, I think it necessary to add” that “your late appointment has given very extensive and very great satisfaction to the public.”

  Washington wanted an answer. Jefferson could come to New York or return to France—but he needed to decide.

  What to do? He loved Paris, and a diplomatic appointment gave him an unusual degree of autonomy and insulation from constant criticism. Yet he had devoted his life to the success of the American Revolution and now had to determine where—in the cabinet or in France—he could render the most valuable service to that larger cause.

  He accepted Washington’s offer. Explaining his thinking to a friend, Jefferson spoke in practical political terms. Washington’s communications “left me at liberty to accept it or return to France, but I saw plainly he preferred the former, and learnt from several quarters”—chiefly from Madison—“it would be more agreeable. Consequently to have gone back would have exposed me to the danger of giving disgust, and I value no office enough for that.”

  Jefferson’s years as secretary of state were both tumultuous and thrilling. Out of them came the convictions and tactical sense that Jefferson took to the vice presidency and to the presidency itself. The drama of the country’s first cabinet shaped Thomas Jefferson—and the nation—far beyond the life of Washington’s administration.

  On the Jeffersons’ return to Virginia, Patsy, now seventeen, soon decided to marry her third cousin Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., the twenty-one-year-old son of Jefferson’s childhood housemate. They had met when Patsy was a child during two Jefferson family visits to Tuckahoe, once in 1781 during the British invasion and again in 1783. Ambitious, well educated, and black-haired, young Randolph had moved quickly once the family had landed at Norfolk in 1789. “Though his talents, dispositions, connections and fortune were such as would have made him my own first choice … I scrupulously suppressed my wishes, that my daughter might indulge her own sentiments freely,” Jefferson wrote a friend in France. He delayed his departure to arrange Patsy’s marriage settlement with the Randolphs. He wanted to make sure everything was done correctly. The wedding took place in February 1790.

  That Patsy married so soon upon arrival in the United States to a man she did not know well is something of a curiosity. Historians have speculated that she was perhaps reacting to her father’s liaison with Sally Hemings. The daughter may have felt displaced in her father’s affections in some way.

  It is also possible that things were just as they appeared to be. Patsy was of marriageable age, young Randolph was a fitting suitor, and he appeared to be a man not unlike her beloved father. Randolph was interested in farming, science, law, and politics. Patsy did not hesitate when offered the opportunity to begin the next natural chapter with a man whom her father liked and who shared her father’s interests.

  Sally Hemings was to remain at Monticello when Jefferson moved to New York. Her main work through the years was the care and tending of Jefferson’s private rooms and his wardrobe. He trusted her with the things he valued most. The precise location of her living quarters at this time is unknown, but she may have lived in one of the new log servants’ houses constructed in the mid-1790s along Mulberry Row, the nearby principal plantation street lined with more than twenty dwellings, workshops, and sheds where dozens of slaves and free white workers lived and worked. During and after Jefferson’s presidential years, Sally is thought to have had quarters in the South Terrace wing, constructed between 1802 and 1809.

  Jefferson’s journey north to New York was slow and at times snowy, yet it seemed a kind of political springtime. From London, Richard Price, an elderly radical English philosopher who had long supported the American Revolution, articulated the hopes of many. “The Congress under the new constitution is, I suppose, now met in America; and I am longing to hear that they go on prosperously,” Price had written to Jefferson at the time of George Washington’s inauguration. “Being now advanced into the evening of life, it is with particular gratitude I look back and reflect that I have been spared to see the human species improved, religious intolerance almost extinguished, the eyes of the lower ranks of men opened to see their rights; and nations panting for liberty that seemed to have lost the idea of it.”

  In New York, Jefferson could not find quarters on what he called “the Broadway,” instead leasing a house at 57 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan. (The house, he told Patsy, was “an indifferent one.”) Old friends such as the Adamses were happy to see him. “Mr. Jefferson is here, and adds much to the soc
ial circle,” Abigail Adams wrote in April 1790. The vice president and Mrs. Adams had taken a house called Richmond Hill in a then–relatively remote neighborhood that became Greenwich Village.

  The world was never quiet. At home and abroad—and the two spheres were connected, with foreign wars and confrontations shaping domestic life and politics—the 1790s were to prove complex. In the late summer of 1791, Leopold II, the Holy Roman Emperor (and brother of Marie-Antoinette), in company with Frederick William II of Prussia, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz in defense of the French royal family. In turn, in the spring of 1792, the French revolutionaries declared war on Austria, thus opening a thirteen-year series of wars between revolutionary (and later Napoleonic) France and monarchical Europe. The violence of the French Revolution, including the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (in 1793) and the institution of the Terror (in 1794), drew Britain and Spain into war with France.

  The conflicts of the Old World created complications for the New. Before the decade was out, the United States would face possible wars against Britain because of Britain’s war with France and with France because of France’s war with Britain. Through these trials and their domestic manifestations, including a hard-line limitation of civil liberties amid fears of war with France in the last years of the 1790s, Jefferson was variously secretary of state; a leader of the opposition to the policies of George Washington and then of John Adams; and vice president of the United States.

  Jefferson’s conduct in the maelstroms of the decade was driven in large measure by his twin devotions to liberty and to power. He could be overly generous to the French, but much of his sympathy for the Revolution was connected to his antipathy for, and fear of, the royalism of the British.