Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  For all the crises, Jefferson would end the decade of the 1790s as he began it: as an inveterate protector of the American experiment and defender of American interests.

  On Sunday, March 21, 1790, the first secretary of state paid his first official call on the first president of the United States. It marked the beginning of four years of what Jefferson described as a “daily, confidential and cordial” relationship between the two men. There was so much to cover that the initial conversation could not be confined to a single meeting; the two men met again on Monday (after Washington sat for a portrait by the painter John Trumbull) and on Tuesday.

  Washington and Jefferson had known each other for nearly a quarter of a century, since the days when both were Burgesses in Williamsburg, moving around the old colonial capital between the assembly room and the Raleigh Tavern.

  Washington had reason to think well of the man sitting before him in the March light; many had testified to Jefferson’s strengths. “Nothing can excel Mr. Jefferson’s abilities, virtues, pleasing temper, and everything in him that constitutes the great statesman, zealous citizen, and amiable friend,” Lafayette had told Washington in 1788. After spending time with Jefferson in France, the American merchant Nathaniel Cutting wrote: “I have found Mr. Jefferson a man of infinite information and sound judgment. Becoming gravity and engaging affability mark his deportment. His general abilities are such as would do honor to any age or country.” From Paris a few years before, John Adams had told Secretary of War Henry Knox, “You can scarcely have heard a character too high of my friend and colleague Mr. Jefferson, either in point of power or virtues.”

  To Jefferson, Washington had been a grand, often distant figure whose grace and aloofness made him a living figure of myth. “He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern,” Jefferson wrote long afterward. “Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed.”

  Jefferson was less impressed with Washington’s intellectual gifts. “His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion.”

  There were hidden depths. “His temper was naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it,” Jefferson continued. “If ever, however, it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in his wrath.” Washington was a man, in other words, around whom one was careful.

  Shortly after arriving in New York, Jefferson was struck by one of his episodic headaches, suggesting that he was perhaps uneasy about the duties—and the scrutiny—that awaited him.

  For five years he had been largely removed from the daily, even hourly, cut and thrust of American politics. As a diplomat in a foreign land he had been more of an observer than an actor. As the senior cabinet officer in the new government, he was exposed to the voracious attention of the New York political class.

  It took time for him to acclimate himself, and his dependence on Madison was explicit and rather touching. Seeking Madison’s opinion on a question of form—how the states should communicate with the federal House and Senate—Jefferson acknowledged his debt. “Be so good as to say what you think,” Jefferson wrote. “I must be troublesome to you till I know better the ground on which I am placed.”

  He was clear on one thing: He held an executive office of responsibility and of authority. “The transaction of business with foreign nations is Executive altogether,” he wrote in April 1790. “It belongs then to the head of that department, except as to such portions of it as are specially submitted to the Senate. Exceptions are to be construed strictly.”

  Jefferson marked his forty-seventh birthday in his first weeks in New York. One of the most celebrated Americans in the world, he was an unfamiliar figure to many of those who had come to the national stage during the five years he spent in Paris. William Maclay, a senator from Pennsylvania who was hostile to the administration, found Jefferson’s demeanor surprising and rather disappointing. “He had a rambling, vacant look, and nothing of that firm, collected deportment which I expected would dignify the presence of a secretary or minister,” said Maclay. “I looked for gravity, but a laxity of manner seemed shed about him. He spoke almost without ceasing. But even his discourse partook of his personal demeanor. It was loose and rambling, and yet he scattered information wherever he went, and some even brilliant sentiments sparkled from him.”

  Others saw him differently through the years. To the newspaper publisher Samuel Harrison Smith, he was “lofty and erect; his motions flexible and easy; neither remarkable for, nor deficient in grace; and such were his strength and agility.”

  “His information was equally polite and profound, and his conversational powers capable of discussing moral questions of deepest seriousness, or the lighter themes of humor and fancy,” wrote an English traveler named John Bernard. “Nothing could be more simpler than his reasonings, nothing more picturesque and pointed than his descriptions. On all abstract subjects he was plainness—a veritable Quaker; but when conveying his views of human nature through [that] most attractive medium—anecdote—he displayed the grace and brilliance of a courtier.”

  Jefferson believed in the politics of the personal relationship. “When the hour of dinner is approaching, sometimes it rains, sometimes it is too hot for a long walk, sometimes your business would make you wish to remain longer at your office or return there after dinner, and make it more eligible to take any sort of a dinner in town,” Jefferson wrote Henry Knox in July 1791. “Any day and every day that this would be the case you would make me supremely happy by messing with me, without ceremony or other question than whether I dine at home. The hour is from one quarter to three quarters after three, and, taking your chance as to fare, you will be sure to meet a sincere welcome.”

  He saw himself as a political creature. Replying to a correspondent who questioned his anti-British tone in the Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson noted that those words dated from the war, but that Britain had done little to build constructive relations with her former colonies. “Perhaps their conduct and dispositions towards us since the war have not been as well calculated as they might have been to excite more favorable dispositions on our part,” Jefferson said in November 1790. “Still as a political man they shall never find any passion in me either for or against them. Whenever their avarice of commerce will let them meet us fairly halfway, I should meet them with satisfaction, because it would be for our benefit: but I mistake their character if they do this under present circumstances.”

  Though he tried to make himself pleasant, Jefferson found New York politically uncomfortable. He suffered, he recalled, from “wonder and mortification” at the prevailing Federalist climate in governing circles.

  On evenings out he believed himself “for the most part, the only advocate on the republican side of the question.” The quasi-regal air around the president—the levees and the bows, the enormous carriage with numerous horses—bothered Jefferson, who believed substance could follow style. A tilt toward the monarchical in form might, he feared, precede a move toward the autocratic in fact.

  Further evidence for such conclusions could be found in the Gazette of the United States, published in New York by John Fenno. In a series of essays entitled Discourses on Davila, John Adams, writing pseudonymously, made the case that pure democracy was unnatural. “One question only shall be respectfully insinuated: whether equal laws, the result only of a balanced government, can ever be obtained and preferred without some signs or other of distinction and degree?” Adams continued: “We are told tha
t our friends, the National Assembly of France, have abolished all distinctions. But be not deceived, my dear countrymen. Impossibilities cannot be performed. Have they leveled all fortunes, and equally divided all property? Have they made all men and women equally wise, elegant and beautiful?”

  Worried about the implications of Adams’s argument—that distinctions, possibly hereditary, were intrinsic and might prevail in the New World as well as the Old—Jefferson arranged for Fenno to publish a translation of a National Assembly address to the people: “The Nation, The Law, The King. The Nation is yourselves, the Law is still yourselves, it is your will: The King is the guardian of the Law.”

  By urging Fenno to print translated excerpts from the Gazette de Leide, a reliably republican Dutch paper published in French, Jefferson was putting his own views in the pages that promulgated the Federalist line. By early August 1790 Fenno became entirely a creature of the Federalist faction, but for a brief time Jefferson was able to avail himself of the paper.

  He was not fighting solely tactical battles. He was also thinking grandly. “I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations,” he wrote a French friend in April 1790. “To be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements and under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promotes in the long run even the interests of both: and I am sure it promotes their happiness.”

  There was a late snow in New York in the last week of April 1790. Not long afterward, President Washington became so ill that he was thought to be dying. By early June, however, the president was well enough to take Jefferson along on a fishing trip off Sandy Hook, Long Island. (Jefferson, ever practical and optimistic, hoped any seasickness would “carry off the remains of my headache.”)

  After he had returned from the fishing excursion, Jefferson ran into Alexander Hamilton near Washington’s house one evening.

  Born in 1755 on the British West Indian island of Nevis, Hamilton spent much of his early life on St. Croix. An illegitimate child, he was the son of a French Huguenot mother and a Scottish laird. His mother died when he was thirteen; he became a self-taught man, driven by ambition to overcome the obscurity of his origins. He clerked for a time and then, with the financial support of locals who sensed his potential, went to New York for schooling, ultimately enrolling at King’s College (present-day Columbia University). Quick with his pen—he was a prolific essayist—he became a top aide to General Washington during the Revolution. He married into a powerful New York family, the Schuylers, and became a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. His father-in-law, Senator Philip Schuyler, was said to be “amazingly fond of the old leaven” of monarchism.

  Hamilton favored a strong national government and to a degree sought to emulate the basic British financial and commercial systems. His was a rational and coherent vision of public life, and he believed his vision the best course for the United States. Skeptical about the durability of republican institutions based on broad suffrage and regular elections—as any student of history and human nature would be; there was nothing like America in the world—Hamilton was more open than Jefferson was to the adaptation of old-world features to American government. And Hamilton was willing to entertain the possibilities of a hereditary (or at least lifelong) presidency or Senate.

  In a speech to the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton had spoken of a possible American monarch who would be “capable of resisting the popular current.” More immediately, Hamilton advocated a strong relationship with Britain, which, given the realities of the day, meant the United States would be a subordinate power to London.

  Many (though not all) of Hamilton’s views set him apart from Jefferson—and some of those views were so strongly expressed that Jefferson began to define himself in opposition to the Treasury secretary. Jefferson, for example, had long believed in, and fought for, a respected and effective national government. After his experience of the ancien régime in France, though, and given his anxiety about British designs on America, Jefferson found the discovery of a quasi-monarchical culture growing up around President Washington unsettling. Jefferson believed in a powerful republican government.

  As the Washington administration unfolded, Jefferson came to see Hamilton as the embodiment of the deepest of republican fears: as a man who might be willing to sacrifice the American undertaking in liberty to the expediency of arbitrary authority. And Hamilton came to see Jefferson as a man who might be willing to throw everything the Americans had built to the revolutionary winds blowing from France. It was an extreme, overheated view of Hamilton (as of Jefferson), but it was a time of extreme and overheated views. Such was the political reality of the day, and Hamilton and Jefferson were politicians.

  In later years, when passions had cooled, Jefferson acquired a bust of Hamilton and placed it opposite one of himself in the entrance hall at Monticello. According to the biographer Henry Randall, “The eye settled with a deeper interest on busts of Jefferson and Hamilton, by Ceracchi, placed on massive pedestals on each side of the main entrance—‘opposed in death as in life,’ as the surviving original sometimes remarked, with a pensive smile, as he observed the notice they attracted.”

  On this particular night in New York City in 1790, Jefferson found the Treasury secretary somber, haggard, and dejected beyond description,” Jefferson wrote. “Even his dress was uncouth and neglected.”

  Hamilton had reason to be out of sorts. In his Report on the Public Credit in early 1790 (another followed at the end of the year), Hamilton had argued for a national financial system in which the central government would fund the national debt, assume responsibility for all state debts, and establish a national bank. Money for the federal government would be raised by tariffs on imports and excise taxes on distilled spirits.

  Funding the debt—which basically meant the federal government would pay holders of federal securities their nominal (or face) value, which was higher than their original value—was controversial, for speculators had been purchasing those securities from the securities’ initial holders for less than Hamilton was proposing to pay the current holders. A political and emotional complication was that many of the initial holders were Revolutionary veterans unaware that the paper they owned was about to be worth more. (They had often been paid for their services in Continental paper.) Shrewder speculators, Madison told Jefferson, were “exploring the interior and distant parts of the Union in order to take advantage of the ignorance of the holders.”

  Despite these concerns, Hamilton carried the day on the federal purchase of the securities, successfully beginning to put the federal government in the center of the nation’s financial system.

  The second element of Hamilton’s plan—the assumption of all the state debts by the federal government—would further secure the federal establishment’s standing. The consolidation of debts at the federal level would create the need for federal taxes to pay down the debts, and the power to tax was, as ever, the most fundamental and far-reaching of all the powers of government, with the possible exception of the war-making power (which is actually also partly about taxes, since wars are so costly).

  The assumption proposal, however, instantly divided the nation. Four states (Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland) had already been fiscally responsible and paid off much of their Revolutionary debts. Others (chiefly Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Connecticut) had not, and were therefore quite happy to send their bills to Hamilton in New York. The more fiscally responsible states believed that they would inevitably end up paying federal taxes to bail out their lagging neighbors.

  On Monday, April 12, 1790, about three weeks after Jefferson’s arrival in New York, the Madison-led forces in the House voted down federal assumption of state debts by three votes. It was a devastating defeat for the Treasury secretary.

  The unkempt Hamilton that Jefferson met near the president’s house needed allies. He asked for a word with his cabinet colleague, and the t
wo men spoke in the street near Washington’s door. Would Jefferson help Hamilton with the assumption issue? Without it, Hamilton believed the “continuance of the Union” was at risk.

  Jefferson knew matters were dire. The Congress seemed paralyzed. “It was a real fact,” he said, “that the Eastern and Southern members … had got into the most extreme ill humor with one another,” leading to an atmosphere marked by “the most alarming heat [and] the bitterest animosities.”

  Jefferson appreciated the need for unified action. Unlike many of his fellow Virginians, the secretary of state was not reflexively opposed to assumption. Those who were, though, wanted something in return for seeming to invest the northern part of the nation with even more financial power.

  The location of the national capital offered some hope for a deal. New York was already the financial center of the nation, and the middle and southern states were eager to see the political seat of government elsewhere. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Georgetown on the Potomac were candidates. There was also talk of Trenton, New Jersey, or a site along the Susquehanna River. “The Potomac stands a bad chance, and yet it is not impossible that in the vicissitudes of the business it may turn up in some form or other,” Madison wrote Monroe in June 1790.

  As Jefferson listened to Hamilton, as he read correspondence from the South, and as he thought through the sundry issues at hand, he realized that perhaps, just perhaps, there was room for a compromise.

  The beginning of wisdom, Jefferson thought, might lie in a meeting of the principals out of the public eye. So he convened a dinner. Jefferson believed things could be worked out, he said, for “men of sound heads and honest views needed nothing more than explanation and mutual understanding to enable them to unite in some measures which might enable us to get along.”

  No deal meant disaster. It was clear, Jefferson wrote, “that if everyone retains inflexibly his present opinion, there will be no bill passed at all for funding the public debts, and … without funding there is an end of the government.”