Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  In a report of a conversation with John Graves Simcoe, a British army officer and lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, at Niagara in June 1793, Peirce Duffy, an American military aide, recalled that Simcoe had asked “if the wishes of the people were as much in favor of General Washington as they formerly were or if I thought they would incline to have a British Government.”

  The Jefferson of the cabinet, of the vice presidency, and of the presidency can be best understood by recalling that his passion for the people and his regard for republicanism belonged to a man who believed that there were forces afoot—forces visible and invisible, domestic and foreign—that sought to undermine the rights of man by reestablishing the rule of priests and nobles and kings. His opposition to John Adams and to Alexander Hamilton, to the British and to financial speculators, grew out of this fundamental concern.

  Like significant politicians before and after him, Jefferson was devoted to an overarching vision, but governed according to circumstance. Committed to the broad republican creed, supported by allies in politics and in the public who believed him to be an unshakable advocate of liberty under the law, Jefferson felt himself free to maneuver in matters of detail.

  Where some saw hypocrisy, others saw political agility. As long as a political leader has some core strategic belief—and Jefferson did, in his defense of republicanism—then tactical flexibility can be a virtue. Even Alexander Hamilton recognized Jefferson’s commitment to the nation, no matter how deeply the two disagreed about means. “To my mind a true estimate of Mr. J’s character warrants the expectation of a temporizing rather than a violent system,” Hamilton said in 1801.

  Such mature reflections came toward the end, not at the beginning, of their conflicts. The battle between Jefferson and the men he saw as “Monocrats” (and the “Monocrats” believed Jefferson an American Jacobin who would not have minded the erection of a Parisian guillotine in Philadelphia) was interesting not least because they were implacable foes who could—and did—agree and cooperate from time to time, and who, even in their hours of starkest hostility, served in the same cabinet, dined at the same tables, and moved through the same intimate American world. Wars are often fought between brothers. As Jefferson’s decade or so of struggle with the Federalists shows, there can be no more brutal or more bewildering battles than those that divide a family against itself.

  In 1790 and in 1791, on the island of St. Domingue (now Haiti), slaves and their free allies rose in rebellion against their French imperial masters. In bloody warfare that was to last well over a decade, the blacks of the island, deeply affected by the promises of the French Revolution, fought to win the liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

  For slaveholding Americans, the war on St. Domingue seemed a glimpse of what could come to the United States should the slaves rise en masse. Many of the whites of the island fled, and Jefferson noted their flight with interest. “The situation of the Saint-Domingue fugitives (aristocrats as they are) calls aloud for pity and charity,” he wrote. “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man… . I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India islands will remain in the hands of the people of color, and a total expulsion of the whites [will] sooner or later take place.” For Jefferson, the only way to make the best of the rebellion was to treat it as a warning. “It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (South of Potomac) [will] have to wade through, and try to avert them,” Jefferson said. Throughout the 1790s slaveholding Americans feared that the example of St. Domingue would lead to the long-dreaded slave war, possibly with the explicit help of refugees from the island. These anxieties would grow to the point that “every account of the success of the negro chiefs has been accompanied by an increased audacity in the people of the same color here,” the British diplomat Edward Thornton reported to London in 1802.

  As the years went by, Jefferson wondered whether St. Domingue might become the asylum he sought for America’s slaves. (It did not.) And as he watched the St. Domingue rebellion from his vantage point as secretary of state, Jefferson could not know that the triumph of the blacks, under the leadership of Toussaint-Louverture, would so fatally weaken France in the New World that Paris would one day reassess its ambitions along the American borders.

  Washington spent part of 1791 touring southern states. “I write today indeed merely as the watchman cries, to prove himself awake, and that all is well, for the last week has scarcely furnished anything foreign or domestic worthy of your notice,” Jefferson wrote Washington on the first day of May 1791.

  Jefferson and Madison decided to take a trip of their own—to New York state and to part of New England. It was Federalist country, and their opponents were watching. Jefferson and Madison claimed they were traveling on a botany excursion; Jefferson was also interested in studying the Hessian fly.

  The trip was political as well as scientific. In their brief time together in New York City—Jefferson stayed on Beekman Street—the two Virginians met with New York chancellor Robert R. Livingston and Aaron Burr and with Philip Freneau, a writer they hoped to recruit to start a newspaper to compete with the pro-Hamilton Gazette of the United States. Freneau, whom Madison had known at Princeton, initially declined, but finally accepted and published his first edition of the National Gazette on October 31, 1791. He was to be subsidized by the Department of State, where Jefferson employed him as a translator.

  The Freneau appointment was a critical step for the emerging Republican Party. By creating a newspaper, Jefferson was playing the part of leader of the opposition. As the years went on, John Beckley, the clerk of the U.S. House, became the Republicans’ most effective tactician in the battles against the Federalists, helping to orchestrate the disparate mechanics of organized political action. Those “destined for commands,” Jefferson once said, had to bring “the floating ardor of our countrymen” to “a point of union and effect.” That was precisely the work of popular leadership.

  Madison remained behind after Jefferson returned southward in the middle of June. Writing from New York, Madison captured the feel of the city. “Nothing new is talked of here,” he told Jefferson in July 1791. “In fact stockjobbing drowns every other subject. The Coffee House is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers.”

  In Philadelphia, Jefferson was still settling in. It was not easy: His belongings were scattered between shipments from France to Philadelphia and to Monticello. “You mentioned formerly that the two commodes were arrived at Monticello,” he wrote Polly. “Were my two sets of ivory chessmen in the drawers? They have not been found in any of the packages which came here.”

  On Saturday, August 13, 1791, Jefferson and Hamilton spoke privately about Adams and the political storm over Davila. According to Jefferson, Hamilton said that while he believed a British form of government would be a stronger one, “since we have undertaken the experiment, I am for giving it a fair course, whatever my expectations may be.”

  Jefferson’s opposition was political. “Whether these measures be right or wrong abstractly,” Jefferson said of the Hamiltonian program, “more attention ought to be paid to the general opinion.” He asked Livingston in New York whether “the people in your quarter are as well contented with the proceedings of our government as their representatives say they are?” Jefferson also noted that “there is a vast mass of discontent gathered in the South, and how and when it will break God knows. I look forward to it with some anxiety.”

  He worried, too, about the corruption of the legislature—that lawmakers were becoming financially enmeshed with the Hamiltonian system of securities and bank shares. Such economic ties were not bribes in the overt sense, Jefferson believed, but they did create a pernicious climate of cooperation between the Congress and the Treasury. This subtle form of “corruption” troubled Jefferson, who saw it as the means by which Hamilton and his allies could
control the general direction of government. And control was something Jefferson never liked seeing in other men’s hands.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWO COCKS IN THE PIT

  How unfortunate … that whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissensions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON

  DINNER WAS OVER, and the senior officers of the American government were sitting together, drinking wine. President Washington was out of town, at Mount Vernon, and had asked Jefferson to summon Vice President Adams and the cabinet to handle some pending business.

  The matter was dispatched, and the talk drifted to more general topics. Jefferson’s guests were an impressive lot—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, Attorney General Edmund Randolph—and the after-dinner conversation at the secretary of state’s quarters was dominated by a “collision of opinion” between Adams and Hamilton.

  The subject: the British system of government. In the candlelight, Adams said that in his view “if some of its defects and abuses were corrected, it would be the most perfect constitution of government ever devised by man.”

  Jefferson sat in a kind of predictable horror, listening to this paean to a nation that preserved and perpetuated the role of hereditary power.

  Then Hamilton went a step further than Adams, saying that “it was the most perfect model of government that could be formed; and that the correction of its vices would render it an impracticable government.” To Jefferson’s ears, this meant that Hamilton (and, to a lesser extent, Adams) might well believe more strongly in the British way than the American way.

  This impression was underscored by a passing remark of Hamilton’s at dinner. Jefferson had decorated the walls of his quarters with a collection of portraits that included Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, all men of the Enlightenment. Hamilton asked Jefferson who they were. “I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them,” Jefferson recalled.

  Taking this in, Hamilton paused, thinking. After a moment, he broke his silence.

  “The greatest man that ever lived,” Hamilton said, “was Julius Caesar.”

  As the evening ended, Jefferson reflected on the distinctions between Adams and Hamilton. “Mr. Adams was honest as a politician, as well as a man; Hamilton honest as a man, but, as a politician, believed in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.”

  Neither man was Jefferson’s ally in the wars of President Washington’s years. Both represented forces and tendencies that Jefferson found unsettling, disturbing—and dangerous.

  Early on the afternoon on Tuesday, February 28, 1792, Jefferson was running late. He had hoped to come see Washington well before three o’clock, the time when the president received public callers. The meeting was important to Jefferson—he was arguing for improvements to the postal service by “doubling the velocity of the post-riders” from fifty to one hundred miles a day—but various other matters delayed him.

  Arriving at last, Jefferson hurried through his proposals, explaining that the post office should fall under his own State Department, not Hamilton’s Treasury Department, for “the Treasury possessed already such an influence as to swallow up the whole Executive powers.”

  The matter was not one of “personal interest,” Jefferson said, for he intended to serve in office only as long as Washington himself were to serve. Jefferson’s only purpose, he told the president, was to seek “to place things on a safe footing” for the public good.

  Before he could reply, Washington was summoned to greet the afternoon callers. Would Jefferson come to breakfast the next morning?

  He would, and did. After the meal the two men reviewed the postal question. The president then brought the talk back to the broader topics Jefferson had raised the day before. Washington said he intended to leave the presidency after four years both because of his age (“he really felt himself growing old”) and for fear of appearing greedy for place (“were he to continue longer, it might [give] room to say that having tasted the sweets of office he could not do without them”). Yet the president was anxious to prevent the cabinet from following suit, worrying, he said, that “this might produce a shock in the public mind of dangerous consequence.”

  Jefferson replied with his own implicit evocations of Cincinnatus, casting his political career as an accident of the age. “I told him that no man had ever had less desire of entering into public offices than myself: that the circumstance of a perilous war, which brought everything into danger, and called for all the services which every citizen could render, had induced me to undertake the administration of the government of Virginia” and that he had twice refused diplomatic appointments before “a domestic loss … made me fancy that absence, and a change of scene for a time, might be expedient for me,” which led him to accept the assignment in France.

  In Washington’s company on this late winter morning, engaged by but perhaps tired from struggling against Federalist interests, Jefferson may have felt a quiet comradeship with the president who was flatteringly urging that he stay at his exalted post.

  The two Virginians, linked by common heritage and shaped by the same forces of Revolution, were, however briefly, comfortable with each other, pausing at the pinnacle to review the paths they had traveled to the summit. The stories they told to each other about ambition and obligation and power were the stories they told themselves about ambition and obligation and power. They wished to be seen as above party and removed from the hurly-burly of politics.

  In the warmth of the moment Washington confided a fear to Jefferson, and Jefferson repaid the confidence with candor. The government, Washington said, “had set out with a pretty general good will of the public, yet … symptoms of dissatisfaction had lately shown themselves far beyond what he could have expected, and to what height these might arise in case of too great a change in the administration could not be foreseen.”

  Jefferson did not miss his chance. Speaking bluntly and at some length, he said that there was, in his opinion, “only a single source of these discontents”: Hamilton’s Treasury.

  Hamilton, Jefferson said, was “deluging the states with paper-money instead of gold and silver” to encourage speculation, rather than “other branches of useful industry.” Jefferson told Washington of his conviction that Hamiltonian lawmakers had “feathered their nests with paper.”

  That was not all. Jefferson said that his foes “had now brought forward a proposition, far beyond every one ever yet advanced, and to which the eyes of many were turned, as the decision which was to let us know whether we live under a limited or an unlimited government.”

  Jefferson soon took his leave.

  Jefferson and Hamilton were now “daily pitted in the Cabinet like two cocks,” as Jefferson recalled. A savvy politician, Jefferson recognized—and grudgingly appreciated—Hamilton’s political craft. Hamilton, for instance, carefully managed relations with George Hammond, the official British envoy. Jefferson noticed that Hamilton always seemed to know precisely what Hammond was thinking, which Jefferson said “proved the intimacy of their communications: insomuch that I believe he communicated to Hammond all our views and knew from him in return the views of the British court.”

  But even Washington himself was not exempt from Jefferson’s dark thoughts about the possibility of a breach of faith with the republican promise. Once, in a conversation about whether the House would vote to provide money stipulated by treaty, Washington grew impatient. “He said that he did not like throwing too much into democratic hands, that if [the members of the House] would not do what the Constitution called on them to do, the government would be at an end, and must then assume another form,” Jefferson wrote in April 1792.

  For Jefferson, the images of mona
rchy swirled. The rhetoric of the American Revolution—Jefferson’s rhetoric, the product of his own pen—seemed ever fainter in the clatter of a capital that was beginning to feel more like a king’s court than the seat of a republic.

  The public debt, paper money, excise taxes, the alleged corruption of the Congress: Jefferson believed it all could lead to the consummate betrayal as 1792 wore on. The “ultimate object of all this is to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model,” Jefferson told Washington. Jefferson unmistakably alluded to Hamilton’s 1787 advocacy of a more monarchical system. “That this was contemplated in the Convention is no secret, because its partisans have made none of it,” Jefferson said. “To effect it then was impracticable; but they are still eager after their object, and are predisposing everything for its ultimate attainment.”

  Jefferson believed that members of Congress had a vested interest in the Hamiltonian financial system. It “will be the instrument for producing in future a king, lords and commons, or whatever else those who direct it may choose,” he told Washington. The aim of the “Monarchial Federalists” was to use “the new government merely as a stepping stone to monarchy.”

  He was thinking of the calamitous possibility of southern secession to protest Federalist dominance. “I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the union into two or more parts,” Jefferson said, yet if northern interests were to predominate, it would become impossible to say what might happen.