Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Thoughts of Monticello were a relief from the strain of a life in which Jefferson was often out of sync with Washington, Adams, and Hamilton. A small instance: Jefferson had used the phrase “our republic” in letters drafted for Washington’s signature (as in, “your Min. plen. to our republic”).

  According to Jefferson, Washington told him that “certainly ours was a republican government, but yet we had not used that style in this way: that if anybody wanted to change its form into a monarchy he was sure it was only a few individuals, and that no man in the U.S. would set his face against it more than himself: but that this was not what he was afraid of: his fears were from another quarter, that there was more danger of anarchy being introduced.”

  Washington was out of sorts in any event. “Knox told some little stories to aggravate the Pr[esident],” Jefferson recalled. “To wit, that Mr. King had told him, that a lady had told him, that she had heard a gentleman say that the Pr. was as great a tyrant as any of them and that it would soon be time to chase him out of the city.”

  Jefferson believed the Hamiltonians were drafting excessively critical articles about Washington in the voice of Republicans in order to alienate the president and “make him believe it was that party who were his enemies, and so throw him entirely into the scale of the monocrats.”

  With Jefferson, Washington also alluded to a Freneau newspaper piece he disliked. “He was evidently sore and warm,” Jefferson wrote, “and I took his intention to be that I should interpose in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my office, but I will not do it: his paper has saved our constitution which was galloping fast into monarchy.”

  Jefferson would not submit. In this battle of wills, the secretary of state, as usual, refused to give way.

  The wars of the Old World were once again a subject of concern for the New in the first half of 1793. On February 1, eleven days after the execution of Louis XVI, the French Republic declared war on Britain. Washington was determined to declare the United States’ neutrality in the conflict. Jefferson disliked the draft of the proclamation, which he found Hamiltonian and pro-British.

  The Neutrality Proclamation also raised some Republican questions about an overreaching executive. “It has been asked also,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “whether the authority of the Executive extended by any part of the Constitution to a declaration of the disposition of the U.S. on the subject of war and peace? … The right to decide the question … [of] war or peace … [is] vested in the Legislature.”

  Was Washington acting too kingly? James Monroe thought the proclamation “unconstitutional and improper.”

  The president was sensitive about the questions over neutrality, noting at a November cabinet meeting that he had used it in a draft of a document and “we had not objected to the term.” After dinner Washington remained sour. “Other questions and answers were put and answered in a quicker altercation than I ever before saw the President use,” Jefferson recalled.

  Washington was tired of the strife of governing. In November 1793, the cabinet debated whether the president should propose the creation of a military academy. No, Washington decided, for “though it would be a good thing, he did not wish to bring on anything which might generate heat and ill humor.”

  Both heat and ill humor were at hand in the prospect of a visit from an envoy from France, Edmond-Charles Genet. Hamilton questioned whether the Frenchman should be officially received, raising what Jefferson called “lengthy considerations of doubt and difficulty.”

  Jefferson hoped an enthusiastic public reception would demonstrate broad support for France. Instead, Genet was a disaster, insulting Washington and making himself generally obnoxious. It was, however, more than a question of personality: The envoy was organizing privateers in violation of Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation. Genet was, Jefferson said, “Hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful and even indecent towards the P. in his written as well as verbal communications.… He renders my position immensely difficult.” Indeed Genet did, confiding in Jefferson about the possibility of fomenting rebellions against British and Spanish holdings—confidences Jefferson chose to keep, noting that Genet had spoken to him “not as secretary of state but as Mr. Jeff.”

  At Hamilton’s urging, the cabinet decided to ask the French government to recall Genet in August 1793. Jefferson saw the result was inevitable: Hamilton had won this battle. “He will sink the republican interest if they do not abandon him,” Jefferson wrote Madison.

  Madison sensed Jefferson’s dwindling patience with service in the administration but advised him to stay the course. Jefferson could not bring himself to agree with his old friend. “To my fellow-citizens the debt of service has been fully and faithfully paid,” Jefferson wrote in June 1793. After a quarter century of public service, in revolution, in war, and in a fraught, fragile peace, Jefferson was tired. “The motion of my blood,” he said, “no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.”

  Then, in a cry of frustration, he cataloged the irritations he felt and the sense of futility that sometimes seized him. “Worn down with labors from morning till night, and day to day; knowing them as fruitless to others as they are vexatious to myself, committed singly in desperate and eternal contest against a host who are systematically undermining the public liberty and prosperity,” he was, he said, “giving everything I love, in exchange for everything I hate, and all this without a single gratification in possession or prospect, in present enjoyment or future wish.”

  The battles seemed endless, victory elusive. James Monroe fed Jefferson’s worries, saying he was concerned that America was being “torn to pieces as we are, by a malignant monarchy faction.”

  A rumor reached Jefferson that Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists Rufus King and William Smith “had secured an asylum to themselves in England” should the Jefferson faction prevail in the government. The source of the report “could not understand whether they had secured it themselves, or whether they were only notified that it was secured to them. So that they understand that they may go on boldly, in their machinations to change the government, and if they should be overset and choose to withdraw, they will be secure of a pension in England as Arnold … had.”

  A sign of public dissatisfaction with the Federalist leadership in New York came with the organization and popularity of what were called Democratic-Republican societies led by the working and middle classes, with a strong immigrant presence. The groups’ rhetoric about republicanism and the threat of aristocracy enraged Washington, who lost his temper at a cabinet meeting after Henry Knox alluded to popular abuse of the president. As Jefferson recalled it, “The President was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.… Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives.… That by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet that they were charging him with wanting to be a king.”

  The meeting was effectively over.

  Jefferson wanted out. It was time for a tactical retreat to see whether the larger war could be won. Washington did not want Jefferson to go, and he paid a call at Jefferson’s Schuylkill house in August.

  The president was unhappy. Hamilton also wanted to resign, and Washington felt he was losing control. Would Jefferson stay on until the end of the next congressional session? Jefferson declined, alluding to the “particular uneasiness of my situation in this place where the laws of society oblige me to move always exactly in the circle which I know to bear me peculiar hatred, that is to say the wealthy aristocrats, the merchants closely connected with England, [and] the new created paper fortunes.”

  Washington replied that “the constitution we have is an excellent one if we can keep it where it
is, that it was indeed supposed there was a party disposed to change it into a monarchial form, but that he could conscientiously declare there was not a man in the U.S. who would set his face more decidedly against it than himself.”

  Jefferson told Washington that “no rational man in the U.S. suspects you of any other disposition, but there does not pass a week in which we cannot prove declarations dropping from the monarchial party that our government is good for nothing, it is a milk and water thing which cannot support itself, we must knock it down and set up something of more energy.”

  When Jefferson suggested naming a temporary secretary of state who would then move to the Treasury, Washington demurred, observing that “men never chose to descend: that being once in a higher department he would not like to go into a lower one.”

  Yellow fever struck Philadelphia in late summer 1793. “It has now got into most parts of the city and is considerably infectious,” Jefferson wrote. “At first 3 out of 4 died. Now about 1 out of 3. It comes on with a pain in the head, sick stomach, then a little chill, fever, black vomiting and stools, and death from the 2nd to the 8th day.” (One job seeker tried to find some personal gain in the epidemic: “Viewing with sorrow the large number of victims in all ranks and professions felled by the late distressing disease, I suppose that some vacancies have taken place amongst the persons employed in public offices. In this conception I take the liberty of addressing your Honor with the offer of my best services in that line.”)

  Jefferson was unkind about Hamilton. “Hamilton is ill of the fever, it is said,” Jefferson wrote Madison. “He had two physicians out at his house the night before last. His family thinks him in danger, and he puts himself so by his excessive alarm.… A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phenomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation in military occasions were genuine.”

  Jefferson was so much concerned about public opinion that he was willing to risk illness. “I would really go away, because I think there is rational danger, but … I do not like to exhibit the appearance of panic.”

  On New Year’s Eve, 1793, Jefferson extended his official resignation to Washington, who accepted it on the first day of 1794.

  The president did so, he said, “with sincere regret.” He reassured Jefferson about his tenure in terms both men valued: those of reputation. Washington could not “suffer you to leave your station without assuring you that the opinion which I had formed of your integrity and talents … has been confirmed by the fullest experience; and that both have been eminently displayed in the discharge of your duties.”

  Washington’s benediction was warm: “Let a conviction of my most earnest prayers for your happiness accompany you in your retirement.”

  Preparing to leave Philadelphia, Jefferson advised friends and correspondents “that Richmond is my nearest port and that to which both letters and things had best be addressed to me in future.”

  How long he was to stay in seclusion was a subject of no little speculation. Few believed he was truly withdrawing forever. Hearing the news, a Revolutionary hero thought Jefferson’s retirement was likely to be short-lived. Writing from Rose Hill in New York, Horatio Gates told Jefferson that he was leaving office “covered with glory; the public gratitude may one day force you from that retreat, so make no rash promises, lest like other great men you should be tempted to break them.” John Adams was more succinct, noting the marvel of how well political plants grow in the shade. The old friendship that had begun between Adams and Jefferson nearly twenty years before was a victim of the acrimony of the age. “Jefferson went off yesterday, and a good riddance of bad ware,” Adams wrote Abigail on January 6, 1794. “He has talents I know, and integrity I believe; but his mind is now poisoned with passion, prejudice, and faction.”

  Jefferson spoke as though his retirement was to be permanent. “My private business can never call me elsewhere, and certainly politics will not, which I have ever hated both in theory and practice,” Jefferson wrote Horatio Gates on February 3, 1794. “I thought myself conscientiously called from those studies which were my delight by the political crisis of my country and by those events quorum pars magna fuisti”—the last an allusion to Virgil, meaning “in which we played great parts.” Returning to his nautical imagery, Jefferson went on: “In storms like those all hands must be aloft. But calm is now restored, and I leave the bark with joy to those who love the sea. I am but a landsman, forced from my element by accident, regaining it with transport, and wishing to recollect nothing of what I have seen, but my friendships.”

  A man who ascribes his engagement in the world in terms of the elements, though, cannot rule out a return to that world should the storms come again—which storms tend to do.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IN WAIT AT MONTICELLO

  I live on my horse from an early breakfast to a late dinner, and very often after that till dark.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  I THINK IT IS MONTAIGNE who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head,” Jefferson wrote a friend from Monticello in February 1794. “I am sure it is true as to everything political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character.” Within weeks of being home from Philadelphia Jefferson was struck by how distant the politics of the capital could seem to many Americans. “I could not have supposed, when at Philadelphia, that so little of what was passing there could be known … as is the case here,” he told James Madison. “Judging from this … it is evident to me that the people are not in a condition either to approve or disapprove of their government, nor consequently to influence it.”

  Jefferson’s stay at Monticello between his resignation from Washington’s cabinet and his return to national politics as a candidate for president against John Adams in 1796 lasted only about two years. This period was entirely characteristic, for in these years he practiced a kind of quiet politics at a distance, allowing himself to serve as an emblem of Republican hope as events in Britain, Philadelphia, western Pennsylvania, and among Democratic-Republican societies around the country cast the Federalists in a harsher monarchical light. Jefferson knew that heroes are often summoned from afar—after all, Washington himself had been, not so long ago. Americans had turned to a tall, retired Virginian for rescue before. They might do so again.

  John Adams, serving still as vice president, sent a friendly note along with a book to Monticello in April 1794. “I congratulate you on the charming opening of the spring and heartily wish I was enjoying of it as you are upon a plantation, out of the hearing of the din of politics and the rumors of war.” Thanking Adams, Jefferson wrote, “Instead of writing 10 or 12 letters a day, which I have been in the habit of doing as a thing of course, I put off answering my letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day, and then find it sometimes postponed by other necessary occupations.” Yet he could not forbear a comment on foreign policy. “My countrymen are groaning under the insults of Gr. Britain. I hope some means will turn up of reconciling our faith and honor with peace: for I confess to you I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.”

  This was an interesting point, for in New York and in Philadelphia Jefferson had rarely mentioned the military side of the Revolution. In Albemarle County, though, he may not have been able to keep his mind from the scenes of terror and the depredations of the British. Confronted with renewed reminders about the horrors of war, he had a perspective on events he might not have had in the hurry of a diplomatic struggle. Arnold, Cornwallis, and Tarleton were not forgotten.

  Adams, too, abhorred the prospect of war and echoed Jefferson’s hopes for peace with Britain. He closed with his own wish that he, like Jefferson, might soon “get out of the Fumum et Opes Strepitumque Romae”—“the smoke, wealth, and din of Rome.”

  The latest threat to the peace both men wanted came from a series of Br
itish naval outrages on American shipping with the French West Indies. Now that Britain and France were at war, London had issued a secret Order in Council aimed essentially at closing down the lucrative (for the French) trade out of the islands—a trade largely carried on by American vessels. Americans also worried about unfair British trade policies, encouragement of the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, and support for hostile Indian tribes on the American frontier. “We must adopt such a mode of retaliation as will stake their kingdom to the centre,” a Republican newspaper declared.

  Resisting pressure for war, George Washington dispatched John Jay to London. The former Confederation foreign affairs secretary who was now serving as the nation’s first chief justice, Jay was undertaking a diplomatic mission that Jefferson hoped “may extricate us from the event of a war, if this can be done saving our faith and our rights.” It would not be easy. “The spirit of war has grown much stronger in this part of the country,” Jefferson told Monroe in April 1794.

  Back on his mountain, Jefferson wanted to construct as self-sufficient a world as possible. In the mid-1790s he decided to pull down much of his house in order to build even more grandly; the first Monticello thus gave way to the Monticello familiar to ensuing generations. The estate was undergoing constant construction and renovation. “We are now living in a brick-kiln, for my house, in its present state, is nothing better,” Jefferson had written George Wythe during the building of the first house, and now, years later, it had all started again.

  The house he wanted would not be finished until after he left the presidency in 1809, but he seems to have rarely been happier than when he was in the midst of construction. “He is a very long time maturing his projects,” a visitor once remarked, not particularly insightfully, given that Jefferson began work on the mountaintop in 1768 and was still at it four decades later. Jefferson himself admitted, “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements.”