Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  As work progressed through the years on the expansion of Monticello, Jefferson’s workmen—Irish joiners and enslaved men—also built the L-shaped terraces adjoining the house that he envisioned in 1770; the terraces largely concealed the work and living spaces below—the kitchen, dairy, smokehouse, wash house, ice cellar, store rooms, carriabe bays, and some slave quarters). While construction was underway, Mulberry Row, which ran along the southeastern edge of the main house, expanded to meet his needs. He added new slave quarters, a smokehouse, dairy, blacksmith’s shop, carpenter’s shop, wash house, sawpit, and, in April 1794, he launched a new manufacturing enterprise there: a nailery, where enslaved boys produced as many as 10,000 nails a day. Visiting Jefferson at Monticello in 1796, a French caller was impressed by Jefferson’s easy sense of command and grasp of detail on the estate. “As he cannot expect any assistance from the two small neighboring towns, every article is made on his farm; his negroes are cabinet-makers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc.,” the visitor wrote. “The children he employs in a nail factory.… The young and old negresses spin for the clothing of the rest.”

  As he built and farmed, he fought bouts with rheumatism (which kept him “in incessant torment”) yet found joy in his family. Writing of grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Patsy’s son, in early 1795, he said: “Jefferson is very robust. His hands are constantly like lumps of ice, yet he will not warm them. He has not worn his shoes an hour this winter. If put on him, he takes them off immediately and uses one to carry his nuts etc. in. Within these two days we have put both him and Anne into moccasins, which being made of soft leather, fitting well and lacing up, they have never been able to take them off.”

  He loved his guns and his horses; he loved to hunt and to fish. His mounts tended to have noble names, from Allycroker, Jefferson’s first known horse, to Gustavus to Cucullin to The General to Alfred, Caractacus, Ethelinda, Silvertail, Orra Moor, Peggy Waffington, Zanga, Polly Peachum, and the carriage horses Romulus and Remus. There was also a Raleigh, a Tarquin, a Castor, a Diomede, a Bremo, a Wellington, a Tecumseh, a Peacemaker, and The Eagle, Jefferson’s last horse, which was purchased in 1820.

  Jefferson liked to fish at home and while away. He had a favorite spot “below the old dam” on the Rivanna, he enjoyed outings on the Schuylkill River when he was in Philadelphia, and he relished a day at Lake George in the Adirondacks on his trip through the north with James Madison in 1791. “An abundance of speckled trout, salmon trout, bass and other fish with which it is stored, have added to our other amusements the sport of taking them,” Jefferson had written Patsy. He had been as unhappy with Lake Champlain as he had been happy with Lake George, noting that the larger Champlain was “a far less pleasant water. It is muddy, turbulent, and yields little game”—all things Jefferson disliked in fishing as in life.

  He kept guns and traveled armed (he once left behind a gun locked in a box at the inn at Orange Courthouse, and had to write the innkeeper to track it down). To Jefferson hunting was the best form of exercise. He often recommended it, though riding was the great solace and activity of his later years. Jefferson hunted “squirrels and partridges,” recalled Isaac Jefferson. “Old Master wouldn’t shoot partridges settin’.” A fair-minded sportsman, Jefferson would “scare … up” partridges or rabbits before firing. He would also drive hunters away from Monticello’s deer park.

  Jefferson’s gun collection included a “two shot-double barrel” and a set of Turkish pistols that he recalled having “20 inch barrels so well made that I never missed a squirrel at 30 yards with them.” He was a man of his time on the question of guns, writing in 1822 that “every American who wishes to protect his farm from the ravages of quadrupeds and his country from those of biped invaders” should be a “gun-man,” adding: “I am a great friend to the manly and healthy exercises of the gun.”

  Led by James Madison, correspondents kept Jefferson current on politics and foreign affairs. Animosity between Federalists and Republicans was a constant theme. “Personalities, which lessen the pleasures of society, or prevent their being sought, have occurred in private and at tables,” Tench Coxe, an American economist who served as Hamilton’s assistant secretary of the Treasury, wrote from Philadelphia. The next week James Monroe detailed the fight over resolutions connected to Jefferson’s commerce report; the Senate’s vote to expel Albert Gallatin, a Pennsylvania Republican, on the grounds that when elected he had not been a citizen of the United States for the requisite nine years; a battle over a congressional call to see Gouverneur Morris’s correspondence; an Indian treaty; and, of course, the disastrous mission of Edmond-Charles Genet. Jefferson was living in relative isolation, but details of the world were in constant supply.

  In March 1794, Federalist congressman Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts had introduced legislation to create a new army of fifteen thousand men and give the president extraordinary powers to control sea traffic. The argument, Monroe told Jefferson, was “founded upon the idea of providing for our defense against invasion, and the probability of such an event, considering the unfriendly conduct of G.B. towards us for sometime past.” However concerned the Republicans were about Great Britain, they were also skeptical of the Federalist plan, fearing that this was but a first step toward creating an army that might be raised to defend America but could end up being used to undermine the Constitution in a time of crisis. Republics tended to fall to military dictatorships, and military dictators needed a military. “A change so extraordinary must have a serious object in view,” Monroe wrote Jefferson. “They are to be raised in no given quarter, and although they may be deemed a kind of minute men in respect to their situation except in time of war, yet in every other respect they will be regulars… . The order of Cincinnati will be placed in the command of it.”

  The Republicans struck where they could. As part of a naturalization bill, William Branch Giles proposed requiring new American citizens to renounce any hereditary titles they held in other countries—thus, the Jeffersonians hoped, reducing the chance of emigrant aristocrats creating an old-world ethos in America.

  In reaction, the Federalist congressman Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts suggested that slaveholding immigrants disclose their human property. “You want to hold us up to the public as aristocrats,” said Dexter. “I, as a retaliation, will hold you up to the same public as dealers in slaves.” Giles’s amendment passed; Dexter’s failed. Both efforts illuminated the emotional issues shaping American politics—Republican fear of the prospect of hereditary power and the Federalist anxiety about the strength of slaveholders.

  The accumulation of power in the hands of Federalists was a running source of worry to Jefferson and his comrades. As Congress gathered in the late autumn of 1794, lawmakers who attended Washington’s delivery of his annual message heard the president’s account of the Whiskey Rebellion—and an unapologetic attack on the Democratic-Republican societies.

  The Whiskey Rebellion in the West was rooted in farmers’ fury over Hamilton’s excise taxes. Episode built upon episode until there were attacks on Bower Hill, the home of General John Neville, a federal tax inspector. A leader of the protesters, James McFarlane, was shot and killed. A large government force under both Hamilton and “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was mustered and dispatched to western Pennsylvania; Washington himself rode out with the troops for a time. Though the rebellion collapsed, the violence was connected in Washington’s mind with the political agitation of the Democratic-Republican societies, and he attacked both the Whiskey Rebellion and the societies in 1794.

  Jefferson took a sage tone with William Branch Giles in mid-December. “The attempt which has been made to restrain the liberty of our citizens meeting together, interchanging sentiments on what subjects they please, and stating these sentiments in the public papers, has come upon us, a full century earlier than I expected.”

  Taking the view that the administration was trying not only to quell th
e Pennsylvania uprising but to curtail peaceable freedom of assembly, Jefferson made himself plain to Madison. “The denunciation of the democratic societies is one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the faction of Monocrats.” And what did the Whiskey Rebellion amount to, really? To Jefferson it was hardly worth noting. “There was indeed a meeting to consult about a separation,” he wrote Madison in December 1794. “But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination.”

  Drama, Jefferson knew, was one of the prices one paid for democracy.

  Jefferson’s love of control was evident when he was at home. He was precise and demanding about his horses. When he was younger and his mount was brought to him, he would use a white cambric handkerchief to brush the horse’s shoulders. If there were dust, the horse was returned to the stables. Only the perfect would suffice.

  His horses were sources of immense pleasure—he loved riding—but he also disliked animals with wills of their own, and his mask of equanimity could slip occasionally when it came to his horses. “The only impatience of temper he ever exhibited was with his horse, which he subdued to his will by a fearless application of the whip on the slightest manifestation of restiveness,” said a grandson.

  His family preserved two other stories about significant displays of anger. Both outbursts were the result of being contradicted. The first came when Jefferson ordered a slave to fetch a carriage horse for an errand. Jupiter, the slave who was in charge of those horses, refused not once but twice. “Tell Jupiter to come to me at once,” Jefferson said, furious that his orders had been thwarted. The rebuke that Jupiter endured, according to the family story, was no ordinary one. It was epic, delivered by Jefferson “in tones and with a look which neither he nor the terrified bystanders ever forgot.” Jefferson’s commands were not to be challenged or questioned—ever.

  A second hour of fury that lived on in the family’s history unfolded on a river crossing. Two ferrymen had been fighting between themselves when they took Jefferson and his daughter Patsy aboard for the passage. The peace did not last long, and soon the two men were about to become violent again. According to the story, Jefferson, “his eyes flashing,” then “snatched up an oar, and, in a voice which rung out above the angry tones of the men, flourished it over their heads.” Weapon in hand, Jefferson issued an unmistakable command. “Row for your lives, or I will knock you both overboard!”

  There, in the midst of the waters, his safety and that of his daughter in danger from the quarrels of other men, Jefferson seized control and forced his will on others. “And they did row for their lives; nor, I imagine, did they soon forget the fiery looks and excited appearance of that tall weird-like-looking figure brandishing the heavy oar over their offending heads,” his granddaughter wrote. He let his true emotions show when something he loved—in this case, his daughter—was in danger.

  He loved his country, too, and was growing ever more convinced that it, too, was in peril.

  If you visit me as a farmer, it must be as a condisciple: for I am but a learner; an eager one indeed but yet desperate, being too old now to learn a new art,” Jefferson wrote William Branch Giles. He liked being with old friends. “Come then … and let us take our soup and wine together every day, and talk over the stories of our youth, and the tales of other times,” he wrote one.

  Madison struck at this idyll. “You ought to be preparing yourself … to hear truths which no inflexibility will be able to withstand,” Madison wrote to Jefferson in March 1795. For Madison the central truth was this: Thomas Jefferson was destined to seek the presidency of the United States.

  Jefferson admitted that the subject had been on his mind. Compelled, he said, by his enemies’ “continual insinuations in the public papers” that he was contending to succeed Washington, Jefferson told Madison that he had felt “my own quiet required that I should face it and examine it.” His decision, he wrote in April 1795, was no. He would not stand for the office. “The little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set still less store by a posthumous than present name.” That was not strictly true, but Jefferson liked to tell himself it was. Public men were not to be seen as anxious for office or place, and Jefferson frequently denied his self-evident drive to shape the era in which he lived.

  In this springtime of 1795, though, there may have been more conviction behind his rote protestations than usual. He had been sick with rheumatism, consumed with farming and financial matters long overlooked, delighted by grandchildren, and presumably enjoying, for the first extended period of time in four years, his liaison with Sally Hemings.

  He was not lying when he wrote Madison and other friends of his permanent retirement. He was finding rest and refuge at Monticello. What he himself may not have fully realized was how intimately—how naturally and unthinkingly—he remained connected to politics. By now—nearly a quarter century since his first election to the House of Burgesses—the life of the nation was as much an element of his own life as science or music or Monticello. He could no more unwind himself from the affairs of the republic than he could have chosen to cease being interested in science or books.

  He needed the world of politics and of consequence. It was crucial to his health, and to his sense of self and well-being. “I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes; and that every person who retires from free communication with it is severely punished afterwards by the state of mind into which they get, and which can only be prevented by feeding our sociable principles,” Jefferson wrote to Polly after he became president. “I can speak from experience on this subject. From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives into it: and it will be a lesson I shall never forget as to myself.”

  The articulation of his beliefs, the holding of office, the championing of things republican against things monarchical: Politics was not only what Thomas Jefferson practiced. It was part of who he was, even if he himself sometimes failed to see it.

  In June 1795, he asked the Philadelphia editor Benjamin Franklin Bache to “make me up a set of your papers for the year 1794.” Madison sent along what he called “a fugitive publication” of his own: a pamphlet entitled Political Observations. William Branch Giles announced he was going to see Jefferson “before I go to winter quarters”—the Congress. In the fall, Aaron Burr of New York called at Monticello, leading to Federalist charges that the two men had “planned and approved” the Republican agenda in the ensuing Congress.

  It had been a brief visit on Jefferson’s mountaintop, only a single day. However few the hours they spent together this autumn, though, Jefferson and Burr were to be intimately linked for the next dozen years—first as allies, then as foes.

  Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1756, Aaron Burr was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the theologian, preacher, and president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). Burr’s father, the Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr., married Edwards’s daughter Elizabeth and himself became president of the college, where his son was educated.

  Handsome, charming, adventurous, and ambitious, the younger Aaron Burr was a Revolutionary officer, a lawyer, and one of the most intriguing politicians of the age. He married the widow of a British officer, Theodosia Prevost, and they had a beautiful daughter, also named Theodosia.

  Burr was an architect of Republican politics in New York, rising through the ranks from the state assembly to become the state attorne
y general and, in 1791, U.S. senator. Mastering the mechanics of election, Burr was to prove invaluable to the Jeffersonian cause—until, in Jefferson’s view, the two men’s causes came into conflict in the presidential election of 1800.

  But that still lay in the future. For now, the issue confronting politicians of every sort, and indeed the country, was the possibility of war with Britain.

  John Jay’s mission to London had not produced the result Jefferson had hoped. Far from it: The treaty, which President Washington received on Saturday, March 7, 1795, appeared to concede too much to London, essentially codifying the economic ties between the two nations that Hamilton had been nurturing for years.

  The political reaction was swift and, for Washington, brutal. Angry crowds burned Jay in effigy; there was even talk of impeaching Washington. Jefferson despised the treaty as a Hamiltonian document, and much of the country joined him. “From North to South this monument of folly or venality is universally execrated,” Jefferson told Thomas Mann Randolph in August 1795.

  Even mid-August floods could not replace the Jay Treaty as the overriding topic of the day. “So general a burst of dissatisfaction never before appeared against any transaction,” said Jefferson.

  Worried that Hamilton—“really a colossus to the antirepublican party,” Jefferson called him—might somehow win the war for public opinion, Jefferson urged Madison to write against the treaty, fretting about “the quietism into which the people naturally fall, after first sensations are over.”

  As Jefferson read the treaty, he saw that Hamilton had successfully managed to legislate through Jay’s diplomacy. “A bolder party-stroke was never struck,” Jefferson told Madison. “For it certainly is an attempt of a party, which finds they have lost their majority in one branch of the legislature, to make a law by the aid of the other branch and the executive, under color of a treaty, which shall bind up the hands of the adverse branch from ever restraining the commerce of their patron-nation.”