Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  The treaty was nevertheless narrowly ratified. Washington believed, as did a bare two-thirds majority of the Senate, that the pact was preferable to going to war.

  The agreement with London faced an unusual additional obstacle: The House needed to approve funding for some elements of the treaty. Washington, under attack as “a supercilious tyrant” and a “ruler who tramples on the laws and Constitution,” went to the House chamber in December 1795 to deliver his annual message.

  He had enjoyed more hospitable greetings. “Never, till a few months preceding this session, had the tongue of the most factious slander dared to make a public attack on his character,” wrote William Cobbett, the pamphleteer who wrote under the name Peter Porcupine. “This was the first time he had ever entered the walls of Congress without a full assurance of meeting a welcome from every heart.” Now he was looking out over a crowd of members who “were ready to thwart his measures, and present him the cup of humiliation filled to the brim.”

  Yet the House joined the Senate in grudgingly voting to support the treaty. Finally, on May 6, 1796, Washington signed the Jay Treaty. “The N. England States have been ready to rise in mass against the H. of Reps.,” Madison wrote Jefferson three days after Washington signed the documents. “Such have been the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism in that quarter, that Republicanism is perfectly overwhelmed.” The day belonged to the Federalists.

  The price of this diplomatic and political victory, however, was high, for the approval of the Jay Treaty by the Federalists gave the nascent Republicans a palpable and energizing sense of purpose.

  They knew where to turn, and to whom.

  Jefferson was already thinking about the politics of the hour in practical terms, turning a scientific eye to the world around him. In notes he drafted sometime after mid-October 1795, he sketched out his sense of the state of play.

  Two parties then do exist within the US. They embrace respectively the following descriptions of persons.

  The Anti-republicans consist of

  1.The old refugees and tories.

  2.British merchants residing among us, and composing the main body of our merchants

  3.American merchants trading on British capital. Another great portion.

  4.Speculators and Holders in the banks and public funds.

  5.Officers of the federal government with some exceptions.

  6.Office-hunters, willing to give up principles for places. A numerous and noisy tribe.

  7.Nervous persons, whose languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than active state of things.

  The Republican part of our Union comprehends

  1.The entire body of landholders throughout the United States

  2.The body of laborers, not being landholders, whether in husbandry or the arts

  The latter is to the aggregate of the former probably as 500 to one; but their wealth is not as disproportionate, though it is also greatly superior, and is in truth the foundation of that of their antagonists. Trifling as are the numbers of the Anti-republican party, there are circumstances which give them an appearance of strength and numbers. They all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times; they give chief employment to the newspapers, and therefore have most of them under their command. The agricultural interest is dispersed over a great extent of country, have little means of intercommunication with each other, and feeling their own strength and will, are conscious that a single exertion of these will at any time crush the machinations against their government.

  Jefferson’s assessment of the foe mixed fear and pride. He worried about the Federalists but believed the Republicans capable of victory whenever they chose to bestir themselves. The anxiety produced by the enemy fueled the politician’s sense of urgency; the faith in the virtues of his own cause gave him the power to endure the most hopeless and despairing of moments.

  On the day after Christmas, 1795, Jefferson wrote Bache to subscribe to his newspaper, the Aurora, as well as to other editors in Philadelphia and Richmond to begin receiving their papers. Though he had hardly left the arena, he was now unmistakably back in it.

  Jefferson had never doubted the power of the presidency. From his first reading of the draft Constitution while in France, he sensed that the office could become the center of action for the whole government. Experience had proved his instincts right. Reflecting on Washington’s Jay Treaty victory, Jefferson wrote Monroe: “You will have seen … that one man outweighs them all in influence over the people who have supported his judgment against their own and that of their representatives. Republicanism must lie on its oars, resign the vessel to its pilot, and themselves to the course he thinks best for them.”

  Given the season of these remarks—the middle of June 1796, almost six months to the day before the electoral college was to meet to choose a successor to Washington—Jefferson entertained thoughts about America’s prospects should the pilot of the vessel be a Republican. And, more to the point, whether he himself should be that pilot. Decorous silence on the explicit question of a candidacy for the office was to be maintained, but Jefferson was about to face the most momentous decision of his public life since he chose country over king in the hurly-burly of the Revolution: Would he allow his name to go forward as a candidate for president of the United States after all?

  First, he wanted to clear up some worrisome business with Washington himself. Always sensitive about the opinions of others and particularly anxious for Washington to think well of him, Jefferson had read a report in the June 9, 1796, Aurora that drew on a confidential document Washington had given to members of his cabinet during the neutrality debates. Jefferson was determined to convince Washington that he, at least, had not betrayed the president’s trust. Swearing on “everything sacred and honorable,” Jefferson promised Washington on June 19 that the document had “never been from under my own lock and key.”

  Jefferson was concerned about what Washington thought of him in these early summer weeks of 1796, for he knew that the president was hearing rumors that Jefferson had been privately critical of—even condescending toward—his old chief. Worried about such impressions, Jefferson wrote Washington warning that some people may “try to sow tares between you and me” by presenting Jefferson as “still engaged in the bustle of politics, and in turbulence and intrigue against the government.”

  When Washington replied in July 1796, he absolved Jefferson of responsibility for the Aurora matter but used the occasion to address Jefferson’s views of the administration. “As you have mentioned the subject yourself,” said Washington, “it would not be frank, candid, or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as derogating from that opinion I had conceived you entertained of me.”

  The Federalists were busy maneuvering for the approaching presidential election. Their tactics included overtures to Jefferson nemesis Patrick Henry to stand for president. Henry was uninterested, but the latter suggestion, which, if adopted, would have divided Virginia, underscored the Federalists’ conviction that Jefferson was likely to be their main foe.

  From the West, the legislator William Cocke, a native Virginian now among the leading men of Tennessee, made himself plain to Jefferson in August 1796. It was Cocke’s happy duty, he wrote, “to inform you that the people of this State, of every description, express a wish that you should be the next President of the United States, and Mr. Burr, Vice President.”

  Jefferson’s reply was at once clear and equivocal. “I have not the arrogance to say I would refuse the honorable office you mention to me; but I can say with truth that I would rather be thought worthy of it than to be appointed to it,” he wrote Cocke. For “well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TO THE VICE P
RESIDENCY

  There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  You and I have formerly seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other.… It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hat.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON to Edward Rutledge

  THE PUBLICATION OF WASHINGTON’S farewell address on Monday, September 19, 1796, set off America’s first contested presidential election. The Washington announcement was, Massachusetts congressman Fisher Ames said, “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party racers to start.”

  Presidential elections in the first decades of the republic were odd affairs. Candidates did not campaign. They allowed, obliquely or through friends and allies, that they were available to be elected. Networks of the like-minded put together a ticket for president and vice president. In most states individual electors let it be known that a vote for them would be a vote for their favorites for both offices. Until the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 there was no distinction between the two offices in the electoral college. The second place finisher became vice president.

  However different in form presidential contests were, one feature has been constant from the beginning: They have been rife with attacks and counterattacks.

  It took just ten days from the publication of Washington’s farewell for Jefferson’s enemies to strike against him, and strike hard. On Thursday, September 29, 1796, The Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette published a statement from Charles Simms, a Federalist lawyer close to President Washington. Simms was campaigning to become a presidential elector for John Adams from Prince William, Stafford, and Fairfax counties in Virginia. He took Jefferson on directly in his late September broadside. Jefferson, Simms charged, was not fit for high office, for he had fled the wartime governorship “at the moment of an invasion of the enemy, by which great confusion, loss, and distress accrued to the State in the destruction of public records.” Such a man was too weak to be president, Simms said, “for no one can know how soon or from whence a storm may come.” Jefferson was, in other words, a coward driven by vanity. Adams, on the other hand, was a statesman who could be counted on to stay the course set by George Washington.

  The Jeffersonians reacted with force. John Taylor of Caroline, a pro-Jefferson Virginian, drafted a reply for publication. It made the case that Governor Jefferson had not failed in his duty, telling again the story of the invasion of 1781. Most important, in what was to become a perennially useful political theme, the Republicans argued that the contest of the hour was about the present, not the past. It was, they said, about the conflict between republican and monarchical visions of American government.

  Taylor illustrated his point by describing a 1794 conversation with Vice President Adams and New Hampshire senator John Langdon in which Adams allegedly said that “no government could long exist, or that no people could be happy, without an hereditary first magistrate, and an hereditary senate, or a senate for life.” Campaign literature read: “Thomas Jefferson is a firm REPUBLICAN—John Adams is an avowed MONARCHIST.”

  After the Jay Treaty, the next president faced the rising prospect of war with France—a possibility that imbued the election with an even greater sense of urgency that it already had.

  Enduring a late-autumn cold spell at Monticello—the temperature had dropped to 12 degrees, freezing the ink in its well on his desk—Jefferson awaited news of the 1796 election results. Given the tasks facing the next president, he said the vice presidency might be preferable to winning the presidency itself. “Few will believe the true dispositions of my mind on that subject,” Jefferson wrote. “It is not the less true however that I do sincerely wish to be the second on that vote rather than the first.”

  Hamilton, who opposed both Adams and Jefferson, was a complicating factor. He devised a fascinating strategy to deny his two rivals the presidency by urging Federalist electors in South Carolina to cast ballots for Adams’s choice for vice president, native son Thomas Pinckney, for president rather than vice president. Hamilton’s motive? Madison wrote to Jefferson that Hamilton believed Adams “too headstrong to be a fit puppet for the intriguers behind the screen.”

  One sign that Jefferson was more invested in a personal victory than his formulaic protestations to the contrary lies in a note Madison wrote him on Saturday, December 10, 1796. “You must reconcile yourself to the secondary as well as the primary station, if that should be your lot,” Madison told Jefferson. The emphasis on “must” is Madison’s—suggesting that Jefferson’s closest political friend and counselor knew the presidential candidate to be anxious for the top post. Madison was also preparing his friend for the possibility that the Hamiltonian maneuvering could throw the election into the House of Representatives if Adams and Jefferson ended up in a tie in the vote.

  Jefferson knew that a subsequent numerical deadlock in the House was also possible—“a difficulty from which the constitution has provided no issue,” he wrote Madison. Should he and Adams find themselves in such a situation, Jefferson authorized Madison to “fully to solicit on my behalf that Mr. Adams may be preferred. He has always been my senior from the commencement of our public life, and the expression of the public will being equal, this circumstance ought to give him the preference.”

  As the returns reached Philadelphia, Pinckney faded to third, and Madison’s worries reverted to the fear that Jefferson had been so set on becoming president that he might refuse the second spot. Appealing first to Jefferson’s concern for reputation, Madison wrote that “it is expected that as you had made up your mind to obey the call of your country, you will let it decide on the particular place where your services are to be rendered.” Moreover, having a Republican influence in close proximity to the president could be important, even critical. “There is reason to believe also that your neighborhood to Adams may have a valuable effect on his councils particularly in relation to our external system,” Madison wrote.

  On Wednesday, February 8, 1797, the votes were tallied. Adams won, barely, by a margin of 71 to Jefferson’s 68. Pinckney carried 59. The Federalists fretted about Jefferson’s winning the vice presidency. One anti-Jeffersonian clergyman was reported to have prayed: “O Lord! Wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President a double portion of Thy grace, for Thou knowest he needs it.”

  Adams was thrilled to become president. As he had written Abigail, he believed deeply in “the sense, spirit, and resources of this country, which few other men in the world know so well [or] have so long tried and found solid.” Despite the second-place finish, Jefferson found the results flattering. “I value the late vote highly,” he said, “but it is only as the index of the place I hold in the esteem of my fellow-citizens.”

  Jefferson spent the cold weeks after the election ruminating on politics. “I knew it was impossible Mr. Adams should lose a vote North of the Delaware, and that the free and moral agency of the South would furnish him an abundant supplement,” he wrote. “On principles of public respect I should not have refused [the presidency]: but I protest before my God that I shall, from the bottom of my heart, rejoice at escaping.”

  He took a wry, knowing tone: “The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.” The vice presidency was the better place at this hour. “This is certainly not a moment to covet the helm,” Jefferson said.

  Whispers of possible secession to form a confederacy of northern states appeared in The Connecticut Courant in November and December 1796—whispers that hinted at a larger source of tension. At issue was the advantage Jefferson and his fellow Southerners had in national elections because o
f the three-fifths clause, the constitutional provision that counted a slave as three-fifths of a person to establish the number of congressmen and presidential electors allocated to each state. When Jefferson went on to win the presidency four years later, his Federalist critics would disparage him as the “Negro President” because of his dependence on the three-fifths clause. The battles over slavery were thus rooted not only in the debate over the morality of abolition but in the practical political reality that every additional slave state (ironically and tragically) increased the power of white office seekers from those states.

  Jefferson found it preferable—and more comfortable—to strike grand notes on secession rather than engage his adversaries on the stark realities of the mathematics of power. “We shall never give up our union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators,” he told Elbridge Gerry.

  In the last days of the 1796 election, Jefferson had drafted a kind letter to Adams. After the usual disclaimers (“I have no ambition to govern men”), Jefferson wrote that the presidency was “a painful and thankless office.” Should Adams be able to “shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce and credit will be destroyed,” then “the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence.”

  On New Year’s Day 1797, Jefferson sent Madison a draft of the letter to Adams. “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt at a secondary position to Mr. Adams,” Jefferson wrote. “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” Nevertheless, he asked Madison whether he should send Adams the letter.