Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Madison replied with a six-point case against it. The key ones: Since things were currently cordial between the two men, “it deserves to be considered whether the idea of bettering it is not outweighed by the possibility of changing it for the worse.” Another: “May not what is said of ‘the sublime delights of riding the storm etc.’ be misconstrued into a reflection on those who have no distaste to the helm at the present crisis? You know the temper of Mr. A. better than I do: but I have always conceived it to be a rather ticklish one.” Another: “The tenderness due to the zealous and active promoters of your election, makes it doubtful whether their anxieties and exertions ought to be depreciated by any thing implying the unreasonableness of them. I know that some individuals who have deeply committed themselves, and probably incurred the political enmity at least of the P. elect, are already sore on this head.” And finally: “Considering the probability that Mr. A.’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter … there may be real embarrassments from giving written possession to him of the degree of compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have suggested.”

  Jefferson was grateful for the counsel. He would not mail the letter.

  Jefferson reached Philadelphia on Thursday, March 2, 1797. Without delay he called on the president-elect. Adams, who lodged at Francis’s on Fourth Street, repaid the courtesy the next morning, visiting Jefferson in his temporary quarters. Closing the door behind him, the president-elect said he was glad Jefferson was alone. The two had much to talk about.

  Adams spoke of France, telling Jefferson that he had considered asking the new vice president to undertake a mission to Paris, “but that he supposed it was out of the question, as it did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of accident to himself, nor decent to remove from competition one who was a rival in the public favor.” What did Jefferson think of dispatching Madison to join a diplomatic mission in Paris?

  Jefferson agreed that he should not leave the country and thought Madison would refuse such a post. Adams, however, seemed determined. “He said that if Mr. Madison should refuse, he would still appoint him and leave the responsibility on him.”

  The ceremonial proceedings in Congress Hall on Saturday, March 4, 1797, were brief but memorable. Congress gathered for a short session; the business was the inauguration of the president and the vice president and the swearing-in of new senators and representatives. The president pro tempore of the Senate, William Bingham of Pennsylvania, administered the oath of office to Jefferson in the second-floor Senate chamber.

  The first American secretary of state was now the second vice president of the United States. Jefferson, in turn, swore in the eight new senators and delivered a short speech. He alluded to his broad political convictions and, graciously but unmistakably, to the mortality of the president: “No one more sincerely prays that no accident may call me to the higher and more important functions which the constitution eventually devolves on this office.”

  In a sign of the virulence of the time, some Jefferson supporters found his speech too conciliatory. “His first act in the Senate was to make a damned time-serving, trimming speech in which he declared that it was a great pleasure to him to have an opportunity of serving his country under such a tried patriot as John Adams, which was saying to his friends—I am in; kiss my—and go to H-ll,” one New York Republican was said to have remarked.

  After Jefferson was done, they reconvened in the House chamber on the ground floor of Congress Hall for the presidential inauguration of John Adams. As Adams recalled it, George Washington seemed cheerful—even relieved: “Methinks I heard him think ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.’ ” Jefferson thought Washington a lucky man. “The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag,” he wrote Madison. Privately, Jefferson repeated his claims of satisfaction at the results of the election. “The second office of this government is honorable and easy,” Jefferson said. “The first is but a splendid misery.”

  Two days after the inauguration, Adams and Jefferson dined with Washington. The new president and vice president left the table together. On the street, Jefferson told Adams that Madison would decline the appointment to France.

  It was just as well. The new president had spent time with his cabinet that day and found opposition among the Federalists to his thought of sending Madison. “He immediately said that on consultation some objections to that nomination had been raised which he had not contemplated,” Jefferson recalled, “and was going on with excuses which evidently embarrassed him, when we came to 5th Street where our road separated, his being down Market street, mine off along 5th and we took leave: and he never after that said one word to me on the subject, or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.”

  John Adams governed amid stress and strain. As president he fought to keep the peace, or at least a semblance of it, during what became known as the Quasi-War with France, a sustained series of expensive naval engagements. (Adams referred to it as “the half war with France.”) To see him through his years in office, he retained Washington’s cabinet, including the Federalist secretary of state, Timothy Pickering. This proved problematic, for the cabinet officers tended to see themselves as autonomous, complicating Adams’s administration by undercutting the president. And as vice president, Jefferson spent most of his time presiding over the Senate and tending—quietly—to the construction and nurture of the Republican opposition to Adams’s Federalist government.

  Reflecting on the evening conversation with Adams and on the events of Monday, March 6, 1797, Jefferson wrote: “The opinion I formed at the time on this transaction was that Mr. A. in the first moments of the enthusiasm of the occasion (his inauguration) forgot party sentiments, and as he never acted on any system, but was always governed by the feeling of the moment, he thought for a moment to steer impartially between the parties; that Monday the 6th of March being the first time he had met his cabinet, on expressing ideas of this kind he had been at once diverted from them, and returned to his former party views.”

  The Adams presidential years were busy personal ones in Jefferson’s domestic sphere. Patsy Randolph had three children between 1796 and 1801. In 1796 the Duc de la Rochefoucauld called at Monticello and found that Patsy’s younger, beautiful sister Polly “constantly resides with her father; but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she will doubtless soon find that there are duties which it is sweeter to perform than those of a daughter.” The next year Polly married John Wayles Eppes, a cousin. They would have two children. And Jefferson himself arrived at Monticello for a visit on Tuesday, July 11, 1797. Nine months and two weeks later, Sally Hemings gave birth to a son. The baby was named William Beverley, called Beverley.

  During the vice presidential years Jefferson became more philosophical about criticism, seeing it as an inevitable feature of political life, something to be endured—like storm or fire—if one wished to prevail in the public arena. “I have been for some time used as the property of the newspapers, a fair mark for every man’s dirt,” he wrote. “Some too have indulged themselves in this exercise who would not have done it, had they known me otherwise than thro’ these impure and injurious channels. It is hard treatment, and for a singular kind of offense, that of having obtained by the labors of a life the indulgent opinions of a part of one’s fellow citizens. However these moral evils must be submitted to, like the physical scourges of tempest, fire etc.” It was a more mature and measured view than he had held even while in France or at the beginning of his term as secretary of state—a sign that Jefferson had the capacity to grow and to learn. He did not have to like it, but he knew he had to put up with it.

  He was thinking along the same lines in terms of partisanship. By the end of the 1790s he could even be contempt
uous of politicians who held themselves above party. “A few individuals of no fixed system at all, governed by the panic or the prowess of the moment, flap as the breeze blows against the republican or the aristocratic bodies, and give to the one or the other a preponderance entirely accidental,” he wrote Burr in June 1797.

  The Jefferson political style, though, remained smooth rather than rough, polite rather than confrontational. He was a ferocious warrior for the causes in which he believed, but he conducted his battles at a remove, tending to use friends and allies to write and publish and promulgate the messages he thought crucial to the public debate. Part of the reason for his largely genial mien lay in the Virginia culture of grace and hospitality; another factor was a calculated decision, based on his experience of men and of politics, that direct conflict was unproductive and ineffective.

  Jefferson articulated this understanding of politics and the management of conflicting interests in a long, thoughtful letter to a grandson. “A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good humor, will go far towards securing to you the estimation of the world,” he wrote to Patsy’s son Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Good humor, Jefferson added, “is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment’s consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!” Jefferson went on:

  When this is in return for a rude thing said by another, it brings him to his senses, it mortifies and corrects him in the most salutary way, and places him at the feet of your good nature in the eyes of the company. But in stating prudential rules for our government in society I must not omit the important one of never entering into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many of their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another. Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves dispassionately what we hear from others standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, “never to contradict anybody.”

  The pro-English Jay Treaty had produced a cataclysmic reaction in France. The efforts to keep peace with Britain in part because of France now led to fears of war with France because of Britain. Such were the politics of the 1790s.

  French ships began seizing American craft. “I anticipate the burning of our seaports, havoc of our frontiers, household insurgency, with a long train of etceteras which it is enough for a man to have met once in his life,” Jefferson wrote.

  The perpetual threat of conflict—first with one European power, then with another—infused American politics with a sense of constant crisis. Both Federalists and Republicans believed the fate of the United States could turn on the confrontation of the hour. In the broad public discourse, driven by partisan editors publishing partisan newspapers, there seemed no middle ground, only extremes of opinion or of outcome.

  Into this culture of entrenched division came the publication of a 1796 letter of Jefferson’s that appeared to attack President Washington as a tool of the British interest.

  It was May 1797 when Philip Mazzei publicized the Washington letter Jefferson had written him the year before. “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England,” Jefferson had written of the Jay Treaty controversy. “In short, we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.” The letter was taken as a Jeffersonian assault on Washington and the president’s allegedly pro-British tendencies, which made it perfect fodder for the Federalist press. “The passions are too high at present to be cooled in our day,” Jefferson wrote an old friend.

  About that, at least, both Republicans and Federalists might have agreed, for anecdotes suggesting the other side’s extremism and unreasonableness were in substantial supply.

  The Federalists had Jefferson’s Mazzei letter, and Republicans heard plenty about their enemies, too. On Christmas Day, 1797, Madison repeated worries that Adams was using a new yellow fever epidemic to seize additional power by possibly postponing the meeting of Congress.

  And word reached Jefferson that Adams, upset at Republican George Clinton’s respectable showing in the 1792 balloting for vice president, had said: “Damn ’em, Damn ’em, you see that an elective government will not do,” and that Adams had reportedly recently remarked that “Republicanism must be disgraced, sir.”

  Jefferson was intrigued by similar tales about Hamilton. In late 1797, Tench Coxe alleged that Hamilton had said “ ‘For my part … I avow myself a monarchist; I have no objection to a trial being made of this thing of a republic, but’ etc.” Such stories did little to calm Jefferson’s fears about his Federalist colleagues.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE REIGN OF WITCHES

  No, I think a party is necessary in a free state to preserve its freedom—the truly virtuous should firmly unite and form a party capable at all times of frustrating the wicked designs of the enemies of the doctrine of equality and the rights of man.

  —Jefferson friend JOHN PAGE

  IN THE NEW YEAR, two of Jefferson’s housemates at Francis’s tavern—Congressmen Abraham Baldwin of Georgia and Thomson J. Skinner of Massachusetts—told Jefferson a disturbing story about 1787. As they described it, “a very extensive combination had taken place in N. York and the Eastern states among … people who were partly monarchical in principle or frightened with Shays’s rebellion and the impotence of the old Congress.” Representatives, Jefferson was informed, “had actually had consultations on the subject of seizing on the powers of a government and establishing them by force, had corresponded with one another, and had sent a deputy to Genl. Washington to solicit his cooperation.”

  Washington did not join the plot, and the Constitutional Convention proposed by Virginia had been called in the meantime. Still, the monarchists (in this account) had been—and were—counting on the failure of the new government. Monarchy would then step into the breach.

  Jefferson’s vice presidency, which ran from 1797 to 1801, unfolded in a fevered climate. One congressman, the Republican Matthew Lyon of Vermont, spat in the face of another, the Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut, after Griswold insulted Lyon’s courage. An effort to expel Lyon, a ferociously partisan editor, failed. Frustrated, Griswold attacked Lyon with a cane. Fighting back, Lyon seized some fireplace tongs and the two brawled on the House floor.

  The driving source of national fear was a potential war with France after the Jay Treaty. Then, in March 1798, Adams revealed that a diplomatic mission to France had failed when three French officials—known as X, Y, and Z in state papers—demanded bribes, a huge loan, and an American apology as the price of doing business in the wake of the treaty debacle. The political effect of the episode in the United States was electric. Americans felt insulted by the French, and talk of war intensified. The news of the attempted extortion, Jefferson said, “produced such a shock on the republican mind as has never been seen since our independence.”

  John Adams issued a message calling on Americans to prepare for war. He ordered the country to “adopt with promptitude, decision, and unanimity” measures to protect “our seafaring and commercial citizens, for the defense of any exposed portions of our territory, for replenishing our arsenals, establishing foundries and military manufactures, and to provide such efficient revenue as will be necessary to defray extraordinary expenses and supply the deficiencies which may be occasioned by depredations on our commerce.” Such was the “Quasi-War,” a s
eries of naval attacks that pitted the United States against its first and most important ally in a brutal if undeclared war.

  The sulfurous events of the period cast Jefferson in a role for which he was well suited: that of the eloquent champion of individual rights against a John Adams–led campaign to quell dissent in America amid anxieties about French power and French agents. It was not the last time Americans would curb civil liberties for the sake of national security.

  The main occasion for the tumult of the Adams administration was the four pieces of legislation popularly known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Passed in reaction to the war climate, the bills gave the president with extraordinary powers at the expense, Republicans argued, of the liberties of a free people. The alien laws collectively invested the president the authority to deport resident aliens he considered dangerous. The sedition bill criminalized free speech, forbidding anyone to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

  So began a furiously divisive time of intensity and vitriol. Jefferson and the Republicans believed they were no longer expecting but were instead experiencing the end of American liberty. “Everyone has a right to explain himself,” John Taylor wrote, adding that the government was now “manufacturing a law which may even make it criminal to pray to God for better times.”

  Some Republicans detected monarchical autocracy at work. John Dickinson, Jefferson’s former colleague from the Continental Congress, drew on the history of the English Civil War to illustrate how far he believed President Adams had strayed: “How incredible was it once, and how astonishing is it now, that every measure and every pretense of the stupid and selfish Stuarts should be adopted by the posterity of those who fled from their madness and tyranny to the distant and dangerous wilds of America?”