Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Once sedition legislation passed and was signed by Adams, the speaking of one’s mind—a foundational freedom—could result in fines up to $2,000 and up to two years in prison. “For my own part I consider these laws as merely an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution,” Jefferson said. “If this goes down, we shall immediately see attempted another act of Congress declaring that the President shall continue in office during life, reserving to another occasion the transfer of the succession to his heirs, and the establishment of the Senate for life.” It would, in other words, be the death of what Jefferson’s generation had fought for.

  Adams and the Federalists believed they were limiting liberty’s excesses in order to preserve liberty itself. The danger of war was real, and war called for extraordinary measures. (And the Sedition Act was set to expire in 1801.) To Adams and his allies, the combination of foreign aliens within the United States and a brutal press calling into question the legitimacy of the administration was a possibly lethal one.

  Madison described the state of play well in May 1798: “The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views.… Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.” Extreme measures seemed suited to extreme times.

  On Thursday, February 15, 1798, Jefferson dined with Adams. The “company was large,” Jefferson wrote, but the two men found a moment afterward to talk. They spoke of rising prices (blaming Hamilton’s “bank paper,” of course). “We then got on the Constitution and … he said that no republic could ever last which had not a Senate and a Senate deeply and strongly rooted, strong enough to bear up against all popular storms and passions.… That as to trusting to a popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties … it was the merest chimera imaginable.”

  In Philadelphia, Adams took the long view while addressing a crowd of demonstrators. “Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity, or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that after the most industrious and impartial researches, the longest liver of you all, will find no principles, institutions, or systems of education more fit, in general, to be transmitted to your posterity, than those you have received from your ancestors.” This backward-looking point of Adams’s was so anathema to Jefferson that it agitated his mind long afterward.

  To Jefferson, the imperfections of life and the limits of politics were realities. So were the wonders and the possibilities of the human mind. “I am among those who think well of the human character generally,” he wrote twenty-one months before becoming president. “It is impossible for a man who takes a survey of what is already known, not to see what an immensity in every branch of science yet remains to be discovered.”

  Astronomy, botany, chemistry, natural history, anatomy: These were “branches of science … worth the attention of every man,” Jefferson said, adding that “great fields are yet to be explored to which our faculties are equal, and that to an extent of which we cannot fix the limits.” It was “cowardly” to think “the human mind is incapable of further advances.”

  Jefferson’s vision for the United States was expansive. The work was never done, of course, however strong the performance of a particular era. “The generation which is going off the stage has deserved well of mankind for the struggles it has made, and for having arrested that course of despotism which had overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years,” Jefferson said. A course arrested, though, was not the same thing as a course extinguished.

  In Philadelphia in May 1798, a parade of about 1,200 supporters of the alien bill presented Adams with a statement in favor of the administration’s measures against France. Adams had proclaimed May 9 a fast day—as Jefferson knew from Virginia during the Revolution, such maneuvers had their uses—and violence broke out between the pro-Adams Federalists and the Republicans who had gathered. (In his diary, Nathaniel Ames, a New England Republican, drily noted “Adams’ Fast, to engage Powers above against the French.”) The next day, Jefferson wrote, “a fray ensued and the light horse was called in. I write in the morning and therefore do not yet know the details. But it seems designed to drive the people into violence. This is becoming fast a scene of tumult and confusion.” Such scenes evoked the worst aspects of his time in Paris: the threat and the reality of riot and bloodshed.

  Jefferson was in a conspiratorial frame of mind. “I know that all my motions at Philadelphia, here, and everywhere, are watched and recorded.” He feared his mail was being intercepted and read. It was a chaotic time. In July 1798, Virginia senator Henry Tazewell said he feared the sedition law would be “executed with unrelenting fury.” At the same time Jefferson anticipated the new arrival of an old foe: Alexander Hamilton was to become a senator from New York. (Hamilton ultimately declined to seek the Senate seat.)

  The madness of the scene reminded Jefferson of an elemental force: heat. “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he wrote Patsy. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.”

  Jefferson was pressed for cash, which left him with a feeling of powerlessness. “I have not at this moment more than 50 dollars in the world at my command, and these are my only resource for a considerable time to come,” he wrote in April 1798. He was learning, too, of the tragic nature of one of his sister’s marriages. His sister Mary’s husband, John Bolling, was apparently alcoholic and abusive. “Mr. B.’s habitual intoxication will destroy himself, his fortune and family,” he wrote to Polly. “Of all calamities this is the greatest.” Jefferson was practical, even cold, about the matter. “I wish my sister could bear his misconduct with more patience. It might lessen his attachment to the bottle, and at any rate would make her own time more tolerable. When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable.”

  In a letter dated January 22, 1798, Patsy announced the death of Harriet Hemings, the two-year-old daughter of Jefferson and Sally Hemings; Patsy made no allusion to the little girl’s parentage.

  Later, in August 1799, Dolley Madison visited Monticello. Jefferson composed a letter for her to take to her husband. It spoke of many things—an order of nails from the Monticello factory, the art of plastering, the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson did not mention a significant piece of domestic news, for secrecy forbade it: Sally Hemings was pregnant with another child. The unnamed daughter, who was not to live long, was born in early December 1799.

  Politics remained raw. “The X. Y. Z. fever has considerably abated through the country, as I am informed, and the Alien and Sedition laws are working hard,” he said in October 1798. “I fancy that some of the state legislatures will take strong ground on this occasion.… At least this may be the aim of the Oliverians, while Monck and the Cavaliers (who are perhaps the strongest) may be playing their game for the restoration of his most gracious majesty George the Third.”

  In a contentious crisis, here again was the language of the English Civil War and its royalist outcome. The allusions were directly drawn from the seventeenth-century drama. Oliverians were republicans and Monck was a nobleman who backed the restoration of Charles II, as did the Cavaliers. Jefferson’s point is explicitly made: He feared there were modern-day monarchists seeking to return an English king to power, in this case George III.

  The prosecutions under the new laws were egregious. Republican editors were arrested, indicted, and tried for publishing pieces the Adams administration deemed seditious. Among the most notable cases were those of Benjamin Franklin Bache of the Aurora in Philadelphia and James Thomson Ca
llender of the Examiner in Richmond.

  Editors were not the only targets. Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon—that rare creature, a Republican from Federalist New England—was charged with sedition for a letter he had written to the Vermont Journal protesting the sedition law weeks before it was even signed. In strong but hardly traitorous terms, Lyon had denounced President Adams for the president’s alleged “continual grasp for power … unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” Of Irish descent, Lyon was attacked by Federalists as “a seditious foreigner” who “may endanger us more than a thousand Frenchmen in the field.” Driven by Republican zeal, Lyon was indicted, tried, and convicted in a trial presided over by the Washington-appointed Federalist U.S. Supreme Court justice William Paterson, who sentenced Lyon to four months in jail and fined him $1,000 with these words: “Matthew Lyon, as a member of the federal legislature, you must be well acquainted with the mischiefs which flow from an unlicensed abuse of government.”

  Jefferson was distraught. “I know not which mortifies me most, that I should fear to write what I think or my country bear such a state of things,” Jefferson wrote. “Yet Lyon’s judges … are objects of national fear.” Lyon himself found strength and vindication in the conviction. He reported to jail, sought reelection to the House from prison, and won.

  For Jefferson, the Alien and Sedition Acts were a cause of both near-despair and wonderment. “What person who remembers the times and tempers we have seen could have believed that within so short a period, not only the jealous spirit of liberty which shaped every operation of our revolution, but even the common principles of English whiggism would be scouted, and the tory principles of passive obedience under the new fangled names of confidence and responsibility, become entirely triumphant?” he wrote New York chancellor Robert R. Livingston.

  Never one to stay out of the fray, Jefferson privately lobbied Republican candidates to run for office. In early 1799 he pleaded with John Page to seek a congressional seat. “Pray, my dear Sir, leave nothing undone to effect it.… For even a single vote may decide the majority” in the makeup of the House.

  More dramatically, Jefferson secretly drafted resolutions for the state legislature in Kentucky protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts. (Madison did the same for Virginia.) The vice president of the United States was thus at work on an official rebuke for one of the American states to send to the president of the United States. The Kentucky draft was a purely Republican document, though Jefferson went far down the path to endangering the Union he loved so. In the resolution he endorsed the idea of nullification—the right of a state to refuse to comply with federal laws that it deemed unconstitutional. Here was the great advocate of a stronger, more effective national government proposing a mechanism for chaos and almost certain disunion.

  Viewed in terms of philosophy, the contradictions between Jefferson the nationalist and Jefferson the nullifier seem irreconcilable. Viewed in terms of personality and of politics, though, Jefferson was acting in character. He was always in favor of whatever means would improve the chances of his cause of the hour. When he was a member of the Confederation Congress, he wanted the Confederation Congress to be respected. When he was a governor, he wanted strong gubernatorial powers. Now that he disagreed with the federal government (though an officer of that government), he wanted the states to have the ability to exert control and bring about the end he favored. He was not intellectually consistent, but a consistent theme did run through his politics and statecraft: He would do what it took, within reason, to arrange the world as he wanted it to be.

  John Breckinridge, a Kentucky Republican and speaker of the State House, reported that the Kentucky Senate had balked at the nullification language. “In the Senate,” wrote Breckinridge, “there was a considerable division, particularly on that sentence which declares, ‘a Nullification of those acts by the States, to be the rightful remedy.’ ” On reflection, Jefferson confided his faith in a middle course to Madison. “I think we should … leave the matter in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to push the matter to extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render prudent.”

  If Jefferson had overreacted with his talk of nullification, he was coming to a more settled view of the nature of faction. “In every free and deliberating society, there must from the nature of man be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these for the most part must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time,” he wrote John Taylor in June 1798. “Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch and debate to the people the proceedings of the other.… A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight.”

  The last years of the eighteenth century were unhappy ones for Jefferson, but he never despaired. He knew politics was an intimate enterprise, and he took care to assuage his foes where he could. “No one can know Mr. Jefferson and be his personal enemy,” said Supreme Court justice William Paterson, who had presided over the Lyon sedition trial. “Few, if any, are more opposed to him as a politician than I am, and until recently I utterly disliked him as a man as well as a politician.” Then the two men had occasion to travel together, talking and getting a sense of each other. “I was highly pleased with his remarks,” Paterson said, “for though we differed on many points, he displayed an impartiality, a freedom from prejudice.”

  To Elbridge Gerry, Jefferson made a testament of political faith in January 1799.

  I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another: for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents. And I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches; and not for raising a hue and cry against the sacred name of philosophy … [and not] to go backwards instead of forwards to look for improvement, to believe that government, religion, morality, and every other science were in the highest perfection in ages of the darkest ignorance, and that nothing can ever be devised more perfect than what was established by our forefathers.… The first object of my heart is my own country. In that is embarked my family, my fortune, and my own existence. I have not one farthing of interest, nor one fiber of attachment out of it, nor a single motive of preference of any one nation to another but in proportion as they are more or less friendly to us.

  Still, Jefferson was not overly dreamy. He solicited friends to author attacks on the alien and sedition laws, among other measures, and discussed public-opinion strategies with Madison. The public mind was open to the Republican case, Jefferson said, which made him “sensible that this summer is the season for systematic energies and sacrifices. The engine is the press.” He sent Republican pamphlets to Monroe to promulgate. “I wish you to give these to the most influential characters among our country-men.… Do not let my name be connected with the business.” On another occasion he asked the chairman of the Virginia Republican committee to distribute some tracts. “I trust yourself only with the secret that these pamphlets go from me,” he wrote.

  Jefferson could only do so much as vice president. “A decided character at the head of our government is of immense importance by the influence it will have upon public opinion,” John Taylor wrote Jefferson in February 1799. Taylor was talking about the governorship, but the point applied, as he and Jefferson knew, to the presidency as well.

  THIRTY

  ADAMS VS. JEFFERSON REDUX

  I should be unfaithful to my own feelings were I not to say that it has been the greatest of all human consolations to me to be considered by the republican portion of my fellow citizens, as the safe depository of their rights.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  IT WAS NOT the most sophisticated
of strategies, but it worked. On Monday, February 25, 1799, the Republicans in the House planned to take up petitions against the alien and sedition laws. The Federalists, with a bare but sufficient majority, caucused beforehand and decided, Jefferson told Madison, “that not a word should be spoken on their side in answer to anything which should be said on the other.”

  On the floor, when Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born Pennsylvania Republican House leader, addressed the Alien Act and Virginia congressman John Nicholas the Sedition, the majority sabotaged the proceedings in the most elemental of ways: by drowning out the speakers. The Federalists “began to enter into loud conversations, laugh, cough etc.”

  The din of the House was disorienting and dispiriting. The Republicans felt powerless. “It was impossible to proceed,” Jefferson said.

  At Monticello in the Albemarle spring, Jefferson worried that Adams was going to raise a “Presidential army, or Presidential militia,” the formation of which would “leave me without a doubt that force on the Constitution is intended.” He believed, too, that Hamilton would be the real power behind the new regiments. “Can such an army under Hamilton be disbanded?” Jefferson wrote in April 1799. The debate turned violent. In the House, John Randolph of Roanoke, a Jefferson cousin and lawmaker, attacked the idea of a standing military establishment, referring to regular soldiers as “mercenary forces” and “ragamuffins.” The next evening two marines accosted Randolph at the New Theatre; he was, Jefferson said, “jostled and [had] his coat pulled.”