Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  As the eighteenth century ended, the presidential contest was the supreme battle in the war of ideas and personalities in American politics. Jefferson was determined to seek the top office again. He had seen enough of what he had called a “reign of witches” to underscore his conviction that republicanism was in danger.

  So much seemed at stake. A correspondent reported that Hamilton had led a louder cheer and toast to George III than to John Adams at a dinner of the St. Andrews Club of New York. “No mortal can foresee in favor of which party the election will go,” Jefferson said in March 1800.

  Hyperbole was the order of the day. For Republicans, Adams was an aspiring monarch. Americans, one Republican wrote, “will never permit the chief magistrate of the union to become a King instead of a president.” For Federalists, Jefferson was a dangerous infidel. The Gazette of the United States told voters to choose “GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT” or impiously declare for “JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD.”

  Jefferson’s views on religious liberty, however, appealed to many more moderate voters. New Jersey Republicans charged that Jefferson’s enemies used religion as a means of assault “because he is not a fanatic, nor willing that the Quaker, the Baptist, the Methodist, or any other denominations of Christians, should pay the pastors of other sects; because he does not think that a Catholic should be banished for believing in transubstantiation, or a Jew, for believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

  Still, the religious refrain about Jefferson’s unconventional faith was a frequent one. From the federal bench, Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase, a devoted Federalist, had “harangued” a grand jury with what Monroe reported were “allusions which supported by Eastern calumnies” about Jefferson. “He declared solemnly that he would not allow an atheist to give testimony in court”—an implied reference to Jefferson.

  Chase also moved to indict and try the Scottish-born newspaperman James Thomson Callender, a virulent Republican—whom Jefferson had supported financially—for sedition. The immediate cause of the charges was a little book with a high-minded title—The Prospect Before Us—but a slashing style. “The reign of Mr. Adams has, hitherto, been one continued tempest of malignant passions,” Callender wrote. “As president, he has never opened his lips, or lifted his pen, without threatening and scolding. The grand object of his administration has been to exasperate the rage of contending parties, to calumniate and destroy every man who differs from his opinions. Mr. Adams has labored, and with melancholy success, to break up the bonds of social affection, and, under the ruins of confidence and friendship, to extinguish the only beam of happiness that glimmers through the dark and despicable farce of life.”

  Jefferson told Callender that the tract “cannot fail to produce the best effect.”

  Reading it, Abigail and John Adams seethed.

  George Washington died in December 1799 at Mount Vernon. As solicitous as Jefferson had been to his old president in private, the two men were so far apart politically that Jefferson believed it the wisest course to remain at Monticello rather than to attend any of the many ceremonies commemorating Washington’s life. Jefferson admired Washington’s gifts in the art of leadership but could not help but see the first president as what he had become: a Federalist icon whose party, Jefferson thought, was moving the United States in the wrong direction.

  Theirs had always been a complicated relationship. Eager to please the older man, Jefferson had been less than honest about his support of Philip Freneau and the National Gazette, preferring to mislead Washington rather than force a confrontation over the Republican attacks on the first president. It was Hamilton, not Jefferson, who had emerged as Washington’s political son. “Perhaps no man in this community has equal cause with myself to deplore the loss,” Hamilton said after Washington’s death. “I have been much indebted to the kindness of the General, and he was an Aegis very essential to me.”

  Reacting to the flood of tributes to Washington, Freneau wrote some verses to check the popular tide:

  No tongue can tell, no pen describe

  The frenzy of a numerous tribe,

  Who, by distemper’d fancy led,

  Insult the memory of the dead.

  He was no god, ye flattering knaves,

  He own’d no world, he ruled no waves;

  But—and exalt it, if you can,

  He was the upright, Honest Man.

  This was his glory, this outshone

  Those attributes you doat upon:

  On this strong ground he took his stand,

  Such virtue saved a sinking land.

  James Madison was also striking somber notes about the Federalists. “The horrors which they evidently feel at the approach of the electoral epoch are a sufficient warning of the desperate game by which they will be apt to characterize the interval,” he wrote Jefferson in April 1800. To his sister Martha Carr, Jefferson connected the sedition laws to the 1800 race. “The batteries of slander are fully opened for the campaign which is to decide the Presidential election. The other party have begun it by a furious onset on the printers, that they may have the field to themselves, and allow no means to return their fire.” To Patsy he said: “Our opponents perceive the decay of their power. Still they are pressing it, and trying to pass laws to keep themselves in power.”

  Jefferson harbored a real hope in the good sense of the people. His belief in democracy was not a pose, but a conviction: Educate the public, he believed, and by and large a majority would find its way to the right place.

  Now, in 1800, Jefferson was sure the “madness and extravagance” of the Federalists was too profound and evident to fool the voters. “The people through all the states,” Jefferson said, “are for republican forms, republican principles, simplicity, economy, religious and civil freedom.”

  In early May, Adams made some cabinet changes, nominating John Marshall to replace Timothy Pickering as secretary of state and naming Samuel Dexter to take the place of Secretary of War James McHenry. On taking office, the second president had chosen to keep Washington’s cabinet intact, a decision that had given him less control over the government than he would have liked for much of his tenure. Adams also disbanded what Jefferson had called “the Presidential militia.” To his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., Jefferson noted that the Federalists “are, on the approach of an election, trying to court a little popularity, that they may be afterwards allowed to go on 4 years longer in defiance of it.”

  On the eve of Fourth of July celebrations in 1800, the Baltimore American published rumors that Jefferson had died at Monticello after “an indisposition of 48 hours”—a detail that, in its specificity, lent credence to the report. Several papers followed suit, and the Gazette of the United States said that the report “appears to be entitled to some credit.” By July 6 the truth—that Jefferson was alive and well—was known, prompting a letter from the French economist Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours in New York. “I thought I had lost the greatest man of this continent, the one whose enlightened reason can be the most useful to both worlds,” he wrote. “I spent several days in unutterable despair.”

  In Sharon, Connecticut, a Federalist enclave, the Reverend Cotton Mather Smith dined in a small gathering that included Uriah McGregory, a Jefferson supporter. “I found him an engaged Federal politician,” McGregory said. Smith had asked McGregory if he truly wanted to see “Mr. Jefferson [in] the Presidential Chair?”

  McGregory had answered yes, he did, prompting, “with much other malicious invective,” a diatribe about alleged financial and legal misconduct on Jefferson’s part. The claim from Smith: that Jefferson “had obtained … property by fraud and robbery—and that in one instance you had defrauded and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate, to which you [were] executor, of ten thousand pounds sterling; by keeping the property and paying them in money at the nominal amount that was worth no m
ore than forty for one.” McGregory refused to believe it, and said so. Smith was adamant, replying that “it was true and that ‘it could be proved.’ ”

  Writing Jefferson in July 1800, McGregory noted the uniqueness of the dinnertime attack. “I know, Sir, that you suffered much abuse in this state—and from faithful inquiry believe it to be unmerited and malicious—but never, until the above instance, knew that the vilest of your traducers had ventured to impeach your honesty in pecuniary concerns.” He thought Jefferson should know of the charges, and he hoped to be armed with a reply. “I wish to have it in my power, Sir, to publish a clear and full refutation, together with the vile assertion.”

  Jefferson denied it all—there was no basis for the assertions—and lamented such rumors. On the whole, Jefferson had to count on the coming of “a day when the false witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his slanders.”

  In the fall of 1800 a conspiracy organized by a slave named Gabriel in Henrico County, Virginia, unraveled on the night of its execution. A sprawling effort, the insurrection would have used recruits to take over part of Richmond, Norfolk, and Petersburg. The white authorities struck back mercilessly, hanging twenty-six conspirators.

  From jail in Richmond, James Callender told Jefferson, “Their plan was to massacre all the whites, of all ages, and sexes; and all the blacks who would not join them; and then march off to the mountains, with the plunder of the city. Those wives who should refuse to accompany their husbands were to have been butchered along with the rest, an idea truly worthy of an African heart!”

  Like the warfare on St. Domingue, Gabriel’s conspiracy underscored Jefferson’s view that there was no sustainable future in a society in which blacks and whites lived freely in proximity to one another. In the wake of the Gabriel episode and a panic over slave violence in Virginia, the state’s House of Delegates asked Jefferson to explore whether a foreign land might be open to receiving American blacks. An approach was made to the Sierra Leone Company, but negotiations lapsed for various reasons.

  Politically, in New York, Alexander Hamilton was unhappy that Republicans were doing well in his home state under the leadership of Aaron Burr. In the spring of 1800, New York election results had effectively given the Republicans, who had won what Jefferson called “a great majority in their legislature,” the votes they needed to carry the presidential ballot in the winter. (Legislatures chose presidential electors in New York and ten other states; in only five of the sixteen states in the Union were the electors popularly chosen.) In New York, Edward Livingston reported, there was “a most auspicious gloom on the countenances of every Tory.”

  Hamilton and his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, appealed to John Jay, now governor of New York, to change the state’s election laws before the new Republican majority took office, effectively overturning the verdict of the vote. It was a classic Hamilton maneuver: “In times like this in which we live,” he entreated Jay, “it will not do to be overscrupulous.” The overriding goal, Hamilton said, was to “prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of State.”

  Governor Jay was unmoved. On Hamilton’s letter he wrote “Proposing a measure for party purposes, which I think it would not become me to adopt.” The Republican win in New York would stand, opening a path to the presidency to Hamilton’s nemesis.

  On the day of the news of the New York results, Jefferson met with Adams on other business in Philadelphia. The president, Jefferson said, was “very sensibly affected” by the Jeffersonian victory in New York and “accosted” the vice president.

  “Well, I understand that you are to beat me in this contest,” Adams told Jefferson, “and I will only say that I will be as faithful a subject as any you will have.”

  “Mr. Adams, this is no personal contest between you and me,” Jefferson recalled himself saying.

  Two systems of principles on the subject of government divide our fellow-citizens into two parties. With one of these you concur, and I with the other. As we have been longer on the public stage than most of those now living, our names happen to be more generally known. One of these parties therefore has put your name at its head, the other mine. Were we both to die today, tomorrow two other names would be in the place of ours, without any change in the motion of the machine. Its motion is from its principle, not from you or myself.

  “I believe you are right that we are but passive instruments,” said Adams, “and should not suffer this matter to affect our personal dispositions.”

  From Jefferson’s perspective, however, Adams “did not long retain this just view of the subject. I have always believed that the thousand calumnies which the Federalists, in bitterness of heart, and mortification at their ejection, daily invented against me, were carried to him by their busy intriguers, and made some impression.”

  Jefferson was right that the Federalists were not going quietly. There was talk of fielding another potentially disruptive Pinckney of South Carolina. In 1796 it had been Thomas; in 1800 it was to be his brother Charles Cotesworth Pinckney who would stand as a Federalist candidate along with Adams. It was the 1796 play all over again. The letter of the law said that each elector voted for two candidates but could not designate which was for president and which for vice president. Anti-Adams Federalists such as Hamilton hoped that South Carolina’s electors would choose Jefferson and their native son Pinckney, thus propelling Pinckney (who, combining the votes he won in Adams states with South Carolina’s vote, stood a good chance of winning the whole election) to the presidency.

  “To support Adams and Pinckney equally is the only thing that can possibly save us from the fangs of Jefferson,” Hamilton wrote a fellow Federalist in May 1800. Although Jefferson referred to the Federalists’ tactics as “hocus-pocus maneuvers,” he could be vulnerable if everything broke Hamilton’s way.

  Adams was under assault from all directions. In October 1800, Hamilton published an attack on the second president. Entitled Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq, President of the United States, it argued that Adams did “not possess the talents adapted to the administration of government,” and that “there are great intrinsic defects in his character which unfit him for the office of chief magistrate.” Writing to the diplomat Rufus King in Great Britain, the New York Federalist Robert Troup said he thought the Hamilton-Adams division fatal to Federalist hopes: “Our enemies are universally in triumph.”

  Hamilton, however, believed there was little to lose. “If we must have an enemy at the head of the Government,” Hamilton said, “let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”

  The fall of 1800 was the most momentous of autumns for Jefferson, a time of dizzying anxiety and exultant hopes. He was on the cusp of consummate command, of national approval, of glorious victory. The emotions of the hour were stormy.

  At Monticello, he fell into existential worry. “I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all,” he wrote in a private memorandum. “I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them perhaps a little later.” He listed the navigational improvements he made to the Rivanna River in his burgess days, the Declaration of Independence, his work on the revision of the laws of Virginia—and the introduction of olive trees to the United States.

  Slowly but steadily results from the states reached Monticello. Republicans were winning where they needed to win, holding the South and doing well in Pennsylvania and New York. “Democratic principles seem to be evidently increasing,” said former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, unhappily.

  On hearing that the South Carolina ploy to elect Pinckney had failed and that Jefferson was likely to become president, a Ne
w England clergyman wrote, “I have never heard bad tidings on anything which gave me such a shock.”

  On Friday, December 12, 1800, Jefferson felt confident enough of the results to declare privately that he was likely to be the next president of the United States. “I believe we may consider the election as now decided,” he wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. Delaware Republican Caesar A. Rodney rejoiced; he was convinced that Jefferson’s election signaled the end of the “tempests and tornadoes” of the Adams years.

  Still, Jefferson’s sense of fragility kept him in mind of Federalist traps. Several “highflying Federalists,” Jefferson wrote Aaron Burr, “have expressed their hope that the two republican tickets may be equal, and their determination in that case to prevent a choice by the H. of R. (which they are strong enough to do) and let the government devolve on a President of the Senate.”

  The possibility of a tie, Jefferson told Madison in December, “has produced great dismay and gloom on the republican gentlemen here, and equal exultation in the federalists, who openly declare they will prevent an election, and will name a President of the Senate pro tem by what they say would only be a stretch of the Constitution.… The month of February therefore will present us storms of a new character.”

  There was much uncertainty. “Some of the Jacobins are afraid Mr. J. will not administer the Govt. according to their wishes,” Massachusetts Federalist George Cabot wrote Rufus King on Sunday, December 28, 1800. “Others of them think it was easy and pleasant to rail and find fault but difficult to govern and vindicate; they are unwilling to take responsibility upon themselves or friends: others are afraid Burr will be Chief.”

  The drama was seen by some in light of the larger struggle between monarchy and republicanism. “Our Tories begin to give themselves air[s] already in expectation of a tie,” John Randolph of Roanoke wrote Representative Joseph of Maryland on Tuesday, December 16, 1800. “I fear that, in this event, they will give us some trouble; at the same time I know that it will be damnatory of their party with [those] who are not devoted to the monarchy.”