Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  The voting was slow. Ballot after ballot came and went inside the Capitol. Lawmakers slept on pallets. The weather was terrible. An ailing Representative, Joseph Nicholson of Maryland, was carried through the snow on a stretcher and set up in a room next to the House; his wife helped guide his hand to fill in his choice.

  Finally, at one p.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 1801, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Jefferson prevailed.

  Republicans thought of the Federalists as “the Conspirators,” and Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of the Jeffersonian editor Samuel Harrison Smith, noted how quickly the Federalists “hurried to their lodgings under strong apprehensions of suffering from the just indignation of their fellow citizens” for attempting to subvert the election.

  Afterward James Bayard claimed New England was prepared “to go without a constitution and take the risk of a Civil War.” Jefferson told McKean that “in the event of a usurpation I was decidedly with those who were determined not to permit it. Because that precedent once set, would be artificially reproduced, and end soon in a dictator.”

  Jefferson’s public serenity and strength had been essential to inspiring Republicans to stay the course. “When I look back I cannot but shudder at the prospect which presented itself during the late contest,” wrote the lawyer Archibald Stuart from Staunton, Virginia. “The minds of men from extreme anxiety seemed to settle down into a firm resolution to resist every attempt to give us a President who had not been the choice of the people.… I was pleased to discover this temper as it proves our liberties cannot be lost without a struggle.”

  The roar of cannons announced the news. In Alexandria, thirty-two rounds were fired (sixteen on the courthouse square, another sixteen over the Potomac); in Richmond, there were fireworks; and in Pennsylvania, Republicans rang bells from before noon to sundown. “Our people in this county are running perfectly mad with enthusiasm about the man of the people, the savior of his country (at they term him),” said a New York Federalist. “Drunken frolics are the order of the day, and more bullocks and rams are sacrificed to this newfangled deity than were formerly by the Israelitish priests.” An evangelical minister, William Scales, took a more optimistic view: “Many declare you an atheist,” Scales wrote to Jefferson, “but be it so, I much rather a liberal atheist should govern the people, than a bigoted saint, who knows not God.”

  John Marshall, serving concurrently as secretary of state and as chief justice until Jefferson took office, looked on with wonder and anxiety. He declined to speculate on the causes of what he thought “the strange revolution which has taken place in public opinion” in replacing Adams with Jefferson. “The course to be pursued … is of more importance and is not easily to be determined by those who have no place in the confidence of the President-elect,” Marshall wrote Rufus King. On foreign policy, Marshall shared the old Federalist fear that Jefferson would “excite the resentment and hate of the people against England” but “without designing to proceed to actual hostilities.”

  For all the strife of recent years, Jefferson and the Adamses had managed to maintain quietly civil relations. In early January 1801 the president and the First Lady asked the vice president to dinner. “Mr. Jefferson dines with us and in a card reply to the President’s invitation, he begs him to be assured of his homage and high consideration,” Abigail wrote one of their sons on Saturday, January 3, 1801. She was to leave Washington on Friday, February 13; before she departed, she received Jefferson for tea. As Abigail told it, Jefferson “made me a visit … in order to take leave and wish me a good journey. It was more than I expected.”

  Such small human moments speak well of both the Adamses and of Jefferson. From Philadelphia to Paris to the Potomac, they had been through so much together; few others alive could have understood as well or as thoroughly what their lives had been like in the previous quarter century or so. Politics had brought them together, and politics had now driven them apart. However great their differences, they found it in themselves to treat one another with outward grace.

  Jefferson quietly exulted at the outcome of the election. “I cannot regret entirely the disappointment of [not] meeting [Polly] and yourself at Monticello, because of the cause, which must be a subject of pleasure to us all,” he wrote Patsy of his new need to be in Washington.

  He liked that his victory was seen in global terms. “As to the future, thou art to be the principal Actor,” wrote his Revolutionary colleague John Dickinson. “Perhaps we are the selected people upon Earth, from whom large portions of Mankind are to learn, that Liberty is really a transcendent blessing, as capable by its enlightened energies of calmly dissipating its internal enemies, as of triumphantly repelling its foreign foes.” Another admirer wrote Jefferson: “To you, Sir, doth the groaning republicans over the world look up to for relief.”

  Jefferson did not let such talk inflate his expectations. “If we spend any in hypothetical discussions,” he said, “we shall want time for real business.” He knew what he needed do. The “duty of the chief magistrate,” Jefferson once said, was “to unite in himself the confidence of the whole people” to “produce a union of the powers of the whole, and point them in a single direction, as if all constituted but one body and one mind.” And he knew how hard all of that was. “I sincerely thank you for your congratulations on my election, but this is only the first verse of the chapter,” he wrote his friend John Page. “What the last may be nobody can tell.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE NEW ORDER OF THINGS BEGINS

  You always had the people and now have the government on your side, so that the prospect is as favorable as could be wished. At the same time it must be admitted you have much trouble and difficulty to encounter.

  —JAMES MONROE

  I know indeed there are monarchists among us.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  IT WAS NOT the warmest of exchanges. To make arrangements for the inaugural, Jefferson had to write to his cousin John Marshall—the Federalist whom John Adams had named chief justice and who only days before had been a possible rival of Jefferson’s for the presidency. “As the two houses have notice of the hour, I presume a precise punctuality to it will be expected from me,” Jefferson wrote. Marshall replied that he would “make a point of being punctual.”

  Both men were on time. As noon approached on Wednesday, March 4, 1801, President-elect Thomas Jefferson prepared to make the short walk from Conrad and McMunn’s to the Capitol. John Adams was not present. The second president had made plans to leave Washington on the four a.m. stage, heading north toward home (he went through New York, it was said, “like a shot”). “Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor,” wrote the Massachusetts Spy. “It certainly would have had good effect.” Yet Adams was still grieving over the death, in December 1800, of his son Charles, and, with Abigail awaiting him at home in Massachusetts, he was more than ready to leave the capital. Though he was to live another quarter of a century, Adams never returned to Washington.

  On Capitol Hill cannon fire had sounded outside the boardinghouse; it was a salute from the District of Columbia’s artillery corps. At one point in the morning hours Samuel Harrison Smith called on Jefferson to pick up a package: a copy of the inaugural address, written in Jefferson’s small, neat hand, to be set in type and published in the National Intelligencer.

  At ten o’clock, a company of riflemen from Alexandria, Virginia, had arrived to form a small parade. Shortly before noon, Jefferson stepped outside to meet a detachment of militia officers that escorted him to the inaugural ceremonies. A delegation of congressmen joined him, and the politicians followed a group of officers to the Capitol. Their swords drawn, the militiamen parted to allow Jefferson through, and stood, saluting, as he passed by. After another blast of cannon rang out, echoing across the hilltop village, Jefferson went inside the Capitol buildi
ng.

  About a thousand people awaited him in the Senate chamber, a room one lawmaker described in a letter home to his wife as “magnificent in height, and decorated in a grand style.” The room was 86 by 48 feet, the ceiling 41 feet high. Each senator had a desk and a red leather chair. Margaret Bayard Smith wrote that it was “so crowded that I believe not another creature could enter.” Members of the House and the Senate rose in deference to Jefferson as he made his way to the well of the room.

  After Marshall administered the oath of office, Thomas Jefferson delivered his inaugural address. In his weak voice—few in the crowded room could hear him distinctly—he read one of the most significant state papers in American history, a brief for freedom and forbearance.

  All … will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.… Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.…

  I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.… I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts.

  The address was a political masterpiece. “Today the new political year commences—The new order of things begins,” John Marshall wrote Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the moments before the inauguration, adding: “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists: With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.” Still, “If he arranges himself with them it is not difficult to foresee that much calamity is in store for our country—if he does not they will soon become his enemies and calumniators.” Returning to his letter writing at four p.m., Marshall was slightly cheerier. “You will before this reaches you see his inauguration speech,” Marshall wrote. “It is in the general well judged and conciliatory.”

  James Bayard thought it “in political substance better than we expected; and not answerable to the expectations of the partisans of the other side.” Hamilton admitted that it was “virtually a candid retraction of past misapprehensions, and a pledge to the community, that the new president will not lend himself to dangerous innovations, but in essential points will tread in the steps of his predecessors.” To Benjamin Rush, the physician and Jefferson admirer, it was an occasion for thanksgiving. “Old friends who had been separated by party names, and a supposed difference of principle in politics for many years, shook hands with each other, immediately after reading it, and discovered, for the first time, that they had differed in opinion only, about the best means of promoting the interests of their common country.”

  In his political bitterness and personal grief, John Adams wrote Jefferson from Quincy, Massachusetts, about his dead son. “It is not possible that anything of the kind should happen to you, and I sincerely wish you may never experience any thing in any degree resembling it.” Then Adams added a gracious political note: “This part of the Union is in a state of perfect tranquility and I see nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.”

  Jefferson’s was to be no caretaker presidency. He was a man of action and of strength, and he was eager to wield the power he had long sought. “We reflect … that it is according to nature for the strongest to bear the burden,” Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., wrote to Jefferson, “and we know well that your mind does from nature exult in grand scenes, in ample fields for exertion, in extraordinary toils.”

  Jefferson’s ambition for the nation was limitless. He was to spend his presidential years, he said, “pursuing steadily my object of proving that a people, easy in their circumstances as ours are, are capable of conducting themselves under a government founded not in the fears and follies of man, but on his reason.… This is the object now nearest to my heart.”

  Jefferson privately acknowledged the burdens he faced. “I feel a great load of public favor and of public expectation,” he wrote the day after the inauguration. “More confidence is placed in me than my qualifications merit, and I dread the disappointment of my friends.”

  Whether seeking the approval of his father, his mother, his teachers, his contemporaries, or his countrymen, Jefferson had moved through life at once exhilarated and exhausted by the role of patriarch. Raised to be responsible for the lives and welfare of others, he knew nothing else. He had thought much about human nature and human government, and he believed it his duty to bring what in his inaugural he had called “harmony and affection” to the life of the American nation.

  From war making to economic life to territorial acquisition to federal spending to subpoenas and the sharing of information with Congress and the courts, Jefferson maintained or expanded the authority of the presidential office. He was fortunate to preside over Republican congressional majorities; the Senate margin grew from a narrow 17 Republicans to 15 Federalists in 1801–1803 to 28–6 by Jefferson’s last year in office. The Republican rhetoric of limited and minimal government was heartfelt but hardly controlling. Jefferson had reached the pinnacle by articulating the ideal but acting pragmatically. He could have resigned the vice presidency to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts, for instance; he had, instead, preserved his position in the existing political order, awaiting the hour when he might ascend to the summit. As president he fully intended to rule in the way he had risen.

  The story of his two terms in the President’s House is one of a lifelong student of control and power bringing all of his virtues and vices to the largest possible stage. Federalists who expected him to begin the world over again by seeking to simplify and minimize the executive office misjudged him.

  Critics of Jefferson have argued that his vision of an agrarian nation with a weak central government puts him on the wrong side of history. It was Hamilton, they say, who correctly anticipated a future that would require a system of capital and large-scale action to create the means of national greatness.

  This critique of Jefferson, while familiar, is incomplete. Jefferson sent a reassuring signal to the manufacturing and financial interests who had learned to fear him as a champion of the agrarian over the commercial. “One imputation
in particular has been repeated till it seems as if some at least believed it: that I am an enemy to commerce,” Jefferson wrote a correspondent on Wednesday, February 18, 1801. “They admit me a friend to agriculture, and suppose me an enemy to the only means of disposing of its produce.”

  The presidency Jefferson left in 1809 was rich in precedent for vigorous, decisive, and often unilateral action. It is not too much to say that Jefferson used Hamiltonian means to pursue Jeffersonian ends. He embraced ultimate power subtly but surely.

  Open political warfare was not for him; he preferred to impress himself on the course of events without bombast or drama, leading so quietly that popular history tends to make too little of his achievements as president.

  He understood the country was open to—even eager for—a government that seemed less intrusive and overbearing than the one Washington and Adams had created. In his eight years in office Jefferson cut the national debt from $83 million to $57 million. He cut taxes and spending, reducing military expenditures that had risen through the 1790s.

  For Jefferson, there were too many taxes and too many judges. He had long cared about two things: American liberty and American strength. For eight years he summoned all the power he believed he required to make America more like what he thought it should be. In the partisan wars of the 1790s, many of his foes had misinterpreted his disposition toward individual freedom rather than toward Hamiltonian authority as dreaminess and weakness. They would learn—quickly and unmistakably—that they were wrong.