Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Jefferson governed personally. He knew no other way. He had watched Peyton Randolph lead the House of Burgesses, sometimes in meetings in Randolph’s deep-red clapboard house at Nicholson and North England streets in Williamsburg. From his time spent in the Confederation Congress and presiding over the Senate for four years as vice president, Jefferson appreciated how to handle lawmakers, for he had long been one. Even then a president’s attentions meant the world to politicians and ordinary people alike. For all his low-key republican symbolism, Jefferson understood that access to the president himself could make all the difference in statecraft—hence his dinners with lawmakers and his willingness to receive callers.

  The Jefferson strategy worked. In the Jefferson years Republicans were heard to acknowledge that “the President’s dinners had silenced them” at moments when they were inclined to vote against Jefferson.

  He believed in constant conversation between the president and lawmakers, for Jefferson thought that “if the members are to know nothing but what is important enough to be put into a public message … it becomes a government of chance and not of design.” The president had to be able to trust lawmakers with insights and opinions that he might not offer a broader audience, creating a sense of intimacy and common purpose. Making speeches at other politicians—or appearing to be only making speeches at them—was not the best way to enlist their allegiance or their aid, nor to govern well.

  Jefferson preferred to project power without being showy about it. “What sort of government is that of the U.S.?” Napoleon once asked a French traveler who had just returned from spending time with President Jefferson. “One, Sire,” the traveler said, “that is neither seen or felt.” That was precisely what Jefferson wanted the world to think.

  Another caller in the President’s House, the European naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visited Jefferson in the cabinet room. Observing that a ferociously negative Federalist newspaper was lying about here at the center of Republican power, Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, “Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned?”

  The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. “Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.”

  President Washington had consciously cut a formal figure; President Jefferson greeted morning and midafternoon callers as though he had just—as he sometimes had—come in from a ride. “Mr. Jefferson has put aside all showing off; he greets guests in slovenly clothes and without the least formality,” Louis-André Pichon wrote Paris in 1802. “He leaves every day on foot or on horseback, the most often on horseback, and without even being accompanied by a servant.”

  Jefferson knew who he was, and he knew his place in the world, so he had nothing to prove by constantly appearing perfectly turned out. Quite the opposite: Often only the well born or the socially serene can forgo badges of status—the neglect or absence of which is in itself a badge of status. Jefferson wore different combinations of old frock coats, velveteen breeches, yarn stockings, and ancient slippers.

  When the British diplomat Augustus J. Foster was presented to Jefferson, Foster found that the president “behaved very civilly in general.” In the President’s House, “the door opened suddenly” and there was Jefferson. “He thrust out his hand to me as he does to everybody, and desired me to sit down,” Foster wrote his mother. “Luckily for me I have been in Turkey, and am quite at home in this primeval simplicity of manners.”

  Foster was surprised at Jefferson’s appearance. “He is dressed and looks extremely like a very plain farmer, and wears his slippers down at his heels,” Foster wrote home. Unlike Foster, Joseph Story of Massachusetts, a lawyer and legislator who went on the Supreme Court in 1811, understood what Jefferson was doing. The man who obsessed over Europe’s view of the taste and culture of America was not a provincial slob. He was, rather, who he was. “You know Virginians have some pride in appearing in simple habiliments,” wrote Story, “and are willing to rest their claim to attention upon their force of mind and suavity of manners.”

  Edward Thornton, another British diplomat, shared Story’s sense of things. Jefferson may have been attracted by the “leveling spirit” of republicanism, Thornton wrote in a dispatch home, but none of it was evident in the President’s House, which was “far better arranged than in the time of Mr. Adams, or in the economy of his household and in the style of his living, which are upon a more expensive scale than during [the administrations] of either of the former Presidents, but with less of form and ostentation than was observed by General Washington.”

  Jefferson’s confidence in himself and his leadership was unmistakable. He believed the results of the 1800 election were a mandate for change, and while he usually exercised his power quietly, he did exercise it, keeping himself in command of the executive branch and making his wishes known to his allies in Congress. John Quincy Adams believed Jefferson’s “whole system of administration seems founded upon this principle of carrying through the legislature measures by his personal or official influence.” Jefferson tended to get his way as he had for so long: by deftly but definitively bending the world to his will as much as he could.

  He was more of a chess player than a traditional warrior, thinking out his moves and executing them subtly rather than reacting to events viscerally and showily. In Washington, in fact, he found himself in need of a book he had left at Monticello: a work of strategy by the chess master François-André Danican Philidor. It was important enough to him that he recalled its place precisely: “You will find [it] in the book room, 2nd press on the left from the door of the entrance,” he wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr.

  At a cabinet meeting in the middle of May 1801, Jefferson and his advisers debated the Barbary States. At issue was whether the United States ought to dispatch a squadron under Commodore Richard Dale to the Mediterranean in a display of power to discourage further piracy against American shipping. “All concur in the expediency of [the] cruise,” Jefferson noted.

  He wanted to make sure they concurred in something else, too: that the naval forces were authorized—by executive, not legislative, authority—to “search for and destroy the enemy’s vessels wherever they can find them.” Should Dale find that any of the Barbary States had declared war on the United States, he was to “place [his] ships in a situation to chastise them.” Should he find that all of them had declared war, he was told to distribute his force in such a manner “so as best to protect our commerce and chastise their insolence—by sinking, burning, or destroying their ships and vessels wherever you shall find them.”

  On Saturday, August 1, 1801, Andrew Sterett of the Enterprize, who was serving under Dale, defeated the Tripolitan vessel Tripoli near Malta. “Too long … have those barbarians been suffered to trample on the sacred faith of treaties, on the rights and laws of human nature,” Jefferson told Sterett. “You have shown to your countrymen that that enemy cannot meet bravery and skill united.” Sterett hobbled the Barbary ship and let it loose, continuing on his way. In the wake of the episode, Jefferson described the American victory and asked Congress to authorize offensive actions against aggressors in the Mediterranean.

  Yet he had clearly already provided such authority without Congress back in the spring. Sterett had been acting under those orders. Here Jefferson was effectively exerting control over military and foreign policy while appearing to defer to the legislature. It was typical Jefferson: having his way without precipitating confrontation or a distracting crisis.

  Congress fell into Jefferson’s hands, essentially retroactively approving the orders to Dale and granting the president even wider authority in the wake of the Sterett action. The executive, Congress declared, was “to cause to be done all such other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war will justify, and ma
y, in his opinion, require.”

  Under this provision, Jefferson attempted an elaborate operation to replace the pasha of Tripoli, who had assassinated his own father and a brother, with a more compliant brother, Hamet, who had escaped to Tunis. Over the next several years the Americans unsuccessfully attempted to effect a military overthrow of the regime in Tripoli in Hamet’s favor—an undertaking that had grown out of Jefferson’s initial unilateral projection of power in the region. The man who had, as secretary of state, argued against broad construction in the case of the establishment of the Bank of the United States, found that his own powers as president benefited from the broadest kind of construction.

  Meriwether Lewis rode up Capitol Hill from the President’s House. It was Tuesday, December 8, 1801, and Lewis, as the president’s private secretary, was slated to carry Jefferson’s first annual message to Congress.

  The world was largely at peace, Jefferson said, save for the Barbary States. He was reserved but steely, noting that he trusted the news of Sterett’s victory would be “a testimony to the world that it is not a want of [bravery] which makes us seek their peace; but a conscientious desire to direct the energies of our nation to the multiplication of the human race, and not to its destruction.”

  Jefferson’s campaign to reduce federal taxes and spending, to suppress the new courts, and to allow the states to take the lead in determining the course of domestic affairs marked a significant turn from the basic direction of the country under Washington and Adams.

  The reaction to the president’s message was warm. “Nothing can exceed our exultation on account of the president’s message,” said John Taylor, “and … nothing can exceed the depression of the monarchists.”

  The Federalists were less enamored with the course of things. “Virginia literally dominates,” Robert Troup wrote Rufus King in April 1802. “Jefferson is the supreme director of all measures—he has no levee days—observes no ceremony—often sees company in an undress, sometimes with his slippers on—always accessible to, and very familiar with, the sovereign people.”

  Connecticut congressman Roger Griswold grasped the substance behind the Jeffersonian symbolism. After the annual message came to the Capitol, Griswold wrote:

  Under this administration nothing is to remain as it was. Every minutia is to be changed. When Mr. Adams was President, the door of the president’s House opened to the East. Mr. Jefferson has closed that door and opened a new door to the West. General Washington and Mr. Adams opened every session of Congress with a speech. Mr. Jefferson delivers no speech, but makes his communication by a written message. I fear that you Aristocrats of New England will think these important changes unnecessary and be apt to say that they are made with a view only to change, but you ought to recollect that you are neither Philosophers or skilled in the mysteries of Democratic policy.

  In the New-York Evening Post, Alexander Hamilton wrote that Jefferson’s message should “alarm all who are anxious for the safety of our government, for the responsibility and welfare of our nation.” His portrait of Jefferson was venomous and laced with envy and anger. “Mine is an odd destiny,” Hamilton wrote Gouverneur Morris in these months. “Perhaps no man in the United States has done more for the present Constitution than myself; and … I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric.… What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not meant for me.”

  The world did feel more Jeffersonian than Hamiltonian in the closing days of 1801. “Every day we see vanish the phantoms that the enemies of Mr. Jefferson had built up to discredit him,” Pichon wrote his superiors in Paris.

  One day a vast cheese arrived for the president from the people of Cheshire, Massachusetts. It was a curiosity that became an emblem of republican tribute in the popular culture. “It is not the last stone in the Bastille, nor is it of any great consequence as an article of worth; but as a free-will offering, we hope it will be received,” said the citizens of Cheshire.

  God and politics were on Jefferson’s mind on New Year’s Day 1802. In Colebrook, Connecticut, in October 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association had assembled to applaud Jefferson’s views on religious liberty.

  In reply, he offered a testament to freedom of conscience that unsettled his Federalist foes. “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

  Benjamin Rush had helped inform Jefferson’s views on church and state in 1800. “I agree with you likewise in your wishes to keep religion and government independent of each other,” Rush had told Jefferson. “Were it possible for St. Paul to rise from his grave at the present juncture, he would say to the clergy who are now so active in settling the political affairs of the world: ‘Cease from your political labors your kingdom is not of this world. Read my epistles. In no part of them will you perceive me aiming to depose a pagan emperor, or to place a Christian upon a throne. Christianity disdains to receive support from human governments.’ ”

  Among Federalists, the contempt for Jefferson ran high. George Cabot of Massachusetts feared what he called “the terrible evils of democracy,” but believed Jefferson was unstoppable. The evidence of the winter and the spring of 1801–02 suggested Cabot’s assessment of Jefferson’s power was right.

  In these months Jefferson convinced Congress to abolish all internal taxes, declare war on Tripoli, found the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, ease naturalization rules, and, perhaps most significantly, repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, the law that had expanded federal jurisdiction and created additional courts and judgeships filled by Federalists before Adams left office.

  Told that the president was redesigning a set of medals intended as gifts for Indian tribes, former secretary of war James McHenry took a wry tone. “Would to God that he had confined his revolutionary genius to things of no greater importance, we should have had less today to apprehend for the fate of the Constitution and our country.”

  Beginning with the struggle in the House for the presidency, Aaron Burr had become a seemingly uncontrollable political actor in Jefferson’s Republican Party. Partly because of the Republicans’ belief that Burr had not energetically shut down Federalist efforts to use Burr to deny Jefferson victory in 1800–1801, and partly because of the complications of New York state politics—Burr represented just one faction—Jefferson chose to thwart Burr’s ambitions once the presidential contest was settled. One Burrite, Matthew L. Davis, called on the president to plead his own case for a federal post. Hearing Davis out, Jefferson noticed a buzzing fly and deftly reached out and snatched it out of the air. The gesture was hardly reassuring to the visitor: a president quick enough and wily enough to snag a fly was unlikely to be moved in any direction he did not wish to move. Davis did not get the job, and the snub, Gallatin remarked, was seen as a snub of Burr. “There is hardly a man who meddles with politics in New York,” Gallatin told Jefferson, “who does not believe that Davis’s rejection is owing to Burr’s recommendation.”

  Hamilton shrewdly assessed the political tension between President Jefferson and Vice President Burr. “There is certainly a most serious schism between the Chief and his heir apparent; a schism absolutely incurable, because founded in the breasts of both is the rivalship of an insatiable and unprincipled ambition,” Hamilton wrote King in June 1802. “Mr. Burr will surely arrive at the Presidency,” wrote Louis-André Pichon. “Nobody conducts better than him a political intrigue.”

  At a celebratory Federalist dinner in honor of Georg
e Washington’s birthday in New York in 1802, Burr arrived unexpectedly and cleverly “asked whether he was an intruder—he was answered in the negative—and treated with becoming civility,” Troup reported to King. Burr bided his time a bit then asked whether he might propose a toast. Given the floor, Burr raised a glass and said: “To the union of all honest men.” The implication was clear to the gathering. “This was generally received by the Federalists as an offer on his part to coalesce,” Troup said.

  On Thursday, July 1, 1802, Republicans celebrated Jefferson’s repeal of internal taxes. On the Fourth of July in Charleston, South Carolina, the Reverend Richard Furman linked the American Revolution to Jefferson’s administration, arguing that the two events were divinely ordained. “The special feasts and rejoicings on the 1st of July, and the toasts of the 4th of July, as they have been received from different quarters prove that all republicans are pleased with them.”

  Pichon was privately critical of Jefferson’s administration. “The principles which direct it are evident: the party spirit has passion, an ambition which wants to conserve the power in pleasing the greatest number, a singular propensity to new ideas, and a childish vanity concealed under an exterior of simplicity.” Pichon complained, too, of Jefferson’s excluding him and his wife from an invitation extended to houseguests of the French envoy. “That would scarcely happen in a capital city,” said Pichon. “It’s a pointed rudeness in this desert.”

  The Federalists, though, realized the political facts. “Jefferson is the idol to whom all devotion is paid; and Burr will doubtless be dropped at another election, if they can do it without endangering Jefferson,” Troup wrote King in April 1802.