Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Though he never went beyond Hot Springs, Virginia, Jefferson loved the West. Twenty years before, he had proposed an expedition to be led by George Rogers Clark. A decade later, in 1793, Jefferson took the lead for the American Philosophical Society in planning an exploratory journey by the French botanist André Michaux. Neither the Clark mission nor the Michaux effort came to pass, and it finally took a threat from the British to press Jefferson (and the United States) into action. The anxiety was by now ancient: that the British (as well as the Spanish and the French and various Indian tribes) would establish or, depending on the circumstances, extend holdings in the New World to hem the United States in, thus limiting American growth and creating the constant possibility of invasion.

  The new occasion was the publication of the fur trader Alexander Mackenzie’s book Voyages from Montreal. Reading it in the summer of 1802, Jefferson was struck by Mackenzie’s account of traveling through Canada and reaching the Pacific in 1793.

  Mackenzie wrote enthusiastically of the prospects for Britain in the farther reaches of North America, arguing “it requires only the countenance and support of the British government” to “secure the trade of that country to its subjects.” There was more: “Many political reasons”—presumably including the possible restoration of the power of the British Empire over its lost colonies—“must present themselves to the mind of every [man] acquainted with the enlarged system and capacities of British commerce,” Mackenzie had suggested. It was all connected to an old Jefferson fear, one he had articulated to George Rogers Clark in 1783: “I am afraid,” Jefferson had written of the British and the West, that they “have some thoughts of colonizing into that quarter.”

  The time was right for the exploratory journey Jefferson had long pondered. He wanted to find a route to the Pacific and limn the contours of a West that might well become a theater of contention between the United States and imperial powers.

  To lead the enterprise Jefferson did not look far, choosing Meriwether Lewis, his private secretary. Born in 1774 at Locust Hill, ten miles from Monticello, Lewis came from what Jefferson called his own “neighborhood.” Bold and blue-eyed, young Lewis had been a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, serving under James Wilkinson, when Jefferson asked him to come to Washington to serve in the President’s House in 1801. Impressed with Lewis’s “knowledge of the Western country, of the army and its situation,” Jefferson apparently drew on Lewis’s sense of the officer corps as the president evaluated the military he had inherited from John Adams.

  Jefferson trusted Lewis and admired his hardiness, and, after Congress secretly agreed to fund an expedition to find the best route to the Pacific, asked him to lead it. (The president asked for, and received, $2,500; the final bill came in at about fifteen times that amount.) “Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, and familiar with Indian manners and character,” Jefferson told Benjamin Rush. Lewis asked William Clark, George Rogers Clark’s brother, to join him in organizing what became known as the Corps of Volunteers for North West Discovery.

  Jefferson thought of America as an “empire of liberty.” Now he would have a keener, more detailed grasp of the continent that stretched far beyond the nation’s existing borders—and a chance at claiming that sprawling West.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  VICTORIES, SCANDAL, AND A SECRET SICKNESS

  By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it.

  —JAMES CALLENDER, the Richmond Recorder, September 1802

  THERE HAD BEEN a time, not so very long ago, that Jefferson believed he could, if not end, then transcend, partisanship. It was an ideal of the age: the concept of “party” was viewed with fear and suspicion. The great George Washington himself had warned against partisan spirit in his farewell address.

  The warning did no good, and Jefferson’s hopes of enduring political unity were never to be realized. In early 1801, even before Jefferson declared that Americans were all Federalists and all Republicans in his inaugural address, Albert Gallatin reported the reality on the ground in the capital: “You may suppose that being thrown together in a few boarding houses, without any other society than ourselves, we are not likely to be either very moderate politicians or to think of anything but politics.” Federalist Simeon Baldwin shared the sentiment, writing, “The men of the different parties do not associate intimately.” Yet another observer said, “No tavern or boarding house contains two members of opposite sentiments.”

  Jefferson did try. “Nothing shall be spared on my part to obliterate the traces of party and consolidate the nation, if it can be done without abandonment of principle,” he said in March 1801. Thirty-four months later, after the partisan wars of his first term, he struck more practical notes, accepting the world as it was. “The attempt at reconciliation was honorably pursued by us for a year or two and spurned by them,” he said.

  As Jefferson well knew, in practice the best he could hope for was a truce between himself and his opponents, not a permanent peace. Political divisions were intrinsic; what mattered most was how a president managed those divisions.

  Jefferson’s strategy was sound. Believing in the promise of democratic republicanism and in his own capacity for transformative leadership, he took a broad view: “There is nothing to which a nation is not equal where it pours all its energies and zeal into the hands of those to whom they confide the direction of their force.”

  He proposed a covenant: Let us meet the political challenges of the country together and try to restrain the passions that led to the extremist, apocalyptic rhetoric of what Jefferson called the “gloomy days of terrorism” of the 1790s, and perhaps politics could become a means of progress, not simply a source of conflict.

  The prevailing Federalist view was that such a covenant was lovely to talk about but impossible to bring into being. John Quincy Adams was right when he told his diary that political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. “The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense,” Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term.

  The Founders’ dream of a nation beyond partisanship was one that simply could not survive the very nature of a free politics in a culture of diverse interests.

  Republican or Federalist, to anyone who bothered to pay attention, there was no mystery about Jefferson’s agenda in the capital. “Mr. Jefferson doesn’t at all hesitate to say that the previous administration conducted itself under anti-republican maxims,” the French envoy Louis-André Pichon reported home to Paris, and the new president was determined to correct such “inequalities and errors.”

  Jefferson was relentless in pursuing and putting down threats to his vision of a republican nation. Whether they were Federalist judges and other officeholders—including the chief justice of the United States—or hostile newspapermen, Jefferson’s foes faced spirited challenges from the President’s House. By virtue of the Republican successes in the 1800 presidential and congressional elections, Jefferson had the strength to do largely as he wished. He had made his essential views known; candidates for the House and the Senate had made their support for him and for those views clear as well. A majority of the voting population wanted to move on from the Federalism of the 1790s, and Jefferson was ready to lead the way. The Federalists had a lot to say, but their words were no match for what the president had: the votes.

  The new Judiciary Act of 1802 was a monument to Jefferson’s power. The 1801 act was a Federalist bid to protect the faction from popular reaction by giving lifetime tenure to the like-minded. The 1802 bill, written and passed by Jefferson’s Republicans, sought to break the Federalist hold on the judiciary. On one side stood Federalists arguing that the courts—including courts created only months before—were
sacrosanct. On the other stood Jefferson and his followers asserting that no branch of government could rightly lie beyond the reach of reform.

  The principles at stake were self-evident. So were the political realities. Though Jefferson proceeded with caution—there were no declarations of war on the judiciary—he did proceed. After Jefferson’s 1802 annual message, the Senate went to work on repeal “in pursuance of the recommendation” of the president. “The Judiciary bill has been crammed down our throats without a word or letter being suffered to be altered,” said Roger Griswold.

  The repeal passed on Monday, March 8, 1802. The House vote reflected the Republican advantage in the lower chamber. In the Senate, the bill succeeded by a single vote, but it succeeded. It was an enormous victory for Jefferson, and the Federalists were horrified.

  Jefferson’s hatred of his cousin John Marshall was cordial, but it was hatred nonetheless. (“The judge’s inveteracy is profound, and his mind of that gloomy malignity which will never let him forego the opportunity of satiating it on a victim,” Jefferson once wrote.) In February 1803, the chief justice issued the opinion of the Supreme Court in the case of Marbury v. Madison, a confrontation between one of John Adams’s midnight appointees, William Marbury, and the Jefferson administration. The decision, which held that Madison had been wrong to withhold a commission, went against the president, but Marshall wisely avoided a showdown while helping lay the foundations for the concept of judicial review.

  U.S. judge John Pickering of New Hampshire, meanwhile, was the object of impeachment in the House in the winter of 1803, as was Supreme Court associate justice Samuel Chase. Pickering was unstable, a drinker who may have been insane; his impeachment and conviction were of less ultimate moment than the effort against Chase, who had given the Republicans an opening with a provocative charge to a grand jury in Baltimore and who had been openly hostile to Jefferson’s party before. “Where the law is uncertain, partial, or arbitrary, where justice is not impartially administered to all; where property is insecure, and the person is liable to insult and violence without redress by law,—the people are not free, whatever may be their form of government,” Chase said in May 1803. He attacked the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, telling the Baltimore jury, “Our republican Constitution will sink into a mobocracy,—the worst of all possible governments.”

  Infuriated by Chase’s diatribe—one issued from the sanctuary of the bench—Jefferson wrote Maryland congressman Joseph H. Nicholson, who had recently brought charges against Judge Pickering. “Ought this seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution and on the proceedings of a State to go unpunished; and to whom so pointedly as yourself will the public look for the necessary measures?” In conclusion, Jefferson noted: “I ask these questions for your consideration; for myself, it is better that I should not interfere.”

  Except, of course, that he just had interfered. It was a characteristic Jeffersonian tactic, instigating a course of action from afar. Ultimately the Senate convicted John Pickering and the House impeached Samuel Chase, who won an acquittal from the Senate on the Friday before Jefferson’s second inauguration in 1805. The failure to remove Chase from office has long been interpreted as a defeat for Jefferson, but the president’s point was made. Judges who, in John Randolph’s phrase, played the part of an “electioneering partisan” were not safe from censure of some kind. The Federalist judiciary was on notice.

  Such successes drove Jefferson’s enemies mad. One correspondent wrote to the president of hopes “that your Excellency might be beheaded within one year.” An anonymous letter from New York told Jefferson that the writer—who signed himself “A Federalist Democrat”—had been asked “to go to Washington and then assassinate you.” Twelve days later came another letter from New York, this one signed “A—X,” saying: “You are in danger a dreadful plot is forming against you.… Julius Caesar was cautioned for the Ides of March—I caution you for the last of April.”

  In victory, Jefferson moved carefully on the politically treacherous issue of federal appointments. The composition of the government was among the key questions to challenge the newly inaugurated president—and the newly inaugurated president’s hope to lead a less divided nation. How many Federalist officeholders should be removed and replaced with Republicans? Jefferson’s Republican allies were pushing for aggressive action. “An energetic tone towards the leaders of the royalist party will keep the republicans and new converts together and gain strength daily to your administration,” Monroe had written Jefferson eight days after the inaugural in 1801.

  Jefferson replied that he hoped the fever of the late 1790s had broken and that the Federalist manipulation of the XYZ affair and other supposed threats to the nation had come to be seen as manufactured. “At length the poor arts of tub plots etc were repeated till the designs of the party became suspected.” The “tub plots” reference was from the English Civil War, when forged evidence of a 1679 conspiracy to keep James, the Catholic Duke of York, from the throne was found in a tub of meal. Jefferson’s evocation of the episode in the context of the 1790s shows that he continued to view history partly through the prism of the wars and conflicts of the seventeenth century—a time of conspiracy, intrigue, and perpetual tension between monarchists and republicans.

  Believing the American people essentially sound and aware of the Federalist excesses, Jefferson favored a moderate tone (“We must be easy with them,” he said of the Federalists), but he did not fail to take decisive action.

  Scholarly estimates put Jefferson’s removal rate quite high: He displaced about 46 percent of incumbent officeholders in 1801, the strong majority of whom were Federalists. Such a rate places Jefferson in the historical company of Andrew Jackson, whose removals three decades later shocked establishment sensibilities. Jefferson was especially hard on Adams’s last-minute decisions. One of Adams’s midnight appointments was that of Elizur Goodrich to the collectorship of the port at New Haven. The post had fallen open only in February 1801. Responding to Republican sentiment in Connecticut, Jefferson removed Goodrich and appointed Samuel Bishop, the mayor of New Haven, to his place.

  A group of merchants in New Haven issued a remonstrance against Goodrich’s removal, prompting Jefferson to lay out his thinking on federal appointments. “Declarations by myself in favor of political tolerance, exhortations to harmony and affection in social intercourse, and to respect for the equal rights of the minority, have, on certain occasions, been quoted and misconstrued into assurances that the tenure of offices was to be undisturbed.” But, Jefferson went on, “Is it political intolerance to claim a proportionate share in the direction of the public affairs? Can they not harmonize in society unless they have everything in their own hands?”

  He was pragmatic. He could see the whole. He understood that removals like the one in New Haven would produce political discord, but that was the nature of the enterprise.

  As were scathing newspaper attacks. Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania, the governor who had been so forthright in his support for Jefferson in the 1800 election, felt that the partisan papers in his state were abusing their freedom of expression, and he was weighing whether to take legal action. “The infamous and seditious libels, published almost daily in our newspapers, are become intolerable,” McKean wrote Jefferson in February 1803. “If they cannot be altogether prevented … they may be greatly checked by a few prosecutions.”

  Jefferson replied carefully but clearly. “On the subject of prosecutions, what I say must be entirely confidential, for you know the passion for torturing every sentiment and word which comes from me,” Jefferson wrote McKean on Saturday, February 19, 1803. “I have … long thought that a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses. Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one.”

  Most newspapers, however, were out of reach, inc
luding James Callender’s. On Wednesday, September 1, 1802, in the Richmond Recorder, Callender had his revenge on Jefferson, publishing an account of the Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship.

  It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies! …

  By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it.…

  Behold the favorite, the first born of republicanism! The pinnacle of all that is good and great! In the open consummation of an act which tends to subvert the policy, the happiness, and even the existence of this country!

  ’Tis supposed that, at the time when Mr. Jefferson wrote so smartly concerning negroes, when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race, he had no expectation that the chief magistrate of the United States was to be the ringleader in showing that his opinion was erroneous; or, that he should choose an African stock whereupon he was to engraft his own descendants.…

  We give it to the world under the firmest belief that such a refutation never can be made. The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper at Monticello. When Mr. Jefferson has read this article, he will find leisure to estimate how much has been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon J. T. CALLENDER.