Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Then the president of the United States fixed his attention on the returning American. “To you, Mr. C., we are indebted … [and] no one more deserves the gratitude of his country.”

  The chatter stopped. The capital crowd at the table was startled by this presidential praise, and suddenly attention warmed the long-ignored guest. “Yes, sir,” Jefferson went on, “the upland rice which you sent from Algiers, and which thus far succeeds, will, when generally adopted by the planters, prove an inestimable blessing to our Southern states.”

  With a stroke of grace, Jefferson had transformed an unnoticed guest into what Mrs. Smith called “a person of importance,” and the president fulfilled the most fundamental duty of a host: He showed respect to those under his roof, making them feel comfortable and cared for.

  To Jefferson, each guest who came into his orbit was significant, and he had little patience—no patience, in fact—with the trappings of rank. His blend of politics, republican simplicity, and haute cuisine was not universally popular. Anthony Merry, the new minister from Britain, found that his and Jefferson’s ideas of the deference due a representative of George III were difficult to reconcile. The president’s reception of the new envoy passed without incident. Not so the dinner to which Merry and his wife were invited at the President’s House. Mrs. Madison was the hostess for the evening, and Jefferson took her into dinner. The Merrys ended up in what they believed to be inferior seats at the table.

  Thus began a small but pitched social and diplomatic battle in the drawing and dining rooms of Washington. The Merry faction included the family of the Spanish minister, who also favored more ceremony and nicety. Mrs. Merry, Jefferson said, was “a virago, and in the short course of a few weeks has established a degree of dislike among all classes which one would have thought impossible in so short a time.”

  It was the Old World versus the New, and on Jefferson’s watch the New was to win. “We say to them, no; the principle of society with us, as well as of our political constitution, is the equal rights of all: and if there be an occasion where this equality ought to prevail preeminently, it is in social circles collected for conviviality,” Jefferson wrote in January 1804.

  There was a specific political element to the tempest. The British representatives, Jefferson said, thought that “we are not as friendly now to Great Britain as before our acquisition of Louisiana.” Jefferson denied it: “This is totally without foundation. Our friendship to that nation is cordial and sincere: so is that with France.… We consider each as a necessary instrument to hold in check the disposition of the other to tyrannize over other nations.”

  Anthony Merry never warmed to Jefferson, and the British diplomat followed any whisper of American discontent. Jefferson’s popularity was such—he was renominated by the Republican congressional caucus in February 1804 for a second term as president—that Federalist concern was turning into desperation.

  On Saturday, February 11, 1804, Senator Timothy Pickering sat down in Washington to lament the sorry state of things in the age of Jefferson. Federal judges and other officeholders were under assault. The Jefferson-led mob ruled. “And must we submit to these evils?” Pickering wrote the Massachusetts Federalist Theodore Lyman. “Is there no remedy?”

  Secession, Pickering believed, could be the one way “to resist the torrent” of Jefferson’s government. Massachusetts was thought to be the most likely leader. If she went, then Connecticut would, followed by New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. If New York were convinced it would be the center of the new nation, she would surely join, he said, which could, in turn, bring along New Jersey and Pennsylvania east of the Susquehanna.

  And Britain—Britain would probably agree to let parts of its North America holdings join forces with a northern union. In theory, it all seemed so reasonable. “It is not unusual for two friends when disagreeing about the mode of conducting a common concern, to separate, and manage each in his own way his separate interest; and thereby preserve a useful friendship which without such separation would infallibly be destroyed,” Pickering said.

  Pickering’s vision probably meant civil war. Why would Jefferson’s party let the North go? Another Pickering correspondent, Massachusetts Federalist George Cabot, thought the hour for separation was not yet at hand—but was open to finding the right one. “We are democratic altogether, and I hold democracy in its natural operation to be the government of the worst,” Cabot wrote Pickering.

  Pickering was adamant. “I am disgusted with the men who now rule us and with their measures,” he wrote on the third anniversary of Jefferson’s inauguration. Pickering was putting much faith in reports that Burr might try to become governor of New York, which would, he hoped, provide a counterweight to Virginia. “Jefferson would then be forced to observe some caution and forbearance in his measures,” Pickering said.

  The Federalist view, according to a correspondent of Rufus King’s, was “that the shortest and beaten road of Tyranny is that which leads through Democracy.”

  King was no disunionist, but he said that Pickering’s letter “ought to fix the attention of the real friends of liberty in this quarter of the Union, and the more so as things seem to be fast advancing to a crisis.” Rumors of disunion persisted for several years. Anthony Merry heard them and reported them to London; the British diplomat Augustus J. Foster wrote about them to his mother. “The possibility of a division is even openly talked of in the public papers and recriminations are exchanged between the Eastern and Southern states,” he wrote in June 1805.

  Then there was Aaron Burr, an elusive and daunting political force. On Thursday, January 26, 1804, Burr called on Jefferson at the President’s House. After the electoral college tie of 1800–1801, the two men had had little contact in the first term, and Jefferson was determined to keep him off the ballot in 1804.

  As Burr told his story, he cast himself in the warmest and best of lights. He was, he was saying, the humblest and most honest of men.

  Burr knew he was under attack publicly and privately. Jefferson reported that Burr had said “many little stories had been carried to him, and he supposed to me also, which, he despised, but that attachments must be reciprocal or cease to exist, and therefore he asked if any change had taken place in mine towards him: that he had chosen to have this conversation with myself directly and not through any intermediate agent.” Burr was willing to stand down, he said, but to do so he needed Jefferson’s help: an appointment of some kind.

  Jefferson’s reply was maddening. The president disclaimed any role in electioneering. He said he could do nothing for Burr.

  Meanwhile, the proposed Twelfth Amendment was making its way through the states. The amendment was designed to prevent any future electoral crisis by separating the ballots for president and vice president, meaning that there could be no more ties between candidates who were putatively running as a ticket. “That great opposition is and will be made by Federalists to this amendment is certain,” Jefferson wrote Thomas McKean in January 1804. “They know that if it prevails, neither a President or Vice President can ever be made but by the fair vote of the majority of the nation, of which they are not.”

  A fire had devastated Norfolk, Virginia (Jefferson sent $200 “for the relief of the poor sufferers,” but asked to remain anonymous). At Edgehill, Polly gave birth to a daughter on Wednesday, February 15. “A thousand joys to you, my dear Maria, on the happy accession to your family,” Jefferson wrote on Sunday, February 26, 1804, using the name Polly had taken for herself in November 1789.

  But all was not well. Polly was not recovering. Her husband, John Wayles Eppes, left Washington for home. It was a difficult journey complicated by high winds and ice. “I feel dreadfully apprehensive that the great debility under which she labors may terminate in some serious complaint,” Eppes wrote Jefferson.

  In the Mediterranean, on the last day of October 1803, the U.S. frigate Philade
lphia had been captured by Tripolitan forces. Three and a half months later, in the middle of February 1804, Commodore Stephen Decatur led a courageous expedition to destroy the Philadelphia in order to keep it from being turned against the United States. In British vice admiral Horatio Nelson’s view, Decatur’s mission was “the most bold and daring act of the age,” and Jefferson struck the same notes in his remarks on the episode. “In general I am mortified at the consternation which most of our public agents abroad have manifested at the loss of the Philadelphia,” Jefferson wrote Madison on April 15, 1804. “It seems as if they thought on the loss of one frigate, that everything was lost. This must humble us in the eyes of Europe, and renders it the more indispensable to inflict on Tripoli the same chastisement of which the two most powerful nations of Europe have given the world repeated examples.”

  Jefferson left Washington on Sunday, April 1, 1804, for Monticello. When he arrived three days later, he discovered Polly in much worse condition than he had anticipated. He immediately took charge of her care.

  In a rare instance of understatement, Jefferson told Madison that things were not all they could be. “Our spring is remarkably uncheery,” Jefferson wrote Madison on Friday, April 13—Jefferson’s sixty-first birthday. As Polly grew worse, Jefferson wrote to Dearborn, Gallatin, and Madison, trying to turn his mind, if only for the briefest of moments, to business. It did not work. On a question about Spanish duties at Mobile, Jefferson told Dearborn that Polly’s “distressing situation … disable[s] me from forming any opinion on the subject.” On Tuesday, April 17, 1804, Polly died. “How the President will get over this blow I cannot pronounce,” Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., wrote Caesar A. Rodney. “He passed all last evening with his handkerchief in his hand. Adieu. I begin to feel the want of mine.”

  Dolley Madison learned the news directly from Jefferson. “A letter from the President announced the death of poor [Polly] and the consequent misery it has occasioned them all—this is among the many proofs … of the uncertainty of life!” Mrs. Madison wrote her sister. “A girl so young, so lovely—all the efforts of her father, doctors and friends availed nothing.”

  Exhausted and grieving, Jefferson returned to Washington. “I arrived here last night after the most fatiguing journey I have experienced for a great many years,” Jefferson wrote Patsy, now his last surviving child with his late wife, from Washington on May 14.

  On Saturday, June 2, an unexpected letter arrived at the President’s House from Quincy, Massachusetts. “It has been some time since that I conceived of any event in this life, which could call forth feelings of mutual sympathy,” wrote Abigail Adams. “But I know how closely entwined around a parent’s heart, are those chords which bind the filial to the parental bosom, and when snapped asunder, how agonizing the pangs of separation.”

  Jefferson replied, politely, and the brief correspondence touched on the things that had come to divide Jefferson and the Adamses—Callender’s vicious Prospect Before Us and the midnight appointments.

  Abigail Adams wrote him again on Sunday, July 1, explaining the source of her deepest anger toward Jefferson:

  I have never felt any enmity towards you, Sir, for being elected president of the United States. But the instruments made use of, and the means which were practiced to effect a change, have my utter abhorrence and detestation, for they were the blackest calumny, and foulest falsehoods. I had witnessed enough of the anxiety, and solicitude, the envy, jealousy and reproach attendant upon the office, as well as the high responsibility of the station, to be perfectly willing to see a transfer of it.…

  [N]ow, Sir, I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship, and placed you in a light very different from what I once viewed you in—

  One of the first acts of your administration was to liberate a wretch who was suffering the just punishment of the law due to his crimes for writing and publishing the basest libel, the lowest and vilest slander, which malice could invent, or calumny exhibit against the character and reputation of your predecessor, of him for whom you professed the highest esteem and friendship, and whom you certainly knew incapable of such complicated baseness. The remission of Callender’s fine was a public approbation of his conduct. Is not the last restraint of vice, a sense of shame, rendered abortive, if abandoned characters do not excite abhorrence? … The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth.

  This letter is written in confidence—no eye but my own has seen what has passed. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Often have I wished to have seen a different course pursued by you. I bear no malice; I cherish no enmity. I would not retaliate if I could—nay more in the true spirit of Christian charity, I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.

  Jefferson replied on Sunday, July 22, claiming that his support of Callender had been based on opposition to the sedition laws and his agreement with the writer’s politics at the time. “My charities to him were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life.”

  Jefferson and Abigail held such starkly different views of the events of the last decade or so that, despite the exchange of a total of seven letters from May to October 1804, it became clear further conversation was pointless. The exchange ended as suddenly as it had begun. John Adams learned of it only after it came to a close in the autumn of 1804.

  On Wednesday, July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey, high above the Hudson River, the vice president of the United States shot the first secretary of the Treasury dead in a duel fought over allegedly disparaging remarks Alexander Hamilton had made about Aaron Burr.

  Jefferson made only the most cursory allusions to Hamilton’s death. There was no testimonial, no letter of tribute to a friend that Jefferson expected to reach the newspapers. His silence at the time—the middle of 1804—seems odd, even ungracious. The politics of the moment may help explain why Jefferson held his tongue and his pen on the subject. The public reaction to Hamilton’s death was intense and emotional. He was eulogized as “the greatest and most virtuous of men” by the newspaper he founded, the New-York Evening Post. His huge New York funeral, concluding with his burial at Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street in lower Manhattan, was a spectacular occasion.

  With the presidential election coming in the autumn, Jefferson likely believed a dignified silence—or at least silence he hoped would be seen as dignified rather than callous—was the best course. In the heat of the summer of 1804, praise of Hamilton was interpreted not as the elegant reaction to a shocking and untimely death but as an endorsement of his program and a condemnation of his opponents. John Adams saw this, later writing Jefferson that Hamilton’s partisans had “seized the moment of public feeling to come forward with funeral orations and printed panegyrics.… And why? Merely to disgrace the old Whigs, and keep the funds and banks in countenance.”

  To Jefferson, Hamilton had represented the most dangerous of tendencies. As president, however, Jefferson did little to destroy the system Hamilton had built. “We had indeed no personal dissensions,” Jefferson later said of Hamilton. “Each of us, perhaps, thought well of the other as a man, but as politicians it was impossible for two men to be of more opposite principles.”

  The more pressing issue was Burr, who was indicted for murder both by a coroner’s jury in New York and by a grand jury in New Jersey. The vice president escaped both states in late July. For Jefferson, the problem of Aaron Burr was just beginning, for on Monday, August 6, 1804—not quite a month after Hamilton’s death—Anthony Merry told London that Burr wanted to “effect a separation of the western part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantic and the mountains, in its whole extent.”

  As president Jefferson found it useful to be aware of what the opposition was saying and
doing: Behind the scenes, he was a shrewd consumer of newspapers and political intelligence. Reading the enemy journals, Jefferson detected perils to a possible second term. “I sincerely regret that the unbounded calumnies of the Federal party have obliged me to throw myself on the verdict of my country for trial, my great desire having been to retire at the end of the present term to a life of tranquility, and it was my decided purpose when I entered into office,” he wrote Elbridge Gerry in 1804. “They force my continuance.”

  George Clinton replaced Burr as the Republican candidate for vice president in the 1804 election. A New Yorker, Clinton was the child of Irish immigrants, and his rise to power presaged much of the story of American politics. “Clinton’s family and connections do not entitle him to so distinguished a pre-eminence,” John Jay had written of him. That was a strongly Federalist view. The Jeffersonian view was different, allowing for social and political mobility among whites.

  The Federalists fielded Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who had been John Adams’s vice-presidential candidate four years before. Any challenge to the incumbent was an honorable but hopeless cause: Jefferson’s popularity, based on lower taxes, significant prosperity, and the Louisiana Purchase, was secure. The president was reelected decisively, carrying 162 electoral votes to Pinckney’s 14. Once so dominant, the Federalist enterprise was failing.

  Writing from Philadelphia in December 1804, a correspondent signing himself “A Friend of the Constitution” told Jefferson that “there is a plot formed to murder you.… A band of hardy fellows have joined to do it. They are to have ten thousand dollars if they succeed in the attempt. They are to carry daggers and pistols. I have been invited to join them but would rather suffer death. I advise you to take care and be cautious how you walk about as some of the assassins are already in Washington.”

  The virulence of such threats belied the larger reality in the country. “The power of the Administration rests upon the support of a much stronger majority of the people throughout the Union than the former Administrations ever possessed since the first establishment of the Constitution,” John Quincy Adams said in the wake of Jefferson’s victory. The political faith of Adams’s own father was doomed.