Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Walking into the entrance hall by the glass front door on the East Front of Monticello, Jefferson, his family, and his guests were immediately immersed in the work of his life. Artifacts and emblems of America’s natural and political worlds hung in the great hall; the floor was green (at the suggestion of Gilbert Stuart), the walls whitewashed with a yellow-orange dado below the chair rail. There were the antlers of moose and elk, the upper jawbone of a mastodon, and forty Indian objects, including carved stone sculptures, tools, a Mandan buffalo robe, and a small portrait of a young Sack chief. There were maps, including the Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia, drawn by his father so long before, and later ones of North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There was a scale model of the Pyramid of Cheops.

  There was a sculpture, Ariadne, which Jefferson long mistook for one of Cleopatra before realizing the work was a depiction of the tragic mythological heroine. There were the paintings St. Jerome in Meditation and Jesus in the Praetorium, which Jefferson described in detail: “Jesus … stripped of the purple, as yet naked, and with the crown of thorns on his head. He is sitting.… The persons present seem to be one of his revilers, one of his followers, and the superintendent of the execution. The subject from Mark 15:16–20.” There were portraits of Americus Vespucius, John Adams, and of Jefferson himself (by Gilbert Stuart), two engravings of the Declaration of Independence—one of John Trumbull’s depiction of the signing, the other of the document itself—and busts of Hamilton, Voltaire, and Turgot, the French politician and economist.

  There was method to the decoration of Monticello. For Jefferson, the portraits, busts, statues, and artifacts in the house were not a random collection but rather “memorials of those worthies whose remembrance I feel a pride and comfort in consecrating there.” Anything—or anyone—represented within Monticello was meaningful to Jefferson in some way and to some degree.

  Only steps into the house, then, the range of Jefferson’s mind and heart, the universal nature of his interests and his sense of the sweep of history, were manifest to every eye. The fossils and antlers, the Indian artifacts, and the maps represented the primeval American world and the white man’s first attempts to project power over the land. The pyramid and Ariadne were refugees from the ancient world. The paintings of St. Jerome and of Jesus in the moments before the crucifixion commemorated the vast and inarguable role of religion in the history of western civilization. Vespucius—and Columbus, whose portrait hung in the next room, the parlor—carried the story across the Atlantic to the New World. Voltaire and Turgot represented the work of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson himself, and the Continental Congress in declaring independence from Britain brought the tale forward into the recent past, into the work of the master of the house’s lifetime.

  And so it goes, room after room, object after object, engraving after engraving, painting after painting, medallion after medallion throughout Monticello.

  To reach the parlor, guests moved beneath the tall ceiling decorated with a plaster relief of an eagle surrounded by stars, across the floor, and under a brass Argand-style lamp and a balcony to cross onto a beautiful floor of cherry and beech—a parquet pattern Jefferson personally designed.

  Like the hall, the parlor is eighteen feet, two inches high, and decorated with a Corinthian frieze from the Temple of Jupiter the Thunderer. Here Jefferson crafted a room of tiered artwork surrounding card tables, chairs, sofas, a chess set, a harpsichord, and a pianoforte—a room in which the present life of the house and of the family unfolded in the midst of emblems of the past that had made its owner, and its owner’s nation, possible. “Portraits—24; Paintings—17; Medals—10; Busts—2; Miscellaneous—4,” Jefferson wrote, cataloging the parlor’s decorations.

  Here hung paintings and here sat sculptures of the makers of the age—and of the ages: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Magellan, Napoleon, Lafayette, Columbus, Vespucius, Alexander I, David Rittenhouse, Sir Walter Raleigh, James Madison, Thomas Paine, James Monroe, Louis XVI, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Adams, and Jefferson himself both by Trumbull and by Mather Brown. There was an elegant Charles Willson Peale portrait of Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph and a medallion of Edward Preble, who triumphed at Tripoli in 1804. As in the hall, there were religious images, too: The Penitent Magdalen, Descent from the Cross, and Herodias Bearing the Head of St. John the Baptist. Two small Sèvres figures—Venus with Cupid and Hope with Cupid—evoked the ancient world.

  The brilliantly yellow dining room sits to the right. Through it, separated by double pocket doors on rollers, is the small octagonal tea room. There, Jefferson and his family would eat and converse in what he called his “most honorable suite,” glancing up at busts of Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and John Paul Jones, all by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

  Patsy had a blue sitting room near her father’s private rooms, called the South Square Room, and there was a North Octagonal Room with an alcove bed often used by Dolley and James Madison when they visited.

  The upstairs—including the beautiful Dome Room atop the house—was a series of small bedrooms. The center of the house, and the center of life, was downstairs, where Jefferson presided.

  If it had not been called Monticello,” a visitor wrote in 1816, “I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.” Jefferson’s family agreed. His “cheerfulness and affection,” a granddaughter recalled, “were the warm sun in which his family all basked and were invigorated.”

  He was like a “patriarch of old,” as he put it in a letter to Maria Cosway. “Our mother educated all her children to look up to her father, as she looked up to him herself—literally looked up, as to one standing on an eminence of greatness and goodness,” wrote a granddaughter, Ellen Coolidge. “And it is no small proof of his real elevation that, as we grew older and better able to judge for ourselves, we were more and more confirmed in the opinions we had formed of it.”

  His grandchildren loved him and revered him. They followed him on garden walks (never, though, putting a foot on a garden bed, for that “would violate one of his rules”). He never had to raise his voice: Their sense of his authority was so complete that it was unnecessary for him to “utter a harsh word to one of us, or speak in a raised tone of voice, or use a threat,” a granddaughter recalled. “He simply said, ‘do,’ or ‘do not.’ ” And that was that.

  He picked fruit for them—usually figs and cherries—with a long stick topped with a hook and net bag, and he organized and presided over races on the grounds. The course was the terrace or around the lawn. Jefferson gave head starts according to ages, and the contestants took off when he dropped his white handkerchief from his outstretched right hand. Awards were three figs, prunes, or dates for the winner; two for second place; and one for third. On some summer nights he had a chess table of his own design—it had been made by John Hemings—set up outside for matches with a granddaughter.

  In the wintertime, when the days were short, Jefferson would sit with his family before a fire in the late afternoon. This was the hour, a granddaughter said, “when it grew too dark to read,” and so “in the half hour before candles came in, as we all sat round the fire, he taught us several childish games, and would play them with us.” There was “Cross Questions and Crooked Answers,” a whispering circle game, and “I Love My Love with A,” a pastime in which successive players had to come up with attributes throughout the alphabet.

  The arrival of candles signaled an end to games and a resumption of reading. Everything fell quiet as Jefferson “took up his book to read, and we would not speak out of a whisper lest we should disturb him, and generally we followed his example and took a book—and I have seen him raise his eyes from his own book and look round on the little circle of readers, and smile and make some remark to mamma about it.”

  Despite the privacy of his rooms—a result of his own planning—he did not like being alone for any
great length of time. To preserve the privacy of his rooms, he had constructed Venetian porches, or “porticles,” with blinds that shielded the visibility of his quarters from outside the main house. Once, when he was snowed in at Poplar Forest, he wrote Patsy: “I am like a state prisoner. My keepers set before me at fixed hours something to eat and withdraw.”

  His command was total, his love enveloping. On journeys to Bedford he took care to wrap his family in capes, and, if needed, furs. He sang and conversed the whole way and served picnic lunches of cold meat and wine mixed with water.

  He once overheard a young granddaughter lament that she had never had a silk dress. One arrived for her from Charlottesville the next day. On another occasion a granddaughter tore a beloved muslin dress on the glass door connecting the hall to the portico. “Grand-papa was standing by and saw the disaster,” the granddaughter recalled. Several days later the former president of the United States came into Patsy’s sitting room adjacent to his own apartment, “a bundle in his hand.” To his granddaughter he said, “I have been mending your dress for you.” It was a new frock.

  He might hear a child express a wish for a watch, or for a saddle and bridle, or for a guitar, and would quietly provide them (doing so with borrowed money). He made sure his grandchildren were given Bibles and Shakespeare and writing tables. “Our grandfather seemed to read our hearts, to see our invisible wishes, to be our good genius, to wave the fairy wand, to brighten our young lives by his goodness and his gifts.”

  His sense of the needs of others was part of his nature—a nature, one granddaughter said, “so eminently sympathetic, that with those he loved, he could enter into their feelings, anticipate their wishes, gratify their tastes, and surround them with an atmosphere of affection.” A patriarch’s love is rather like a politician’s skill. Both are about perceiving what others want, and trying, within reason, to provide it. That had been the work of Jefferson’s public life and now, in retirement, it was that of his personal life, too.

  The good cheer Margaret Bayard Smith had noted in Jefferson at Madison’s inauguration remained evident in the first months of his return to Virginia. “Mr. Jefferson called last week, and dined here yesterday,” Elizabeth Trist wrote a friend from Farmington in April 1809. “I never saw him look better nor appear so happy.”

  On her own promised visit to Monticello in the middle of 1809, Margaret Bayard Smith thought Jefferson in a perfect place and frame of mind. “The sun never sees him in bed, and his mind designs more than the day can fulfill, even his long day,” she wrote. “There is a tranquility about him, which an inward peace could alone bestow.”

  As he began his retirement, Jefferson enjoyed reading of the public’s confidence in him and the course he had set. “We have been permitted to hear the thunder of war at a distance, and peaceably tread the arduous path of intellectual improvement, unmolested by the awful din of battle, or the more dreadful scenes of devastation that now desolate the nations of the world,” a group of college students wrote on Inauguration Day 1809. An anonymous writer praised him as the greatest of men: “You have, in your public capacity, been to me a father, a protector, a preserver. For these services I will forever render you the tribute of a grateful heart.” An old friend from France offered him the highest flattery: “Though I am convinced that Mr. Madison, your friend and your student, will govern according to the same principles as you have, I cannot help regretting that you did not want to retain the presidency for four more years,” Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours wrote Jefferson in June 1809.

  The world still looked to him, and to America, as emblems of hope. “No one knows better than you how difficult it is to do good: men are very evil; their heads are filled with nonsense, and it is so contagious, so tenacious, that not even the great, philosophical chemist Jefferson is able to reduce it to gas so that it evaporates from human judgment,” wrote a Spanish diplomat at Philadelphia.

  “What would become of mankind if republican government did not survive in your country?” asked a French correspondent. “I shudder to think of the consequences!”

  In his cabinet he wrote with his legs stretched out along a red-leather bench beneath a plantation writing table. He grudgingly spent hours at his table, reading and keeping up with his correspondence, for he was a fully engaged farmer. “My present course of life admits less reading than I wish,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush from Monticello. “From breakfast, or noon at latest, to dinner, I am mostly on horseback, attending to my farms or other concerns, which I find healthful to my body, mind, and affairs.” He ordered samplings of the English mulberry and peach-apricot, as well as wild geese and a ram for the farm. “I am now on horseback among my farms from an early breakfast to a late dinner, with little regard to weather,” he told Lafayette in January 1811. “I find it gives health to body, mind and affairs.”

  He had a ready refrain on the subject of politics. “I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing,” he wrote in 1819. “I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy … of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too.”

  Yet Jefferson could never fully remove himself from the life of the present. To Lafayette he expressed the hope that the tumults of Europe would work themselves out. “If there be a God, and he is just, his day will come. He will never abandon the whole race of man to be eaten up by the leviathans and mammoths of a day.” He subscribed to the papers, telling Madison that he was “reading the newspapers but little and that little but as the romance of the day, a word of truth now and then comes like a drop of water on the tongue of Dives.” One thing was very clear as he settled back into life on the mountain: He loved, he said, the “ineffable luxury of being owner of my own time.”

  With those hours he stayed in close touch with the scientific, educational, and philosophical worlds. William Clark continued to dispatch specimens to the President’s House, and Madison sent the skin of a bighorn sheep from the Rocky Mountains to Monticello on July 4, 1809. (“The bundle being too large for the mail, I shall forward it by some other opportunity.”) Jefferson oversaw the English translation of a French commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, debated the origins of the potato with a correspondent, wrote for vine cuttings to cultivate wine, and mused on the role of libraries. “I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the county under such regulations as would secure their safe return in due time,” he said.

  In the fall, John Walker, his onetime friend whose wife Jefferson had tried to woo, was sick, and said that he would like to see his old friend. James Monroe wrote Jefferson to tell him “a visit by you to Col. Walker would at this time be considered by him an act of great kindness, and be received with much sensibility.” Betsy Walker was ill, too. Apparently unwilling to risk a scene, Jefferson decided not to pay the call at Belvoir, declining to make the short journey he had so often made in that distant summer during his bachelor days. He sent a gift of a basket of ripe figs, prompting Hugh Nelson, a Walker son-in-law, to thank him and report the sad news that both Walkers were “still very feeble and low.”

  He was also forever prepared to refight the years of his governorship. Writing a historian seeking information on the Revolutionary period, he argued that Virginia had always contributed “above par” to the national efforts. Indeed, he said, “our whole occupation was in straining the resources of the state to their utmost, to furnish men, money, provisions and other necessaries to the common cause.”

  Word arrived of the brutal death of his old secretary Meriwether Lewis. As Jefferson heard the story, a sleeping servant had heard two pistol shots. Lewis, who had been thought “deranged,” was found “weltering in his blood” with a wound to his head and a fatal shot to the heart; the first had apparently
failed to kill him, and he tried to finish the job with the second. This, too, seemed to have been insufficient, and the poor man was left to stab himself with his dirk.

  Elijah Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont, left an unsparing account of Jefferson. “Mr. Jefferson is tall, spare, straight in body,” Fletcher wrote in 1811. “His face not handsome but savage—I learnt he was but little esteemed by his neighbors.… The story of Black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts—This conduct may receive a little palliation when we consider that such proceedings are so common that they cease here to be disgraceful.”

  Jefferson coolly recorded the births of Hemings’s children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops. Jefferson was apparently able to consign his children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they grew up in his midst. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children,” said Madison Hemings, who added that Jefferson was, however, “affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”

  It was, to say the least, an odd way to live, but Jefferson was a creature of his culture. “The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter,” Josiah Quincy, Jr., of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the Carolinas. “It is far from being uncommon to see a gentleman at dinner, and his reputed offspring a slave to the master of the table.”

  This was daily reality at Monticello. In a letter to James Parton, Henry Randall reported some observations of Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s from the mountain. Discussing the physical similarities between Jefferson and the children of Sally Hemings, Randolph “said in one case that the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” On one occasion, Randolph reported, “a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.” (Randolph offered these reminiscences to support the theory that Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr was the father of Sally Hemings’s children—a theory ultimately disproved by DNA research.