Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  For Jefferson such ambiguities and unacknowledged truths were part of life. “I asked Col. R[andolph] why on earth Mr. Jefferson did not put these slaves who looked like him out of the public sight by sending them to his Bedford estate or elsewhere,” Randall wrote Parton. “He said Mr. Jefferson never betrayed the least consciousness of the resemblance—and although he (Col. R[andolph]) had no doubt his mother would have been very glad to have them removed, that both and all venerated Mr. Jefferson too deeply to broach such a topic to him. What suited him, satisfied them.”

  What suited Jefferson was the code of denial that defined life in the slave-owning states. It was his plantation, his world, and he would live as he wished. “The secrets of an old Virginia manor house,” wrote Henry Randall, “were like the secrets of an Old Norman Castle.” And such secrets were to be kept as well as they could be. That was how Jefferson wanted it, and in this matter, as in so many others, he was to have his way.

  Jefferson sometimes felt his age. “I am little able to walk about,” he wrote Philip Mazzei in July 1811. “Most of my exercise is on horseback, and the powers of life are very sensibly decayed.” Jefferson was acutely aware of his own capacities. “It is wonderful to me that old men should not be sensible that their minds keep pace with their bodies in the progress of decay,” he wrote Benjamin Rush in August 1811. He was proud of his own insights on this score, mildly but unmistakably congratulating himself for recognizing human limitations: “Had not a conviction of the danger to which an unlimited occupation of the executive chair would expose the republican constitution of our government made it conscientiously a duty to retire when I did, the fear of becoming a dotard and of being insensible of it, would of itself have resisted all solicitations to remain.”

  His curiosity endured. “How do you do?” he wrote his friend and former attorney general Levi Lincoln in Massachusetts. “What are you doing? Does the farm or the study occupy your time, or each by turns? Do you read law or divinity? And which affords the most curious and cunning learning? Which is most disinterested? And which was it that crucified its Savior?”

  On the second day of 1811, Benjamin Rush opened a quiet campaign to bring Jefferson and Adams back into correspondence. “Such an intercourse will be honorable to talents, and patriotism, and highly useful to the cause of republicanism not only in the United States but all over the world,” Rush wrote Jefferson. “Posterity will revere the friendship of two ex-presidents that were once opposed to each other. Human nature will be a gainer by it.” If Jefferson would make the first move, Rush said, all would be well. Adams was ready, and time was likely short. “Tottering over the grave,” Rush said, Adams “now leans wholly upon the shoulders of his old revolutionary friends.”

  The Adams-Jefferson friendship had been a victim of the passions of the 1790s. “You remember the machinery which the Federalists played off, about that time,” Jefferson wrote Rush. He recalled the Alien and Sedition Acts, which to Jefferson’s mind were meant “to beat down the friends to the real principles of our Constitution, to silence by terror every expression in their favor, to bring us into war with France and alliance with England, and finally to homologise our Constitution with that of England.”

  Rush pressed ahead with his cause, if gently. “Many are the evils of a political life, but none so great as the dissolution of friendships, and the implacable hatreds which too often take their place,” Rush replied.

  The second president spent two days at home in Quincy with two visiting neighbors of Jefferson’s. The conversation ranged widely. “Mr. Adams talked very freely of men and of things, and detailed many highly interesting facts in the history of our country, and particularly of his own administration, and of incidents connected with the presidential election of 1800,” wrote Edward Coles, one of the callers. Adams “complained,” too, about Jefferson. “I told him I could not reconcile what he had heard of Mr. Jefferson’s language and conduct to him, with what I had heard [Jefferson] repeatedly say, and that too to friends who were political opponents of Mr. Adams,” Coles wrote. “Upon repeating some of the complimentary remarks thus made by Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Adams not only seemed but expressed himself highly pleased.”

  Reassured and surprised by the warm report from the Virginians, Adams changed his tone about Jefferson, displaying, Coles said, “an exalted admiration of his character, and appreciation of his services to his country, as well during the Revolution as subsequently.” Adams then criticized the press for its harshness toward Jefferson, adding: “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”

  These eight words were all it took for Jefferson. “This is enough for me,” he wrote Rush. “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.” Rush sent word of Jefferson’s sentiments to Adams, who, in turn, wrote Jefferson on New Year’s Day 1812, sending him a copy of John Quincy Adams’s inaugural lectures at Harvard on rhetoric and oratory.

  Replying, Jefferson struck the right notes. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he wrote from Monticello on Tuesday, January 21, 1812. “It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.”

  Thus an ancient friendship, shattered by politics, was restored. When Adams answered from Quincy on Monday, February 10, 1812, he was already writing as though the intervening years had been nothing. He asked Jefferson about a pamphlet published in Virginia that predicted the apocalypse was set for June 1812. To Adams it was a wonder that such prophets endured despite the “continual refutation of all their prognostications by time and experience.”

  They wrote of history and books and grief; of their families and farming and of their common past. “On the subject of the history of the American revolution, you ask who shall write it?” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1815. “Who can write it? And who ever will be able to write it? Nobody; except merely its external facts. All its councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.”

  Adams proved the more prolific correspondent. “So many subjects crowd upon me that I know not with which to begin,” he wrote Jefferson. The second president saw the renewed connection in grand terms. “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.”

  Jefferson loved the letters. “Mr. Adams and myself are in habitual correspondence,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush in March 1813. “I owe him a letter at this time, and shall pay the debt as soon as I have something to write about. For with the commonplace topic of politics, we do not meddle. When there are so many others on which we agree why should we introduce the only one on which we differ?”

  Of the vagaries of politics, Adams wrote: “My reputation has been so much the sport of the public for fifty years, and will be with posterity, that I hold it a bubble, a gossamer, that idles in the wanton summer’s air.” Jefferson took the same tone, musing: “The summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind; and to these I wish to consign my remaining days,” he wrote Adams in June 1813.

  Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the [best men; nobles] should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions.… As we had been longer than most others on the public
theatre, and our names therefore were more familiar to our countrymen, the party which considered you as thinking with them, placed your name at their head; the other, for the same reason, selected mine.

  It was past time, Jefferson said, for the political wars of the first decades of the republic to end. “And shall you and I, my dear Sir, like Priam of old, gird on the ‘arma, diu desueta, trementibus aevo humeris’? Shall we, at our age, become the Athletae of party, and exhibit ourselves, as gladiators, in the arena of the newspapers? Nothing in the universe could induce me to it. My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts, and will never take counsel from me as to what that judgment should be.”

  Adams was gracious but unyielding about their differences of opinion. “I believe in the integrity of both, at least as undoubtingly as in that of Washington,” Adams wrote of Jefferson and Madison. “In the measures of administration I have neither agreed with you or Mr. Madison. Whether you or I were right posterity must judge.” Adams acknowledged that the “nation was with you. But neither your authority nor that of the nation has convinced me. Nor, I am bold to pronounce, will convince posterity.”

  Their debates about the nature of democracy and the future of the country were fascinating, and the correspondence forced both men to clarity of thought and a kind of reasonableness. Gone were the pejorative exclamations of partisan days. “The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society,” wrote Jefferson. “And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?” He added:

  I have thus stated my opinion on a point on which we differ, not with a view to controversy, for we are both too old to change opinions, which are the result of a long life of inquiry and reflection; but on the suggestion of a former letter of yours that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other. We acted in perfect harmony through a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, though neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow-citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. If we do not think exactly alike as to its imperfections, it matters little to our country which, after devoting to it long lives of disinterested labor, we have delivered over to our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it, and of themselves.

  By the time they died in 1826, Jefferson and Adams had exchanged a total of 329 letters in their lifetime, with a substantial number—158—coming from 1812 until the end.

  We have had a wretched winter for the farmer,” Jefferson had written Madison in March 1811. It had not been much better for statesmen. “The rancor of party was revived with all its bitterness during the last session of Congress,” his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes wrote Jefferson the same month. “United by no fixed principles or objects and destitute of everything like American feeling, so detestable a minority never existed in any country—Their whole political creed is contained in a single word ‘opposition’—They pursue it without regard to principle, to personal reputation or the best interests of their country.”

  From Monticello Jefferson watched as his anxieties of the decades—the fear of British power over America—were realized. Beginning in 1812, the scenario Jefferson had so often warned against came to pass as the United States once more went to war against England. Jefferson had begun his post–President’s House life still believing that Britain could be dealt with short of armed conflict. Yet he advised Madison to rule nothing out. “War however may become a less losing business than unresisted depredation.”

  In September 1811, Jefferson wrote John Wayles Eppes that the President and Mrs. Madison as well as the secretaries of war and of the navy were expected at Monticello with their families. News of a British frigate and sloop of war “stationing themselves in the Delaware and refusing to withdraw” might, however, keep the cabinet officers away.

  Benjamin Rush saw the whole. “Our country has twice declared itself independent of Great Britain—once in 1776, and again 1800.… Are we upon the eve of a declaration … being repeated a third time, not by the pen, or by a general suffrage but by the mouths of our cannon?”

  As war approached Jefferson returned home from Poplar Forest. Rain and hail were damaging the wheat crops—ten inches of rain fell in ten days in May—as Virginians awaited word from Washington. In Jefferson’s mind the conflict with Britain was also with Americans sympathetic to London. “Your declaration of war is expected with perfect calmness; and if those in the North mean systematically to govern the majority it is as good a time for trying them as we can expect,” Jefferson wrote Madison in May 1812.

  President Madison sent a war-preparation message to Congress on Tuesday, November 5, 1811. He argued that the depredations along the borders and on the oceans were too much to bear. The time had come to put the question of America’s permanent independence to the test.

  “We are to have war then? I believe so and that it is necessary,” Jefferson wrote Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. “Every hope from time, patience and the love of peace is exhausted, and war or abject submission are the only alternatives left us.”

  On the last day of 1811, Jefferson offered warm words to Madison. “Your message had all the qualities it should possess, firm, rational, and dignified.… Heaven help you through all your difficulties.”

  FORTY-ONE

  TO FORM STATESMEN, LEGISLATORS AND JUDGES

  In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  JEFFERSON HAD BEEN HERE before: the king’s armies on the move, the American cause in jeopardy. For Jefferson and his generation, the conflict that had begun so long ago in the wake of the French and Indian War had reached a climactic hour. For half a century, from the Stamp Act to impressments at sea, the British had never wholly accepted the idea that America was truly a sovereign power. As late as 1810, an American congressman could still say, “The people will not submit to be colonized and give up their independence.” For the second time in Jefferson’s life, then, war came between Britain and America.

  For a long time, the War of 1812 was disastrous for the Americans. In August 1814 the British burned Washington; the salvation of documents and a portrait of George Washington was left to Dolley Madison, who fled the President’s House just ahead of the enemy. Jefferson reacted fiercely to reports that some Americans were welcoming the British. “No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty,” Jefferson wrote John Wayles Eppes in 1814. “Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only.”

  After victories at Baltimore and at Plattsburgh, America found its footing. Peace with Britain came with the Treaty of Ghent, a document that brought the half a century of hostilities with the mother country to an end. Another battle was done, too: that between Jeffersonian Republicans and unrepentant Federalists in New England. At a meeting in Connecticut—it was known as the Hartford Convention of 1814–15—the Federalists issued a pro-British manifesto amid renewed talk of secession. News of the gathering, though, came as word of the peace with Britain spread, thus casting the Federalists in an extreme and unpopular light. “The cement of the Union is in the heartblood of every American,” said Jefferson. “I do not believe there is on earth a government established on so immovable a basis.”

  By the middle of 1815, then, the America Jefferson had so long envisioned and fought for was at last largely secure from enemies without and within.

  In 1
814 the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina arrived unannounced, yet found Monticello and its master welcoming and impressive. The bishop, Theodore Dehon, was forcibly struck by Jefferson’s physical presence. “Mr. Jefferson’s large person seemed the appropriate tenement of his capacious and largely stored mind,” wrote the bishop’s biographer. “He moved with great ease and more rapidity, than one unaccustomed to it could have done, over his well-waxed, tessellated mahogany floor.”

  Jefferson dazzled in conversation: “He spoke, almost constantly, on various topics seasonably introduced, very sensibly, and seemed never to hesitate for a thought or a word. The impression was unavoidable that he was a master mind.” After spending the night and breakfasting with Jefferson, the bishop’s party departed for Montpelier.

  At home Jefferson was under constant siege from the public. Patsy guessed she had at least once been asked to find beds for fifty overnight guests.

  The smashing of glass alerted the household to one visitor: A lady caller once jabbed her parasol through a window to clear her field of vision as she strained to see the great man. Strangers hoping for a glimpse of him were known to fill the hall between his study and the main part of the house, “consulting their watches, and waiting for him to pass from one to the other to his dinner, so that they could momentarily stare at him.” Other groups would gather near the porticoes in the gathering evening, “approach within a dozen yards, and gaze at him point-blank until they had looked their fill, as they would have gazed on a lion in a menagerie.”