Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  After Jefferson’s death, the nineteenth-century biographer Henry Randall once walked over Monticello with Wormley Hughes, a former slave of Jefferson’s. Pointing to the three carriage bays under the North Terrace (each could accommodate a four-horse coach), Randall asked, “Wormley, how often were these filled, in Mr. Jefferson’s time?”

  “Every night, sir, in summer, and we commonly had two or three carriages under that tree,” Hughes said, gesturing to another spot.

  “It took all hands to take care of your visitors?” Randall asked.

  “Yes, sir, and the whole farm to feed them.”

  A Virginia gentleman who had fallen out with Jefferson years before was visiting Montpelier, and Madison encouraged him to join another friend who was en route to Monticello. He decided to go. When the gentleman appeared at the house on the mountain, he was worried about his unannounced call.

  On seeing him, Jefferson looked surprised for “about a second,” but then “advanced instantly and saluted his guest with as prompt cordiality as if he had been looking for him.” Jefferson seated the unexpected guest next to him at dinner and called for Madeira, which Jefferson had somehow remembered was a favorite. The guest demurred, saying he would drink Jefferson’s wine.

  Afterward, when Jefferson excused himself, the guest asked his Montpelier companion, “Do you suppose I could get a glass of good brandy here? I have been so amused by Jefferson that here I have been sipping his … acid, cold French wine, until I am sure I shall die in the night … unless I take an antidote.” But Jefferson was not to know: The guest would give no offense.

  The next day the guest returned to Madison’s, “lauding Jefferson to the skies.” Yet he could not see “ ‘why a man of so much taste should drink cold, sour French wine!’ He insisted to Mr. Madison that it would injure Jefferson’s health. He talked himself warm on the topic. He declared it would kill him—that some night he would be carried off by it! Finally, he insisted that Madison write and urge him to change his wine. His altered tone towards Jefferson, and his warm solicitude in the particular just named, afforded great amusement to Madison and Jefferson. The trio thenceforth remained fast friends.”

  His hearing was failing a bit, and he needed eyeglasses more often. Ill in early 1818, he recovered, but his contemporaries continued to fall.

  Late in the year he learned that Abigail Adams had died. He wrote warmly to John Adams, noting that words could do little in such an hour of grief, a lesson Jefferson had learned, he said, “in the school of affliction.” Still, “mingling sincerely my tears with yours,” Jefferson said, “it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

  Jefferson took pleasure in his family, but his kith and kin were also sources of anxiety. Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., was in chronic financial trouble, appears to have drunk too much, and is said to have grown jealous of Jefferson’s centrality in the life of the family. He served three terms as governor of Virginia, but as he grew older Randolph never really found peace. He and his son Thomas Jefferson Randolph fell out over the fate of Edgehill, the heavily indebted Randolph plantation, and the father grew erratic. He could be violent; his son said he was “more ferocious than the wolf and more fell than the hyena”—hardly a warm familial characterization. (Randolph died in 1828.)

  Another concern was Charles L. Bankhead, the husband of Ann Cary Randolph, Jefferson’s beloved granddaughter. He was a drinker whose alcoholism and tendency to violence—including violence toward his wife—grew worse as the years passed. Bankhead tried the law and tried farming, never making much of himself. Jefferson once sent Ann a copy of the novel The Modern Griselda: A Tale, by Maria Edgeworth, about a failing marriage.

  Though son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., could be unstable, it was Bankhead who posed the most persistent threat to Jefferson’s sense of order and harmony. “He was a fine-looking man, but a terrible drunkard,” said the overseer Edmund Bacon. Bankhead made a dangerous spectacle of himself in Charlottesville and at Monticello. “I have seen him ride his horse into the barroom at Charlottesville and get a drink of liquor,” said Bacon. “I have seen his wife run from him when he was drunk and hide in a potato hole to get out of danger.”

  Early in his retirement, Jefferson took Bankhead to Poplar Forest in a bid to encourage a move to Bedford County (one reason may have been to put more distance between Bankhead and the barroom). In the end, though, the Bankheads settled at Carlton, a plantation adjacent to Monticello.

  By 1815, Jefferson felt compelled to ask Charles’s father, a medical doctor, to treat his own son before it was too late. Promises of reform had been broken; Bankhead would come back from Charlottesville so drunk that Jefferson thought him “in a state approaching insanity.”

  Bankhead could be vicious toward Ann. Jefferson described “an assault on his wife of great violence” after which Bankhead “ordered her out of the room, forbidding her to enter it again and she was obliged to take refuge for the night in her mother’s room. Nor was this a new thing.”

  One night Bankhead was berating Jefferson’s butler Burwell Colbert at Monticello for refusing to hand over the keys to the liquor cabinet. Colbert “would not give him any more brandy,” according to Bacon. Patsy tried to calm Bankhead down but failed, and called for Bacon. (“She would never call on Mr. Randolph at such a time, he was so excitable,” Bacon said.) Nevertheless, Randolph heard the fight. “He entered the room just as I did, and Bankhead, thinking he was Burwell, began to curse him,” Bacon wrote. Randolph seized a hot poker from a hearth and struck his son-in-law in the head, burning off a chunk of flesh and nearly killing him.

  On Monday, February 1, 1819, outside the courthouse in Charlottesville, Bankhead got into a fight with his brother-in-law Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the former president’s favorite grandson. The causes of the clash are unclear, but the result was not. Randolph horsewhipped Bankhead, leaving wounds on his head, and Bankhead gravely wounded Randolph by stabbing him twice.

  Jefferson had just arrived back at Monticello from his daily ride when news of the attack reached him. He immediately set off for Charlottesville, riding furiously. Finding his grandson lying in Leitch’s store on the square, Jefferson knelt and wept. Young Randolph survived, but the bloody episode only worsened Jefferson’s fears for Ann.

  “With respect to Bankhead,” Jefferson wrote, “there is much room to fear, and mostly for his wife. I have for some time taken for granted that she would fall by his hands.” Ann died in childbirth in 1826.

  Despite all, Jefferson struggled to be optimistic. “I think, with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us,” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1816. Jefferson took the broadest of views: “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”

  Adams was always less sanguine. “I dare not look beyond my nose into futurity,” he wrote Jefferson. “Our money, our commerce, our religion, our national and state constitutions, even our arts and sciences, are so many seedplots of division, faction, sedition and rebellion. Everything is transmuted into an instrument of electioneering.”

  Jefferson believed in the future, and why not? His own lifetime was testament to the possibility of political and intellectual progress. The past, he thought, should hold no magical, unexamined claim over the present. “Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” he wrote in 1816.

  They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that
age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions … but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

  He loved the spirit of innovation. “The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.” The future was full of infinite possibilities. “When I contemplate the immense advances in science, and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation; and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been, as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches,” he wrote in retirement.

  There was now world enough and time to build as well as defend. In the wake of the British army’s burning of the roughly 3,000 books belonging to Congress at Washington, Jefferson offered to sell the nation his own collection. There were 6,487 volumes in Jefferson’s hands; in the words of the National Intelligencer, the library “for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond all price.” They formed the core of the new Library of Congress.

  And as the years passed, he turned more and more of his attention to a project in Charlottesville that he believed would create the conditions in which succeeding generations could surpass those that came before.

  It was a university—a university so thoroughly the work of his hands that it was to become known simply as “Mr. Jefferson’s.” In 1818, he left his mountain for a twenty-five-mile journey to the Mountain Top Tavern in Rockfish Gap between Nelson and Augusta counties in the Blue Ridge. There Jefferson and others approved a plan for a university to be built in Charlottesville. It was a formidable gathering. Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall were on hand, as were other notable Virginia politicians. Jefferson was clearly in charge and relished the role.

  The mission, in Jefferson’s words, was to “form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity, and individual happiness are so much to depend.” He invested the enterprise with the highest of stakes, writing: “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

  The making of the University of Virginia was Jefferson’s last great effort of will and leadership. It called on his political, intellectual, and architectural gifts. As with so much in his life, there were compromises and problems (he spent too much money), but also as with so much else, Jefferson created something that endured. The Declaration of Independence’s words lived on past him. The nation built from the addition of Louisiana lived on past him. His conception of the possibilities of a strong presidency lived on past him. The university did, too.

  Education had been a perennial interest. “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people,” Jefferson had written George Wythe in the 1780s. “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”

  Jefferson conceived the work of the university as a critical element of the kind of American world he had long worked to bring about. “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” he said. Echoing his first inaugural address, he added: “For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

  There was also a provincial element in his enthusiasm. “If our legislature does not heartily push our University we must send our children for education to Kentucky or Cambridge,” Jefferson said in 1820, alluding to Transylvania College in Kentucky and to Harvard College. “The latter will return them to us fanatics and tories, the former will keep them to add to their population.”

  He envisioned a great new institution, and nothing could keep him away when he wanted to be on hand. In 1819, Eliza House Trist noted that Jefferson rode through “a perfect hurricane … to visit the college.” He was said to have installed a telescope on a terrace at Monticello to watch the construction.

  His first university appointment fell victim to the kind of sectarian religious strife that drove him to distraction. In 1820, Thomas Cooper, a Unitarian, was asked to come to the university as a professor. The state’s religious world reacted ferociously, mounting what Jefferson called a “Holy Inquisition,” but the zealots won. Jefferson was forced to back down.

  The old man never lost his capacity to learn from his mistakes, however, and two years later, amid enduring criticism that the state university was hostile to religion, he offered a brilliant plan to assuage concerns that the institution was failing to nurture religious belief among its pupils. The immediate cause of worry for sectarian observers was Jefferson’s refusal to include a professor of divinity on the faculty. In his 1822 annual report as rector, Jefferson gently but unmistakably shifted the burden back to the individual faiths themselves, offering any sect the opportunity to build and fund its own school on the grounds of the university. The library would be open to all, and officials would allow students the ability to attend classes of a sectarian nature as well as ordinary university courses—“but always understanding,” Jefferson wrote, “that these schools shall be independent of the University and of each other.”

  Jefferson was once again exercising power passively and achieving his own ends under the guise of being reasonable and open. And he was being reasonable and open: The proposed compromise had much to recommend it as a sensible accommodation of interests. Faced with the prospect of having to build their own institutions, though, the different denominations declined. There would still be no professor of divinity, and there would be no separate seminaries. Jefferson may have lost Cooper, but he won the larger war.

  The same year his belief in the power of reason led him into the regions of hyperbole. “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free enquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests,” he said in 1822, “the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.” (On the other side of the prediction ledger, Jefferson correctly foresaw the rise of coffee. The coffee bean, he wrote, “is become the favorite beverage of the civilized world.”)

  He was also closer to the mark—though, given the perennial popularity of traditional Christianity and Judaism, still wide of it—when he mused about the spread of less conventional spiritual beliefs. “Were I to be the founder of a new sect, I would call them Apiarians, and, after the example of the bee, advise them to extract the honey of every sect,” he said. “My fundamental principle would be … that we are to be saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power.”

  Jefferson believed in the existence of a creator God and in an afterlife. Most significantly, he defended the moral lessons of the life and teachings of Jesus, whose divinity Jefferson rejected but whose words and example he embraced. In his presidential years he had completed a forty-six-page work entitled The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth extracted from the account of his life and doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In retirement he returned to the project, privately cre
ating a more ambitious work he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. “The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknowledged,” Jefferson wrote the Unitarian Jared Sparks in 1820. “Thinking men of all nations rallied readily to the doctrine of one only God, and embraced it with the pure-morals which Jesus inculcated.”

  A churchgoer who carried his well-worn Book of Common Prayer to services, served as a vestryman, and invoked the divine in his public statements, Jefferson was, as he once put it, “of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” Though he fought against the establishment of religion, he understood and appreciated the cultural role faith played in the United States. As a politician and a devotee of republicanism, Jefferson hoped that subjecting religious sensibilities to free inquiry would transform faith from a source of contention into a force for good, for he knew that religion in one form or another was a perpetual factor in the world. The wisest course, then, was not to rail against it but to encourage the application of reason to questions of faith. The more rational men became about religion, Jefferson believed, the better lives they would lead; in turn the life of the nation would become more stable and virtuous.

  It was not going to be a quick or easy war to win, especially given the power of traditional Christianity. To John Adams Jefferson wrote: “The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.”