by Jon Meacham
Jefferson had a fairly detailed vision of the after-life, seeking comfort from the present pain of the loss of loved ones in the expectation that they would meet again beyond time and space. Of Heaven, he wrote Adams: “May we meet there again, in Congress, with our ancient colleagues, and receive with them the seal of approbation.”
At heart, he believed “the doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man”:
1.That there is only one God, and he all perfect.
2.That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3.That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself is the sum of religion.
His own faith, he told Adams, “is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.” As a young man, Jefferson recalled with pride, he had been “bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.”
He remained bold to the end. “It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three.… But this constitutes the craft, the power, and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.” Still, he donated money to the American Bible Society, agreeing that “there never was a more pure and sublime system of morality delivered to man than is to be found in the four evangelists.”
In October 1819, he was felled with a stricture of the ileum, an intestinal crisis that his doctors believed possibly fatal. He rallied, as he always had, but his convalescence gave way to a period of intense worry over the Union in 1820 and beyond. “The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave,” he wrote a correspondent that year. A powerful one from the West was coming fast.
FORTY-TWO
THE KNELL OF THE UNION
From the Battle of Bunker’s Hill to the Treaty of Paris we never had so ominous a question.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, on the admission of Missouri to the Union
JEFFERSON LIKED TO THINK WELL of the future. It suited the prevailing nature of his temperament. He knew, too, that the public preferred a promise of progress rather than reversal, of light rather than dark. “I have much confidence that we shall proceed successfully for ages to come,” he wrote the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois in 1817. “My hope of its duration is built much on the enlargement of the resources of life going hand in hand with the enlargement of territory.”
On Friday, December 10, 1819, Jefferson took note of a debate in Congress with vast implications: the conditions under which Missouri would be added to the Union. The House voted for admission only if antislavery provisions were part of the agreement; the Senate, where slave states held more sway, refused to go along.
From the Constitutional Convention through the Louisiana Purchase, the Northeast had feared that an expanding slaveholding South and West would give the slave interests permanent control over the country. At the same time, the South and West feared for the future of slavery.
To Jefferson it was the worst of hours. He knew slavery was a moral wrong and believed it would ultimately be abolished. He could not, however, bring himself to work for emancipation. As a politician he understood that sectional tensions represented the greatest threat to the union. In his own public career, they already had threatened it in the secessionist movements in the Northeast over the Louisiana Purchase and, later, over the embargo.
Yet slavery was a higher order of problem. Missouri, Jefferson said, was “like a fire bell in the night … the knell of the Union.” He added: “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”
By his own admission, Jefferson’s solution for the problem of slavery was too complex to be executed. “The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be,” he wrote. “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
To John Adams, Jefferson was candid about his anxieties. “The banks, bankrupt law, manufactures, Spanish treaty, are nothing,” he wrote in December. “These are occurrences which, like waves in a storm, will pass under the ship. But the Missouri question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what more, God only knows.”
The resolution was a compromise. Slavery was to be allowed below the 36th parallel but other than in Missouri itself it was forbidden any farther north. Fugitive slaves were to be returned to their owners in the event of escape into the free regions.
Jefferson saw the issue in terms of power. If the federal government began regulating slavery within the states, then a precedent would be established, for regulation could finally lead to abolition.
He believed, too, the North was trying to create new free states that would strengthen the national hand of the antislavery interest, possibly giving free states a lock on the electoral college. “It is not a moral question, but one merely of power,” he wrote Lafayette. “Its object is to raise a geographical principle for the choice of a president, and the noise will be kept up till that is effected.”
The terms in which he thought and spoke of the Missouri matter suggest the depth of his feeling about it. Jefferson linked the question to one that had driven him for so long: that of the threat of monarchy. “The leaders of Federalism, defeated in their schemes of obtaining power by rallying partisans to the principle of monarchism … have changed their tack,” he said, and were now attempting to build political support by appealing to antislavery sentiment.
In the end Jefferson could see slavery only as tragedy. He may have believed it to be “a hideous blot,” as he wrote in September 1823, but it was not a blot he felt capable of erasing. The man who believed in the acquisition and wielding of power—political power, intellectual power, domestic power, and mastering life from the fundamental definition of human liberty in the modern world down to the smallest details of the wine he served and the flowers he planted—chose to consider himself powerless over the central economic and social fact of his life.
Writing to a correspondent who asked him to devise a way to free the slaves of Virginia, Jefferson demurred. “This, my dear sir,” Jefferson said, “is like bidding old Priam to buckle the armor of Hector.… This enterprise is for the young.… It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.”
Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson’s sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform. “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity,” he wrote in 1814, but that was not true. He was not willing to sacrifice his own way of life, though he characteristically left himself a rhetorical escape by introducing the subjective standard of practicability.
By his lights nothing other than a removal of blacks from the established United States would work—a removal that would have dwarfed even the removal of Indians from what was understood by Jefferson and so many of his contemporaries to be white America. Indians were to be unjustly driven across the Mississippi. Blacks would have to be dispatched no
t across a river but an ocean. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”
A multiracial society was beyond his imagination, except it was not beyond his experience, since he had created just such a society at Monticello. Mixed-race children such as those he had with Sally Hemings—children whom he saw every day, in his house, alongside his white family—suffered, in his general view, from an intrinsic “degradation” produced by the “amalgamation” of white and black.
How is it possible to explain the disorienting contradiction between his harsh views of “amalgamation” and his own paternity of such children? Perhaps Jefferson felt, as he often did, that if he were in control—which he was, in his eclectic domestic sphere—then he would be able to keep matters in hand. He felt this way about his debts, and he had felt this way about the country writ large when he was seeking and held the presidency. The human products of “amalgamation,” to use his term, were thought to be sources of chaos in the world beyond his own mountain. In his domain, though, he could have convinced himself that his centrality made Monticello the exception to what he supposed to be the rule in other realms.
Rendering moral judgments in retrospect can be hazardous. It is unfair to judge the past by the standards of the present. Yet we can assess a man’s views on a moral issue—which slavery unquestionably was—by what others in the same age and facing the same realities thought and did. Beginning with Robert Carter, the planter who freed his slaves in 1791, some Virginians of Jefferson’s class recognized that the blight of slavery had to go and did what was within their power by emancipating their slaves.
More broadly, the politicians of the North were steadily creating a climate in which antislavery rhetoric and sentiment could take root and thrive. The very fact of the debate over Missouri suggested that the antislavery forces were gathering strength—and were willing to use it. As important for a sophisticate such as Jefferson was the French view of the institution. He had lived in that world, and had presumably feared that the Hemingses, and particularly Sally Hemings, might have successfully sought their freedom while in France.
So it is not as though Jefferson lived in a time or in places where abolition was the remotest or most fanciful of prospects. It had not only been thought of but had been brought into being in his lifetime in lands he knew intimately. Jefferson was wrong about slavery, his attempts at reform at the beginning of his public life notwithstanding.
Here again, though, and in dramatic relief, we see that Jefferson the practical politician was a more powerful persona than Jefferson the moral theorist. He was driven by what he had once called, in a 1795 letter to Madison, “the Southern interest,” for the South was his personal home and his political base. He could not see a pragmatic way out of the conundrum, so he did what politicians often do: He suggested that the problem would be handled in the fullness of time—just not now. He did not believe full-scale colonization was feasible. “I do not say this to induce an inference that the getting rid of them is forever impossible,” he wrote in 1824. “For that is neither my opinion nor my hope. But only that it cannot be done in this way.”
Could it be done in any way? Jefferson did not know. “Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication,” he wrote in 1815, a point that reflects the sensibility of—as well as the sensitivities of—a vote counter accustomed to seeking popular approval for proposed courses of action.
“The march of events has not been such as to render its completion practicable within the limits of time allotted to me; and I leave its accomplishment as the work of another generation,” Jefferson wrote the reformer Frances Wright in 1825. “And I am cheered when I see that.… The abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.”
They just were not to be experiments he could undertake—an extremely rare case of the innovative, ever curious, inventive Jefferson refusing to engage in work he knew to be essential. And so he did what he almost never did: He gave up.
Personal debt was another enduring irony of Jefferson’s life. Planters of his time and place were often land rich and cash poor, borrowing heavily against their farms, their slaves, and their prospective crops. The need for ready money drove Jefferson, his father, and many of their contemporaries into the growing of tobacco, a cash crop that exhausted the soil but tended to command a greater price at market than wheat or other grains. As such, when tobacco was high, the Virginians made money; when tobacco was low, Virginians muddled along or lost money, depleting their land no matter how much cash came in. Thomas Jefferson tried to move away from tobacco at Monticello when he returned to Virginia in 1794, but he always grew the crop on his more distant plantations.
A confluence of factors kept Jefferson in debt. There was the gentry culture of his time. There were promissory notes to be signed for friends and family members. Most of all, there was the inherited debt. In an effort to pay it down, he sold inherited property worth £4,000, but skyrocketing inflation during the Revolutionary War made what was owed him under the land agreements worth “but a shadow”—while the debt remained, with the spiraling effect of accumulating interest.
Why would Jefferson, a man who sought power over men and events, concede his power to creditors and continue to incur debts when he was already so burdened? Part of the explanation may lie in his tendency, as he put it, to take things “by the smooth handle” and avoid difficult personal choices. It was always easier, it seemed, to sign another note and defer payment to another day, than it was to face a stark financial reckoning. Oddly, too, his innate sense of control and place may have enabled him to see debt as an abstract problem rather than a concrete one. He was part of a family and class in which borrowing money and mortgaging lands was as much a part of the culture as hospitality or hunting. The prospect of ruin was real but in Jefferson’s mind remote—or at least remote enough for him to allow his essential sense of security about his standing in society to trump fiscal discipline. Ironically, then, Jefferson’s feeling of power in general led him to sacrifice his power—and his family’s future—in particular. As with slavery, Jefferson’s capacity to live with contradiction was nothing less than epic.
The Missouri question made Jefferson even more eager to get on with the building of the University of Virginia, for he believed the rising generation of leaders should be trained at home, in climes hospitable to his view of the world, rather than sent north.
His had been a largely comfortable old age, particularly given the circumstances of the time. In his late seventies he was thought by a friend to look “as well as he did 10 years ago.”
That began to change in the 1820s. His wrist, injured in Paris in the late 1780s, grew worse, and he became ever more elegiac as the first years of the 1820s passed. Worried about Missouri, his wrist aching, he wrote to Adams on the first day of June 1822: “The papers tell us General Stark is off at the age of 93. Charles Thomson still lives at about the same age, cheerful, slender as a grasshopper, and so much without memory that he scarcely recognizes the members of his household. An intimate friend of his called on him not long since; it was difficult to make him recollect who he was, and, sitting one hour, he told him the same story four times over. Is this life? … It is at most but the life of a cabbage; surely not worth a wish.”
One day toward the end of 1822 he put a foot wrong at Monticello. A step down from a terrace gave way under his weight. He collapsed, struck the ground, and broke his left arm. It healed fairly well, but now both his right and left hands had been significantly injured. “During summer I enjoy its temperature,” Jefferson said, “but I shudder at the approach of winter, and wish I could sleep through it with the dormouse, and only wake with him in sprin
g, if ever.”
Jefferson had few doubts about his generation’s place in history. In a letter to John Adams introducing his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson said: “Like other young people he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.”
But he did worry about how history would treat the times in which he had lived and led. “We have been too careless of our future reputation, while our Tories will omit nothing to place us in the wrong,” he wrote Supreme Court justice William Johnson of South Carolina in 1823. Jefferson was contemptuous of John Marshall’s five-volume biography of George Washington, which he believed Federalist propaganda, and as the years went by he worried about works on Alexander Hamilton and on John Adams.
Besides the five-volumed libel which represents us as struggling for office, and not at all to prevent our government from being administered into a monarchy, the life of Hamilton is in the hands of a man who, to the bitterness of the priest, adds the rancor of the fiercest Federalism. Mr. Adams’ papers, too, and his biography, will descend of course to his son, whose pen, you know, is pointed, and his prejudices not in our favor. And doubtless other things are in preparation, unknown to us. On our part we are depending on truth to make itself known, while history is taking a contrary set which may become too inveterate for correction.
As he continued to grow older, he refused to surrender his independence. He would do as he wished. In May 1823, Jefferson was on his solitary daily ride. Crossing the Rivanna, his horse became “mired in the river,” a granddaughter wrote, and Jefferson, his legs tangled, fell into the current. His family was horrified, worrying that “he would inevitably have been drowned had not the rapidity of the current carried him down to a much shallower place, where by reaching the bottom of the river with his hand he was enabled to rise on his feet and get out.” He got soaked and his arm wound up in a sling, but he refused to accede to family demands that he give up his solitary rides. He had just turned eighty.