Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  In October 1823 he answered a letter of President Monroe’s seeking counsel on whether the United States should join with England to oppose Spanish efforts to retain Madrid’s South American colonies, which were in revolt. The real issue, Jefferson replied, was more general than particular: How should the United States think of European adventurism in its hemisphere?

  “The question presented by the letters you have sent me is the most momentous which has ever been offered to my contemplation since that of Independence,” Jefferson wrote Monroe. “Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second—never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with [cross]-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own.”

  The doctrine that bears Monroe’s name—that the United States opposes all European intervention in the Western Hemisphere—owes much to the work of Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who was instrumental in the formulation of the policy. But it was also at least partly of Jeffersonian inspiration. In Jefferson’s case, it was fitting that a man who had spent his life in pursuit of control would extend it as far as he could in the service of his nation, leaving a kind of last declaration of independence. This time it was a matter of policy, not of revolution. It was a declaration all the same.

  In the 1824 presidential election, Jefferson saw anew that the Founders’ dream of the end of party was still a dream, something that might come true in the future but surely not in the present. Writing Lafayette, Jefferson said, “You are not to believe that these two parties are amalgamated, that the lion and the lamb are lying down together. The Hartford Convention, the victory of Orleans, the peace of Ghent, prostrated the name of Federalism. Its votaries abandoned it through shame and mortification; and now call themselves Republicans. But the name alone is changed, the principles are the same.”

  The presidential field was unusually large in 1824. There was John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts; Henry Clay of Kentucky; John C. Calhoun of South Carolina; William Crawford of Georgia; and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. The race in part represented a generational shift. Jackson had been born the year Jefferson began his law practice and had been a fourteen-year-old prisoner of war in 1781, the year Jefferson escaped from Tarleton at Monticello.

  Jefferson favored Crawford, a veteran of Madison’s and Monroe’s cabinets. The Georgian suffered a stroke in late 1823, however, and the election was ultimately decided in the House of Representatives in February 1825. Though Jackson won the most popular votes, Adams was chosen in the House after Clay, who was to become Adams’s secretary of state, gave his support to Adams. (Jackson’s charges of a “corrupt bargain” would fuel his own ambitions to avenge his defeat in 1828, which he did.)

  Arriving at Monticello in a procession of trumpets and banners, Lafayette stepped out of his carriage on a brilliant autumn day in November 1824 at the East Front of the house. Lafayette, now sixty-seven years old, had come to America for a triumphant farewell tour, a living monument (like Adams and Jefferson) to days that seemed ever more glorious and distant.

  Finally stooped with age in his eighty-first year, Jefferson walked toward his guest. They embraced without embarrassment, two old revolutionaries who had seen the best and the worst of their times and of their countries.

  “My dear Jefferson!” said the guest.

  “My dear Lafayette!” replied the host.

  They had not laid eyes on each other for more than thirty years, and Jefferson was graciously determined to honor Lafayette not only for the Frenchman’s services to the Revolutionary cause but to the cause of the young nation during Jefferson’s years in France.

  At a banquet in Lafayette’s honor in Charlottesville, Jefferson drafted a toast to be read:

  His deeds in the war of independence you have heard and read. They are known to you and embalmed in your memories, and in the pages of faithful history. His deeds in the peace which followed that war are perhaps not known to you; but I can attest them. When I was stationed in his country … [h]e made our cause his own.… His influence and connections there were great. All doors of all departments were open to him at all times; to me, only formally and at appointed times. In truth, I only held the nail, he drove it. Honor him, then, as your benefactor in peace, as well as in war.

  There was a benedictory quality to Jefferson’s toast, a broader message to his countrymen there and far beyond, for he knew his words would be published and read everywhere.

  Born and bred among your fathers, led by their partiality into the line of public life, I labored in fellowship with them through that arduous struggle which, freeing us from foreign bondage, established us in the rights of self-government; rights which have blessed ourselves, and will bless, in their sequence, all the nations of the earth.

  In a particular place, a universal theme: In old age Jefferson was the Jefferson of youth, a man who honored the work of politics, the comradeship of service, and the ideas that drove flawed men to fight for causes larger than themselves.

  As Jefferson aged he retained his conversational skill of speaking of topics of special interest to his companion of the moment. When those were exhausted, he would muse widely about the past and the future. He was always gracious. “In conversation, Mr. Jefferson is easy and natural, and apparently not ambitious; it is not loud, as challenging general attention, but usually addressed to the person next to him,” Daniel Webster wrote of an 1824 stay at Monticello. Jefferson spoke of “science and letters, and especially the University of Virginia, which is coming into existence almost entirely from his exertions.… When we were with him, his favorite subjects were Greek and Anglo-Saxon, historical recollections of the times and events of the Revolution, and of his residence in France from 1783–4 to 1789.”

  A New Englander, Webster was unhappy about the rise of Andrew Jackson in the West. Jefferson apparently shared at least some of Webster’s fears. “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President,” Jefferson said, according to Webster. “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws or constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible.”

  On reading Webster’s account, the biographer Henry Randall wondered about its accuracy, and put the question to a grandchild, who replied:

  I cannot pretend to know what my grandfather said to Mr. Webster, nor can I believe Mr. Webster capable of misstatement. Still I think the copy of the portrait incorrect, as throwing out all the lights and giving only the shadows. I have heard my grandfather speak with great admiration of General Jackson’s military talent. If he called him a “dangerous man,” “unfit for the place” to which the nation eventually called him, I think it must have been entirely with reference to his general idea that a military chieftain was no proper head for a peaceful republic as ours was in those days.… He did not like to see the people run away with ideas of military glory.

  As always, Jefferson was in significant debt, yet he had, as a favor to a friend, cosigned a note for $20,000 for Virginia governor Wilson Cary Nicholas in 1819. It was the act of a gentleman and a kinsman: a Nicholas daughter had married a Jefferson grandson.

  Nicholas was forced to default on the note, leaving the former president responsible for the debt. On the granddaughter-in-law’s first call at Monticello since news of the disaster, Jefferson took care to seek her out. Abashed and horrified by the news, she was unsure how to conduct herself around Jefferson. When he emerged from his rooms, he immediately called for her. “She heard his voice and flew to meet him,” Henry Randall wrote. “Instead of the usual hearty hand-shake and kiss, he folded her in his arms. His smile was radiant.” At dinner he spoke with her with great grace; the shame the young woman had felt disappeared. “Neither then nor on any subsequent occasion,” wrote Randall, “did he ever by a
word or look make her aware that he was even conscious of the misfortune her father had brought upon him.”

  Governor Nicholas himself lived along the route Jefferson traveled to Poplar Forest, and Jefferson knew he could not fail to call on him. “I ought not to stop; I have not time; but it would be cruel to pass him,” Jefferson said to a family member as they turned off the road toward Nicholas’s place. Meeting his old friend, Jefferson behaved perfectly. “He showed no depression, and did not make an equal exposure of his feelings by feigning extraordinary cheerfulness,” wrote Randall. For the rest of Nicholas’s life, Jefferson treated him as though nothing had happened. A busybody lady once spoke meanly of Nicholas in Jefferson’s presence at Monticello, and the former president cut her off politely but firmly. He had, he told her, “the highest opinion of Governor Nicholas, and felt the deepest sympathy for his misfortunes.” Such was the private character of the man whose public enemies accused him of selfishness, duplicity, inordinate ambition, and cold-bloodedness.

  The debilitating burden of debt facing Jefferson forced him to do what he liked least in the world: put himself in the hands of others. The market was bad, and so traditional routes of raising capital—finding buyers for his land—were out. Then inspiration struck. He had been, Patsy said, “lying awake one night from painful thoughts” when he conceived the notion of holding a lottery. In an appeal to the General Assembly of Virginia, he sought permission to sell tickets in exchange for chances at his lands, mills, and—to his horror—Monticello itself, if his debts were to be retired. However devastating to his pride this would be, he had no other choice. His grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph was in charge of the arrangements.

  The former president was in a valedictory frame of mind. Asked to send counsel to a young namesake, he composed a significantly longer letter than he tended to write at this point. The subject engaged him, however, and always had: How to live a virtuous life? “Adore God,” he wrote. “Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.”

  There was more: a paraphrased version of Psalm 15.

  THE PORTRAIT OF A GOOD MAN BY THE MOST SUBLIME OF POETS, FOR YOUR IMITATION.

  Lord, who’s the happy man that may to thy blest courts repair;

  Not stranger-like to visit them, but to inhabit there?

  ’Tis he whose every thought and deed by rules of virtue moves;

  Whose generous tongue disdains to speak the thing his heart disproves.

  Who never did a slander forge, his neighbor’s fame to wound;

  Nor hearken to a false report, by malice whispered round.

  Who vice in all its pomp and power, can treat with just neglect;

  And piety, though clothed in rags, religiously respect.

  Who to his plighted vows and trust has ever firmly stood;

  And though he promise to his loss, he makes his promise good.

  Whose soul in usury disdains his treasure to employ;

  Whom no rewards can ever bribe the guiltless to destroy.

  The man who by this steady course has happiness insur’d,

  When earth’s foundations shake, shall stand, by Providence secur’d.

  And there was yet more.

  A DECALOGUE OF CANONS FOR OBSERVATION IN PRACTICAL LIFE.

  1.Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

  2.Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

  3.Never spend your money before you have it.

  4.Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

  5.Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

  6.We never repent of having eaten too little.

  7.Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

  8.How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

  9.Take things always by their smooth handle.

  10.When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

  In a bizarre episode in his last years, history almost killed him. A New York artist arrived at Monticello to take a plaster cast of Jefferson’s face—a life mask. Something went wrong, however, and the plaster almost suffocated him; only by banging a chair next to the sofa on which he lay did Jefferson manage to alert his butler Burwell Colbert to his plight. His life was saved, as his life had been shaped, by the act of a slave.

  Musing about abolition—and presumably repatriation—in the fading spring, he wrote: “The revolution in public opinion which this cause requires, is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps in an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.”

  His health had been deteriorating since the first day of 1826. “It is now three weeks since a re-ascerbation of my painful complaint [a severe attack of diarrhea] has confined me to the house and indeed my couch,” Jefferson wrote a friend in Richmond on January 1, 1826. “Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.… Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.” Still, he refused to give up riding, even though he had to mount his horse Eagle by putting the horse on a terrace below and lowering himself into the saddle.

  With the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming in the summer of 1826, organizers of the Washington celebrations were eager to bring Jefferson back to the capital for the day. He was too ill to consider it, but in his sun-filled cabinet he drafted a letter to commemorate the occasion. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man,” he wrote. “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

  These were to be his last words to the nation he had helped found, and which he had led through so much for. His farewell to Madison, his friend of half a century, was more personal but as heartfelt. “Take care of me when dead,” Jefferson asked in a letter to his old friend in February.

  Still, he was not expecting an imminent death. After dispatching his letter about liberty to the Fourth of July commemoration in Washington, Jefferson wrote another on a different passion: wine, making arrangements to pay the customs collector at Baltimore the tax on an incoming shipment.

  He would not live to drink it. Soon Jefferson was confined to his bed. He continued to read, browsing through the Bible, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, musing on the great tragedians as time and illness finally caught up with him in the last days of June.

  The end was at hand.

  FORTY-THREE

  NO, DOCTOR, NOTHING MORE

  The loss of Mr. Jefferson is one over which the whole world will mourn. He was one of those ornaments and benefactors of the human race, whose death forms an epoch, and creates a sensation throughout the whole circle of civilized man.

  —Thomas Jefferson’s nephew DABNEY CARR, JR.

  ON SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1826, Jefferson painfully put pen to paper to ask Dr. Robley Dunglison to call. Dunglison left Charlottesville as soon as he received the note. When he arrived, he found Jefferson had forced himself from his bedroom into the parlor, as though to greet him in the old ordinary way.

  Dunglison put him back in bed. The doctor said he was “apprehensive that the attack would prove fatal. Nor did Mr. Jefferson himself indulge in any other opinion. From this time his strength gradually diminished and h
e had to remain in bed.”

  Jefferson now marshaled his will toward the realization of one last mission: He wanted to survive until the Fourth of July.

  As he lay dying, his daughter sat with him during the day. Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Nicholas Trist kept watch in the nights. Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., the man who had been his son-in-law since moments after the return from Paris more than thirty years before, stayed away. “His mind was always clear—it never wandered,” his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph said. “He conversed freely, and gave directions as to his private affairs.”

  Jefferson told his grandson what he wanted done about his coffin and his burial. There was to be nothing showy or grand. He would take his leave of the world with a simple Episcopal service and be laid to rest in the cemetery on the western slope of Monticello where he had interred Dabney Carr so many decades before—and then his mother, and then his wife.

  Henry Lee, son of Light-Horse Harry Lee, called on Jefferson in the last days of June. Lee was on a mission: He was editing a new edition of his father’s Memoirs of the War, a book that treated Jefferson’s wartime governorship in an unfavorable light. Even in extremis, Jefferson could not resist one more chance to revise the history of those days. He invited Lee into his sick chamber on Thursday, June 29, 1826.

  At Monticello, Patsy stopped Lee in the main part of the house. Her father was simply too sick to see him, she said. Saddened, Lee reflected that he was “never more to behold the venerable man, who had entered all the walks of politics and philosophy, and in all was foremost—and to whom the past, and the present, and all future ages are, and will be, so much indebted.”