Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Learning Lee was on hand, Jefferson, lying in his bed, sent for the visitor anyway. “My emotions at approaching Jefferson’s dying bed I cannot describe,” Lee wrote. “You remember the alcove in which he slept. There he was extended, feeble, prostrate; but the fine and clear expression of his countenance not all obscured.” He recognized Lee and warmly offered his hand from the bed. “The energy of his grasp, and the spirit of his conversation, were such as to make me hope that he would yet rally—and that the superiority of mind over matter in his composition, would preserve him yet longer.”

  Jefferson could not help Lee as he had wished. He was too ill to locate the papers he had promised him that gave Jefferson’s side of the Arnold-Tarleton-Cornwallis story. He spoke of death in philosophical, even colloquial, terms. “He alluded to the probability of his death—as a man would to the prospect of being caught in a shower—as an event not to be desired, but not to be feared.”

  Lee noticed an intriguing detail. Jefferson waved any buzzing flies away from the alcove himself, taking charge of the operation without help from the party gathered around him.

  He wanted as much control as possible. “Mrs. Randolph afterwards told me this was his habit—that his plan was to fight old age off, by never admitting the approach of helplessness,” Lee wrote. After he left the bedroom for the main part of the house, Lee never laid eyes on Jefferson again.

  Jefferson’s rooms, ordinarily so private, filled as his strength ebbed. He said good-bye to his family, addressing each in turn. Of an eight-year-old grandson, he smiled and said, “George does not understand what all this means.” To a great-granddaughter he quoted the Gospel of Luke: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”

  Thomas Jefferson Randolph suggested he was looking better, but Jefferson would have none of it. “Do not imagine for a moment that I feel the smallest solicitude about the result,” Jefferson said. “I am like an old watch, with a pinion worn out here, and a wheel there, until it can go no longer.” He was nearing what he had once referred to as “that eternal sleep which, whether with or without dreams, awaits us hereafter.”

  He awoke to a noise and wondered whether he had heard the name of the Reverend Frederick Hatch, the rector of the parish. No, he was told. “I have no objection to see him, as a kind and good neighbor,” Jefferson said, turning over.

  He had composed a poem for Patsy, alluding to his imminent reunion with Patty and Polly, and enclosed the lines in a little casket she did not open until after he died.

  Life’s visions are vanished, its dreams are no more;

  Dear friends of my bosom, why bathed in tears?

  I go to my fathers, I welcome the shore

  Which crowns all my hopes or which buries my cares.

  Then farewell, my dear, my lov’d daughter, adieu!

  The last pang of life is in parting from you!

  Two seraphs await me long shrouded in death;

  I will bear them your love on my last parting breath.

  Lying in his alcove bed, Jefferson mused about the Revolution, telling stories of the great drama. The smallest details reminded him of the largest of struggles. His bed curtains, he noted, had come from the first postwar importations in 1782.

  In the chambers of his mind Jefferson may have been hurtling back into the past, hearing again the voices of the House of Burgesses or of the Pennsylvania State House or of Versailles or of the President’s House, but part of him remained firmly rooted in the present, somehow keeping track of time, willing himself to live to see, however dimly, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

  “A few hours more, Doctor, and it will be all over,” he said at one point, only to rally.

  At five forty-five p.m. on the second, he took laudanum in grog. He was given tea three hours later and brandy four hours after that. He slept fitfully as the clock tinged.

  Then, on the evening of the third, at about seven p.m., he asked Dunglison, “Ah! Doctor, are you still there?” Jefferson’s central concern, though, was time: “Is it the Fourth?”

  “It soon will be,” Dunglison replied.

  Jefferson took what would be his last dose of laudanum, muttering “Oh God!”

  Two hours later, at nine p.m., Dunglison woke him for more medicine.

  “No, Doctor, nothing more,” Jefferson said.

  The remaining three hours passed with agonizing slowness. Jefferson woke late on the night of the third and said, in questioning voice, “This is the Fourth?” Nicholas Trist remained silent, for it was not. Jefferson spoke again. “This is the Fourth?” He would not be stymied. Trist could not bring himself to disappoint the old man, and lied by nodding that yes, it was indeed the Fourth. “Ah,” said Jefferson. “Just as I wished.”

  Perhaps he knew, somehow, that it was not, in fact, the anniversary of his declaration, at least not quite yet, and so Jefferson fought on, breathing still.

  At last the clock above Jefferson’s bed tinged twelve times, ushering in the Fourth of July.

  Drifting in and out of consciousness, Jefferson appeared to dream of ancient crises met and overcome, murmuring about the Revolutionary Committee of Safety and gesturing as if he were writing. “Warn the Committee to be on the alert,” he said. He was dwelling on danger. In his last hours he was still struggling to defend the American cause, if only in his flickering imagination.

  At four o’clock in the morning, he gave the attending slaves some directions. The final words of a man whose first memory was of being handed up to a slave on a pillow were addressed to his slaves. For a man who had worked for, and witnessed, so much change, in the end some things were as they were in the beginning.

  At ten he stirred and stared at a grandson, trying but failing to signal what he wanted. It was Burwell Colbert who interpreted the glance correctly. Jefferson wanted his head elevated; the butler arranged him as he wished. An hour later he was moving his parched lips but saying nothing. Much to his evident relief, a grandson lifted a wet sponge to Jefferson’s mouth.

  It was over. At ten minutes before one o’clock on Tuesday, July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died in his bed, three miles from Shadwell, where he had been born a subject of the British Empire eight decades before.

  He died with his eyes open, his gaze fixed on his beloved alcove, his shelter from the storms of a world in which he had long warred, often triumphed, and always loved.

  Thomas Jefferson Randolph touched his grandfather’s cooling skin, gently closing the great man’s eyes. Nicholas Trist quietly clipped a few small locks of his still-sandy hair, relics for the family. The wooden coffin built by John Hemings was made ready. The body was transferred to it, and the coffin was taken to the parlor to rest in state.

  To me he has been more than a father, and I have ever loved and reverenced him with my whole heart,” Dabney Carr, Jr., wrote Nicholas Trist a week later. A grieving James Madison wrote Trist: “He lives and will live in the memory and gratitude of the wise and the good, as a luminary of science, as a votary of liberty, as a model of patriotism, and as a benefactor of humankind.” The professor of ancient languages at the University of Virginia said: “He ought to be revered by all who enjoy the advantage of being educated in his University, and ever remembered as one of the great men whom Virginia has produced. His great deeds are recorded in the epitaph which he wrote for his own tomb.”

  Wormley Hughes, the gardener, dug Jefferson’s grave on the western side of the mountain. The weather had been wet when the funeral party gathered inside Monticello for Jefferson’s final journey. The mourners were few. Jefferson had not wanted a large service, and a delegation from the university in Charlottesville got a late start, missing much of the final rites.

  A small group of family, friends, and slaves escorted the wooden coffin down the hill from the house. The Reverend Hatch read the burial office over the
grave.

  The service was conducted from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord,” Hatch read, “ ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.’ ”

  The promise of Paris was honored. In his life and in his will Jefferson had kept his word to Sally Hemings. Of the four children of Jefferson and Sally’s who survived to adulthood, Beverly and Harriet had been allowed to leave Monticello in the early 1820s, and both are said to have lived as whites. According to their son Madison Hemings, “Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City.… She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived or lives.” Madison was freed in Jefferson’s will and moved to Ohio, as did Eston, who eventually settled in Wisconsin and changed his name to Eston Jefferson and declared himself to be white. Both were carpenter-joiners and farmers. In his will Jefferson also freed three other members of the Hemings family: Burwell Colbert, John Hemings, and Joe Fossett. Jefferson freed no other slaves—only Hemingses.

  Sally Hemings herself, now fifty-three years old, soon moved to Charlottesville and lived without incident as a free woman. Jefferson did not name her in his will, yet there is evidence that his wishes may have been implicitly clear to Patsy and his heirs: Sally Hemings was to be treated with respect. In 1834, Patsy gave Sally Hemings “her time”—an unofficial emancipation, and Sally had been free in fact since Jefferson’s death. In time—Sally died in 1835—she bequeathed some mementos of Jefferson to her children: a pair of his glasses, an inkwell, and a shoe buckle.

  Jefferson’s tenuous hold on life had been the only thing keeping his heavily indebted plantations from his creditors. The lottery he had hoped would rescue his affairs died with him. When Jefferson died, he owed creditors, in early twenty-first-century terms, between $1 million and $2 million—so much that Monticello and his slaves had to be sold. Jefferson’s ideas and his public work endured. His personal world did not.

  Six hundred miles away, John Adams, ninety years old, had died on the same day as Jefferson, also at home in bed, a coincidence the incumbent president, John Quincy Adams, called “visible and palpable marks of Divine Favor, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe.” Preparing a eulogy to deliver at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Daniel Webster wrote his remarks one morning before breakfast, later recalling that when he was done “my paper was wet with my tears.” On a beautiful day in Boston, with President Adams in the hall, Webster painted an indelible portrait of Jefferson’s and Adams’s ascent to the American pantheon: “On our fiftieth anniversary, the great day of national jubilee, in the very hour of public rejoicing, in the midst of echoing and reechoing voices of thanksgiving, while their own names were on all tongues, they took their flight together to the world of spirits.”

  On his own deathbed some of John Adams’s final words were said to be about his old rival and friend: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

  And so he does.

  EPILOGUE

  ALL HONOR TO JEFFERSON

  Jefferson’s principles are sources of light because they are not made up of pure reason, but spring out of aspiration, impulse, vision, sympathy. They burn with the fervor of the heart.

  —WOODROW WILSON, 1912

  HE SURVIVES AS HE LIVED—in many ways and in many different lights. In the immediate aftermath of his death he was, together with Adams, recognized chiefly for the Revolution of 1776, the virtues of which were beyond dispute in the American mind. “To have been the instrument of expressing, in one brief, decisive act, the concentrated will and resolution of a whole family of states,” said Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts in an 1826 eulogy, “of unfolding, in one all-important manifesto, the causes, the motives, and the justification of the great movement in human affairs … this is the glory of Thomas Jefferson.”

  Jefferson’s finished work was the creation of an imperfect but lasting democratic habit of mind and heart. “Mr. Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail,” wrote the historian Henry Adams. “Mr. Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.”

  Ellen Wayles Coolidge was en route from Boston to Charlottesville when the news of her grandfather’s death reached her in New York. She arrived at Monticello long after the funeral was over. To her, the place that had been home for so long was now a foreign land. “He was gone,” she wrote Henry Randall many years later, recalling the pain of her return. “His place was empty. I visited his grave, but the whole house at Monticello, with its large apartments and lofty ceilings, appeared to me one vast monument.”

  Such was the power of Jefferson, though, that Ellen expected him to appear to her at any moment—to hear his voice, to look into his eyes, to feel his touch once more. “I wandered about the vacant rooms as if I were looking for him,” she said.

  Had I not seen him there all the best years of my life? … I passed hours in his chamber. It was just as he had left it. There was the bed on which he had slept for so many years—the chair in which, when I entered the room, I always found him sitting—articles of dress still in their places—his clock by which he had told so many useful hours—In the cabinet adjoining were his books, the beloved companions of his leisure—his writing table from which I gathered some small relics, memoranda and scraps of written paper which I still preserve. All seemed as if he had just quitted the rooms and there were moments when I felt as if I expected his return.

  She was in a curiously dreamlike state.

  For days I started at what seemed the sound of his step or his voice, and caught myself listening for both. In the dining room where, in winter, we passed a good deal of time, there was the low arm chair which he always occupied by the fireside, with his little round table still standing as when it held his book or his candle.… In the tea-room was the sofa where, in summer, I had so often sat by his side—In the large parlor, with its parquet floor, stood the Campeachy chair … where, in the shady twilight, I was used to see him resting. In the great Hall, with its large glass doors, where, in bad weather, he liked to walk, how much I liked to walk with him!—Everything told of him. An invisible presence seemed everywhere to preside!

  Finally she left the house, and the estate, never to return. Her grandfather lived, for her, in her heart and mind.

  And in her nation’s. Like his grieving granddaughter in the summer of 1826, Americans have never quite let Jefferson go. “If Jefferson was wrong,” wrote the biographer James Parton in 1874, “America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.”

  That is a remarkable burden to put on any one man or any one vision of politics, but the observation resonates because in death Jefferson remains much as he was in life: a vivid, engaging, breathing figure, brilliant and eloquent, at once monumental and human. It is difficult to imagine having a glass of claret with George Washington at Mount Vernon and talking of many things; it seems the most natural thing in the world to imagine doing so with Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, surrounded by paintings from France and busts from Philadelphia and artifacts from the dazzling world of the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

  Jefferson speaks to us now because he spoke so powerfully and evocatively to us then. His circumstances were particular, yet the general issues that consumed him are constant: liberty and power, rights and responsibilities, the keeping of peace and the waging of war. He was a politician, a public man, in a nation in which politics and public life became—and remain—so central. As Jefferson wrote, “Man … feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election, one day in the year,
but every day.”

  Had he been only a philosopher he would not have endured as he does. Had he been only a legislator, or only a diplomat, or only an inventor, or only an author, or only an educator, or even only a president he would not have endured as he does.

  He endures because we can see in him all the varied and wondrous possibilities of the human experience—the thirst for knowledge, the capacity to create, the love of family and of friends, the hunger for accomplishment, the applause of the world, the marshaling of power, the bending of others to one’s own vision. His genius lay in his versatility; his larger political legacy in his leadership of thought and of men.

  With his brilliance and his accomplishment and his fame he is immortal. Yet because of his flaws and his sins and his failures he strikes us as mortal, too—a man of achievement who was nonetheless susceptible to the temptations and compromises that ensnare all of us. He was not all he could be. But no politician—no human being—ever is.

  We sense his greatness because we know that perfection in politics is not possible but that Jefferson passed the fundamental test of leadership: Despite all his shortcomings and all the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred, he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.

  Jefferson is the founding president who charms us most. George Washington inspires awe; John Adams respect. With his grace and hospitality, his sense of taste and love of beautiful things—of silver and art and architecture and gardening and food and wine—Jefferson is more alive, more convivial.

  Nineteenth-century secessionists and twentieth-century states’-rights purists have found him a hero; progressive leaders from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Truman have believed him to embody the best impulses in the American tradition of popular government.