Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Many archives and libraries were welcoming and helpful. In particular I am grateful to Del Moore, reference librarian, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Library, Colonial Williamsburg, and to Katherine A. Ludwig at the David Library of the American Revolution. The New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library were critical resources. At the New York Public Library, I am especially indebted to the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History, and Genealogy. The general holdings of the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building, their microfilm collection, and other NYPL branches were also invaluable, as was the staff of the Jessie Ball duPont Library at the University of the South. Also thanks to the staffs of the David Library of the American Revolution; Library and Archives Canada; Archives of Ontario; the Loyalist Collection, University of New Brunswick; and the Devon Record Office, Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom.

  In France, Melissa Lo and Tom Stammers worked in the diplomatic archives and translated those manuscripts for me; Melissa also undertook archival work in England, along with Louisa Thomas. I am also grateful to Jamie Johnston, Matthew Price, Caitlin Watson, Baobao Zhang, and Jessica Gallagher for their work transcribing manuscript sources. In the Senate Historical Office, I am again grateful to historian Donald A. Ritchie and to his colleague Betty Koed.

  Of the making of books about Jefferson there will be no end, and that’s a very good thing. Readers seeking an intelligent, accessible, and thorough survey of the current state of Jefferson scholarship will find it in the essays collected by editor Francis D. Cogliano in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, a 2012 volume published as one of the Blackwell Companions to American History. Frank Cogliano has been welcoming and generous to me, and the book he edited is invaluable. Contributors include Annette Gordon-Reed, Michael A. McDonnell, Kristofer Ray, Robert G. Parkinson, Peter Thompson, John A. Ragosta, Johann N. Neem, Iain McLean, Todd Estes, Joanne B. Freeman, Robert M. S. McDonald, Jeremy D. Bailey, Leonard J. Sadosky, Andrew Burstein, Andrew Cayton, Lucia Stanton, Cassandra Pybus, Catherine Kerrison, Billy L. Wayson, Richard Samuelson, Kevin J. Hayes, David Thomas Konig, Hannah Spahn, Caroline Winterer, Peter S. Onuf, R. B. Bernstein, Max M. Edling, Cameron Addis, Matthew E. Crow, Barbara B. Oberg and James P. McClure, Brian Steele, and Jack N. Rakove.

  For their counsel and friendship, I am grateful to historians and biographers who kindly took the great trouble to advise me on different points. Evan Thomas and Michael Beschloss are eternally generous with me, as are Oscie Thomas and Affie Beschloss.

  Annette Gordon-Reed, whose work on Jefferson and the Hemings family is a landmark contribution to American history, has been a wonderful friend and invaluable reader. Susan Kern, the author of a remarkable book on Jefferson’s origins, The Jeffersons at Shadwell, graciously spent a morning with me on the Shadwell site and read parts of the manuscript. Lucia “Cinder” Stanton arranged that visit, and so much else. Gordon S. Wood, a longtime hero of mine, generously read the manuscript and offered valuable insights.

  At Monticello, both Cinder Stanton and Susan Stein read and commented on the manuscript, improving it greatly. Peter Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia and mentor to a generation or two of scholars of Jefferson and of American history, read my draft carefully and made helpful comments, rescuing me, as did my other readers, from mistakes. Professor Onuf also offered this book a benediction when it was done, something for which I will be always grateful.

  In 2012, I was fortunate to be invited to a conference hosted in Charlottesville by the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. Entitled “Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biography as a Construction of History,” the gathering was fittingly dedicated to Onuf. For their roles in organizing and directing the conference, I am grateful to Andrew O’Shaughnessy, the Saunders Director of the International Center and a longtime friend; to Robert McDonald of West Point; and to Joseph W. Dooley of the SAR. The papers presented were intriguing and illuminating, and I learned much from them, and from a roundtable discussion moderated by Barbara Oberg. Professor McDonald, who also presented a paper co-authored by Christine Coalwell McDonald, is preparing a volume of the papers. Contributors include Jefferson Looney, Andrew Burstein, Nancy Isenberg, Joanne B. Freeman, Jan Ellen Lewis, Richard A. Samuelson, Brian Steele, Herbert Sloan, Annette Gordon-Reed, Frank Cogliano, R. B. Bernstein, and Gordon S. Wood.

  Walter Isaacson, Henry Wiencek, Pauline Maier, Ron Chernow, Joseph J. Ellis, Daniel Jordan, Sean Wilentz, David McCullough, Andrew Burstein, Nancy Isenberg, Stacy Schiff, Robert A. Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gary E. Moulton, and the late Christopher Hitchens were selfless readers, advisers, interlocutors, and editors along the way. The responsibility for the book, of course, lies with me.

  For kindnesses large and small, thanks to Richard and Lisa Plepler, Jonathan Karp, John Huey, Julia Reed, May Smythe, Mark Miller, Clara Bingham, Anna Quindlen, Tom Brokaw, Perri Peltz and Eric Ruttenberg, Graydon Carter, John Danforth, Gardiner and Nicholas Lapham, Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough, Willie Geist, Mike Barnicle, Ann Edelberg, Alex Korson, Cate Cetta, Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, Linda and Mort Janklow, Alice Mayhew, Richard Stengel, Nancy Gibbs, Jane and Brian Williams, Jeffrey Leeds, Claire and John Reishman, Leslie and Dale Richardson, Hardwick Caldwell III, Tammy Haddad, Chloe Dupree, Barbara DiVittorio, Bill Owens, Jeffrey Fager, Rebecca Pratt, George Gilliam, Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., Kitty Boone, Betsy Fischer, David Gregory, Neal Shapiro, Alison Stewart, Wayne Fields, Lenora Fisher, Richard Cohen, Robley Hood, Ruby Walker, Shaima Ally, Madeline Magee, Roger Hertog, and Donna Pahmeyer and her colleagues at the University Book and Supply Store.

  Once again I am indebted to my friend Mike Hill, who was as invaluable and gracious as ever. Louisa Thomas was indispensable, and I am looking forward to her book about Louisa Catherine Adams. (I am sure it will be quite kind about Jefferson.) Jack Bales once again worked his bibliographical magic. My thanks to Christine Mejia for her grace and hard work, and to Rob Crawford, who played a critical role in checking the manuscript. Lucy Shackelford also checked a final draft.

  This is my fifth book with Random House, and I continue to be dazzled by, and grateful for, Gina Centrello. Her intelligence, friendship, and support are without peer. My editor, Kate Medina, is a master of the craft, and her impeccably high standards inspire those of us lucky enough to benefit from her wisdom. Thanks, too, to Anna Pitoniak and Lindsey Schwoeri for their steadfast grace and good work. Will Murphy was a generous reader. Susan Kamil and Tom Perry are terrific, and they lead a wonderful publication team. As ever, I am indebted to the erratic but charming Sally Marvin and to Barbara Fillon. Thanks also to Benjamin Steinberg, Jonathan Jao, Andy Ward, Allison Dobson, Bill Takes, Porscha Burke, Selby McRae, Sara Velazquez, Sanyu Dillon, Avideh Bashirrad, Erika Greber, Carole Lowenstein, Paolo Pepe, and Carol Poticny, who once again worked artistic magic. Michelle Daniel was a superb copy editor. In my view, had the incomparable Benjamin Dreyer and Dennis Ambrose been in charge of Operation Overlord, the Allies would have braved the rain and stuck to schedule, attacking on June 5. As it is, I am grateful they do what they do, and do it so well. And as ever, I agree with Christopher Buckley’s view that Amanda Urban will be my first call if I ever fall into the hands of the Taliban.

  This book is dedicated to Herbert Wentz, my teacher and friend. I owe him and his wife, Sofia, debts I cannot possibly repay.

  My wife, Keith, has long endured my journeys into the past, offering love, support, and (not always initially welcome) counsel. She makes all things possible, and our children—Mary, Maggie, and Sam—are, now and forever, the things that matter most.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS USED

  Anas The Complete Anas of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank B. Sawvel

  APE, I Gil Troy, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Fred L. Israel, eds. History of American Presidential Elections,
1789–2008. 4th ed. Vol. 1, 1789–1868.

  EOL Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815

  FB Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book: With Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings, ed. Edwin Morris Betts

  GB Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book 1766–1824: With Relevant Extracts from His Other Writings, ed. Edwin Morris Betts

  Henry Adams, History Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson

  Jefferson,Writings Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Library of America)

  JHT, I–VI Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time

  LOC Library of Congress

  MB, I–II Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, ed. James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton

  Parton,Life James Parton, Life of Thomas Jefferson

  PTJ, I–XXXVIII The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

  PTJRS, I–VIII The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Retirement Series

  Randall, Jefferson, I–III Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson

  TDLTJ Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson

  TJ Thomas Jefferson

  TJF The Thomas Jefferson Foundation

  VTM Merrill D. Peterson, Visitors to Monticello

  EPIGRAPHS

  “A FEW BROAD STROKES” Henry Adams, History, 188.

  “I THINK THIS IS THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY” John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere,” April 29, 1962. Online, by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8623 (accessed 2012).

  PROLOGUE · THE WORLD’S BEST HOPE

  HE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT TJ to Vine Utley, March 21, 1819, LOC. Extract published at Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Digital Archive, www.monticello.org/familyletters (accessed 2011). “But whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun,” he wrote Utley. (Ibid.) “He said in his last illness that the sun had not caught him in bed for fifty years,” grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph recalled to the biographer Henry S. Randall. (Randall, Jefferson, III, 675.) Visiting Monticello in December 1824, when Jefferson was eighty-one, Daniel Webster wrote: “Mr. Jefferson rises in the morning as soon as he can see the hands of his clock, which is directly opposite his bed, and examines his thermometer immediately, as he keeps a regular meteorological diary.” (VTM, 98.)

  LEAN AND LOOSE-LIMBED Margaret Bayard Smith thought him “tall and slender.” (The First Forty Years of Washington Society in the Family Letters of Margaret Bayard Smith, ed. Gaillard Hunt [New York, 1965], 80.) In 1760, Jefferson was, James Parton wrote, “tall, raw-boned, freckled, and sandy-haired.… With his large feet and hands, his thick wrists, and prominent cheek-bones and chin, he could not have been accounted handsome or graceful. He is described, however, as a fresh, bright, healthy-looking youth, as straight as a gun-barrel, sinewy and strong, with that alertness of movement which comes of early familiarity with saddle, gun, canoe, minuet, and contra-dance.… His teeth, too, were perfect.… His eyes, which were of hazel-gray, were beaming and expressive; and his demeanor gave assurance of a gentle heart, and a sympathetic, inquisitive mind.” (Parton, Life, 1.) For a collection of contemporary accounts of Jefferson’s physical appearance and demeanor, see TJF, “Physical Descriptions of Jefferson,” http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/physical-descriptions-jefferson (accessed 2011). “This sandy face, with hazel eyes and sunny aspect; this loose, shackling person; this rambling and often brilliant conversation, belonged to the controlling influences of American history, more necessary to the story than three-fourths of the official papers, which only hid the truth,” wrote Henry Adams, the unflinching but sometimes appreciative historian of the Jefferson presidency. “Jefferson’s personality during these eight years appeared to be the government, and impressed itself, like that of Bonaparte, although by a different process, on the mind of the nation.” (Henry Adams, History, 127.)

  CONRAD AND MCMUNN’S Allen C. Clark, “Daniel Rapine, the Second Mayor,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 25 (1923), 198. See also MB, II, 1032.

  A BASIN OF COLD WATER PTJRS, VIII, 544. “I have for 50 years bathed my feet in cold water every morning … and having been remarkably exempt from colds (not having had one in every 7 years of my life on an average) I have supposed it might be ascribed to that practice,” Jefferson wrote James Maury. “When we see two facts accompanying one another for a long time, we are apt to suppose them related as cause and effect.” (Ibid.) See also Gordon Jones and James A. Bear, “Thomas Jefferson’s Medical History,” unpublished manuscript, Jefferson Library. Jones and Bear attributed Jefferson’s habit to a reading of Sir John Floyer’s popular book Psychrolousia: Or, the History of Cold Bathing; Jefferson owned a 1706 edition of the work. (Ibid.) For details on Floyer, see D. D. Gibbs, “Sir John Floyer, M.D. (1649–1734),” British Medical Journal 1, no. 5638 (1969): 242–45.

  WORE A GROOVE Susan R. Stein, “Notes on Jefferson’s Bed Chamber,” memorandum to author, November 10, 2011. Stein is Richard Gilder Senior Curator and Vice President of Museum Programs, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The groove is on the side of Jefferson’s bed facing the fireplace. (Author observation.)

  SIX FOOT TWO AND A HALF James A. Bear, Jr., ed., Jefferson at Monticello (Charlottesville, Va., 1967). According to Edmund Bacon, a Monticello overseer, “Mr. Jefferson was six feet two and a half inches high, well proportioned, and straight as a gun barrel.” (Ibid.)

  HIS SANDY HAIR Parton, Life, 1.

  FRECKLED SKIN Ibid.

  WRINKLING A BIT TDLTJ, 337.

  ALTERNATELY DESCRIBED AS BLUE, HAZEL, OR BROWN TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/eye-color (accessed 2012).

  HE HAD GREAT TEETH Parton, Life, 1. “His teeth, too, were perfect,” reported Parton. Writing in 1824, Daniel Webster observed: “His mouth is well formed and still filled with teeth; it is strongly compressed, bearing an expression of contentment and benevolence.” (VTM, 97.)

  MUDDY AVENUES AND SCATTERED BUILDINGS Records of the Columbia Historical Society 25, 198–99. Federalist lawmaker James A. Bayard of Delaware wrote this to Andrew Bayard on January 8, 1801: “We have the name of a city [Washington], but nothing else. The [North] wing of the Capitol which is finished is a beautiful building. The President’s House is also extremely elegant. Besides these objects you have nothing to admire but the beauties of nature. There is a great want of Society, especially female.” A week later, Albert Gallatin wrote to his wife, Hannah Gallatin: “Our local situation is far from being pleasant, or even convenient. Around the Capitol are 7 or 8 boarding houses, one tailor, one shoemaker, one printer, a washing woman, a grocery shop, a pamphlets and stationery shop, a small dry goods shop, and an oyster house. This makes the whole of the Federal City as connected with the Capitol.” (Ibid.)

  SECLUDED INSIDE PTJ, XXXII, 513. In a note dated January 27, 1801, Jefferson, who, as vice president, served as the presiding officer of the Senate, wrote that he was “at home always when not in [the] Senate.” (Ibid.)

  WITH STABLES FOR SIXTY HORSES Washington National Intelligencer, January 30, 1801. An advertisement for the boardinghouse read: “Have opened houses of entertainment in the range of buildings formerly occupied by Mr. Law, about two hundred paces from the Capitol, in New Jersey Avenue, leading from thence to the Eastern Branch. They are spacious and convenient, one of which is designed for stage passengers and travelers, the other for the accommodation of boarders. There is stableage sufficient for 60 horses. They hope to merit public patronage.” (Ibid.)

  TWO HUNDRED PACES AWAY Ibid.

  A VICIOUS ELECTION See James Roger Sharp, The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance
(Lawrence, Kan., 2010); Susan Dunn, Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism (Boston, 2004); John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York, 2004); James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville, Va., 2002); APE, 49–78. Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (LaVergne, Tenn., 2009), 232–66, tells the story from the perspective of a crucial Jefferson ally.

  HAD RECEIVED THE SAME NUMBER OF ELECTORAL VOTES The potential problem for a tie had been clear from the first presidential election, in 1789. The practice was for a few electors to “throw away” a few votes for the vice presidential candidate to a candidate who had no chance of winning, thus giving the presidential candidate the most votes. “The votes were unanimous with respect to General Washington, as appears to have been the case in each of the States,” James Madison had told Jefferson, who was then in France. “The secondary votes were given, among the Federal members, chiefly to Mr. J. Adams, one or two being thrown away in order to prevent a possible competition for the Presidency.” (PTJ, XV, 5.) Things had not gone so smoothly this time, hence the crisis.

  “WORN DOWN HERE” PTJ, XXXII, 556–57. The letter, to his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph, known as Patsy, was written from Washington on February 5, 1801.

  “THE THEME OF ALL CONVERSATION” Ibid., 263.

  “THE CRISIS IS MOMENTOUS” Washington Federalist, February 12, 1801. The paper also wrote: “We waited all yesterday in the hourly expectation of being able to announce to our anxious countrymen the result of the presidential election, but it remains to this moment undecided and the happiness of five millions of people awfully suspended in the balance!” (Ibid.)