Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  “FUN AND HONOR AND PROFIT” EOL, 280.

  BE MADE PRESIDENT Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2008), 196–220.

  HAD “HEARD A MEMBER OF CONGRESS LAMENT” Anas, 206.

  “A DESIRE TO PROMOTE … DIVISION” Ibid., 466.

  A RUMOR THAT JOHN MARSHALL JHT, III, 495.

  HAD JUST BEEN NAMED CHIEF JUSTICE Kathryn Turner, “The Appointment of Chief Justice Marshall,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 17 (1960): 143–63.

  “IF THE UNION COULD BE BROKEN” PTJ, XXXII, 404. For McKean on the overall crisis, see ibid., 432–36.

  WAS TOLD THAT TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND MEN James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 269.

  WERE “PREPARED TO TAKE UP ARMS” Ibid. Others worried that Hamilton would take advantage of the uncertainty. “An army … with Alexander Hamilton at their head could get possession of forts, arsenals, stores and arms in a short time,” one Pennsylvania Republican told Jefferson. (PTJ, XXXII, 485.) Jefferson himself told James Madison that any “legislative usurpation would be resisted by arms.” (PTJ, XXXIII, 16.)

  AFTER A SNOWSTORM STRUCK WASHINGTON Diary of Gouverneur Morris, February 1801, LOC. It snowed on February 11 and again on the 13th; Jefferson was chosen on February 17. (Ibid.)

  THE THIRTY-SIXTH BALLOT PTJ, XXXII, 578.

  FOR THIRTY-SIX OF THE FORTY YEARS As noted in the text, aside from Jefferson himself, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren considered themselves part of the Jeffersonian tradition. John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, is the exception. For excellent overviews of the years between 1800 and 1840, see EOL; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007); and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005).

  JEFFERSON SOUGHT, ACQUIRED, AND WIELDED POWER My contention is that Jefferson was at heart a politician—a politician with a wide-ranging philosophical mind and oft-expressed principles, to be sure, but still a politician. See, for instance, Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York, 2003), 37–59. Bailyn concluded:

  So it was Jefferson—simultaneously a radical utopian idealist and a hardheaded, adroit, at times cunning politician; a rhetorician, whose elegant phrases had propulsive power, and a no-nonsense administrator—who, above all others, was fated to confront the ambiguities of the Enlightenment program. He had caught a vision, as a precocious leader of the American Revolution, of a comprehensive Enlightenment ideal, a glimpse of what a wholly enlightened world might be, and strove to make it real, discovering as he did so the intractable dilemmas. Repeatedly he saw a pure vision, conceptualized and verbalized it brilliantly, and then struggled to relate it to reality, shifting, twisting, maneuvering backward and forward as he did so. (Ibid., 47.)

  “THE WORLD’S BEST HOPE” PTJ, XXXIII, 149.

  “WHATEVER THEY CAN, THEY WILL” PTJRS, VIII, 32.

  “MR. JEFFERSON WAS AS TALL” Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, 11.

  JEFFERSON “WAS LIKE A FINE HORSE” Ibid., 71.

  NOTING THE TEMPERATURE EACH DAY See, for instance, MB, I, 771. “My method is to make two observations a day, the one as early as possible in the morning, the other from 3 to 4 o’clock, because I have found 4 o’clock the hottest and daylight the coldest point of the 24 hours,” he wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., his son-in-law, on April 18, 1790. “I state them in an ivory pocket book … and copy them out once a week.” (Ibid.)

  A TINY, IVORY-LEAVED NOTEBOOK MB, I, xvii. The typical contents of Jefferson’s pockets are illustrated in William L. Beiswanger and others, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 65. The book notes that the items included an English pocketknife, key ring and trunk key, gold toothpick, goose quill toothpick, ivory rule, watch fob, steel pocket scissors, and a red-leather pocketbook. (Ibid.)

  HE DROVE HIS HORSES HARD AND FAST James A. Bear, Jr., ed., Jefferson at Monticello (Charlottesville, Va., 1967), 5.

  HIS “ALMIGHTY PHYSICIAN” PTJ, VIII, 43.

  DRANK NO HARD LIQUOR BUT LOVED WINE Randall, Jefferson, III, 450. Isaac Jefferson “never heard of his being disguised in drink.” (Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, 13.)

  GIFTS OF HAVANA CIGARS PTJRS, I, 466.

  DUMBWAITERS AND HIDDEN MECHANISMS Beiswanger and others, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, 53.

  HIS OWN VERSION OF THE GOSPELS Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Boston, 1989). In the afterword to this edition, Jaroslav Pelikan wrote: “There has certainly never been a shortage of boldness in the history of biblical scholarship during the past two centuries, but for sheer audacity Thomas Jefferson’s two redactions of the Gospels stand out even in that company.” (Ibid., 149.)

  PALLADIAN PLANS FOR MONTICELLO Beiswanger and others, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, 2–33. A book of Palladio’s that belonged to Jefferson emerged in the collections of Washington University in St. Louis in 2011, which I was generously allowed to see.

  THE ROMAN-INSPIRED CAPITOL OF VIRGINIA Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993), 19–20.

  PATRON OF PASTA TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/macaroni (accessed 2012).

  RECIPE FOR ICE CREAM Marie Kimball, Thomas Jefferson’s Cook Book (Charlottesville, Va., 1976), 2–3. See also TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/ice-cream (accessed 2012).

  THE PERFECT DRESSING FOR HIS SALADS TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/house-and-gardens/thomas-jeffersons-favorite-vegetables (accessed 2011). “Salad oil was a perennial obsession for Jefferson. He referred to the olive as ‘the richest gift of heaven,’ and ‘the most interesting plant in existence.’ When he found domestic olive oil imperfect and imported olive oil too expensive, Jefferson turned to the possibilities of oil extracted from sesame seed or benne (Sesamum orientale).” (Ibid.)

  HE KEPT SHEPHERD DOGS MB, I, 745. See also PTJ, XXIX, 26–27.

  HE KNEW LATIN, GREEK, FRENCH TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/languages-jefferson-spoke-or-read.

  ADMIRED THE LETTERS OF MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ TJ to Ellen Wayles Randolph, March 14, 1808, Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. “Among my books which are gone to Monticello, is a copy of Madame de Sevigné’s letters, which being the finest models of easy letter writing you must read.” (Ibid.)

  MADAME DE STAËL’S Corinne, or Italy Hannah Thornton to TJ, January 15, 1808, Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. “Mrs. Thornton’s Compliments to the President of the U.S, and having heard that he possesses a copy of Made. Stäel’s celebrated Novel ‘Corinne’ and not being able to procure it elsewhere at present, hopes he will excuse the liberty she takes in requesting the favor of a perusal of it, if disengaged,” she wrote. (Ibid.)

  A COLLECTION OF WHAT A GUEST CALLED “REGAL SCANDAL” PTJRS, VIII, 240.

  A DIAMOND NECKLACE AND MARIE-ANTOINETTE Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1990), 203–10.

  AMID CHARGES THAT HE HAD ALLOWED HIS MISTRESS Philip Harling, “The Duke of York Affair (1809) and the Complexities of War-Time Patriotism,” The Historical Journal 39, no. 4 (December 1996): 963–84.

  “WITH A SATISFACTION” PTJRS, VIII, 240.

  A GUEST AT A COUNTRY INN TDLTJ, 38.

  “TO SEE THE STANDARD OF REASON” PTJ, X, 604.

  “WHAT IS PRACTICABLE MUST OFTEN CONTROL” Jefferson, Writings, 1101.

  “THE HABITS OF THE GOVERNED” Ibid.

  THE DEBATE AND THE DIVISION Jefferson has tended to be depicted in what I believe to be an overly harsh light in r
ecent years, often portrayed as, at best, a mystery and, at worst, a cynical politician. In an illuminating essay, Gordon S. Wood explored the distorting dynamic of excessive celebration and excessive condemnation. “We seriously err in canonizing and making symbols of historical figures who cannot and should not be ripped out of their own time and place,” Wood wrote. “By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendent moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be, we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this eighteenth-century slaveholder.” (Wood, “The Ghosts of Monticello” in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf [Charlottesville, Va., 1999], 29.) For influential recent portraits of Jefferson, see, for instance, Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997); David McCullough, John Adams (New York, 2001); Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004); and Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York, 2010).

  “IT IS A CHARMING THING” Ibid., xxxviii, 20. The letter was written to Ann Cary, Thomas Jefferson, and Ellen Wayles Randolph from Washington on March 2, 1802.

  LEADING SOME PEOPLE TO BELIEVE Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (New York, 2007), 168. Ellis quotes John Adams’s grandson Charles Francis Adams, who observed: “More ardent in his imagination than his affections, he did not always speak exactly as he felt towards friends and enemies. As a consequence, he has left hanging over a part of his public life a vapor of duplicity, or, to say the least, of indiscretion, the presence of which is generally felt more than it is seen.” (Ibid.)

  CALLING ON SAMUEL HARRISON SMITH Margaret Bayard Smith, First Forty Years, 6.

  THE CHILD OF A FEDERALIST FAMILY Ibid., vi. Margaret Bayard Smith was born in 1778; her father was Colonel John Bayard, a Pennsylvania statesman and member of the Continental Congress. Her family included James A. Bayard, a Federalist lawmaker and diplomat from Delaware, who was to play a noted role in Jefferson’s election to the presidency in February 1801. (Ibid.)

  FOUND HERSELF “SOMEWHAT CHECKED” Ibid., 6.

  THE STRANGER ASSUMED “A FREE AND EASY” Ibid., 6–7.

  SHE DID NOT KNOW Ibid., 7.

  AT THIS POINT THE DOOR TO THE PARLOR OPENED Ibid.

  “AND IS THIS THE VIOLENT DEMOCRAT” Ibid., 5–6.

  TAKING HIS LEAVE Ibid., 8.

  A GRIEF THAT LED HIM TO THOUGHTS OF SUICIDE Randall, Jefferson, I, 382. See also Parton, Life, 265–66, and JHT, I, 396–97.

  PROMISED HIS DYING WIFE Parton, Life, 265.

  A DECADES-LONG LIAISON WITH SALLY HEMINGS Annette Gordon-Reed has done by far the finest work on this subject; my debt to her is incalculable. See Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, Va., 1997) and the monumental work The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York, 2008). See also the findings in the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, TJF, January 2000, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings (accessed 2012); Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; and Catherine Kerrison, “Sally Hemings,” in Cogliano, ed., A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, 284–300. For a contrary view, see William G. Hyland, Jr., In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal (New York, 2009), and Daniel Barton, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (Nashville, Tenn., 2012), 1–30.

  The 1998 DNA finding that a male in the Jefferson line had fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’s children led to a scholarly reevaluation of the entire question of the Jefferson-Hemings connection. The then-president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Daniel P. Jordan, charged a committee with the task of examining the issue. “Although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings,” Jordan wrote when the committee’s report was published in 2000. “We recognize that honorable people can disagree on this subject, as indeed they have for over two hundred years. Further, we know that the historical record has gaps that perhaps can never be filled and mysteries that can never by fully resolved.”

  I agree with Jordan and with the committee. (One member dissented and wrote a minority report, which is available at TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings.) In my view, there is convincing biographical evidence that Jefferson was a man of appetite who appreciated order, and that the ability to carry on a long-term liaison with his late wife’s enslaved half sister under circumstances he could largely control would have suited him.

  Dissenters have pointed to Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph Jefferson as a candidate for paternity, a possibility that would fit with the DNA finding. Isaac Jefferson, the Monticello slave who left his recollections, reported that Randolph Jefferson “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” As the committee pointed out, however, Isaac Jefferson left Monticello in 1797, which means “his reference probably predates that year, and most likely refers to the 1780s, the period that is the subject of the majority of his recollections.”

  To those who continue to argue that there was no relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, I am taking the liberty of quoting at length the “Assessment of Possible Paternity of Other Jeffersons” from the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:

  One reaction to the DNA study of Jefferson and Hemings descendants has been the accurate observation that the test results only prove that a Jefferson fathered the last of Sally Hemings’s children—not that Thomas Jefferson himself was the father. In order to investigate this possibility, Monticello researchers reviewed Thomas Jefferson’s papers as well as Jefferson family genealogies to determine the identities and whereabouts of other male members of his family.

  Sally Hemings’s confirmed times of conception extend from early December of 1794 through mid-September of 1807. During these eighteen years at least twenty-five adult male descendants of Jefferson’s grandfather Thomas Jefferson (1677–1731) lived in Virginia: his younger brother Randolph and five of his sons, as well as one son and eighteen grandsons of his uncle Field Jefferson. Of this total, most were living in the Southside region—over a hundred miles from Monticello—and do not figure in Jefferson’s correspondence or his memoranda.

  There remained eight out of the twenty-five for whom age and proximity warranted further documentary investigation. These include Randolph Jefferson and his five sons (Isham, Thomas, Jr., Field, Robert, and Lilburne) as well as two grandsons of Field Jefferson (George and John Garland Jefferson). While each of these individuals had some interaction with Thomas Jefferson and spent some time at or in the vicinity of Monticello, most had no documented presence at Monticello during the times when Sally Hemings conceived her children. Several of them were at Monticello when Thomas Jefferson was absent (Sally Hemings is not known to have conceived in his absences). Randolph Jefferson’s sons Thomas, in 1800, and Robert Lewis, in 1807, may well have been at Monticello during the conception periods of Harriet and Eston Hemings. Randolph Jefferson was invited to Monticello during the period of Eston Hemings’s conception, but it is not known that he actually made the visit.

  The committee concludes that convincing evidence does not exist for the hypothesis that another male Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children. In almost two hundred years since the issue first became public, no other Jefferson has ever been referred to as the father; denials of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity named the Carr nephews. Furthermore, evidence of the sort of sustained presence necessary to have resulted in the creation of a famil
y of six children is entirely lacking, and even those who denied a relationship never suggested Sally Hemings’s children had more than one father. Finally, the historical evidence for Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of Eston Hemings and his known siblings overwhelmingly outweighs that for any other Jefferson.

  Readers who do wish to examine the issue in detail will find TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings (accessed 2011–12) to be invaluable.

  ONE THAT OPENED IN 1764 PTJRS, IV, 599. Jefferson believed March 1764 marked the “dawn of the revolution.”

  LIVED AND GOVERNED IN A FIFTY YEARS’ WAR To Jefferson, the conflict ran from 1764 (ibid.) to the end of the War of 1812 in 1815. Louise Burnham Dunbar, A Study of ‘Monarchical’ Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801 (New York, 1970), details American attitudes toward monarchy and the handful of attempts that were made to move the young nation in the direction of hereditary or lifetime power. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York, 2008), 11–133, covers America’s relations with the world generally, but the story of U.S.-British tensions is at center stage. Also illuminating are Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, 2005); Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York, 2010); and Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89 (Chicago, 1977). Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), is a landmark work on the role of deeply held notions of liberty and of the pervasiveness of conspiracy.

  Several related issues must be explored in order to describe and assess the idea of a Fifty Years’ War. One question is the pervasive paranoia at the time, something that has been the subject of scholarly debate since Bernard Bailyn did his study of pamphlets in the revolutionary era and Richard Hofstadter laid out his vision of “the paranoid style.” (Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics [Cambridge, Mass., 1996].) A seminal paper is John R. Howe, Jr., “Republican Thought and Political Violence of the 1790s” American Quarterly 19 no. 2 (Summer, 1967): 147–65. Howe contends that the political climate in the 1790s was so emotional and overheated that “stereotypes stood in the place of reality.” (Ibid., 150.) He attributes this climate to the intensity of the Founders’ awareness of the fragility of republicanism and the failure of previous experiments, an awareness of the immensity of their historical moment followed by a profound anxiety about the decline of virtue, which was, of course, to be the glue of their free society. Under pressure, Howe argues, the Americans of the time could become deranged.