Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Gordon S. Wood, for one, disagrees. He has written that the paranoia and conspiracy theories were actually the rational thoughts of rational men, really reflected by the dominant currents of the era. Men of the Enlightenment assumed that history was a course of events in which men could cause effects—that they were agents in control of their fates. This meant that when something happened, someone was behind it. Wood gives Jefferson more credit than many scholars for his fears of a monarchical plot. In her 1922 study, Louise Burnham Dunbar held that there were indeed monarchical plots seriously considered, but that the American people by and large were antimonarchical.

  A second key question is how one defines monarchism and republicanism. What the Federalists wanted was what John Adams described a little too openly as a “monarchical republic” (EOL, 82)—modeled on England’s system but without the “corruption,” that is, the blurring of branches, which occurred because crown ministers were members of Parliament. (Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States [New York: 2011], 182.) They wanted a strong federal government where citizens owe fealty to the nation over the states, with a strong centralized economy and a powerful army that could challenge the European monarchies on their level. Certainly from the start George Washington and John Adams drew on the iconography of a monarchy, and the Federalists who defended the Constitution did so because of their disillusionment with the idea of a confederacy and fears of the excesses of democracy. They had a sense of themselves as working within an English tradition, hence Jefferson’s Anglophobia. Wood points out that, being from the West Indies, Hamilton did not have loyalty to a state. (EOL, 90.) Hamilton very consciously modeled the financial system on that of Britain. The monarchy debate also plays into Jefferson’s role in the battles over the judiciary, since that was the branch most easily seen as a fortress against democracy and the source of permanent establishment.

  “PLANTING A NEW WORLD” TJ to John Page, March 18, 1803, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

  “IT WAS INCUMBENT” Ibid.

  “THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF OUR COUNTRY” Margaret Bayard Smith, First Forty Years, 81.

  IT WAS A “BOLD AND DOUBTFUL ELECTION” TJ to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, LOC. Extract published at Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Digital Archive, www.monticello.org/familyletters (accessed 2011). This was very nearly the last letter of his life, a message sent to the Washington organizers of celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. Jefferson, in fact, wrote two additional letters after this one, both about business matters, including arranging for the payment of duties on a shipment of wine. See J. Jefferson Looney, “Thomas Jefferson’s Last Letter,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 2 (2004): 178–84.

  ONE · A FORTUNATE SON

  “THE POLITICAL OR PUBLIC CHARACTER” Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 1972), 8.

  “IT IS THE STRONG IN BODY” TDLTJ, 20.

  THE KIND OF MAN PEOPLE NOTICED I have drawn on several sources for my discussion of Peter Jefferson. See TDLTJ, 17–26; JHT, I, 9–33; Randall, Jefferson, I, 5–18; and Parton, Life, 9–10.

  WHAT BECAME ALBEMARLE COUNTY The county was founded in 1744. For an overview, see John Hammond Moore, Albemarle, Jefferson’s County, 1727–1976 (Charlottesville, Va., 1976), 1–67, which covers the period from the second quarter of the eighteenth century through the Revolution. See also S. Edward Ayres, “Albemarle County, Virginia, 1744–1770: An Economic, Political, and Social Analysis,” Magazine of Albemarle County History 25 (1966–67): 37–72. JHT, I, 435–39, discusses Peter Jefferson’s lands, slaves, and estate. For a sense of Virginia as a whole, see Michael A. McDonnell, “Jefferson’s Virginia,” in Cogliano, ed., A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, 16–31.

  AFTER THE LONDON PARISH TDLTJ, 22.

  THE WILDERNESS OF THE MID-ATLANTIC Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2002), 117–37, tells the story of Virginia from 1570 to 1650; 138–57 carry the account forward to 1750 in the “Chesapeake Colonies.” For more background on the formation of the planter culture of Virginia and of the larger Chesapeake region, Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), is excellent, especially 187–211; 346–368 are illuminating on slavery. See also Norman K. Risjord, Jefferson’s America, 1760–1815, 3d ed. (Lanham, Md., 2010), 1–33, for a portrait of America in 1760; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2003); James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975). For a discussion of Anglican influences, see Daniel J. Boorstin, “The Church of England in Colonial Virginia,” in The American Past in Perspective, vol. I, To 1877, ed. Trevor Colbourn and James T. Patterson (Boston, 1970), 33–43. For details on Bacon’s Rebellion, see Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), and Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003).

  BORN ON APRIL 13, 1743 Randall, Jefferson, I, 11. The April 13 date is according to the New Style calendar.

  ONCE SINGLEHANDEDLY PULLED DOWN Ibid., 13.

  UPRIGHTED TWO HUGE HOGSHEADS Ibid.

  A SUPERLATIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LIGHT Jefferson, Writings, 3–4.

  “THE TRADITION IN MY FATHER’S FAMILY” Ibid. The recollections are in an autobiography Jefferson wrote between January 6, 1821, and July 29, 1821. (Ibid., 3, 101.) He ended his narrative with his arrival in New York to become secretary of state in 1790.

  THE ANCIENT ROOTS I believe the best work on the pre-Monticello Jeffersons can be found in the scholarship of Susan Kern, who was enormously helpful to me and to whom I owe a great debt. In both her dissertation on the subject and in her resulting book The Jeffersons at Shadwell (New Haven, Conn., 2010), Kern paints a remarkably detailed portrait of the lives of Thomas Jefferson’s ancestors and particularly of his parents, Peter and Jane Jefferson. The results of her archaeological work and analysis of Shadwell, she wrote, “demands reinterpretation of historians’ characterizations of Peter Jefferson, Jane Randolph Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson’s boyhood experience. The material provisions of the plantation suggest that Peter and Jane Jefferson fashioned a world wholly familiar to Virginia’s elite.” (Ibid., 5.)

  AT AGE TEN, THOMAS “Memoir of Thomas Jefferson Randolph,” Edgehill-Randolph Papers, Collection 1397, Box 11, University of Virginia.

  “FINDING A WILD TURKEY” Ibid.

  THE FAMILY HAD IMMIGRATED TO VIRGINIA TDLTJ, 20.

  LISTED AMONG THE DELEGATES Ibid.

  THE FUTURE PRESIDENT’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 292–93. See also JHT, I, 7.

  THE DAUGHTER OF A JUSTICE Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 293.

  SPECULATED IN LAND AT YORKTOWN Ibid.

  HE DIED ABOUT 1698 Ibid.

  HE KEPT A GOOD HOUSE Ibid.

  A DINNER OF ROAST BEEF AND PERSICO Ibid.

  BORN IN CHESTERFIELD COUNTY Ibid., xiii, 18.

  WITH JOSHUA FRY Jefferson, Writings, 3.

  “MY FATHER’S EDUCATION” Ibid.

  PETER JEFFERSON BECAME A COLONEL Edgar C. Hickish, “Peter Jefferson, Gentleman,” unpublished manuscript, Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

  PROVED HIMSELF A HERO TDLTJ, 19–20. See also Randall, Jefferson, I, 13–14. Arthur T. McClinton and others, The Fairfax Line: A Historic Landmark (Edinburg, Va., 1990), includes an account by the surveyor Thomas Lewis of the September 10, 1746, to February 24, 1747, expedition to map “the southwest line of Thomas Lord Fairfax’s princely domain in Virginia.” Peter Jefferson was said to have be
en at one point “very indisposed.” (Ibid., 44.)

  FOUGHT OFF “THE ATTACKS” TDLTJ, 20.

  “NEVER WEARIED OF DWELLING” Ibid., 19.

  VIRGINIA’S LEADING FAMILY Randall, Jefferson, I, 7–10. See also Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 17–19; Jonathan Daniels, The Randolphs of Virginia (Garden City, N.Y., 1972); Clifford Dowdey, The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of “King” Carter and the Golden Age (Boston, 1969); and H. J. Eckenrode, The Randolphs: The Story of a Virginia Family (Indianapolis, 1946).

  IN 1739, HE WED JANE RANDOLPH TDLTJ, 18.

  ISHAM RANDOLPH JHT, I, 13–17.

  BORN IN LONDON IN 1721 Ibid., 13. See also Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 44.

  DUNGENESS IN GOOCHLAND COUNTY Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 19.

  WALLED GARDENS Ibid.

  TRACED ITS COLONIAL ORIGINS Daniels, Randolphs of Virginia, 17–18.

  THRIVED IN VIRGINIA Ibid.

  HOME TO ENGLAND IN 1669 Ibid., 18.

  PREVAILED ON A YOUNG NEPHEW, WILLIAM Ibid., 17. Daniels wrote: “Almost certainly William came to Virginia at the behest—or with the encouragement—of his Uncle Henry Randolph.” (Ibid.)

  AT SOME POINT BETWEEN 1669 AND 1674 Ibid., 17. William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke 1773–1833: A Biography Based Largely on New Material (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), however, says that he specifically came over about 1673 at around age 24 (Ibid., I, 9.)

  TAKING HIS UNCLE’S PLACE Daniels, Randolphs of Virginia, 18.

  AN ALLY OF LORD BERKELEY Ibid., 24.

  SHIPPING, RAISING TOBACCO, AND SLAVE TRADING Ibid., 27.

  FAMILY SEAT ON TURKEY ISLAND Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, I, 10.

  DESCRIBED AS “A SPLENDID MANSION” Ibid.

  MARY ISHAM RANDOLPH Daniels, Randolphs of Virginia, 23.

  “ARE SO NUMEROUS THAT THEY ARE OBLIGED” Ibid., 32–33.

  A CAPTAIN AND A MERCHANT Ibid., 40–42. See also Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 44, and Virginia Scharff, The Women Jefferson Loved (New York, 2010), 3–4.

  A “PRETTY SORT OF WOMAN” Scharff, Women Jefferson Loved, 3.

  “A VERY GENTLE” Randall, Jefferson, I, 10. The merchant, Peter Collinson, also warned that such Virginians were liable to “look perhaps more at a man’s outside than his inside,” advising his correspondent, the botanist John Bartram, to “pray go very clean, neat and handsomely dressed to Virginia.” (Ibid.)

  “THE POWERFUL SCOTCH EARLS” Ibid., 7. Jefferson was always skeptical about the value of such claims to nobility. His mother’s family, he wrote, “trace their pedigree far back in England and Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith and merit he chooses.” (Jefferson, Writings, 3.) See also PTJ, I, 62.

  “I ROSE AT 6 O’CLOCK” Diary of William Byrd II, February 27, 1711, Elliot J. Gorn, Randy Roberts, and Terry D. Bilhartz, eds., Constructing the American Past, I, (New York, 2004), 71. An additional passage from the day describes the Byrds’ treatment of a slave, Jenny: “In the evening my wife and little Jenny had a great quarrel in which my wife got the worst but at last by the help of the family Jenny was overcome and soundly whipped.” (Ibid.)

  VISITING VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND Edmund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1963), 7.

  “THE YOUTH OF THOSE MORE INDULGENT SETTLEMENTS” Ibid.

  INSTRUCTED IN MUSIC Ibid., 18.

  TAUGHT TO DANCE Ibid.

  “WAS INDEED BEAUTIFUL” Ibid.

  A PROSPEROUS, CULTURED, AND SOPHISTICATED FAMILY Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 1–13. For a discussion of the political impact of Jefferson’s social background, particularly on affairs in Virginia, see Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, “Growing Weary in Well-Doing: Thomas Jefferson’s Life Among the Virginia Gentry,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101 (January 1993): 5–36. See also Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (New York, 1972), and Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952), for assessments of the politically, economically, and culturally privileged world in which Jefferson grew to maturity.

  HIS STUDY ON THE FIRST FLOOR Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 29.

  A CHERRY DESK Ibid., 43.

  PETER JEFFERSON’S LIBRARY Ibid., 33–38. Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford, 2008), 15–29, is also useful.

  “WHEN YOUNG” Hayes, Road to Monticello, 27.

  VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD AND JOHN OGILBY’S AMERICA Ibid., 26–27.

  “FROM THE TIME WHEN” TDLTJ, 37.

  A WORLD OF LEISURE Ibid., 23–24.

  “MY FATHER HAD A DEVOTED FRIEND” Ibid., 24.

  BELIEVED HIS FIRST MEMORY Ibid., 23. His great-granddaughter reported that Jefferson “often declared that his earliest recollection in life was of being … handed up to a servant on horseback, by whom he was carried on a pillow for a long distance.” (Ibid.)

  BOUND FOR TUCKAHOE JHT, I, 18–20.

  “HENRY WEATHERBOURNE’S BIGGEST BOWL” Randall, Jefferson, I, 7.

  THE JEFFERSONS WOULD STAY Why not bring the Randolph children to Shadwell and remotely manage Tuckahoe, rather than moving his own family to Tuckahoe and remotely managing Shadwell? Was Peter Jefferson in an inferior position, essentially coming to work for Randolph? Some Randolph descendants thought so, and later enjoyed asserting that their more celebrated Jefferson cousins descended from a father who had taken wages from an ancestor of theirs.

  Writing a century later, in 1871, however, Jefferson’s great-granddaughter noted that the fact that Peter Jefferson “refused to receive any other compensation for his services as guardian is not only proved by the frequent assertion of his son in after years, but by his accounts as executor, which have ever remained unchallenged.” In an arch footnote, the great-granddaughter added: “In spite of these facts, however, some of Randolph’s descendants, with more arrogance than gratitude, speak of Colonel [Peter] Jefferson as being a paid agent of their ancestor.” (TDLTJ, 22–23.) As Jefferson was to learn, the Randolphs were an eccentric clan. One 1775 incident was reported to Jefferson by Archibald Cary: “A dispute arose at dinner at Chatsworth between Peyton Randolph and his brother Lewis Burwell, who gave the other the lye, on which Peyton struck him, Burwell snatch’d a knife and struck him in the side, but fortunately a rib preventing its proving mortal. He was prevented by the ladies from making a second stroke. You’ll judge what poor Mrs. Randolph must suffer on this unhappy affair, but she is become familiar with misfortune.” (PTJ, I, 250.)

  THE ROOTS OF THAT NEAR-OBSESSION Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York, 1998), 48, speculates on the psychological impact of Jefferson’s life at Tuckahoe, though she focuses on his affection for his own home, not his avoidance of conflict, which I think a likely legacy.

  “THE WHOLE COMMERCE” Jefferson, Writings, 288.

  ANOTHER SMALL CHILDHOOD MOMENT TDLTJ, 23.

  THOMAS’S MOTHER, JANE RANDOLPH JEFFERSON Jane Jefferson has long been depicted as a riddle, a mystery at the heart of the story of Thomas Jefferson. There are several reasons for this. For one, Jefferson appears to have spoken more often and more fully about his father than about his mother, leaving more family stories that, combined with the extant public records available for leading colonial men (who held office and left more traces than women of the day), have given us a more detailed sense of Peter Jefferson than we have had for Jane Jefferson. Another reason is the Shadwell fire in 1770 destroyed family papers that may have shed light on the relationship between mother and son. And another reason lies in Jefferson’s larger reticence about the women in his life. Evidence of Jefferson’s musing about either his mother or his wife is sparse. The relatively thin traditions about Jane Jefferson h
ave led some writers to speculate that mother and son were estranged. See, for instance, Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 40–46.

  Reflecting on Merrill Peterson’s observation that “By his own reckoning she was a zero quantity in his life” (Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography [New York, 1970], 9), Brodie wrote: “No mother is a zero quantity in any son’s life, and the fact that Jefferson, whether deliberately or not, managed to erase all traces of his opinion and feeling for her seems evidence rather of very great influence which he deeply resented, and from which he struggled to escape.” (Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 43.) More recent scholarship has attempted to revise the estrangement interpretation, most notably Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, and Scharff, Women Jefferson Loved, 3–57.

  “A WOMAN OF A CLEAR” TDLTJ, 21–22.

  A METICULOUS RECORD KEEPER Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 230.

  THOMAS’S SISTER ELIZABETH Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 48.

  “THE MOST FORTUNATE OF US ALL” PTJ, I, 10.

  “SHE WAS AN AGREEABLE” Randall, Jefferson, I, 16–17. See also Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, 70. From the traditions we have of Jane Jefferson, bluster and threats were out of character. In contrast to her own mother, Mrs. Isham Randolph, Jane Jefferson was described by the family as “mild and peaceful by nature, a person of sweet temper and gentle manners.” (Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 41.) Even allowing for familial sentimentality, this description of Mrs. Jefferson of Shadwell differs from that of Mrs. Randolph of Dungeness, who was said to be “a stern, strict lady of the old school, much feared and little loved by her children.” Her daughter Jane, however, was different. Ibid., 681. The source of these traditions is Ellen Wayles Randolph.