Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  “OUR PLAN BEST, I BELIEVE, COMBINES” Ibid.

  A POWER OF CENTRAL PTJ, VI, 248. “We have substituted a Congress of deputies from every state to perform this task,” Jefferson wrote, “but we have done nothing which would enable them to enforce their decisions. What will be the case? They will not be enforced.… Can any man be so puffed up with his little portion of sovereignty as to prefer this calamitous accompaniment to the parting of a little of his sovereign right and placing it in a council from all the states, … who being chosen by himself annually, removable at will?” (Ibid.)

  HAD TO LAY THEIR “SHOULDERS” Ibid., 249.

  “I HAVE LONG THOUGHT” PTJ, X, 272. Jay made such points often. “An uneasiness prevails through the country and may produce untoward events,” he wrote on July 14, 1786. “Time alone can decide this and many other doubts, for nations, like individuals, are more frequently guided by circumstances than circumstances by them.” (Ibid., 135.) Through the years, they got along, but only just. In Madison’s view, expressed in 1785, the Congress had thus far “kept the vessel from sinking, but it has been by standing constantly at the pump, not by stopping the leaks which have endangered her.” (Ibid., VIII, 579.)

  “THERE NEVER WILL BE MONEY” Ibid., X, 225.

  “THE STATES WILL GO” Ibid., VI, 248.

  “WHAT, THEN, IS THE AMERICAN” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer; and, Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York, 1986), 69.

  IN 1780, THE MARQUIS DE BARBÉ-MARBOIS PTJ, IV, 166–67.

  NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA Jefferson, Writings, 123–325. See also David Tucker, Enlightened Republicanism: A Study of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Lanham, Md., 2008), and “ ‘I have known’: Thomas Jefferson, Experience, and ‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’ ” in Cogliano, ed., A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, 60–74.

  “AN EXACT DESCRIPTION” Jefferson, Writings, 127.

  “THE particular customs” Ibid., 288. When John Adams read the Notes, he praised them highly. “It is our meditation all the day long,” Adams wrote to Jefferson. “I cannot now say much about it, but I think it will do its author and his country great honor.” (PTJ, VIII, 160.) Adams added that the passages on slavery were “worth diamonds.” (Ibid.)

  IN AN EVENING’S CONVERSATION PTJ, VI, 377.

  TWO LARGELY NEGLECTED PIECES Irving Brant, “Two Neglected Madison Letters,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 3, no. 4 (October 1946): 569–87.

  KITTY FLOYD BROKE OFF PTJ, VI, 333. Writing obliquely to Jefferson, Madison said that “the object I was … pursuing has been brought [to an end] by one of those incidents to which such affairs are liable.” (Ibid.)

  “I SINCERELY LAMENT” Ibid., 335–36.

  “PARLIAMENTARY NEWS IS INTERESTING” PTJ, VI, 317.

  SIXTEEN · A STRUGGLE FOR RESPECT

  “FOREIGN CIVIL ARRANGEMENT” PTJ, VI, 470.

  FOUR HUNDRED CONTINENTAL SOLDIERS PTJ, VI, 318–19. It was only after the legislature’s departure, Madison told Jefferson, that “the mutineers surrendered their arms and impeached some of their officers, the two principal of whom have escaped to sea.” (Ibid., 318.)

  PENNSYLVANIA OFFICIALS Peter S. Onuf, ed., Congress and the Confederation (New York, 1991), 70–71.

  TO “PREVENT ANY INFERENCES” PTJ, VI, 319.

  REMAINED AT PRINCETON See Varnum Lansing Collins, The Continental Congress at Princeton (Whitefish, Mont., 2005).

  MOVED TO ANNAPOLIS Edith Rossiter Bevan, “Thomas Jefferson in Annapolis, November 25, 1783–May 11, 1784,” Maryland Historical Magazine 41, no. 2 (1946): 115–24, offers some commentary and an accounting of daily expenditures.

  TO SECURE HIM A ROOM PTJ, VI, 336.

  LEFT MONTICELLO ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1783 MB, I, 536.

  OFFERED “SCANTY ACCOMMODATIONS” PTJ, VI, 319.

  A “VILLAGE WHERE THE PUBLIC BUSINESS” Ibid., 337.

  AS “THE UNITED STATES” Ibid., 369.

  “IT IS NOW ABOVE A FORTNIGHT” Ibid., 381.

  “THE RIOT OF PHILADELPHIA” Ibid.

  THE TREATY OF PARIS JHT, II, 414–17.

  STILL NO QUORUM IN THE CONGRESS PTJ, VI, 388. “I am sorry to say that I see no immediate prospect of making up nine states, so careless are either the states or their delegates to their particular interests as well as the general good which would require that they be all constantly and fully represented in Congress,” Jefferson told Benjamin Harrison on December 17, 1783. (Ibid.)

  “I CANNOT HELP” Ibid., 419.

  “ALL THAT CAN BE SAID” Ibid. With France distracted by a continental war, America would be in a weakened bargaining position—a fact Jefferson understood and feared. (Ibid.) Jefferson was determined that Congress abide by its own rules and hold off on ratification until what he called “the danger of not having nine states” was overcome. (Ibid., 420.) The making of treaties was “an act of so much energy and substance” that to settle for seven states only would be “a breach of faith in us a prostitution of our seal, and a future ground … of denying the validity of a ratification.” (Ibid., 424–25.)

  “I HAVE HAD VERY ILL HEALTH” Ibid., 438.

  JEFFERSON SOUGHT A COMPROMISE Ibid., 441–42. In Jefferson’s words, those members of the “opinion that 9 having ratified the Provisional treaty and instructed their ministers to enter into a definitive one conformable thereto, which is accordingly done, seven may under these particular circumstances ratify what has been so declared by 9 to have their approbation.” (Ibid., 441.)

  CONNECTICUT AND NEW JERSEY AT LENGTH ARRIVED Ibid., 461.

  HE CALLED ON “ALL THE GOOD” Ibid., 463.

  “THAT WERE IT CERTAIN” Ibid., 386–87.

  “I HAVE BEEN JUST ABLE” Ibid., 466.

  “THE DIFFERENT SPECIES OF BONES” Ibid., 371.

  THE COMTE DE BUFFON MB, I, 549.

  “UNCOMMONLY LARGE PANTHER SKIN” Ibid.

  “I FIND THEY HAVE SUBSCRIBED” PTJ, VI, 371.

  A MECHANICAL COPYING DEVICE Ibid., 373.

  SEVENTEEN · LOST CITIES AND LIFE COUNSEL

  THE GOVERNOR IS PTJ, VII, 303.

  ALL THE TALK WAS OF BALLOONS Ibid., 57.

  GRAND BALLOONING EXPERIMENTS Jefferson and Hopkinson are referring to a series of experimental balloon flights that were conducted in Paris in late 1783. In June 1783, the brothers Montgolfier—Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, who had developed the first hot-air balloons—conducted the first public launching of a balloon in Paris. Then, on November 21, 1783, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier made the first free manned flight in a balloon in Paris. Pilâtre de Rozier was killed on June 15, 1785, when he and a companion, Pierre-Ange Romain, “plummeted over 1,000 feet to their deaths near Bologne when the double balloon in which they were attempting to cross the English Channel caught fire and partially collapsed.” (L. H. Butterfield, Wendell D. Garrett, and Marjorie E. Sprague, eds., Adams Family Correspondence, VI, 181.) Jefferson refers to the Pilâtre de Rozier crash in a letter of June 19, 1785. (PTJ, VIII, 237.) Jefferson also mentioned the crash in a letter to Abigail Adams on June 21, 1785. “This will damp for a while the ardor of the Phaetons of our race who are endeavoring to learn us the way to heaven on wings of our own,” he wrote. (Ibid., 241.)

  THE REVOLUTIONARY POSSIBILITIES PTJ, VI, 542.

  TEN YEARS LATER MB, I, 548–49.

  “I WISH YOU HAD” PTJ, VI, 545.

  “A SUBTERRANEOUS CITY” Ibid., VII, 123.

  “THE BRITISH ROBBED ME” Ibid., VI, 507.

  “YOU HAVE NO DOUBT” Ibid., 508.

  “IN SOME OF THE REMOTEST SETTLEMENTS” Ibid., 509.

  BUFFON’S THEORY OF HEAT Ibid., 436–37.

  “I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT” Ibid., XVIII, 98.

 
HE WROTE THE MARQUIS DE BARBÉ-MARBOIS Ibid., VI, 373–74. “The plan of reading which I have formed for her is considerably different from what I think would be most proper for her sex in any other country than America,” he wrote Marbois. “I am obliged in it to extend my views beyond herself, and consider her as possibly at the head of a little family of her own. The chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead I calculate at about fourteen to one, and of course that the education of her family will probably rest on her own ideas and direction without assistance.” He was thus pressing her harder than he otherwise would have. “With the best poets and prosewriters I shall therefore combine a certain extent of reading in the graver sciences. However I scarcely expect to enter her on this till she returns to me. Her time in Philadelphia will be chiefly occupied in acquiring a little taste and execution in such of the fine arts as she could not prosecute to equal advantage in a more retired situation.” (Ibid., 374.)

  “THE ACQUIREMENTS WHICH I HOPE” Ibid., 359.

  “CONSIDER THE GOOD LADY” Ibid., 359–60. As he traveled as a member of the Congress, Jefferson kept an eye on his daughters. On the road, this time to Annapolis, he wrote James Monroe that he was leaving Patsy in Philadelphia “having had it in my power to procure for her the best tutors in French, dancing, music, and drawing.” (Ibid., 355.)

  Also to Patsy, who was apparently caught up in an enthusiasm about the coming of the apocalypse in the wake of a severe earthquake, Jefferson advised caution and perspective. “I hope you will have good sense enough to disregard those foolish predictions that the world is to be at an end soon,” he wrote her on December 11, 1783. “The Almighty has never made known to anybody at what time he created it, nor will he tell anybody when he means to put an end to it, if ever he means to do it.” (Ibid., 380.)

  “WITH RESPECT TO THE DISTRIBUTION” Ibid., 360.

  “YOU ARE NOW OLD ENOUGH” Ibid., 379.

  TO BECOME “A MAN” Ibid.

  “OUR FUTURE CONNECTION WITH SPAIN” Ibid., VIII, 408.

  “FIX REASON FIRMLY” Ibid., XII, 15.

  “MONROE IS BUYING” Kaminski, Founders on the Founders, 291.

  “THOUGH THE DIFFERENT WALKS OF LIFE” PTJ, XXXI, 118.

  THE NOTE, DONALD TOLD JEFFERSON, “WAS SO FRIENDLY” Kaminski, Founders on the Founders, 224–25.

  “ADMONITION AFTER ADMONITION” PTJ, VI, 546.

  “AMONG OTHER LEGISLATIVE” Ibid., 549.

  TO WARN OF “ENCROACHMENTS” Ibid., 511–12.

  “GIVES A PICTURE” Ibid., VII, 15–16.

  “AN ATTACK OF MY PERIODICAL HEADACHE” Ibid., VI, 570.

  “I SUPPOSE THE CRIPPLED STATE” Ibid., VII, 25.

  FOR PREWAR DEBTS EOL, 112, and Charles Pinnegar, Virginia and State Rights, 1750–1861 (Jefferson, N.C., 2009), 53.

  AT LEAST TWO ELEMENTS Ibid.

  A TRADE ROUTE CONNECTING PTJ, VI, 548. See also Joel Achenbach, The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West (New York, 2004), 34–35.

  “THIS IS THE MOMENT” Ibid., VII, 26–27.

  FASCINATED WASHINGTON Achenbach, Grand Idea, 37. See also Stuart Leibiger, Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, 1999), 37.

  “I HAVE NO EXPECTATION” PTJ, VII, 49.

  WASHINGTON SUPERVISED IMPROVEMENTS Leibiger, Founding Friendship, 46. See also Achenbach, Grand Idea, 129–35.

  CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO CANAL Leibiger, Founding Friendship, 46–47.

  “opinion of the Institution of the Society of Cincinnati” PTJ, VII, 88–89.

  “IS INTERESTING, AND, SO FAR AS” Ibid., 105–7.

  “THE WAY TO MAKE FRIENDS QUARREL” Ibid., 106.

  WASHINGTON APPEARS TO HAVE TAKEN JEFFERSON’S COUNSEL SERIOUSLY Ibid., 108–9. See also Markus Hunemorder, The Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy and Distrust in Early America (New York, 2006), 28–29.

  “MIGHT DRAW INTO THE ORDER” Hunemorder, Society of the Cincinnati, 47.

  JEFFERSON THOUGHT BROADLY AND BOLDLY The West let him dream big, and he proposed the union of the Ohio and Potomac rivers. “This is the moment … for seizing it if ever we mean to have it,” he said. “All the world is becoming commercial.” Jefferson was pushing Virginia to approve a special tax for the river project, but, as he told George Washington, “a most powerful objection always arises to propositions of this kind. It is that public undertakings are carelessly managed and much money spent to little purpose.” (PTJ, VII, 26–27.)

  Jefferson’s plan for overcoming these obstacles: Recruit Washington from retirement to head up the project. The general’s reply was astute. Though he agreed with Jefferson about the merits of the project, Washington said, “I have no expectation that the public will adopt the measure; for besides the jealousies which prevail, and the difficulty of proportioning such funds as may be allotted for the purposes you have mentioned, there are two others, which in my opinion, will be yet harder to surmount. These are (if I have not imbibed too unfavorable an opinion of my countrymen) the impracticability of bringing the great and truly wise policy of this measure to their view, and the difficulty of drawing money from them for such a purpose if you could do it.” (Ibid., 49.) Washington was insightful, too, about the nature of legislative assemblies. “Men who are always together get tired of each other’s company,” he told Jefferson. “They throw off the proper restraint. They say and do things which are personally disgusting. This begets opposition. Opposition begets faction, and so it goes on till business is impeded, often at a stand.” (Ibid., 51–52.)

  In April, Washington implicitly complimented Jefferson by writing for his “opinion of the Institution of the Society of Cincinnati,” an organization of Washington’s officers that some feared was a nascent aristocratic order that could corrupt the republic. (Ibid., 88.)

  Jefferson was happy that Washington had asked. The issue of the Cincinnati, he said, “is interesting, and, so far as you have stood connected with it, has been a matter of anxiety to me.… I have wished to see you stand on ground separated from it; and that the character which will be handed to future ages at the head of our revolution may in no instance be compromised in subordinate altercations.”

  Jefferson knew his man. Nothing could be better calculated to win Washington’s attention than the suggestion that his own reputation was at risk. Jefferson said that he was certain that Washington meant no harm. The “moderation and virtue of a single character”—Washington—“has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish,” but even he “is not immortal, and his successor or some one of his successors at the head of this institution may adopt a more mistaken road to glory.” Congress, Jefferson said, shared his views. (Ibid., 105–7.)

  Jefferson argued against the Order on two grounds. First, that the political nature of man made it highly unlikely that a society designed to meet regularly would long endure peaceably. “The way to make friends quarrel is to pit them in disputation under the public eye,” Jefferson said. A second Jeffersonian objection was that a hereditary society was out of harmony with the spirit of a republic based on what Jefferson called the “natural equality of man.” (Ibid., 106.)

  Washington appears to have taken Jefferson’s counsel seriously. (Ibid., 109.)

  “I SEE THE BEST EFFECTS” PTJ, VI, 548–49.

  CONGRESS ACCEPTED THE VIRGINIA CESSION Ibid., 571–80.

  A PLAN TO CREATE NEW STATES Ibid., 581–617.

  HAD NAMES FOR THEM Ibid., 591.

  ORDINANCE OF 1784 Ibid., 581–617.

  “FOREVER REMAIN A PART” Ibid., 614.

  “THEIR RESPECTIVE GOVERNMENTS” Ibid.

  BANNED THE EXPANSION OF SLAVERY Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 27.

  THE PLAN FAILED BY A
SINGLE VOTE Ibid., 28.

  A DELEGATE FROM NEW JERSEY WAS TOO ILL Ibid.

  “THUS WE SEE THE FATE” Ibid.

  WOULD NO LONGER RISK HIS “USEFULNESS” Ibid., 89.

  THE NORTHWEST ORDINANCE OF 1787 Ibid., 29. See also Boyer and Dubofsky, Oxford Companion to United States History, 557–58; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 18–19; and EOL, 121–22.

  THE MORNING AND INTO THE AFTERNOON PTJ, VII, 221–30.

  AFTER THE REGULAR POST HAD LEFT ANNAPOLIS Ibid., 229.

  “I AM NOW TO TAKE” Ibid., 233.

  “AT THE CLOSE OF EVERY SESSION” Ibid.

  “A TENDER LEGACY” Ibid., 233–34.

  A FAREWELL TO THE VIRGINIA HOUSE Ibid., 244.

  “FOOLISH WORLD IN PARIS” Ibid., 257.

  GATHERED INTELLIGENCE ON THE COMMERCE Ibid., 323–55.

  “MIGHT IN SOME DEGREE” Ibid., 358.

  FOUR O’CLOCK ON THE MONDAY MORNING MB, I, 554.

  EIGHTEEN · THE VAUNTED SCENE OF EUROPE

  “HE IS FULL OF HONOR AND SINCERITY” William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 184.

  “A COWARD IS MUCH MORE” PTJ, VII, 640.

  REMEMBERED THE “GOOD COMPANY” TDLTJ, 73.

  “THE WINDS WERE SO FAVORABLE” MB, I, 555.

  HE WAS DETERMINED Lawrence S. Kaplan, Jefferson and France: An Essay on Politics and Political Ideas (Westport, Conn., 1980), 19–20.

  JEFFERSON VIEWED FRANCE IN THE CONTEXT Ibid. I agree with Kaplan’s argument, one supported by the more astute of contemporary players. For the case against Jefferson on the French question, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago, 1996). Iain McLean, “The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson,” in Cogliano, ed., A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, 110–27, is a fine survey of the period.

  HARES, RABBITS, AND PARTRIDGES PTJ, VII, 383–84.

  STILTON CHEESES Ibid., 384. In the end, he could not send the cheeses. (Ibid., 429.)

  “VERY THICK WEATHER” Ibid., 508.