The man who was to be called the founder of the Democratic Party was born on April 13, 1743, in the family-built home called Shadwell on the Rivanna River in what is now Albemarle County, Virginia. He was the third child and first son of the successful surveyor, planter, and slave owner Peter Jefferson and his wife, Jane Randolph, of a prominent Virginia family. He took to his studies early under local clergymen. When his father died at forty-nine, young Tom at fourteen assumed the role of male head of the household. Two years later he went off to Williamsburg to attend the College of William and Mary, where he was said to have wasted most of his first year in revelry in the first real town he had ever visited. Thereafter, however, he came under the tutelage of two prominent classical scholars and buckled down. A year later one of them brought Jefferson into his law office there.1
Though he was a shy and reluctant speaker, young Jefferson soon won recognition as an accomplished writer marked for esteem as a public man. He graduated from William and Mary at age nineteen, and after a five-year apprenticeship he was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767. A year later, with funds inherited from his father, Jefferson began building his hilltop home eventually called Monticello.2
In 1769, Jefferson took a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. In 1774, he was assigned to write a paper of guidance for the Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress, called “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” an eloquent indictment of the British Parliament’s treatment of the colonies. The next year, when Jefferson was sent to Philadelphia as a replacement in the Virginia delegation to the Second Continental Congress, his pen was called on again. With the American Revolution already started in Lexington and Concord, he was assigned to draft the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms against the British Crown.” Both documents presaged Jefferson’s historic 1776 Declaration of Independence in its direct and bitter attack not only on the British Parliament but also on King George III himself. As the historian Joseph J. Ellis observed in his Jefferson biography American Sphinx, one could readily recognize in Jefferson’s “Summary” and “Causes of Necessity” “a preview of coming attractions” and “a dress rehearsal” of the bill of indictment against the English monarch justifying the colonies’ breaking away from his rule.3
The composition of the final document declaring the independence of “the United States of America” was assigned to John Adams and Jefferson, with Adams readily leaving the actual composition to his admired younger friend from Virginia, while he prepared for the Continental Congress debate on its adoption. From mid-May to early July 1776, while working on drafts for a new Virginia constitution, Jefferson spent only a few days composing America’s most famous document.4
In 1779 he was elected governor, and in 1781, when turncoat General Benedict Arnold invaded the state and torched Richmond just as Jefferson’s term was ending, Jefferson was forced to flee the capital. Amid allegations that he had failed to provide adequate defense for the city, the legislature launched an inquiry, but Jefferson was exonerated.5 Adding to his despondency over the fate of Richmond, in 1782 his wife, Martha, died several months after giving birth for the seventh time in their ten-year marriage. Jefferson was distraught. It is said that on her deathbed she asked him to promise never to remarry, and he never did.6
In 1784, Jefferson went to France as the American minister, to negotiate commercial contracts with European states and seek loans to pay off Revolutionary War debts. During the Constitutional Convention in 1787 he kept in touch with his friend James Madison, urging him to have a bill of rights incorporated. After witnessing the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, he returned home and on arrival became Washington’s first secretary of state. At the end of 1793, as previously noted, Jefferson resigned his cabinet post and returned to Monticello.7
By this time, Jefferson was concentrating on the development of the new party that was first designated as the Anti-Federalist faction but was soon to be called Republican and eventually Democratic. In 1796 under its aegis, he ran for the presidency against the Federalist vice president Adams, narrowly losing in the electoral college, as we know, which placed him in the vice presidency under Adams in 1797.
In the wake of the now-ratified Jay Treaty, which seemed so favorable to Britain and hostile to France, there was much anticipation as to what role Adams might have Jefferson, as a prime American admirer of the French, play toward healing the breach. Adams had not forgotten some of Jefferson’s past slights and criticisms, telling a friend, Tristram Dalton, “His entanglements with characters and politics which have been pernicious are and have been a source of inquietude and anxiety to me.”8
A day before the inaugurations of the two men, Jefferson called on Adams at the St. Francis Hotel in Philadelphia, where both would be staying. It was their first meeting in about three years and was sufficiently amiable that Adams returned the call the next morning. As Jefferson recalled and wrote much later, Adams plunged at once into discussing the French crisis, expressing his desire that Jefferson play a leading role in settling it. The Directory of the new French Republic viewed the Jay Treaty as a decidedly pro-British pact, and as a result the American minister there, James Monroe of Virginia, had been recalled, replaced by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, a strong Federalist. Now Adams, as Jefferson remembered, said it was “the first wish of his heart” to dispatch the prospective vice president to Paris but that “it did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of an accident to himself, nor decent to remove from consideration one who was a rival for public favor.”9
Jefferson wrote that he agreed with that thinking and in any event was tired of living in Europe and hoped never to return. He also reminded Adams, as he well knew, that as president of the Senate, the vice president was a constitutional officer of the legislative branch; hence it would be improper for him to undertake executive branch functions.
The episode made clear to both sides that that there would be little party comity in the new administration. Adams, looking back on the affair, wrote, “We parted as good friends as we had always lived; but we consulted very little together afterwards. Party violence soon rendered it impracticable, or at least useless.”10 And Jefferson noted that henceforth Adams never spoke of a role for him regarding French policy or ever consulted with him concerning any aspects of the government.
With Jefferson out of that loop within the Adams administration, the crisis with France deepened. The French Directory forced Pinckney to leave Paris and take temporary haven in Amsterdam, even as more American shipping in the Caribbean was seized by the French in what was becoming an undeclared war against the United States. At the same time, Jefferson did not hesitate to fire partisan barbs at the rival Federalists and, at least by implication, at their president. A letter Jefferson had written a year earlier to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, surfaced in a Federalist newspaper, charging that the United States had fallen to “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.” It was an obvious allegation that Adams preferred accommodation with England over friendship with France.11
Adams countered Jefferson’s harsh words with renewed efforts to achieve peace through negotiations with France, while urging Congress to build up America’s defenses, particularly against attacks and plunder of American shipping at sea. The equipping of three new navy frigates was authorized to put some muscle behind Adams’s words. Meanwhile, the armies of the young French general Napoleon Bonaparte were attacking Austria and Italy and reportedly contemplating an invasion of Britain, increasing the Adams’s urgency to avoid outright war with France.
Jefferson, assuming more political direction of the pro-French Republicans than ever before, privately intervened, calling on the French representative in Philadelphia to prolong the negotiations with the new American team. The French diplomat noted later that the vice president had reminded him of Adams’s situation: “He only became
President by three votes, and the system of the United States will change along with him.” In other words, the trouble would be resolved with Jefferson’s election to the presidency the next time the American people went to the ballot box.12
In any event, the French Directory eventually refused to see the new American mission, and injury was added to insult when three secret agents known only as X, Y, and Z made outrageous stipulations as representatives of the French foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. They reported that negotiations could proceed only with the payment of $250,000 to Talleyrand, as well as a $1 million loan to France to make up for what the agents said were insults by Adams to their country.
The American negotiators flatly refused, and Adams pressed on in his further military buildup of fortifications at home and more warships at sea to confront marauding French vessels. While calling for these defensive measures, Adams kept the dispatches relating to the XYZ bribery effort secret. Jefferson thereupon accused Adams of warmongering and demanded that the papers be opened to congressional scrutiny. In what proved to be a major political blunder on Jefferson’s part, the Federalists responded by pushing a resolution through Congress ordering publication and wide distribution of the XYZ Papers.13
Their disclosure electrified the American public and greatly dampened the pro-French ardor that had been born of the French assistance to the American Revolution and heightened by the French Revolution. Federalist pressure for war against France soared, and in May 1798 Congress suspended the 1778 treaty with France. At Adams’s urging, it created the Navy Department to oversee shipbuilding and attacks on armed French ships. Adams called for tripling the size of the provisional army and the taxes to pay for it. Congress also approved an enlarged provisional army, and Adams persuaded General Washington to come out of retirement to lead it with the authority to choose his own staff.
As public furor over the XYZ Papers spilled out into street protests in Philadelphia and New York, Vice President Jefferson also was vexed by the notion of a standing army used to suppress domestic dissent. He was disturbed, too, when Adams surprisingly emerged as a reborn national hero while steadfastly insisting he still sought a peaceful settlement with France. Shunted to the sidelines in the administration in which he marginally served, Jefferson filled the vacuum by working to subvert Adams’s initiatives, obviously with an eye on achieving victory over him in the 1800 presidential election, which had so narrowly eluded him in 1796.
The Federalist newspapers, meanwhile, jumped on Jefferson, one intoning editorially, “The Vice President—May his heart be purged of Gallicism in the pure fire of Federalism or be lost in the furnace,” and “John Adams—May he like Samson slay thousands of Frenchmen with the jawbone of Jefferson.”14
Also in the summer of 1798, news reached the president that his three-man commission to Paris had broken up, a disturbing development to Adams. Amid clamors in some quarters for a declaration of war, Adams diplomatically informed Paris, “I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful and independent nation.”15
With Adams subsequently drawing an assurance from Paris that his next envoy would be so welcomed, the clouds of war blew over, and in the next presidential election Jefferson was able to argue that the Federalists had favored war with France as the only way to retain control of the government. And then, on December 1, 1799, the sudden death of Washington at sixty-seven put aside all else in respectful mourning.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1798, the high-riding Federalists had committed a major political blunder. They had pushed through Congress the infamous Alien and Sedition and Naturalization Acts, to which Adams had yielded. The first two laws empowered the president to deport any “dangerous” foreigner and to fine and imprison anyone for writing “false, scandalous and malicious” observations or for stirring up disorder or rebellion among the people and against the government. The third extended the residence requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years, and the acts taken together were read by the Republicans as another Federalist effort to kill their infant party in its crib.16
The Jeffersonians were confident that the Naturalization Act, with its bias against British, Irish, and French Americans in direct contravention of the Bill of Rights, would drive immigrants into their new party, as would the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson predicted that such assaults on basic constitutional guarantees of freedom would eventually backfire on their proponents. “A little patience,” he counseled, “and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles.”17
Jefferson as a champion of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech was obviously appalled and retreated to Monticello to plot how to make the most of the Federalist actions. He condemned these blatant efforts to stifle political dissent, using them to recruit more support for the new party and to broadcast that the Federalists, with Hamilton still pulling the strings, were as determined as ever to impose a monarchical rule on the country.
Amid spreading domestic fears of disloyalty at home and objections to the new legislative acts of repression, Jefferson spent much of the next six months drafting and refining what came to be known as the Kentucky Resolutions, counters to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The resolutions insisted on the right of each state to nullify any act of the federal government it considered to be a violation of the Constitution. Madison at the same time authored the Virginia Resolutions to the same general purpose. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson almost sounded on the verge of leading a secession, warning that unless the public joined them in their stand, he was “determined, were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from the union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government.”18
The legislatures in Kentucky and Virginia passed the respective resolutions restating that powers not granted to the federal government were reserved to the states, which could reject laws passed by Congress if those legislatures deemed them unconstitutional. They became cornerstones of the Republicans’ creed as the party moved to wrest national power from the fading Federalists in the 1800 election.
About a month later, news reached America of another significant death—of the French Republic, with Napoleon Bonaparte declaring himself first consul at the age of thirty-three. The end of the French Revolution was a particular blow to Jefferson, its prime American champion, but Napoleon by now wanted no part of a distracting war with America. Jefferson was able to focus more intently now on a matter of even greater concern and importance to him—his bid in the 1800 election to replace Adams in the president’s chair.
After years of partisan sparring between the Federalists and the Republicans, the battle lines were drawn. Adams, despite his cantankerous personality, generally eschewed direct public appeals and was not particularly known as a political brawler. Many of the oratorical punches he threw at rivals were in otherwise loving written exchanges with his highly political wife, Abigail, in perhaps American politics’ most engaging, long-running correspondence. Jefferson by contrast was notorious for waging verbal combat through others, such as the like-minded and cooperative political associate James Madison and the hired-gun propagandist James Callender, a vitriolic Britain-hater.
When Callender was out of work, Jefferson sent him money to carry him over, later deviously writing to James Monroe that his generosity had exceeded his good judgment. “As to myself, no man wished more to see his pen stopped; but I considered him still as a proper object of benevolence,” he told Monroe, adding about Callender’s view of the payments, “He considers these as proofs of my approbation of his writings, when they were mere charities, yielded under a strong conviction that he was injuring us by his writings.” At the same time, Jefferson urged Madison and Monroe to circulate pamphlets espousing the Republican cause, cautioning Monroe, “Do not let my n
ame be connected with the business.”19
While ever professing his friendship toward Adams, Jefferson continued to bankroll Callender’s writing against the president whose office Jefferson now sought. He brushed aside Adams’s continued commitment to peace with France, encouraging Callender to cast the choice in the 1800 presidential campaign as either Adams and war or Jefferson and peace. Callender stooped to the vilest personal descriptions of Adams as “a gross hypocrite” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Jefferson, shown the galley proofs of Callender’s handiwork, told him they could “not fail to produce the best effects.”20 For his trouble, Jefferson’s hired gun was arrested in May of the election year for sedition, for inciting the public against the president, and received a sentence of seven months in jail.
Callender for his part, dissatisfied at one point with Jefferson’s payments, later wrote in a Federalist newspaper in Richmond that Jefferson, then president, had for many years kept one of his slaves as a concubine. “By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.… The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.”21 The reference was to Sally Hemings, and the story spread, with Jefferson neither confirming nor denying it.
From the Federalist side, meanwhile, came a heavy assault on Jefferson for pro-French allegiance and allegations of atheism or of deism—accepting the existence of God without accepting his authority over all things. The Reverend William Linn of New York warned that Jefferson’s election would “destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society.… The voice of the nation in calling a deist to the first office must be construed into no less than rebellion against God.”22
The American Vice Presidency Page 4