Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  All that confusion during Jefferson’s first election finally resulted, in 1804, in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which required that the president and the vice president be voted for separately, so that there’d never again be any question of which man should get which office if they happened to end up with an equal number of votes. But the really valuable thing that occurred during Jefferson’s time, as I’ve said, was the arrival of the two-party system. And the two-party system is plenty valuable because, as I’m sure is obvious, it means that there’ll always be an opposition group to yell and complain that the party in power is doing wrong; and if the people agree that the party in power really is doing wrong, that party gets thrown out. Opposition is good for a political party and for the country in general because there’s never been a time in the history of any free country when one group could run the country successfully forever, so whenever that group gets to behaving foolishly or improperly, it’s essential to have somebody around to point it out and tell the people what they’re doing. And that group then usually gets overthrown and there’s a new start. That’s why you’ll find, in modern times, that there’s an opposition party in every free government and in every republic.

  And our two-party system, our system of a Democratic Party and a Republican Party of almost equal strength, is, I believe, better than the systems in other countries. The British, for example, have two major political parties, too, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, but the difference is that the Conservative Party is made up mostly of the people who control the finances of the country and the Labour Party is made up mostly of the working class. We don’t have that. Our two main parties are made up of sections of every part of the population of the United States. It’s true, of course, that it’s the general policy of the Republican Party for the financiers to control the country, so they might be compared in a way to Britain’s Conservative Party, and it’s also true that the Democratic Party has a greater percentage of the people who have to work for a living, so we Democrats might be compared in a way to the Labour Party. But the big difference is that the Republicans have plenty of people who are interested in labor and the welfare of the country as a whole, and the Democrats have plenty of rich people, so there are different segments of the population and different types of people in the three branches that separate the powers in this country: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches. And that’s a very good thing because, when a president is elected every four years, there’s never any total turnover that will upset the government of the United States.

  If you want to trace the development of the two major political parties in this country, and the origins and development of their differences, you have to remember that it was the notion of the Federalists to exploit, or at least to dominate, the ordinary man, and the refusal of the Democratic-Republicans to go along with this, so that their party was made up largely of the would-be exploited. That means, at least in my view, that the Federalists were like some of the modern Republicans and the Democratic-Republicans were like most of the modern Democrats.

  As the years went along, the names changed here and there, with the Federalists fading out and their party next being called the National Republicans and then the Whigs, and the Democratic-Republicans settling for just being called Democrats, but their viewpoints remained more or less the same, with the Democrats being the party of the common man and the Republicans being the party of the more aristocratic class. The two-party system collapsed for a while in 1824, when John Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, ran against Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay with no political designations for any of the three men, but the results were truly chaotic. Jackson got the most votes, ninety-nine electoral votes and 152,901 popular votes; Adams was next with eighty-four electoral votes and 114,023 popular votes; W. H. Crawford of Georgia was third, at least in electoral votes, with forty-one electoral votes and 46,979 popular votes; and Clay received thirty-seven electoral votes and 47,217 popular votes - but it was decided that no man had a clear enough majority, and it was up to the House of Representatives to do the final voting. Clay then had to drop out because he had the fewest electoral votes, and he decided to throw his support to Adams. The House of Representatives then gave Adams thirteen states, Jackson seven, and Crawford four, so Adams became our sixth president even though Jackson had done better than him in both the electoral and popular voting! Can you beat that?

  You can be sure that, when Jackson ran against Adams again in 1828, the two political parties ran their men as the only two major candidates, and this time Jackson beat Adams even more decisively, 178 electoral votes and 647,292 popular votes to Adams’ eighty-three electoral votes and 507,730 popular votes. And when he ran again in 1832, this time against Henry Clay, Jackson invented the convention system, bringing the members of his party together in a large meeting in Baltimore to pick their candidates. He also had another, equally important motive: He’d begun to realize that little caucuses, little special interest groups, in Congress and in the various legislatures were again controlling too many things, and he wanted to make sure that people of every persuasion within his party were present and being vocal and visible in expressing what they wanted in the party’s policies and who they wanted as candidates.

  The Whigs were still around as late as 1852, when Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, ran against John C. Frémont, the Whig candidate. Then in 1856, the Whigs and some of the other and weaker parties got together and called themselves the Republican Party. The original name of Jefferson’s party came, of course, from the fact that they were a democratic organization in a republic, but now that Jackson’s people were just calling themselves Democrats, the opposition took the other half. I think they had the idea of fooling the people a little bit. Anyway, as you know, Frémont didn’t make it, but a very great president, Lincoln, was elected as a Republican. And after a while, I’m afraid, the Republicans went back to being Federalists in disguise all over again, too frequently forgetting the needs and desires of the man in the street.

  That fellow Richard Nixon said recently that Jefferson wouldn’t agree with the Democrats of the present day. Well, that’s just nonsense. I’m just as sure as I sit here that if Jefferson were alive, he’d be right in line alongside the Democratic Party as it is today because it’s fundamentally the basis on which free government is organized. As I’ve pointed out, the Democratic Party goes all the way to the time of Jefferson shortly after the Revolution, and it’s based on the fact that the Constitution means what it says - that the power of the government is in the people. I’m certain, therefore, that Jefferson would be a good Democrat if he were alive today.

  I haven’t talked a lot about Jefferson’s personal background, aside from the fact that he was descended from a king and a few other things like that. So let me do a little of that now because a man’s background and upbringing often determine whether he becomes a good president or a bad one.

  I’ll have a bit of fun to start with and tell you that Jefferson was born on April 2 and April 13, 1743; that he was born in Goochland County, Virginia, and Albemarle County, Virginia; and that his full name was Thomas Jefferson and wasn’t. What are the explanations for all that? Well, when he was born, the old style or Julian calendar was still in use, that funny old calendar that started the year on March 25 and did a lot of other things that look strange to us today, so his date of birth was April 2 at the time. But the Gregorian calendar, the one we use today, was adopted by Britain and the colonies in 1752, and that shifted things around and April 2 became April 13, so the “official” date of Jefferson’s birth is now April 13, 1743. As for the other things, well, Jefferson was born in Goochland County, but the name was fancied up and changed to Albemarle County later on, and Jefferson never called himself anything other than Thomas Jefferson, but he was really Thomas Jefferson III, because he was named for his paternal grandfather, and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Jefferson II.

  It’s pretty clear that the aristo
cratic side of the family was the maternal side. Jefferson told friends that he really knew nothing about his father’s family beyond the fact that the Jefferson family probably originally spelled the name Jaeffreson and probably lived originally at Mount Snowden, Wales, and probably came here early in the seventeenth century. Jefferson’s mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, however, was the one who could trace her family all the way back to King David I, who ruled Scotland from 1124 to 1153, and the Randolphs were one of the richest and most respected families in Virginia. But by the time Tom came along, the families were pretty equal in reputation and holdings; his paternal grandfather became a major landowner and judge before his death in 1731, and Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, increased the family’s wealth substantially, owned about 7,000 acres of good Virginia land, and was also a surveyor, sheriff, an officer in the local militia, and a judge himself.

  Thomas Jefferson grew up to be a tall fellow, nearly six feet three inches in height, with red hair and a face full of freckles. (A book I once read described him as looking like a taller Tom Sawyer, and I’d say that’s a pretty good description.) He was extremely shy, which made him a very poor speaker when he went into public life though he was okay when he was speaking to small groups and probably felt more at ease. And he didn’t seem to give a damn about his clothes other than to insist that everything he wore fit loosely and comfortably, and more than once he shocked visiting foreign dignitaries by showing up for meetings in worn old clothes and house slippers.27 He enjoyed good health all his life, except for headaches when he was nervous and tense, arthritis toward the end of his life, and after he was forty-three, a bad right hand because he tried jumping over a fence to impress a lady friend and fell and broke his wrist.

  He was one of eight children; two sisters preceded him, and then there were four more sisters and a brother. One of his sisters, Anna, and his brother, Randolph, were twins. Another of his sisters, Elizabeth, was retarded. Both his parents died relatively young - his father at forty-nine of an illness that was never figured out and named, and his mother of a stroke at fifty-six. Jefferson himself, fortunately for the country, lived to the good old age of eighty-three.

  Despite his shyness, he was quite a ladies’ man. His first romance was with a sixteen-year-old girl named Rebecca Burwell when he was nineteen, and he attempted shortly afterwards to propose to her, but he was so nervous that he couldn’t talk straight, and she ended up marrying a fellow named Jacquelin Ambler. The Amblers subsequently had two daughters, one of whom later married John Marshall, who became Chief Justice of the United States and the man who went easy on Aaron Burr.

  Jefferson’s next love was a married woman, Betsey Moore Walker, and that caused Jefferson a lot of trouble when he was president. In 1805, her husband, John Walker, wrote a long article in which he said that he’d trusted Jefferson and made him executor in his will and asked Jefferson to look after Betsey while he was away, and instead Jefferson had tried repeatedly to seduce his young wife. In fact, Walker said, Jefferson continued to try to seduce Betsey for eleven long years, even after Jefferson had gotten married himself, and had even jumped out of the darkness at Betsey a couple of times and tried to force her to give in to him.

  Walker got so agitated after he wrote his piece that he ended up challenging Jefferson to a duel, but Jefferson admitted only that he had fallen in love with Betsey while he was single but denied all the other things, and he managed to convince Walker to meet him for a quiet talk at James Madison’s house and cooled him down.

  On January 1, 1772, as I mentioned previously, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton, and their marriage was an extremely happy one but not very lucky. Martha became pregnant seven times, but only two children survived. These were two daughters, one also named Martha but nicknamed Patsy, and the other named Mary but called Polly. And on September 6, 1782, after ten and a half years of marriage, Jefferson’s wife died. She was only thirty-four and had given birth to another daughter just four months before her death, but the child, another daughter, lived for only two years.

  Jefferson promised his wife on her deathbed that he would never remarry, and he never did. But he continued to be attractive to, and attracted by, women for the rest of his life. One of his two more famous romances after Martha’s death was with Maria Hadfield Conway, a well-known painter of the period and wife of another painter, whom Jefferson met in 1786, when he was minister to France. It was while he was taking a walk with Maria, at which point he was forty-three and she was twenty-seven, that he tried to get over that fence and ended up breaking his wrist, which was set poorly and gave him a deformed hand for the rest of his life. The romance subsided after Maria and her husband left Paris. It flared up again when Maria returned to France for a few months in 1787 and was confined only to passionate letters after that.

  Jefferson’s other romance has received even more attention from historians, who, I guess, were shocked because it was with one of the slaves on his plantation, Sally Hemings. In those days, it was commonplace for plantation owners to take female slaves to bed with them whether they wanted to go or not, but it’s clear that Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings was a genuine love affair and not like that at all. Sally Hemings was the daughter of another slave, Elizabeth Hemings, but her father was John Wayles, who was also the father of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, which made Sally the half-sister of Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. The history books record that Sally was an outstandingly beautiful woman and that Jefferson had several children with her, though some historians dispute the latter statement. The thing that’s certain, in any case, is that, for some of the time Jefferson was in France, Sally was there, too, and took care of Jefferson’s daughter Polly, and that the love affair with Sally lasted for thirty-eight years.

  Jefferson’s early education was with ministers; he boarded and studied first with Reverend William Douglas in Northam, Virginia, staying there except for visits home from the age of nine until he was fourteen, and then he studied until he was sixteen with Reverend James Maury in Fredericksville, Virginia. Jefferson didn’t care much for Douglas and had already begun to develop his doubts about established religions and his general feelings that the best kind of religion was a belief in God and in doing good for other people, but he liked Maury, who also tutored two other men who later became presidents, James Madison and James Monroe. In 1760, Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary and went there for two years, then went on to study law for five years, and was admitted to the Virginia bar in April 1767. It was at William and Mary, incidentally, that Jefferson met Dr. William Small, a professor of literature whom Jefferson liked and admired and helped instill in him his love of books and reading and his lifelong interest in and curiosity about almost everything. Jefferson had always enjoyed books, but he became such a dedicated reader that, when the family home burnt down in 1770 and the fire destroyed all of his books, he set out almost fanatically to buy more books and ended up with a library of over 6,500 volumes.

  He was now twenty-four, and his father had been dead for ten years at this point, so, as the oldest son, Jefferson expected to spend the rest of his life practicing law in Virginia but mostly to devote his time to managing the family plantation and the Jefferson properties. As a matter of fact, not long after he married Martha, he reached a decision even to give up his law practice and spend his time as a farmer and with the books he loved so much. He had already begun to build the mansion that became his home for the rest of his life, Monticello, and it seemed to him that he already had all he needed and wanted in life. But he’d become a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769, a kind of standard assignment for young and prominent Virginians, and the other young men who became his friends there were outspoken about their feelings regarding British injustice.

  One of his colleagues in the House of Burgesses was Patrick Henry, a fiery and self-educated young lawyer whose two famous lines, “Give me liberty or give me death” and “If this be treason, make the most
of it,” did a lot to advance the idea of the American Revolution. Jefferson agreed with these views and in 1774 wrote his own brilliant statement of his opinions on the relationship between his homeland and the motherland, Summary View of the Rights of British America. He was also very active in the Committee of Correspondence in Virginia, that underground network of men, mostly very young men, who believed increasingly in freedom for America and kept their views alive by writing to each other constantly on the subject.

  It was inevitable, of course, that Jefferson became a member of the Continental Congress, and in a way, almost equally inevitable that Jefferson would be the man picked to write the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. As you’re aware, those other men picked for the committee to prepare the Declaration were no dumbbells - you’ll recall that they were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman - but it was decided almost without discussion that Jefferson would write the initial draft of the Declaration all by himself because, despite that tendency to freeze up and give poor speeches before larger audiences, it was already more than clear from his correspondence and other writings that he was far and away the best writer of his times. Three of the other four men on the committee were older and more experienced than Jefferson: Adams, born in 1735, was forty-one; Sherman, born in 1721, was fifty-five; Franklin, born in 1706, was already seventy. Only Livingston, born in 1746, was younger than Jefferson, but they all felt that Jefferson was best equipped to put their views down on paper. He went to work on June 11, 1776, and without ever going to other people’s writings to assist him, had completed his draft of the Declaration seventeen days later.