Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  And then Jefferson did that third important thing I wanted to mention, which was to send Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest and come back with a full report on all the good things we had there for ourselves. I don’t think many people realize or remember that Lewis was Jefferson’s personal secretary and close friend and was chosen by Jefferson because he felt that the expedition was so important that he wanted somebody especially good to head it. Lewis in turn picked his friend William Clark to join him on the expedition, which they hoped would take them as far as the Pacific Ocean, and the body of men set out on a dangerous and difficult trip that lasted two and a half years, from May 1804 to September 1806, and covered 8,000 miles. They ended up back in St. Louis with a tremendous amount of valuable information about the areas they visited and the Indians who lived there, and they confirmed that an overland route was possible, opening the door to considerable additional exploration and settling of the lands by Americans. Lewis went on to become governor of the territory in 1807, but had a sudden and tragic end two years later; he was on his way from his headquarters in St. Louis to Washington to arrange for publication of the important journals of his expedition when he stopped at an isolated inn on the Natchez Trace, and he was found dead there the next morning, just thirty-five years of age. It’s still debated as to whether it was a suicide or whether he was murdered. Clark was appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs, negotiating a number of important treaties, and then was governor of the Missouri Territory from 1813 to 1821, resuming his duties as superintendent of Indian Affairs until his death at the age of sixty-eight in 1838.

  Jefferson was a very social sort of man, and when he left the presidency on March 3, 1809, he went back to Monticello and spent the rest of his life there, keeping busy by entertaining visitors and neighbors and corresponding with friends around the country. He hurried back there because most of his interests were centered in his home, and during the eight years he was president, he stayed in Washington only when it was necessary for him to be there. At all other times, he went quickly back to Virginia and relaxed in his lovely big house.

  He was a very genial man, and a good man to have around in any company. He knew how to make people enjoy themselves. In fact, he was too much that way for the simple reason that the friends he entertained, while he was president and after he left the presidency, ate him out of house and home, and he lost all of his properties except Monticello because he couldn’t keep up with the expense of running things. His house was a kind of hotel, and when he left the White House, he was nearly $25,000 in debt. His indebtedness increased rather than decreased in the years that followed because there were no presidential pensions in those days, and his only income was from selling tobacco and flour and a few other items grown and manufactured at Monticello. He also had a tremendous number of family connections to whom he kept giving money because he felt responsible for them, and in one way or another, I guess he was. He was a good farmer after he left the White House, and he’d been a good farmer in his earlier days, growing just about everything that grows on a farm and being very successful at it; but he was so liberal that anything he accumulated soon disappeared to the people who were begging him to take care of them or expecting him to entertain them. But he managed to get along, and he enjoyed the last seventeen years of his life as a private citizen.

  He was just a good human being, and he liked people, and he liked to associate with people, and he liked to get along with people, and he liked to discuss all questions with anybody who was willing to discuss them with him. He talked to visitors and friends on any subject they wanted to bring up, and this gave him constant enjoyment because he knew all the most intelligent people in Virginia and New York and Massachusetts, and in France and England, too, for that matter. Sometimes, of course, he had to make some pretty strong sacrifices to keep up his way of life. In 1815, for example, when we were at war with the British again and they burned down the Capitol, the fire wiped out the Library of Congress at the same time, and Jefferson agreed to sell the government his beloved collection of books to start up a new Library of Congress. It must have hurt his heart to do that - he’d accumulated 6,500 books by that time, and it took eleven big wagons to get the collection to Washington - but he needed the $23,950 he got for his books. There’s a sad postscript to that, too; there are only about a third of those books still in the Library of Congress because there was another fire there in 1851, and two-thirds of Jefferson’s collection was destroyed. Still, he remained a happy and gregarious man for the remainder of his life.

  His heavy correspondence also accomplished another good thing: It renewed his relationship with John Adams, and they ended up friends. I hope I’ve made it clear that I don’t believe Adams was a bad sort of man. I don’t think there was anything underhanded about John Adams; I think he was an honorable and upright man and an outstanding character of his time. But his political ideas were not in agreement with those of Jefferson - in which I believe, of course - and because of this I don’t think he was a very effective president. As I’ve said, his idea of government, like Alexander Hamilton’s, was that the country should be run by a special coterie of people who, in those days, were considered better than the general run of the population - that the welfare of the country was best served by people who had a situation in the world above the ordinary run of the population because the upper classes knew more about what was good for the people than the people themselves knew. Jefferson didn’t agree with this at all, of course; he trusted the people.

  I suppose much of the reason for Adams’ viewpoint stems from the fact that he spent so much of his time abroad as a diplomat and foreign officer for the United States; he spent most of the ten years from 1778 to 1788 in France, Holland, and England, before becoming Washington’s vice president in 1789 and president himself in 1796. His son, John Quincy Adams, in fact, was raised principally out of this country. They were in contact mostly with Europeans whose ideas were very different from the ideas of the people who were growing up and developing in the Colonies; and while Jefferson and others were inaugurating some of the great policies and beliefs that were included in the Constitution, Adams was acquiring notions that were not very proper notions in Jefferson’s opinion, and in mine. And I think that, while Adams was a strong advocate of freedom from England, and did everything he could to help free the country from England, he still had those views in the back of his head when he entered the White House. Well, anyway, he wasn’t president long enough to bring many of his programs into operation. People got tired of him before he had a chance to have a second term.

  As I’ve mentioned, he was so disappointed at not being reelected that he left the White House at midnight so that he wouldn’t have to ride in the same carriage with Jefferson to Jefferson’s inauguration, and he also left in that bad-mannered way because he felt betrayed by many members of the Congress. There’s no doubt that he was. Every president is. But the difference is that that was just the start of it, and people hadn’t yet learned to understand it as a fact of life.

  I’m sure that Jefferson was as outraged by Adams’ behavior as I was by Eisenhower’s, and I’m sure Adams never really got over the fact that Jefferson had clearly been a better president than he’d been. I don’t think, incidentally, that Jefferson was ahead of his time in doing a better job than his predecessor. I think the work Washington had done was simply carried on by Jefferson after he became president. Adams hadn’t made any real approach to the Constitution, hadn’t really tried to understand and use it, so - as though Adams had never even been there - Jefferson was just carrying on the firm and stable government that Washington had created. Jefferson kept the government running.

  But the smoldering anger between the two men was all smoothed over by their long correspondence, and Jefferson and Adams became the best of friends. When Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1826, at about six o’clock in the evening, he was nearly ninety-one, making him the presid
ent with the longest life thus far. His final thoughts were on the United States and on Jefferson; his last words were, “The country is saved, and Jefferson lives.” But that was also a final irony in the lives of the two men, because Jefferson was already dead. He died five hours before Adams, at twelve-fifty p.m., aged eighty-three. He willed the only thing he had left, Monticello, to his daughter Patsy, but his indebtedness had now climbed to a total of $107,274, and Patsy had to sell the house and auction off his furniture to pay his debts. Monticello was later bought by a naval officer named Uriah P. Levy and bequeathed by him to “the people of the United States.” Even that generous act didn’t help because a battle developed over the terms of his will, and it wasn’t until 1923 that the mansion was renovated and refurnished and opened to the public.

  THE THREE MEN who followed Thomas Jefferson into the presidency - James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams - were all right, I suppose, but they were certainly nothing special. They weren’t simpletons like Ulysses S. Grant or fools surrounded by crooks like Warren G. Harding, but we’re still lucky that the country managed to stay on its feet during the twenty years, from 1808 to 1828, in which they served.

  Madison, born in Port Conway, Virginia, on March 16, 1751, was a friend of Jefferson’s and became president largely because Jefferson made it clear that Madison was the man he wanted to succeed him. Jefferson was so popular as president that a lot of people asked him to run for a third term, but he said that he felt that two terms were plenty, and that a man who was president might be tempted to stay on for his lifetime, and then we’d have a kingdom instead of a democracy, and he preferred to go home to Virginia and see James Madison in his place. There were two other men in Jefferson’s party who also wanted the nomination: Monroe, also a close friend of Jefferson’s, and George Clinton of New York, who felt that Virginians were beginning to make the presidency their personal property and wanted to become the first New Yorker to get the job. But Jefferson favored Madison because Madison had been his secretary of state during all eight years of the Jefferson administration, working so closely with him on the Louisiana Purchase and on foreign policy and other matters that it was sometimes impossible to tell which man had thought up which moves or which policies in some situations, and Jefferson felt that Madison as president was most likely to carry on the things on which the two men had worked together. Jefferson was also an admirer of Madison because Madison was one of the principal authors of the Constitution and wrote most of the final version, and he was more influential than anyone else in the Constitutional Convention in managing to get it through at last. And it wasn’t an easy victory, either; it was passed by a narrow margin of eighty-nine to seventy-nine.

  That’s why Madison is known in our history as Father of the Constitution and Master Builder of the Constitution, and that’s another thing that Jefferson and Madison had in common: their belief in the Constitution and the need for a strong federal government to run the country, and their increasing dislike of Patrick Henry because of his opposition to the Constitution on the grounds that it limited states’ rights. Henry became such an enemy of Madison’s that, when Madison tried to become a senator from Virginia early in his career, Henry use his very strong influence in Virginia to get him defeated, saying that there’d be a revolution in the state and “rivulets of blood” would run if Madison entered the Senate. And when Madison switched around and decided instead to run for the House of Representatives, Henry again opposed him bitterly, putting up James Monroe as Madison’s opponent, and missed getting Madison defeated a second time only by a tiny margin. But Jefferson and Madison were so firmly entrenched by 1808 that Madison won the nomination and the presidency with ease. He was then able to defeat another New Yorker named Clinton, DeWitt Clinton, who was George Clinton’s nephew, in 1812, getting eleven states and 128 electoral votes to Clinton’s seven states and eighty-nine electoral votes. (Clinton returned home to New York, which was a good thing, because he then went to work on getting the all-important Erie Canal approved and completed, a necessity for the country at the time. The canal ran from Albany to Buffalo and connected Lake Erie and the Hudson River, allowing Americans in those areas to trade and do business with each other instead of having to rely on Canadian sources.)

  Madison didn’t look like much personally. He was the smallest of our presidents, just five feet four inches tall, and he was so thin that he tipped the scales at 100 pounds only when he was soaking wet or had a bunch of rocks in his pockets. He was so nervous that he suffered from an ailment called epileptoidal hysteria, whose victims don’t really have epilepsy but nevertheless have similar problems including falling to the floor and frothing at the mouth. He also dressed somewhat too conservatively, wearing only black suits, which made him look smaller and thinner.

  He was the first president to wear only clothing made in the United States rather than the dressier stuff that came from England and France. He was also the first president to refuse to wear knee breeches and other overly ornate items of clothing. Before that, they all wore knee breeches and silver-buckle shoes and long stockings. That is, the officials did; the common people didn’t. Madison changed the presidential clothing style because everybody else, the general public, was wearing substantially the same sort of clothes that we wear today; he felt there wasn’t any reason to follow the British customs of pomp and ceremony. (But can you imagine a president wearing knee breeches or other ceremonial things today, even on special occasions? It surely wouldn’t work in this day and age. They’d laugh him right out of office.)

  Madison also had sort of nondescript brown hair, pale blue eyes, a weak and trembly voice that couldn’t be heard in the back when he addressed large audiences, and a nose that caught your eye because it had once gotten frostbitten and was permanently scarred.

  But despite his unimpressive appearance and manner, he was a brilliant fellow with a crystal-clear mind, an excellent education at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, and a decent man who, like his friend Jefferson, was much more interested in the welfare of the average citizen than the privileged few. We also owe him, as a nation, a debt of gratitude because he was a meticulous sort of person and kept a very detailed record of what went on every day at the Constitutional Convention - details that, since the sessions were secret, would otherwise have been lost to our history forever. But the reason he wasn’t an outstanding president is that, like many another man, and despite his considerable brainpower and education, he found it difficult to make decisions. As a president, the man who had to say yes or no and do this or do that, he was what we might call, in these days, a weak sister. He just couldn’t make decisions. Some historians say he was over-intellectual. He was certainly well-informed on history and government, and he was certainly an intellectual, but I don’t think we want to blame his intellectualism for the fact that he wasn’t a very good president. It was just that, when it came time for him to act like an executive, he was like a great many other people; when the time comes to make decisions, they have difficulty doing it.

  And that was particularly unfortunate because he was president when the War of 1812 came along, and that was one of the worst periods in our history. In a sense, one of the main reasons Jefferson wanted Madison as his successor was that he felt that Madison would continue to preserve peace in our country, but events made that impossible. In Congress, two young men, Henry Clay of Kentucky, speaker of the House of Representatives, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, were gaining power every day, and they were leaders of a group known as the War Hawks. Clay was born in 1777 and Calhoun was born in 1782, so they had no personal familiarity with the agonies of the Revolutionary War, and the War Hawks agitated constantly for the United States to go to war against England or France; they didn’t seem to care which, and in fact a majority of the War Hawks felt that we should go to war against both.

  There were, without doubt, reasons and provocations f
or harsh feelings toward the two countries. Both British and French ships were stopping and boarding American ships and seizing their cargoes. The British, in particular, were feeling proud of themselves because of their victories over the French, being more and more convinced that they were the sole masters of the seas; so, you’ll recall, they were going one very unpleasant step further than the French and also seizing American sailors and forcing them into the British navy. As far as they were concerned, the Americans weren’t Americans at all; they were still British subjects no matter how much the sailors insisted to the contrary.

  All this became worse and worse toward the end of Jefferson’s second term, with practically every American ship on the seas being stopped and boarded; and in desperation, in 1807, Jefferson put an embargo on American ships, prohibiting them from leaving American ports without his permission. His notion was the British and French might then promise not to bother American ships because they needed American goods for their own people. It didn’t do any good. The British, in particular, continued to board the relatively few ships that were allowed to leave America, figuring, I guess, that they’d get along with just the American goods they managed to steal, and American merchants complained that the embargo was putting them out of business, and they wanted to take their chances with their ships, and the War Hawks became louder in their insistence that we declare war against Britain.