Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Read online

  ALSO BY JON MEACHAM

  American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

  American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

  Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

  Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement (editor)

  This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

  Copyright © 2012 by Jon Meacham

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Meacham, Jon.

  Thomas Jefferson: the art of power / Jon Meacham.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6766-4

  eISBN 978-0-679-64536-8

  1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1783–1809. I. Title.

  E332.M48 2012 973.4’6092—dc23 2012013700

  [B]

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  www.atrandom.com

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  FIRST EDITION

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan

  TO HERBERT WENTZ

  And, as ever, for Mary, Maggie, Sam, and Keith

  A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception.… Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.

  —HENRY ADAMS, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson

  I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

  —PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, at a dinner in honor of all living recipients of the Nobel Prize, 1962

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  eBook Information

  Also by Jon Meacham

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Note on the Text

  Prologue · The World’s Best Hope

  Part I · THE SCION · BEGINNINGS TO SPRING 1774

  ONE · A Fortunate Son

  TWO · What Fixed the Destinies of My Life

  THREE · Roots of Revolution

  FOUR · Temptations and Trials

  FIVE · A World of Desire and Denial

  Part II · THE REVOLUTIONARY · SPRING 1774 TO SUMMER 1776

  SIX · Like a Shock of Electricity

  SEVEN · There Is No Peace

  EIGHT · The Famous Mr. Jefferson

  NINE · The Course of Human Events

  TEN · The Pull of Duty

  Part III · REFORMER AND GOVERNOR · LATE 1776 TO 1782

  ELEVEN · An Agenda for Liberty

  TWELVE · A Troublesome Office

  THIRTEEN · Redcoats at Monticello

  FOURTEEN · To Burn on Through Death

  Part IV · THE FRUSTRATED CONGRESSMAN · LATE 1782 TO MID-1784

  FIFTEEN · Return to the Arena

  SIXTEEN · A Struggle for Respect

  SEVENTEEN · Lost Cities and Life Counsel

  Part V · A MAN OF THE WORLD · 1785 TO 1789

  EIGHTEEN · The Vaunted Scene of Europe

  NINETEEN · The Philosophical World

  TWENTY · His Head and His Heart

  TWENTY-ONE · Do You Like Our New Constitution?

  TWENTY-TWO · A Treaty in Paris

  Part VI · THE FIRST SECRETARY OF STATE · 1789 TO 1792

  TWENTY-THREE · A New Post in New York

  TWENTY-FOUR · Mr. Jefferson Is Greatly Too Democratic

  TWENTY-FIVE · Two Cocks in the Pit

  TWENTY-SIX · The End of a Stormy Tour

  Part VII · THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION · 1793 TO 1800

  TWENTY-SEVEN · In Wait at Monticello

  TWENTY-EIGHT · To the Vice Presidency

  TWENTY-NINE · The Reign of Witches

  THIRTY · Adams vs. Jefferson Redux

  THIRTY-ONE · A Desperate State of Affairs

  Part VIII · THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES · 1801 TO 1809

  THIRTY-TWO · The New Order of Things Begins

  THIRTY-THREE · A Confident President

  THIRTY-FOUR · Victories, Scandal, and a Secret Sickness

  THIRTY-FIVE · The Air of Enchantment!

  THIRTY-SIX · The People Were Never More Happy

  THIRTY-SEVEN · A Deep, Dark, and Widespread Conspiracy

  THIRTY-EIGHT · This Damned Embargo

  THIRTY-NINE · A Farewell to Ultimate Power

  Part IX · THE MASTER OF MONTICELLO · 1809 TO THE END

  FORTY · My Body, Mind, and Affairs

  FORTY-ONE · To Form Statesmen, Legislators and Judges

  FORTY-TWO · The Knell of the Union

  FORTY-THREE · No, Doctor, Nothing More

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  THOMAS JEFFERSON LEFT POSTERITY an immense correspondence, and I am particularly indebted to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, published by Princeton University Press and first edited by Julian P. Boyd. I am, moreover, grateful to the incumbent editors of the Papers, especially general editor Barbara B. Oberg, for sharing unpublished transcripts of letters gathered for future volumes. The goal of the Princeton edition was, and continues to be, “to present as accurate a text as possible and to preserve as many of Jefferson’s distinctive mannerisms of writing as can be done.” To provide clarity and readability for a modern audience, however, I have taken the liberty of regularizing much of the quoted language from Jefferson and from his contemporaries. I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson’s frequent use of “it’s” for “its” and “recieve” for “receive,” and have, in most cases, expanded contractions and abbreviations and followed generally accepted practices of capitalization.

  PROLOGUE

  THE WORLD’S BEST HOPE

  Washington, D.C., Winter 1801

  HE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT. Lean and loose-limbed, Thomas Jefferson tossed back the sheets in his rooms at Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill, swung his long legs out of bed, and plunged his feet into a basin of cold water—a lifelong habit he believed good for his health. At Monticello, his plantation in the Southwest Mountains near the Blue Ridge of Virginia, the metal bucket brought to Jefferson every morning wore a groove on the floor next to the alcove where he slept.

  Six foot two and a half, Jefferson was nearly fifty-eight years old in the Washington winter of 1800–1801. His sandy hair, reddish in his youth, was graying; his freckled skin—always susceptible to the sun—was wrinkling a bit. His eyes
were penetrating but elusive, alternately described as blue, hazel, or brown. He had great teeth.

  It was early February 1801. The capital, with its muddy avenues and scattered buildings, was in chaos, and had been for weeks. The future of the presidency was uncertain, the stability of the Constitution in question, and, secluded inside Conrad and McMunn’s on New Jersey Avenue—a new establishment with stables for sixty horses just two hundred paces away from the unfinished Capitol building—Jefferson was in a quiet agony.

  He soaked his feet and gathered his thoughts. After a vicious election in which he had challenged the incumbent president, John Adams, it turned out that while Jefferson had defeated Adams in the popular vote, the tall Virginian had received the same number of electoral votes for president as the dashing, charismatic, and unpredictable Aaron Burr of New York, who had been running as Jefferson’s vice president. Under the rules in effect in 1800, there was no way to distinguish between a vote for president and one for vice president. What was supposed to have been a peaceful transfer of power from one rival to another—from Adams to Jefferson—had instead produced a constitutional crisis.

  Anxious and unhappy, Jefferson was, he wrote to his eldest daughter, “worn down here with pursuits in which I take no delight, surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word which falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.” His fate was in the hands of other men, the last place he wanted it to be. He hated the waiting, the whispers, the not knowing. But there was nothing he could do. And so Thomas Jefferson waited.

  The election, Jefferson said, was “the theme of all conversation.” The electoral tie between Jefferson and Burr, with Adams not so far behind, threw the contest to the House of Representatives—and no one knew what would happen. It was suddenly a whole new election, taking place in the House where each of the sixteen state delegations had one vote to cast. Whoever won nine of those votes would become president. “THE CRISIS is momentous … !” the Washington Federalist newspaper declared in the second week of February. Could Burr, who admitted that he thought of politics as “fun and honor and profit,” be made president by mischievous Federalists, taking the election from Jefferson, a fellow Republican? Or could Jefferson’s foes elect an interim president, denying Jefferson and his Republicans ultimate power?

  In the claustrophobic atmosphere of Washington, anything seemed possible—and Jefferson, who liked to cultivate the air of a philosopher who was above the merely political, found himself in a struggle to secure his own election and, in his mind, rescue the nation from the allegedly monarchical tendencies of the Federalist Party. As a young man in 1776 he had hazarded all for the American experiment in liberty. Now, a quarter of a century later, Jefferson believed that the United States as he knew it and loved it might not long endure. During the 1800 campaign, the patriot-physician Benjamin Rush told Jefferson that he had “heard a member of Congress lament our separation from Great Britain and express his sincere wishes that we were again dependent on her.”

  Such thoughts terrified Jefferson, who confessed that he felt bound to protect the principles of ’76 he had articulated in the Declaration of Independence. If he—the choice of the majority of the people—lost the presidency, then what had Americans been fighting for all these years? So much was at stake. An old Revolutionary ally from Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, said Jefferson’s foes were acting from “a desire to promote … division among the people, which they have excited and nourished as the germ of a civil war.”

  There had been a rumor that John Marshall, the secretary of state who had just been named chief justice, might be appointed president, blocking Jefferson from the office. “If the union could be broken, that would do it,” said James Monroe, who was told that twenty-two thousand men in Pennsylvania were “prepared to take up arms in the event of extremities.”

  Disorder, which Jefferson hated, threatened harmony, which he loved.

  In the end, after a snowstorm struck Washington, Jefferson narrowly prevailed on the thirty-sixth ballot in the House to become the third president of the United States. And so began the Age of Jefferson, a political achievement without parallel in American life. George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton are sometimes depicted as wiser, more practical men than the philosophical master of Monticello. Judged by the raw standard of the winning and the keeping of power, however, Thomas Jefferson was the most successful political figure of the first half century of the American republic. For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren. (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.) This unofficial and little-noted Jeffersonian dynasty is unmatched in American history.

  He had a defining vision, a compelling goal—the survival and success of popular government in America. Jefferson believed the will of an educated, enlightened majority should prevail. His opponents had less faith in the people. Alexander Hamilton referred to the broad American public as an “unthinking multitude”; Jefferson thought that same public was the salvation of liberty, the soul of the nation, and the hope of the republic.

  In pursuit of his ends, Jefferson sought, acquired, and wielded power, which is the bending of the world to one’s will, the remaking of reality in one’s own image. Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma. Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic. To realize his vision, he compromised and improvised. The willingness to do what he needed to do in a given moment makes him an elusive historical figure. Yet in the real world, in real time, when he was charged with the safety of the country, his creative flexibility made him a transformative leader.

  America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises. So was Jefferson. In his head and in his heart, as in the nation itself, the perfect warred with the good, the intellectual with the visceral. In him as in America, that conflict was, and is, a war without end. Jefferson’s story resonates not least because he embodies an eternal drama: the struggle of the leadership of the nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding world.

  More than any of the other early presidents—more than Washington, more than Adams—Jefferson believed in the possibilities of humanity. He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes. Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

  He loved his wife, his books, his farms, good wine, architecture, Homer, horseback riding, history, France, the Commonwealth of Virginia, spending money, and the very latest in ideas and insights. He believed in America, and in Americans. The nation, he said in his first inaugural address in 1801, was “the world’s best hope.” He thought Americans themselves capable of virtually anything they put their minds to. “Whatever they can, they will,” Jefferson said of his countrymen in 1814.

  A formidable man, “Mr. Jefferson was as tall, straight-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered,” said Isaac Granger Jefferson, a Monticello slave. “Neat a built man as ever was seen … a straight-up man, long face, high nose.” Edmund Bacon, a Monticello overseer, said that Jefferson “was like a fine horse; he had no surplus flesh.… His countenance was always mild and pleasant.”

  To be tall and forbidding might command respect for a time, but not affection. To be overly familiar might command affection for a time, but not respect. Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it. His bearing gave him unusual oppor
tunities to make the thoughts in his head the work of his hands, transforming the world around him from what it was to what he thought it ought to be.

  A philosopher and a scientist, a naturalist and a historian, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge. He adored detail, noting the temperature each day and carrying a tiny, ivory-leaved notebook in his pocket to track his daily expenditures. He drove his horses hard and fast and considered the sun his “almighty physician.” Jefferson was fit and virile, a terrific horseman and inveterate walker. He drank no hard liquor but loved wine, taking perhaps three glasses a day. He did not smoke. When he received gifts of Havana cigars from well-wishers, he passed them along to friends.

  Jefferson never tired of invention and inquiry, designing dumbwaiters and hidden mechanisms to open doors at Monticello. He delighted in archaeology, paleontology, astronomy, botany, and meteorology, and once created his own version of the Gospels by excising the New Testament passages he found supernatural or implausible and arranging the remaining verses in the order he believed they should be read. He drew sustenance from music and found joy in gardening. He bought and built beautiful things, creating Palladian plans for Monticello and the Roman-inspired capitol of Virginia, which he designed after seeing an ancient temple in Nîmes, in the south of France. He was an enthusiastic patron of pasta, took the trouble to copy down a French recipe for ice cream, and enjoyed the search for the perfect dressing for his salads. He kept shepherd dogs (two favorites were named Bergere and Grizzle). He knew Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish.

  He was also a student of human nature, a keen observer of what drove other men, and he loved knowing the details of other lives. He admired the letters of Madame de Sévigné, whose correspondence offered a panoramic view of the France of Louis XIV, and Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, a romantic picaresque novel. In his library at Monticello was a collection of what a guest called “regal scandal” that he had put together under the title The Book of Kings. It included the Mémoires de la Princesse de Bareith (by the princess royal of Prussia, sister of Frederick the Great); Les Mémoires de la Comtesse de la Motte (by a key figure in a scandal involving a diamond necklace and Marie-Antoinette); and an account of the trial of the Duke of York, the commander in chief of the British army who had been forced to resign amid charges that he had allowed his mistress to sell officer commissions. Jefferson pointed out these tales, his guest recalled, “with a satisfaction somewhat inconsistent with the measured gravity he claims in relation to such subjects generally.”