Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Read online

  A compromise was proposed. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina were “not yet matured for falling from the parent stem,” Jefferson said, and “it was thought most prudent to wait a while for them.”

  But not too long. A vote was put off three weeks, until the first of July. In the interim, so “that this might occasion as little delay as possible,” Jefferson said, committees were appointed to draft a declaration, prepare a plan for the new government, and set guidelines for the negotiation of foreign alliances.

  But who was best to draft the declaration, which was due for consideration and a vote in fewer than three weeks?

  John Adams thought Jefferson should do it, a decision with roots in a secret conversation that had taken place two years before. In 1774, on the eve of the First Continental Congress, Benjamin Rush and a few other delegates had met the Massachusetts contingent on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Taking tea in a private room at an inn in Frankford, Pennsylvania, six miles from the city, Rush and his colleagues offered Adams and company some practical political counsel. “We were all suspected of having independence in view,” Adams recalled long afterward, and Massachusetts seemed ahead of much of the rest of America. Adams continued:

  Now, said they, you must not utter the word independence, nor give the least hint or insinuation of the idea, neither in Congress or any private conversation; if you do, you are undone; for the idea of independence is as unpopular in Pennsylvania and in all the Middle and Southern States as the Stamp Act itself. No man dares to speak of it. Moreover, you are the representatives of the suffering state. Boston and Massachusetts are under a rod of iron. British fleets and armies are tyrannizing over you; you yourselves are personally obnoxious to them and all the friends of government; you have been long persecuted by them all; your feelings have been hurt, your passions excited; you are thought to be too warm, too zealous, too sanguine. You must be, therefore, very cautious. You must not come forward with any bold measures, you must not pretend to take the lead. You know Virginia is the most populous State in the Union. They are very proud of their ancient dominion, they call it; they think they have a right to take the lead, and the Southern States and Middle States too, are too much disposed to yield it to them.

  Adams appreciated the straight talk. “This was plain dealing … and I must confess that there appeared so much wisdom and good sense in it, that it made a deep impression on my mind, and it had an equal effect on all my colleagues,” he recalled.

  Two years later, meeting with Jefferson in the early summer of 1776, Adams had what he called “the Frankfort advice” (the town was actually Frankford) in mind. To a correspondent who wondered why Jefferson had been invested with such responsibility, Adams wrote:

  You inquire why so young a man as Mr. Jefferson was placed at the head of the committee for preparing a Declaration of Independence? I answer: It was the Frankfort advice, to place Virginia at the head of everything.… There were three committees appointed at the same time, one for the Declaration of Independence, another for preparing articles of confederation, and another for preparing a treaty to be proposed to France. Mr. Lee was chosen for the Committee of Confederation, and it was not thought convenient that the same person should be upon both. Mr. Jefferson came into Congress in June, 1775, and brought with him a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent of composition. Writings of his were handed about, remarkable for the peculiar felicity of expression. Though a silent member in Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation—not even Samuel Adams was more so—that he soon seized upon my heart; and upon this occasion I gave him my vote, and did all in my power to procure the votes of others. I think he had one more vote than any other, and that placed him at the head of the committee. I had the next highest number, and that placed me the second. The committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr. Jefferson and me to make the draft, I suppose because we were the two first on the list.

  As Adams recalled the ensuing conversation with Jefferson, the Virginian suggested that Adams himself write the draft.

  “I will not,” Adams said.

  “You should do it,” Jefferson said.

  “Oh! no.”

  “Why will you not? You ought to do it.”

  “I will not.”

  “Why?”

  “Reasons enough.”

  “What can be your reasons?”

  “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.”

  “Well, if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”

  “Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.”

  In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was to be both poetic and prosaic, creating sympathy for the larger cause while condemning Britain in compelling terms. His purpose, he said, was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of … but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we were compelled to take.”

  As he sat to write the declaration at Jacob Graff’s hosue—he slept in one room and wrote in a private parlor across the stairs—Jefferson knew what had to be done, and he knew how to do it. He had thought much about the ends and means of independence. The document he wrote flowed naturally from his character and his convictions. He did not have the time or the inclination to take a fresh view of things. He later wrote: “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

  That the words of the declaration came to Jefferson amid the hectic pace of legislative life in a time of worry over war gives them more, not less, authority as a window into his own mind and heart. He was distilling an Enlightenment vision about the sanctity and centrality of the individual, arguing that self-government was part of the nature of things.

  When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

  He had the best of editors in private: “self-evident” was Benjamin Franklin’s. In sum, Jefferson’s draft was a political undertaking with a philosophical frame. It was produced in a particular moment by a politician to satisfy particular concerns for a particular complex of audiences: undecided Americans, soldiers in arms, and potential global allies.

  He worked away in these summer days of 1776, dividing his time between writing in his quarters and executing congressional business. Congress ordered that the declaration be sent “to the several assemblies, conventions, and committees, or councils of safety, and to the several commanding officers of the continental troops; that it be proclaimed in each of the United State
s, and at the head of the army.” Constituencies included readers in all of the colonies (especially in regions where opinion still tended against independence) and those in the armed service of the American cause. Hence Jefferson included a lengthy list of charges against King George III, some of which were obscure even to contemporaries.

  Jefferson’s influences were manifold. Locke, Montesquieu, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment were among them, as was James Wilson’s pamphlet Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Authority of the British Parliament and George Mason’s Declaration of Rights, written for the Virginia constitution.

  Jefferson had consulted, too, with Franklin and Adams. (“The enclosed paper has been read and with some small alterations approved of by the committee,” Jefferson wrote in a note to Franklin, whose gout and boils were keeping him confined to his lodgings. “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?”)

  Jefferson spared nothing in his attacks on England and on George III, including harsh language condemning the slave trade. Despite his defeats on antislavery measures in Virginia, both in court and in the House of Burgesses, Jefferson tried once more to lead an American institution—in this case, the Continental Congress—to a relatively progressive position on slavery.

  Yet he failed again. Adams long remembered these passages of Jefferson’s.

  A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose.…

  We reported it to the committee.… We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson’s handwriting, as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was.

  The declaration was introduced on Friday, June 28, 1776, and debate began on Monday, July 1. As Adams remembered, large passages were cut, irritating Jefferson. “The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many,” he said. “For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offense.”

  The denunciation of slavery was also eliminated. “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving [of] the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and to Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it,” said Jefferson. “Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” He had tried anew on slavery and fallen short anew. His political instinct to fight only those battles he believed he could win now took even firmer hold.

  Jefferson hated being edited by such a large group. He fairly writhed as he sat in the Pennsylvania State House, listening to member after member offering his thoughts, wanting to change this and cut that. Benjamin Franklin had sufficiently conquered his gout to attend the sessions. Sympathetic about Jefferson’s evident distress, Franklin tried to soothe his young colleague, to whom every suggestion and demand on the floor was a fresh agony, as though each objection was directed not at the document but at Jefferson himself. As Franklin told Jefferson, “I have made it a rule, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.” Yet for all his momentary discomfort, Jefferson exercised an extraordinary measure of power by taking on drafting duties: However many changes came in, it was still his voice and vision at the core of the enterprise.

  On Tuesday, July 2, 1776, the delegates voted to adopt the resolution for independence. Two days later, on a pleasant summertime Thursday—at midday the temperature was 76 degrees—they ratified the declaration. Overnight the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap produced the approved text on broadside, creating the first set of published copies; on July 6, Benjamin Towne, publisher of The Pennsylvania Evening Post, ran the declaration on his front page.

  The following Monday, July 8, the news was announced in Philadelphia in front of the State House; the crowd cheered, “God bless the free states of North America!”

  It was a nervous time. The delegates knew they had committed themselves to a treasonous course. They relieved the tension where they could, in small moments of grim levity. Horseflies buzzed through the Pennsylvania State House from a nearby stable, Jefferson said in later years, bedeviling what James Parton called “the silk-stockinged legs of honorable members. Handkerchief in hand, they lashed the flies with such vigor as they could command … but the annoyance became at length so extreme as to render them impatient of delay, and they made haste to bring the momentous business to a conclusion.”

  Jefferson loved the story of an exchange between the fat Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and the wispy Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. “Gerry, when the hanging comes, I shall have the advantage; you’ll kick in the air half an hour after it is all over with me!”

  In later years there was much back-and-forth over the declaration and its significance, with John Adams, jealous of Jefferson’s authorial fame, complaining that the declaration was “a theatrical show,” not a substantive document. “Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that, i.e. all the glory of it,” Adams remarked in 1811.

  The revolutionary nature of Jefferson’s words was, nevertheless, clear from the beginning. With the power of the pen, he had articulated a new premise for the government of humanity: that all men were created equal. He basically meant all white men, especially propertied ones, but the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, for one, recognized the import of the document adopted in Philadelphia. Attacking the declaration from London, Bentham scoffed at the idea that every man had a natural, God-given right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; such assertions, Bentham said, were “absurd and visionary,” and he likened the American political thinking to the old New England fury over witchcraft.

  “ ‘All men,’ they tell us, ‘are created equal,’ ” Bentham wrote. “This surely is a new discovery; now, for the first time, we learn, that a child, at the moment of his birth, has the same quantity of natural power as the parent, the same quantity of political power as the magistrate.”

  Ultimately, though, this was the essential American view. Bentham had read Jefferson right. Jefferson’s pride in authorship, meanwhile, was contemporaneous and clear. He dispatched copies of his original version to friends. “You will judge whether it is the better or worse for the critics,” he wrote a colleague. His friend John Page reassured Jefferson by complimenting him, and then Page suggested, gently, that the event of independence transcended the querulous editors of the Pennsylvania State House. “I am highly pleased with your Declaration,” said Page. “God preserve the United States. We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?”

  TEN

  THE PULL OF DUTY

  I pray you to come. I am under a sacred obligation to go home.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON to Richard Henry Lee, 1776

  Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

  —American motto suggested by Jefferson

  IN 1776, WITH JEFFERSON at work in the cause of the nation in Philadelphia, Patty suffered a disastrous miscarriage. In the same days and weeks in which he drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson could not rest easy about his wife, desperately watching out for letters from her hand. “I wish I could be better satisfied on the point of Patty’s recovery,” he wrote a brother-in-law in July 1776.
“I had not heard from her at all for two posts before, and no letter from herself now.”

  Jefferson hated not hearing, and he feared the worst. His 1772 marriage had proved an enviable one; Patty Jefferson was a good and loving wife. She was, a granddaughter wrote, “a favorite with her husband’s sisters (we all know that this is a delicate and difficult relation), with his family generally, and with her neighbors.… She commanded his respect by her good sense and domestic virtues, and his admiration and love by her wit, her vivacity, and her agreeable person and manners.”

  Jefferson knew that it was his duty to remain in Philadelphia, and he felt inescapably drawn to political life. Still, he longed to be home with his wife and family.

  When we think of Jefferson in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, we think of a philosopher at work with a quill pen and an agile mind shaped by, and suffused with, Enlightenment ideas about the rights of man. The drafting of the Declaration of Independence, however, was only one of many things that Jefferson did and that happened around him in those critical months. The onslaught of military reports, wartime supply issues, and intelligence and rumor about subversion from within taught him about the centrality of national security, the dangers of conspiracy, and the eternal need to manage public opinion.

  The work was exhausting. The politics of the moment were fraught with fears over conspiracies, of Loyalists plotting at home, and of Indian attacks on the frontier. Nothing—and no one—was to be counted on.

  It was a season of schemes and secrets. In late June came word of a Loyalist plot in New York within the Continental army to kill George Washington and desert the American cause. The mayor of New York was said to be part of the conspiracy. A member of Washington’s personal bodyguard detail was condemned to death. The British, meanwhile, were gathering force.