Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Read online

  For the rest of his life Jefferson sought to replicate the spirit and substance of these long Williamsburg nights. At his round dining table at Monticello, in the salons of Paris, and in the common rooms of boardinghouses and taverns in Philadelphia and New York, and finally at the President’s House in Washington, D.C., Jefferson craved talk of the latest in science and the arts and adored conversation with the beautiful women, politicians, and men of affairs who made the world run on both sides of the Atlantic.

  In this elite number Jefferson also included his cousin Peyton Randolph, attorney general of Virginia, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and the first president of the Continental Congress. Born in 1721, Randolph was at once convivial and imposing. On meeting him, Silas Deane of Connecticut wrote that Peyton Randolph was “of an affable, open and majestic deportment, large in size, though not out of proportion”; he also “commands respect and esteem by his very aspect, independent of the high character he sustains.”

  Small, Wythe, Fauquier, and Peyton Randolph established the standards by which Jefferson judged everyone else. They represented a love of engaging company, a devotion to the life of the mind, and a commitment to the responsible execution of political duties for the larger good. “Under temptations and difficulties,” he told a grandson, “I would ask myself—what would Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph do in this situation? What course in it will ensure me their approbation?”

  Jefferson was to be always guided by experience and example, thinking about what men of the world—men he respected and loved—might do, for in their day their decisions had given them, in Jefferson’s words, “very high standing,” standing that Jefferson felt “the incessant wish” to match, and surpass.

  In pursuit of that standing, Jefferson never cut himself off from the social and cultural currents of his time. When on holiday from Williamsburg, he played his part in the rites of Virginia hospitality, often hosting others at Shadwell or visiting friends at their plantations.

  On a visit one winter to Colonel Nathaniel Dandridge’s place in Hanover County, Jefferson met Patrick Henry, a young man living in Louisa County. Jefferson recalled that the two “passed perhaps a fortnight together at the revelries of the neighborhood and season. His manners had something of the coarseness of the society he had frequented; his passion was fiddling, dancing and pleasantry. He excelled in the last, and it attached every one to him.”

  Jefferson conceived of life in social terms, and he believed that his own identity was bound up with the world around him. A slave was always in attendance. Family, neighbors, and callers were more or less constant presences. “I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes,” he once wrote to one of his daughters.

  He was a political man in the purest sense of the term. He lived among others, engaged in the business of living in community, and enjoyed being at the center of everything no matter what the everything was: He was a happy member of the FHC (or Flat Hat Club) at William and Mary, a secret society that, as Jefferson put it, “had no useful object.”

  Even the bustle of a plantation paled in contrast to the charms of Williamsburg. When away from the capital, he longed for intelligence about what he might be missing. “If there is any news stirring in town or country, such as deaths, courtships and marriages in the circle of my acquaintance let me know it,” Jefferson wrote his college friend John Page.

  For a time in the early 1760s, Jefferson was in love—passionately if ineffectually—with a young woman named Rebecca Lewis Burwell, the sister of his classmate Lewis Burwell, Jr., of Gloucester County. His letters on the subject are about what one would expect of a young man not quite twenty years old: overstated, breathless, self-serious, and melodramatic. His attempts at humor and self-mockery in his correspondence about Rebecca Burwell fall largely flat, and the episode is chiefly interesting for the light it sheds on Jefferson’s sensitivity to rejection, disorder, and criticism.

  Little about the courtship went well. Even rats and rain seemed to conspire against him. On Christmas Eve 1762, Jefferson went to bed as usual, leaving his pocketbook, garters, and watch in his room. The watch held a paper drawing of Rebecca Burwell, the single token Jefferson appears to have had of the object of his affections.

  Awaking on Christmas morning, Jefferson discovered not only that rats had gotten into his room and gnawed at his pocketbook and garters—the rodents spent part of the night only inches from Jefferson’s head—but that rain in the night had leaked into the house, soaking the watch and destroying the image of his beloved. To the lovesick Jefferson the accidents seemed terrible omens.

  In this season he compared himself to Job and wondered, “Is there any such thing as happiness in this world?” His answer: “No.” About a month later, in January 1763, writing from Fairfields, a brother-in-law’s place in Goochland County, Jefferson was still gloomy. “All things here appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner and supper and go to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same: so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day,” he wrote John Page.

  Jefferson always wanted some level of control, too, and he savored secrecy. “We must fall on some scheme of communicating our thoughts to each other, which shall be totally unintelligible to everyone but to ourselves,” he wrote Page as they shared gossip about courtships, dances, and lovers’ maneuverings.

  His feelings for Rebecca grew stronger as the year wore on. Nine months later, on Thursday, October 6, 1763, Jefferson decided to declare himself.

  There was a dance that evening in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, with its brightly lit banqueting hall.

  In this elegant setting Jefferson believed his hour had come. “I was prepared to say a great deal: I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me, in as moving language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner,” Jefferson wrote the next day. He was dancing with Rebecca in an “agreeable company.” Everything appeared set.

  He tried to speak, and it all fell apart. “But, good God!” Jefferson wrote afterward. “When I had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder, and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible signs of my strange confusion!”

  His humiliation was nearly complete. Yet he did not capitulate totally, not without one additional attempt: a conversation in which Jefferson “opened my mind more freely and more fully.” He had plans (not then realized) to travel to England, but his heart was Rebecca’s if she would have it—sort of.

  As Jefferson told the story to his friend John Page in January 1764, he made his intentions clear to Rebecca without committing himself, which gave Jefferson a degree of dignity and control: “I asked no question which would admit of a categorical answer, but assured [her] that such questions would one day be asked.” In the end there were no further questions—there were, in fact, no further interviews of any kind between the two. Defeated, he made his retreat. After he was rejected by Rebecca, Jefferson experienced what may have been the first instance of an ailment that was to recur at times of stress: a painful prolonged headache.

  Characterizing himself as “abominably indolent” in a letter to a friend written late on a March evening, Jefferson said that his “scheme” to marry Rebecca was now “totally frustrated” by her impending marriage to the wealthy Jacquelin Ambler of Yorktown, which took place in May 1764.

  Then, in an apparent allusion to prostitution or to sexual activity with enslaved women or with women in the servant class—it is unclear which, but these seem the likeliest possibilities—Jefferson wrote: “Many and great are the comforts of a single state, and neither of the reasons you urge can have any influence with an inhabitant and a young inhabitant too of Williamsb
urg. For St. Paul only says that it is better to be married than to burn. Now I presume that if that apostle had known that providence would at an after day be so kind to any particular set of people as to furnish them with other means of extinguishing their fire than those of matrimony, he would have earnestly recommended them to their practice.”

  It was nearing midnight as he wrote these words. He was suffering from his headache as the candle burned down and Jupiter, his personal slave, fell asleep. Perhaps it was the intimacy of the hour that encouraged his candor; perhaps he was boasting vainly. But Jefferson had some reason to say that “providence” had given men like himself the “means” to satisfy his sexual appetites—means he appears to have made use of. This much was clear: Jefferson needed to get his mind off his lost love. Fortunately for him, he was a man of wide interests—interests his teachers and mentors were nurturing as his lovesickness faded.

  THREE

  ROOTS OF REVOLUTION

  Our minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  FOR THOMAS JEFFERSON, politics were ubiquitous. They were the air he breathed. “May we outlive our enemies,” Jefferson once wrote in a private note to himself. On the same page of a memorandum book on which he noted that he had sent to London for summer clothes for his slave Jupiter and scarlet cloth for his own waistcoats, he added an aphorism: “No liberty, no life.”

  To follow Jefferson in the 1760s and early 1770s is to see how the American Revolution took shape, and why. The definition of liberty and the nature of representative government—fundamental human questions—were consuming concerns in the America of Jefferson’s young adulthood. In these decades, London held power over the American colonies. The British Navigation Acts controlled trade and transportation; merchants in Philadelphia or farmers in Albemarle County were subject to an economic system in which they had no real political voice. Royal governors could convene colonial assemblies such as the Virginia House of Burgesses. The governors could also veto any legislation and were empowered to dissolve the sessions at will. No directly elected representatives of the British in North America sat in the British Parliament.

  Such issues were to grow in scope and significance as Jefferson himself grew older. In 1754, when Jefferson was not yet twelve years old, at a convention in Albany, New York, the American colonists made a proposal, known as the Albany Plan of Union. It was a bid to become a largely self-governing province under a national royal governor. Its author, Benjamin Franklin, noted that the plan collapsed because Americans thought it too autocratic and the British found it too democratic.

  When Jefferson was fourteen, he inherited his father’s edition of Paul de Rapin-Thoyras’s history of England—a book that sheds light on the roots of the American Revolution, for the American story of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was inextricably linked with the story of England in the seventeenth.

  Americans who knew their British history—and since most Americans were provincial Britons, most of them did—understood political life to be a constant struggle to preserve individual liberty from encroachments of Crown and courtier.

  With the British politician and writer Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Jefferson believed history was “philosophy teaching by examples.” History, then, mattered enormously, for it could repeat itself at any time in any generation. And if that history brought tyranny, it was to be fought at all costs.

  First published in 1723, Rapin’s book held that the story of England (and thus of English peoples such as the Americans) was the story of the battle between monarchical and (relatively) popular authority. Whigs were oriented more toward the Parliament and the people, Tories toward the king. Jefferson took this way of thinking about politics seriously, later arguing that all societies were likely to be divided into such camps.

  The drama of the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution had shaped the American view of life and politics. In books by Rapin, Bolingbroke, and others, history was depicted as a war between the few and the many for ultimate power. In Britain in the seventeenth century, the people, including many aristocrats, had rebelled against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuart kings, leading to chaos. There was the execution of Charles I, the commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of the Stuarts (which led to more political and religious strife), and finally the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William of Orange and his wife, Mary, were crowned to preside over a balanced constitution. As a condition of kingship, William and Mary agreed to uphold an English Declaration of Rights that limited the monarchy’s power to abuse the rights of individuals and of Parliament. Through the Constitutional Settlement of 1689–1701, England achieved order and protected liberty with a balance of powers.

  Americans of Jefferson’s time lived in an atmosphere in which life was viewed in the context of the episodic tyranny that had roiled the mother country in the previous century. Security could be found only in a mixed government in which the executive—the monarchy, in Britain’s case—was checked by a bicameral legislature made up of Commons and Lords. (An independent judiciary also played a key role.) The history Americans wanted was that of a balanced constitution. The history they would go to war against was that of anything less than a government they judged fair and representative.

  By virtue of his birth and education, Jefferson was disposed to support the American cause. The inclusion of Rapin’s multivolume history of England in Peter Jefferson’s library suggests an ancestral sympathy for the worldview Thomas Jefferson would help propel to the center of the Atlantic world. Henry Randall, the early Jefferson biographer, reported that Peter Jefferson was “a staunch Whig, and he adhered to certain democratic (using the word in its broad, popular sense) notions and maxims, which descended to his son.”

  Ever curious, Thomas Jefferson went further into the matter than most. He read Tacitus’s Germania and became an adherent of the theory that England was initially populated by freedom-loving Saxons who were subjugated by the monarchical and feudal forces of William the Conqueror. According to this view, Americans were now heirs of the Saxon tradition of individual freedom, a tradition long under siege.

  Jefferson and his fellow American Revolutionaries took the positions they did—positions that led to war in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776—partly because they saw themselves as Englishmen who were being denied a full share of the benefits of the lessons of English life. In the decade between 1764 and 1774—between a protest over taxation to the eve of revolution—Jefferson and like-minded Americans were guarding against the abridgement of personal liberties or the representation Englishmen had won for themselves as a result of the Glorious Revolution. Every proposal from London, every thought of a tax, every sign of imperial authority, raised fears of tyranny in America, for such proposals, taxes, and expressions of authority in the seventeenth century had produced such tyranny in the mother country during the civil war and the restoration.

  The arguments over taxation and representation—which were really arguments, of course, about liberty and control—gained fresh force at the conclusion of the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War or the Great War for the Empire.

  The conflict of arms had ended in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham, but the fighting between the French and their Indian allies on the one hand and the British and the Americans on the other led to a cold war over money and power between the Old and New Worlds.

  Empires are expensive, and the one London controlled at the end of the Seven Years’ War was of remarkable scope. Simply put, London needed revenue and believed the American colonies should bear more of the cost of maintaining the British dominions. About ten thousand British troops were to remain in North America; the redcoats represented a pervasive sense of threat. Armies that could liberate and pro
tect could also conquer and subjugate.

  The imperial authorities were now reaching ever more deeply into the lives and fortunes of Americans—Americans who watched such assertions of power warily, fearful that despotism was at hand. Before the French and Indian War, London had not exercised strict control over grants of the western lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. After the war, and after an uprising of Ohio Valley Indian tribes against British posts, London sought to give the king the power to decide the fate of the western lands, a move that particularly alienated Virginians accustomed to speculating freely there. Before the war, London had not been especially rigorous in its enforcement of Navigation Acts to regulate trade. After the war, London opened a campaign to use “writs of assistance” to board and search colonial vessels, enraging Boston in particular.

  The South and West were angry about the lands and the Indians; the Northeast was uneasy about the writs of assistance. And the whole of the colonies was infuriated by what was known as the Sugar Act of 1764, which included mechanisms for strict enforcement. Though the bill actually lowered the tax on molasses, it imposed duties on other items (including Madeira wine, a favorite of the young Jefferson). The Sugar Act was also an attempt to establish a principle and a precedent in these post–Seven Years’ War days: that, in the words of the legislation, it was “just and necessary that a revenue be raised in your Majesty’s said dominions in America.”

  In the House of Commons on Friday, March 9, 1764, Prime Minister George Grenville, a Whig politician who served as head of government from 1763 to 1765, had risen to announce the Sugar Act and the prospect of a colonial stamp tax (a tax on documents and things made of paper, including newspapers and playing cards). Grenville told the House that he “hoped that the power and sovereignty of Parliament, over every part of the British dominions, for the purpose of raising or collecting any tax, would never be disputed.”