by Jon Meacham
A guest at a country inn was said to have once struck up a conversation with a “plainly-dressed and unassuming traveler” whom the stranger did not recognize. The two covered subject after subject, and the unremarkable traveler was “perfectly acquainted with each.” Afterward, “filled with wonder,” the guest asked the landlord who this extraordinary man was. When the topic was the law, the traveler said, “he thought he was a lawyer”; when it was medicine, he “felt sure he was a physician”; when it was theology, “he became convinced that he was a clergyman.”
The landlord’s reply was brief. “Oh, why I thought you knew the Squire.”
To his friends, who were numerous and devoted, Jefferson was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying.
Yet to his foes, who were numerous and prolific, Jefferson was an atheist and a fanatic, a demagogue and a dreamer, a womanly Francophile who could not be trusted with the government of a great nation. His task was to change those views as best he could. He longed for affection and for approval.
A master of emotional and political manipulation, sensitive to criticism, obsessed with his reputation, and devoted to America, he was drawn to the world beyond Monticello, endlessly at work, as he put it, “to see the standard of reason at length erected after so many ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles.” As a planter, lawyer, legislator, governor, diplomat, secretary of state, vice president, and president, Jefferson spent much of his life seeking control over himself and power over the lives and destinies of others. For Jefferson, politics was not a dispiriting distraction but a sacred duty, an undertaking that made everything else possible.
Inspired by his own father’s example, he long sought to play the part of a patriarch, accepting—even embracing—the accompanying burdens of responsibility. He was the father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of the American West. He led the first democratic movement in the new republic to check the power and influence of established forces. And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country’s finest hours lay ahead.
The story of Jefferson’s life fascinates still in part because he found the means to endure and, in many cases, to prevail in the face of extreme partisanship, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Jefferson’s political leadership is instructive, offering us the example of a president who can operate at two levels, cultivating the hope of a brighter future while preserving the political flexibility and skill to bring the ideal as close as possible to reality.
He has most commonly been thought of as the author or designer of America: a figure who articulated a vision of what the country could be but was otherwise a kind of detached dreamer. Yet Jefferson did not rest once his words were written or his ideas entered circulation. He was a builder and a fighter. “What is practicable must often control what is pure theory,” he said during his presidency; moreover, “the habits of the governed determine in a great degree what is practicable.”
Jefferson fought for the greatest of causes yet fell short of delivering justice to the persecuted and the enslaved. In the end, for all the debate and the division and the scholarship and the symposia, there may be only one thing about Thomas Jefferson that is indisputable: that the man who lived and worked from 1743 to 1826 was a breathing human being who was subject to the passion and prejudice and pride and love and ambition and hope and fear that drive most other breathing human beings. Recovering a sense of that mortal Jefferson—the Jefferson who sought office, defined human rights for a new age, explored expanding frontiers in science and philosophy, loved women, owned slaves, and helped forge a nation—is my object in the following pages.
He is not a man of our time but of his own, formed by the historical realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He must be seen in context. It is also true, however, that many of his concerns were universal. His was a particular life of perennial significance.
And the world—or at least much of it—found him charming, brilliant, and gracious. Engaged in a constant campaign to win the affection of whoever happened to be in front of him at a given moment, Jefferson flirted with women and men alike. “It is a charming thing to be loved by everybody,” he told his grandchildren, “and the way to obtain it is, never to quarrel or be angry with anybody.” He hated arguing face-to-face, preferring to smooth out the rough edges of conversation, leading some people to believe Jefferson agreed with them when, in fact, he was seeking to avoid conflict. He paid a price for this obsession with congeniality among those who mistook his reticence for duplicity.
Yet women in particular loved him. Calling on Samuel Harrison Smith, the Republican publisher of the Washington National Intelligencer, Jefferson was shown into the Smiths’ parlor, where he spent a few minutes alone with Smith’s wife, Margaret, a writer and hostess. The child of a Federalist family, Mrs. Smith did not at first realize who Jefferson was, and found herself “somewhat checked by the dignified and reserved air” of the caller. What she experienced as a “chilled feeling,” however, passed almost instantly. Offered a chair, the stranger assumed “a free and easy manner, and, carelessly throwing his arm on the table near which he sat, he turned towards me with a countenance beaming with an expression of benevolence and with a manner and voice almost femininely soft and gentle.” Gifted in the arts of the morning call, he “entered into conversation on the commonplace topics of the day,” Mrs. Smith said, “from which, before I was conscious of it, he had drawn me into observations of a more personal and interesting nature.”
Such was his charm that though she did not know quite why, here she was, saying things she had not meant to say. “There was something in his manner, his countenance and voice that at once unlocked my heart.” The caller was in a kind of control, reversing the usual order of things in which the host, not the hosted, set the terms and conditions of conversation. “I found myself frankly telling him what I liked or disliked in our present circumstances and abode,” Mrs. Smith said. “I knew not who he was, but the interest with which he listened to my artless details … put me perfectly at my ease; in truth, so kind and conciliating were his looks and manners that I forgot he was not a friend of my own.”
At this point the door to the parlor opened, and Mr. Smith walked in. Learning that the caller was “Mr. Jefferson,” Mrs. Smith was at once thrilled and embarrassed. “I felt my cheeks burn and my heart throb, and not a word more could I speak while he remained.” She was struck by the gulf between the image and the man. “And is this the violent democrat, the vulgar demagogue, the bold atheist and profligate man I have so often heard denounced by the Federalists?” she asked. “Can this man so meek and mild, yet dignified in his manners, with a voice so soft and low, with a countenance so benignant and intelligent, can he be that daring leader of a faction, that disturber of the peace, that enemy of all rank and order?” Taking his leave, Jefferson “shook hands cordially with us … and in a manner which said as plain as words could do, ‘I am your friend.’ ”
Jefferson did not limit his sensuous appetites to the beauties of art, the power of music, or the splendor of landscapes. He pursued two women before he met his future wife, leading to more than a decade of domestic happiness. Her death devastated him into insensibility, and he wandered the woods of Monticello in a grief that led him to thoughts of suicide.
He had promised his dying wife he would never remarry. He kept his word but embarked on a love affair with one woman, the beautiful (and married) Maria Cosway. Finally, Jefferson maintained a decades-long liaison with Sally Hemings, his late wife’s enslaved half sister
who tended to his personal quarters at Monticello. They produced six children (four of whom lived) and gave rise to two centuries of speculation about the true nature of the affair. Was it about love? Power? Both? And if both, how much was affection, how much coercion? Jefferson’s connection with Sally Hemings lasted from about 1787 to Jefferson’s death in 1826—almost forty years.
The power of America’s founding myth—or myths, if one divides the stories into a seventeenth-century one of Jamestown and Plymouth and an eighteenth-century one of the Revolution—is such that it is difficult to envision the story of the country as it actually unfolded. By force of nearly two and a half centuries of habit, we tend to view our history as an inevitable chain of events leading to a sure conclusion. There was, however, nothing foreordained about the American experiment. To treat it as a set piece pitting an evil empire of Englishmen against a noble band of Americans does a disservice to both, for it caricatures Britain and minimizes the complexities that Jefferson and his contemporaries faced in choosing accommodation or rebellion.
Most Americans were, after all, of British descent, and American culture in the decades leading up to the Revolution was deferential to—and even celebratory of—the monarchy. The whole structure of the lives of Jefferson’s American ancestors and of his generation was built around membership in the British Empire. For many if not most Americans, the hatred of King George III that marked the active Revolutionary period was the exception, not the rule.
Jefferson lived and worked in a time when nothing was certain. He knew—he felt—that America’s enemies were everywhere. The greatest of these was Britain, and not only during the struggle for independence. Rather than recalling the Revolutionary War in its traditional way—as the armed struggle that lasted from Lexington and Concord in 1775 until the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781—it is illuminating in considering Jefferson to think of the struggle against Great Britain and its influence in American life as one that opened in 1764 and did not end until the Treaty of Ghent and the Battle of New Orleans brought the War of 1812 to a close in 1815.
Seen this way—which is how Jefferson saw it, or at least implicitly experienced it—Jefferson lived and governed in a Fifty Years’ War. It was a war that was sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but was always unfolding. It took different forms. There were traditional battlefield confrontations from 1775 to 1783 and again from 1812 to 1815. There were battles by proxy with Loyalists and British allies among the Indians. There were commercial strikes and counterstrikes. There were fears of political encroachment within the United States that could be aided by British military movements from Canada, Nova Scotia, or Britain’s western posts (posts they declined to surrender after the Revolution). There were anxieties about disunionist sentiment in New England and New York. There were terrors about monarchical tendencies.
Anything that happened in either foreign or domestic politics was interpreted through the prism of the ongoing conflict with Britain. Even talk of potential alliances with London in the event of war with France was driven not by affection for Britain but by calculations of national interest. Jefferson did not trust the old mother country, and he did not trust those Americans who maintained even imaginative ties to monarchy and its trappings—aristocracy of birth, hereditary executives, lifetime legislatures, standing armies, large naval establishments, and grand, centralized financial systems. When Jefferson sensed any trend in the general direction of such things, he reacted viscerally, fearing that the work of the Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention was at risk. The proximity of British officials and troops to the north of the United States and the strength of the British fleet exacerbated these anxieties.
Was Jefferson paranoid about such possibilities, especially in the period from the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which marked the end of the Revolutionary War, through his presidency, which ended in 1809? Perhaps. Was he engaging in conspiracy mongering? Yes. But sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize. Jefferson’s fevered fears about a return of monarchy, which was often his shorthand for a restoration of British influence and an end to the uniquely American enterprise in self-government, were dismissed as fanciful by no less a figure than George Washington. But in the climate of the time—a time of revolution, of espionage, and of well-founded terrors that the American republic might meet the dismal fate all other republics had ever met—Jefferson’s sense of Britain as a perennial foe is unsurprising and essential to understand. He thought he was in a perennial war. And if we are to understand what he was like, and what life was like for him, then we must see the world as he saw it, not as how we know it turned out.
To Jefferson, little in America was secure, for the military success of the Revolution had marked only the end of one battle in a larger, half-century war. From Alexander Hamilton’s financial program to John Adams’s weakness for British forms to the overt New England hostility toward his presidency, he judged political life in the context of the British threat to democratic republicanism. In retrospect, Jefferson’s fears about the British may seem overheated—they surely did to some who lived through the same years and the same pressures—but they were real to him.
Jefferson hungered for greatness, and the drama of his age provided him a stage which he never really left. Writing his William and Mary schoolmate and Revolutionary colleague John Page in 1803—Page was governor of Virginia, Jefferson president of the United States—Jefferson said: “We have both been drawn from our natural passion for study and tranquility, by times which took from us the freedom of choice: times however which, planting a new world with the seeds of just government, will produce a remarkable era in the history of mankind. It was incumbent on those therefore who fell into them, to give up every favorite pursuit, and lay their shoulder to the work of the day.”
In his retirement at Monticello, he looked back over the years, through the haze of war and struggle and peril, and knew that he had done his duty. “The circumstances of our country at my entrance into life,” he remarked to a visitor, “were such that every honest man felt himself compelled to take a part, and to act up to the best of his abilities.” He could have done no other. The Revolution, Jefferson once said, had been nothing less than a “bold and doubtful election … for our country, between submission, or the sword.”
The point of departure for understanding Jefferson, however, lies not at Conrad and McMunn’s, nor at the President’s House nor even at Jefferson’s beloved plantation on the hill. Before Monticello there was another house in the woods of the Southwest Mountains of Virginia. The search for Thomas Jefferson must begin there, on the banks of the Rivanna River, a tributary of the James, at a vanished plantation called Shadwell.
ONE
A FORTUNATE SON
It is the strong in body who are both the strong and free in mind.
—PETER JEFFERSON, the father of Thomas Jefferson
HE WAS THE KIND OF MAN people noticed. An imposing, prosperous, well-liked farmer known for his feats of strength and his capacity for endurance in the wilderness, Peter Jefferson had amassed large tracts of land and scores of slaves in and around what became Albemarle County, Virginia. There, along the Rivanna, he built Shadwell, named after the London parish where his wife, Jane, had been baptized.
The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy, and Virginian. Money was to be made, property to be claimed, tobacco to be planted and sold. There were plenty of ambitious men about—men with the boldness and the drive to create farms, build houses, and accumulate fortunes in land and slaves in the wilderness of the mid-Atlantic.
As a surveyor and a planter, Peter Jefferson thrived there, and his eldest son, Thomas, born on April 13, 1743, understood his father was a man other men admired.
Celebrated for his courage, Peter Jefferson excelled at riding and hunting. His son recalled that the fathe
r once singlehandedly pulled down a wooden shed that had stood impervious to the exertions of three slaves who had been ordered to destroy the building. On another occasion, Peter was said to have uprighted two huge hogsheads of tobacco that weighed a thousand pounds each—a remarkable, if mythical, achievement.
The father’s standing mattered greatly to the son, who remembered him in a superlative and sentimental light. “The tradition in my father’s family was that their ancestor came to this country from Wales, and from near the mountain of Snowden, the highest in Great Britain,” Jefferson wrote. The connection to Snowden was the only detail of the Jeffersons’ old-world origins to pass from generation to generation. Everything else about the ancient roots of the paternal clan slipped into the mists, save for this: that they came from a place of height and of distinction—if not of birth, then of strength.
Thomas Jefferson was his father’s son. He was raised to wield power. By example and perhaps explicitly he was taught that to be great—to be heeded—one had to grow comfortable with authority and with responsibility. An able student and eager reader, Jefferson was practical as well as scholarly, resourceful as well as analytical.
Jefferson learned the importance of endurance and improvisation early, and he learned it the way his father wanted him to: through action, not theory. At age ten, Thomas was sent into the woods of Shadwell, alone, with a gun. The assignment—the expectation—was that he was to come home with evidence that he could survive on his own in the wild.
