Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Yet disputed it was, and would be. Americans were avidly reading the Massachusetts lawyer James Otis’s Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, a kind of forerunner to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that made a compelling case for the American cause.

  Otis’s views were abroad in the colonies in the autumn of 1764, when, in Williamsburg, George Wythe drafted a petition to the House of Commons protesting taxation. His language, however, was considered too strong by some burgesses, even treasonable, which suggests that Wythe—the man closest to Jefferson, and whom Jefferson idolized—held decided opinions on the questions that led to revolution.

  The essence of the anti-British position was summed up in a 1764 resolution that Virginia sent to the king and to Parliament: “that the People are not [to be] subject to any taxes but such as are laid on them by their own consent, or by those who are legally appointed to represent them.” Virginia’s resolutions had no effect on the outcome in London. Parliament did not even consider them, and the Stamp Act passed on Friday, March 22, 1765.

  The subsequent drama offered Jefferson his first intimate glimpse of politics. The Virginia debates over how to respond to the Stamp Act had a bit of everything: emotional rhetoric, imperial tension, generational division, and legislative sleight of hand. There were principles at stake and ideas to be refined and applied to the real world—and there were raw political and human calculations. It was a perfect laboratory for the struggles that concerned Jefferson for the rest of his life.

  A significant number of the members of the Virginia House of Burgesses wanted to take a stand against Parliament’s assertion of power. But how far should the Americans push the Whig interpretation of the rights of the colonies and of individuals? At this point, in 1765, the notion of a full clash of arms with Great Britain was remote, even to men like Patrick Henry, whom Jefferson watched speak in the House on Thursday, May 30, 1765.

  It was already late in the House of Burgesses’ spring session. Many members had left Williamsburg for home. Jefferson, “yet a student,” as he recalled, was there to watch the action. A number of anti–Stamp Act resolutions—seven in all—were in play. On the floor, Patrick Henry, the self-taught lawyer and charmer whom Jefferson had first met at Nathan Dandridge’s house, was pressing for the boldest of the measures.

  Jefferson stood at the door of the House, listening to Henry in wonder. With eloquence Jefferson believed “great indeed,” Henry said Tarquin and Caesar had had their Brutus, Charles his Cromwell, and Henry, according to the single contemporaneous account of the debate, “did not doubt but some good American would stand up in favor of his country.” Jefferson was swept away. “He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote,” Jefferson said of Henry.

  A French traveler who was watching with Jefferson recorded that the Speaker of the House, hearing Henry invoke Brutus and Cromwell, said that Henry had “spoke treason.”

  Henry backed down. According to the French observer, Henry said “he was ready to ask pardon, and he would show his loyalty to His Majesty King George III at the expense of the last drop of his blood, but what he had said must be attributed to the interest of his country’s dying liberty which he had at heart.”

  With Henry’s rhetorical flight ending, a divided House took up the resolutions. The struggle on the floor, Jefferson said, was “most bloody.” Records of the deliberations are scant, but the formulation at issue seems to have been this, which was apparently framed as the “Fifth Resolution” put forward by Henry:

  Resolved Therefore that the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony and that every attempt to vest such power in any other person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as AMERICAN FREEDOM.

  Men such as Peyton Randolph wanted to strike a more moderate tone for the moment, but the stronger language passed by the narrowest of margins, 20–19. “By God, I would have given 500 guineas for a single vote,” Randolph said afterward. One more vote against the resolution would have tied the count, and the Speaker, John Robinson, would have voted no, defeating it.

  Instead, the radicals had won. Going on record against London was, itself, not as disturbing to the more moderate members as was the sense that they had lost control. Patrick Henry had taken on the establishment and succeeded.

  As night fell in Williamsburg, a triumphant Henry left the capital. He had won. Or so he thought.

  The next morning—it was now Friday, May 31, 1765—Jefferson could not wait to return to the House. Intrigued by the cut and thrust, he arrived at the chamber early. Once there he discovered another Randolph cousin, Peter Randolph, already at work. Randolph was examining the records of the House to find a precedent for what the leadership hoped to accomplish once the bell rang the burgesses into session: rescind the Fifth Resolution, undoing Henry’s victory and regaining command of the field.

  Jefferson was therefore witness to a bid to overturn the previous day’s result. An hour or so later, the House took up the matter and reversed itself from the day before. Henry’s departure had given his foes an opportunity they did not fail to exploit. Though the records of the House are silent about the Stamp Act on May 31, Governor Francis Fauquier wrote the Board of Trade that after “a small alteration in the House”—presumably Henry’s departure—“there was an attempt to strike all the Resolutions off the Journals. The 5th which was thought the most offensive was accordingly struck off.”

  The lesson for Jefferson, the man who would come to be seen as the great democrat, tribune of liberty, and scourge of elite authority? Never give up the political fight and never shy away from using any and all means to carry the day. Only six weeks after his twenty-second birthday, Jefferson had been given a tutorial in the intricacies of power. On Thursday he had been thunderstruck by Homeric oratory evoking the glories of liberty and asserting that to give Parliament any control over Virginia or her sister colonies would do nothing less than “destroy AMERICAN FREEDOM.”

  Then on Friday, he watched the prior day’s defeated faction become today’s victors through resilience and opportunism. Unwilling to give up, Henry’s foes were vigilant and resourceful, seeing their chance in his departure and taking steps to find precedent to give their course of action the color of authority. Important, too, was mastery of the means (in this case, the legislative process) to give oneself the ability to achieve the desired end. In later years, whenever Jefferson was able to seize unexpected political moments and turn them to his advantage, he appreciated the role of tactical skill. He had seen it all demonstrated late in a Williamsburg May.

  Fauquier saw, too, that things were changing. On the following Tuesday, June 4, 1765, he hosted the annual birth-night ball in honor of George III, usually a spectacular occasion in Williamsburg. Not this year. “I went there in expectation of seeing a great deal of company,” wrote the anonymous French traveler, “but was disappointed for there was not above a dozen of people. I came away before supper.”

  As the Stamp Act debates unfolded, Jefferson’s own first significant public act, the memory of which he cherished, was an elaborate attempt to bend the natural world to his purposes. To do so he used his mind and the arts of quiet persuasion.

  The Rivanna was not navigable for boats carrying crops from Albemarle farmers to market. Climbing into a canoe, Jefferson set out to learn whether anything could be done.

  Paddling along the river his friend Margaret Bayard Smith once described as “wild and romantic,” Jefferson discovered that the removal of rocks below Milton Falls could transform the Rivanna into a vital route for his and his neighbors’ crops. Jefferson raised private money to undertake the project, successfully making the case to individual investors. In October 1765, the colonial assembly praised Jefferson’s “laudable and useful” work, a
nd authorized the “clearing the great falls of [the] James River, the river Chickahominy and the north branch of [the] James River.”

  Jefferson was thrilled. He was working in the tradition of his father, bringing order to the wilderness and—no small thing—being recognized and honored for it.

  For Jefferson, the eleven years between the Stamp Act battle in Williamsburg and the Rivanna work in 1765 and the formal Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 was a time of steady maturation—intellectually, politically, and emotionally. Like many Americans, he was an unlikely revolutionary. His journey from loyal subject to leading rebel reveals Jefferson to be a pragmatist as well as an idealist, a man who understood the importance of using philosophy and history to create emotional appeals to shape broad public sentiment.

  Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world. In 1766, Jefferson helped bring a Maryland publisher, William Rind, to Williamsburg to create a Virginia Gazette to rival the one that was controlled by Joseph Royle, John Dixon, and Alexander Purdie. “Until the beginning of our revolutionary disputes,” recalled Jefferson, “we had but one press, and that having the whole business of the government, and no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it.”

  Fascinated with how to marshal men, he studied the political arts not only in books but in Williamsburg and Albemarle County. A poor public speaker himself, he admired gifted orators such as Patrick Henry. Shadwell, a convenient stopping place for those making their way to and from Williamsburg, was open to all sorts and conditions of travelers, including Ontassete, the Cherokee chief who crossed the Atlantic in 1762 for a celebrated visit to George III. “The moon was in full splendor,” Jefferson recalled, “and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence: His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated actions, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.”

  When it came to the spoken word, Jefferson knew that he could not compete in such arenas with such men. Armed with this insight, he cultivated alternative means of influencing others. He studied the folkways of deliberative bodies. He learned to write with grace, with conviction, and—important in a revolutionary time—with speed.

  He immersed himself in the subtle skills of engaging others, chiefly by offering people that which they value most: an attentive audience to listen to their own visions and views. Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think. Everyone wants to believe that what they have to say is fascinating, illuminating, and possibly even epochal. The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: “one of the choice ones of the earth.”

  A grandson described Jefferson’s tactical approach to personal exchanges. “His powers of conversation were great, yet he always turned it to subjects most familiar to those with whom he conversed, whether laborer, mechanic, or other.”

  There was a method to this habit beyond the acquisition of information. Henry Randall tells the story of a “most intelligent and dignified Virginia matron of the old school” who often hosted Jefferson at her table. She was, Randall reported, “wont to boast that [Jefferson] never failed to inquire with great particularity how her best dishes were compounded and cooked.” Though she suspected that charm was at work—even flattery—she was also convinced by the apparent sincerity of Jefferson’s manner of listening. “I know this was half to please me,” she allowed, “but he’s a nice judge of things, and you may depend upon it, he won’t throw away anything he learns worth knowing.” With her, as with so many others, Jefferson knew what he was doing.

  The autumn of 1765 should have been a heady time for Jefferson. In July his sister Martha had married his friend Dabney Carr, an alliance that pleased Jefferson beyond measure. The Carrs set up housekeeping in Goochland County, at a place called Spring Forest that was along Jefferson’s route to and from Williamsburg.

  Young and bright, beloved and respected by his teachers in Williamsburg, popular in the aristocratic circles of Virginia, and with the Rebecca Burwell debacle fading from his memory, Jefferson thought the world a largely happy place.

  Then, on Tuesday, October 1, 1765, his sister Jane died, reminding him anew, in the manner of his father’s death and of the failed romance with Burwell, of the fragility of life.

  He had loved Jane, and his grief as the autumn of 1765 gave way to the new year was so deep that it endured in family lore. “The loss of such a sister to such a brother was irreparable,” a great-granddaughter wrote. Drawing on the works of the English poet William Shenstone, a writer much interested in mourning and in the virtues of rural seclusion, Jefferson composed an epitaph in Latin for Jane, which reads in translation:

  Ah, Joanna, best of girls.

  Ah, torn away from the bloom of vigorous age.

  May the earth be light upon you.

  Farewell, forever and ever.

  In the last week of March 1766, nearly six months after Jane died, Jefferson began his garden book, an episodic record of the lives—and deaths—of flowers and vegetables. He longed for spring. “Purple hyacinth begins to bloom,” he wrote on Sunday, March 30, 1766. “Narcissus and Puckoon open,” he noted on April 6. The “puckoons,” or bloodroot, were not long for this world. A week later, on his birthday, the “Puckoon flowers fallen.”

  Still mourning Jane, he was torn between home and the larger world. As the weeks fell away, he planned an excursion north. His first journey outside Virginia foreshadowed much in his life: his ability to conceal anxiety beneath a cool veneer and his urge to engage the world of politics. Setting out in the spring of 1766, Jefferson, always concerned with combating and controlling diseases, stopped at Philadelphia to see Dr. William Shippen, Jr., to be inoculated against smallpox. Jefferson continued on to New York, where, in a sign of the intimacy of the American elite, he boarded in a house along with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a future Revolutionary friend and ally.

  It was a perilous trip. Twice on the first day Jefferson’s horse broke away from him, “greatly endanger[ing] the breaking [of] my neck.” The second day brought terrible rains, and Jefferson could find no shelter on the road. The third day he was fording a stream and was nearly swamped by unexpectedly deep water. He was among strangers, too, for the first time in his life, seeing “no face known to me before.”

  Stopping in Annapolis, which he found “extremely beautiful” and whose houses he thought rather better than those in Williamsburg, Jefferson was drawn to the Maryland colonial assembly. His descriptions of the chambers, which he found wanting, and of the lawmakers, whom he also found wanting, are rich in detail. He was not impressed by the appearance and the seriousness of the Maryland legislators.

  He was snobbish about his fellow colonists. “I was surprised on approaching it to hear as great a hubbub as you will usually observe at a public meeting of the planters in Virginia,” Jefferson told John Page. He noted that the Speaker’s wig was yellowed, and, to the young Virginian, the man had “very little the air of a speaker.” The close cataloging of the assembly suggests his interest in the workings of power. It was natural for Jefferson, now a son of Williamsburg, to document his impressions of the seat of a neighboring colony. The spirit of the hour, meanwhile, was momentous: “I would give you an account of the rejoicings here on the repeal of the Stamp Act but this you will probably see in print before my letter can reach you.”

  In London, Parliament had stood down from the stamp duties, but passed the Declaratory Act asserting
its view that it possessed the power to levy taxes on its colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” For Jefferson, the story of the Stamp Act had begun in the lobby of the House of Burgesses. That it ended for him when he was on the road gave him his first tactile evidence that the American story, and the American cause, was larger than Williamsburg and larger than Virginia. His conception of the American nation may owe something to the celebrations he watched on the Maryland shore.

  In 1767, Jefferson was admitted to the bar of the General Court of Virginia after his study with George Wythe. He lived at Shadwell with his mother but traveled often. Cases took him to courthouses from Staunton to Winchester. His sister Martha wrote him a report from the garden in early June, noting that his carnations were in bloom, seventy-one days after being planted. His interest in the garden and the farm was practical as well as ornamental. In late November 1767, he calculated how much hay he would need to store up to feed his horses through the winter nights.

  Contemporaries recalled Jefferson as a bright, enthusiastic, and intellectually curious lawyer. His practice was eclectic. One case involved the theft of a bottle of whiskey and a shirt, another a charge of slander in which a David Frame sued a man for saying “he saw [Frame] who is a married man in bed with Elizabeth Burkin, etc.”

  Jefferson’s friends loved him, his clients appreciated him, his elders admired him. He was the kind of man other men thought well of and believed they could trust—unless, as one of his best friends was to discover, a beautiful young wife was in the picture.

  FOUR

  TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS

  You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady.

  —JEFFERSON, in an 1805 acknowledgment of his infatuation with Elizabeth Moore Walker

  All men are born free [and] everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will.