Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  The Jeffersons discovered part of a bottle of wine, and the night was, according to tradition, “lit up with song, and merriment, and laughter!” After a week or so they moved on to Elk Hill, a plantation in Goochland County along the James River and Byrd Creek. Elk Hill belonged to Patty—she had lived there with her first husband—and the Jeffersons made much use of the house and the land (at its peak Elk Hill was 669 acres).

  A subject of particular interest in their private hours was James Macpherson’s popular translation of the poetry of Ossian, said to be a third-century legendary Celtic bard. (He was not; the poems were, in fact, written largely by Macpherson and passed off as ancient verse.) “The tender and the sublime emotions of the mind were never before so finely wrought up by human hand,” Jefferson said in 1773. “I am not ashamed to own that I think this rude bard of the North the greatest poet that has ever existed.”

  Monticello is often seen as Jefferson’s retreat from the world. He himself spoke of it in such terms. The house on the hill was also an imaginative redoubt, a fortress in which the master could not only seek shelter but also gather himself and his forces to fight great battles. He may well have found in Ossian’s epic imagery a poetic model for what he wanted his own world to be like. In his commonplace book, he copied a section that spoke to height and power and fame and adventure:

  As two dark streams from high rocks meet, and mix and roar on the plain; loud, rough, and dark in battle meet Lochlin and Innis-fail: chief mixed his strokes with chief, and man with man; steel clanging sounded on steel, helmets are cleft on high; blood bursts and smokes around. Strings murmur on the polished yews. Darts rush along the sky. Spears fall like the circles of light that gild the stormy face of the night. As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of the battle.… For many were the falls of the heroes; and wide poured the blood of the valiant.

  Patty Jefferson was a careful housekeeper, taking steps to ensure that her husband’s private world ran smoothly. She saw to fresh supplies of meat, eggs, butter, and fruit and supervised the making of beer and of soap. She personally directed the work of the kitchen on more sophisticated foods. “Mrs. Jefferson would come out there with a cookery book in her hand and read out of it to Isaac’s mother how to make cakes, tarts, and so on,” recalled Isaac Granger Jefferson, a slave who left a memoir of life at Monticello among the Jeffersons.

  A caller at Monticello, a German officer, found the Jeffersons charming and engaging. He admired Jefferson’s “copious and well-chosen library” and the Monticello project itself, saluting his host’s “noble spirit of building.” He also noted that Jefferson was designing a compass for the parlor ceiling, to track the strength and direction of the wind.

  What the Jeffersons did together made perhaps the greatest impression. “As all Virginians are fond of music, he is particularly so,” the visitor said. “You will find in his house an elegant harpsichord piano forte and some violins. The latter he performs well upon himself, the former his lady touches very skillfully and who is in all respects a very agreeable, sensible and accomplished lady.”

  It is a warm portrait of a harmonious and happy life on the little mountain, a life of ideas, invention, and the making of music. It was the life Jefferson had long hoped for—the kind of life his father had built and his mother had maintained, and which he now gave his own family at his chosen summit.

  On Sunday, May 16, 1773, in a keen personal loss for Jefferson, his friend and brother-in-law Dabney Carr died of a “bilious fever,” leaving Jefferson’s sister Martha to raise six children.

  Jefferson’s instinctive reaction was that of a father. He did whatever was within his power to bring stability to his sister’s family by offering order, shelter, and love in the midst of his own sadness over losing the beloved friend of his youth. His grief seems to have surpassed that of his reaction to his sister Jane’s death. For Carr, whom he buried at Monticello, he could not, at first, settle on a single epitaph, sketching out his plans for his friend’s grave on a sheet of paper:

  INSCRIPTION ON MY FRIEND D. CARR’S TOMB.

  Lamented shade, whom every gift of heaven

  Profusely blest; a temper winning mild;

  Nor pity softer, nor was truth more bright.

  Constant in doing well, he neither sought

  Nor shunned applause. No bashful merit sighed

  Near him neglected: sympathizing he

  Wiped off the tear from Sorrow’s clouded eye

  With kindly hand, and taught her heart to smile.

  MALLET’S Excursion.

  Send for a plate of copper to be nailed on the tree at the foot of his grave, with this inscription:

  Still shall thy grave with rising flowers be dressed

  And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast;

  There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow,

  There the first roses of the year shall blow,

  While angels with their silver wings o’ershade

  The ground now sacred by thy reliques made.

  On the upper part of the stone inscribe as follows:

  Here lie the remains of

  Dabney Carr,

  Son of John and Jane Carr, of Louisa County,

  Who was born ——-, 1744.

  Intermarried with Martha Jefferson, daughter of Peter

  And Jane Jefferson, 1765;

  And died at Charlottesville, May 16, 1773,

  Leaving six small children.

  To his Virtue, Good Sense, Learning, and Friendship

  This stone is dedicated by Thomas Jefferson, who, of all men living,

  Loved him most.

  While Jefferson struggled to absorb Carr’s loss, Patty mourned her father. On Friday, May 28, 1773, John Wayles died, leaving a heavily indebted estate. Patty Jefferson did not hesitate to move Elizabeth Hemings and the Hemings-Wayles children—Patty’s half siblings—from the Forest to Monticello in the wake of her father’s death.

  We do not know how Patty really felt about her father’s liaison with Elizabeth Hemings and about their children. Within the limitations of the world in which she lived, however, we do know that Patty chose to protect the Hemings family by keeping them together after Wayles’s death and by bringing them into the domestic sphere she shared with her husband and child.

  The Hemings family was to be forever intertwined with the Jeffersons and with Monticello. Elizabeth Hemings’s son Robert, whom Jefferson called Bob, replaced Jupiter as Jefferson’s body servant until Jefferson left for France in the 1780s. Elizabeth’s son James Hemings traveled with him to Paris and worked as Jefferson’s chef. Another son, John Hemings (often spelled Hemmings), became an accomplished joiner and cabinetmaker, crafting furniture, interior moldings, and a landau (four-wheeled) carriage of Jefferson’s design.

  Jefferson now had charge over three branches of his or his wife’s family. There was his own wife, Patty, and their infant daughter. There was his sister and his nieces and nephews. And, in a connection no one could acknowledge, there was his wife’s father’s concubine, Elizabeth Hemings, and his wife’s half siblings, including Sally Hemings.

  One man, Thomas Jefferson, stood at the center of this eclectic universe. He was the master of Monticello, a burgess of Virginia, a lawyer of note. And he was about to become a central leader and defining voice of a revolutionary nation in armed rebellion against the world’s greatest empire.

  SIX

  LIKE A SHOCK OF ELECTRICITY

  Things seem to be hurrying to an alarming crisis, and demand the speedy, united councils of all those who have a regard for the common cause.

  —Letter of the Virginia House of Burgesses, May 31, 1774

  IT WAS A BIZARRE SEASON at Monticello. In the early afternoon hours of Mon
day, February 21, 1774, the first recorded earthquake in the history of Virginia struck with strength in Albemarle County. In the furor, Elizabeth Jefferson, Thomas’s reputedly mentally disabled sister, disappeared from Shadwell. She was found, dead, three days later, after apparently drowning in the Rivanna.

  In the middle of the first week of May, a springtime snowstorm left the Blue Ridge covered in white. The next day brought a terrible frost that killed “almost everything,” Jefferson said: leaves, vines, wheat, rye, corn, and a good deal of tobacco. “This frost was general and equally destructive through the whole country and the neighboring colonies,” Jefferson wrote in his garden book. Only half of Monticello’s fruit survived.

  Yet there was also joy on Jefferson’s mountain: Patty Jefferson gave birth to a second daughter on Sunday, April 3, 1774. Called Jane Jefferson, the baby bore the name of both Jefferson’s mother and of his late sister. It was Patty Jefferson’s second delivery in nineteen months. She had been pregnant for all but about nine or so months of her twenty-seven-month-old marriage. Even among the elite, childbirth was dangerous and could be fatal to both mother and infant. Jefferson was to learn this well: All but two of the six children born to Patty and Thomas Jefferson were fated to die in infancy or childhood.

  Self-evidently an ardent lover, Jefferson also proved an attentive husband and father. His memorandum book notes the purchase of “breast pipes,” glass devices that facilitated the breastfeeding of infants.

  Political duty, however, always called. The House of Burgesses was set to meet in Williamsburg in the spring of 1774. There was much to discuss. And Jefferson had to be there.

  Leaving his wife and his two infant daughters—the newborn Jane and the toddler Patsy—Jefferson reached Williamsburg on the eve of confrontation with Britain.

  These had been—and would continue to be—years of crisis. Beginning in his first session as a member of the House of Burgesses in May 1769, Jefferson had served in the midst of conflicts with Britain of varying degrees of severity. A pattern took hold. The British Parliament imposed new taxes to raise revenue from British America. Colonists in their sundry capitals (Boston, Annapolis, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and so on) resisted to a greater or lesser degree depending on the moment. The royal governments in the New World and the establishment in Britain grew yet more impatient with what they saw as a continent populated by the recalcitrant, the unreasonable, and the ungrateful.

  From the time of the Townshend Acts to the Boston Tea Party (a protest over duties on tea), London attempted to exert control. The American colonists fought back by various means. There were nonimportation agreements in the colonies to keep British goods off the American market. There were objections to the possible arrest of Americans who would then be tried in England. There were committees of correspondence to establish communication among the colonies.

  In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson sensed a sort of tragic stasis. Independence was a possibility, but not a certain one. As late as May 1772, for example, George Wythe was still committed to the maintenance of at least the appearance of the status quo. Writing to London, he ordered a “robe, such as is worn by the clerk of the House of Commons, but better than the one I had before … which indeed was scandalous.” Even allowing for irony in his manner of expression, Wythe clearly did not yet envision a new world of republican simplicity.

  A remark of Jefferson’s father-in-law’s illuminated the ethos of the time for many of the colonists. Writing in Williamsburg in October 1772, John Wayles had reported: “Our sale of slaves goes on slowly so ’tis uncertain when we shall be down, but I suppose before the Rebel party leaves town.” The “Rebel party” was still only a movement to be alluded to in passing.

  To protest was one thing, to rebel quite another. There were Virginians of Jefferson’s class who chose to remain loyal to London rather than take the path of revolution. His cousin John Randolph of Tazewell Hall was to become known as John Randolph “The Tory” for his allegiance to the Crown—an allegiance that led him to return to England as revolutionary sentiment grew. Overall, about a fifth of white American colonists in these years, or 20 percent, sided with England.

  Still, a notation in Jefferson’s memorandum book suggests his own musings were growing more expansive. “Non solum nobis, sed patriae”: “Not for ourselves only, but for our country.”

  For the elite, revolution was the shrewdest economic choice. London had already stymied landownership in the West, restricting those with capital (or those capable of borrowing capital) from acquiring coveted acres. Virginia’s public finances were a mess; there was no way for the colony to honor the paper money issued during the Seven Years’ War, which alienated most of the holders of the paper. And there was the inescapably personal issue of the money that planters owed creditors in Britain. In Jefferson’s words, such debts were now “hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.” Virginians owed at least £2.3 million to British merchants, nearly half the total owed by all the American colonies. In May 1774, Jefferson and Patrick Henry had proposed suspending payments of such debts.

  Only weeks earlier Jefferson had made a personal financial decision with perilous consequences. When John Wayles died in 1773, he left an estate worth £30,000, but one that was also heavily indebted, with £11,000 owed to his largest creditor, Farell and Jones in Bristol. In January 1774, Jefferson and Wayles’s two other sons-in-law decided to break up the jointly held estate among themselves, with a fateful result: Jefferson’s liability for his portion of the Wayles debt now extended to his personal property.

  The decision to revolt was not solely economic, but it was surely informed by concerns over money. In Virginia the impetus to rebel came from the propertied elements of society; the middle and lower classes were slower to follow the lead of men such as Jefferson. It was a rich man’s revolution, and Jefferson was a rich man. It was a philosophical revolution, and Jefferson was a philosophical man.

  The intersection of economic and ideological forces created a climate in which well-off, educated Virginians saw a clearer, more compelling, and more attractive future if they could successfully separate themselves from London.

  In Jefferson’s political imagination, any move that could be interpreted as an encroachment on liberty was interpreted in just that way. Taxes, the presence of British troops, trade regulations, the disposition of western lands, and relations with Indian tribes, among other matters, were all seen as grasps for power by London, power that Jefferson and others believed rightly belonged to them (or at least to them within a constitution in which they played a much larger role). Absolutism was always just a step away; subjugation an imminent possibility. The Americans were not wrong to think this way, for the history they knew—and the politics they were experiencing—tended to favor the Crown and its adherents rather than the people as more broadly defined.

  As a Virginian and a burgess, Jefferson had an acute sense of the tightening of royal authority. Before 1729, no royal governor in Virginia had suspended an act of the colonial legislature. In the ensuing thirty-five years, until 1764, governors intervened fewer than sixty times, or less than twice a year. Then, in the nine years between 1764 and 1773, there were seventy-five such suspensions—a steady, and infuriating, rate of increase that the most powerful Virginians, those in the House of Burgesses, felt directly and ever more often.

  On Thursday, May 19, 1774, Virginia newspapers announced the Boston Port Act. Enacted by Parliament, the law closed the city’s port until restitution was made for the losses incurred by the East India Company in the Boston Tea Party the previous December.

  The legislation closing Boston’s port in retaliation for the protesters’ dumping the taxed tea into Boston Harbor infuriated Jefferson’s circle. (It was one of what became known as the Intolerable Acts of 1774.) Jefferson said he was among the burge
sses who agreed “we must boldly take an unequivocal stand in the line with Massachusetts.”

  Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and four or five other members joined Jefferson in the capitol’s Council Chamber, home to a library of parliamentary and legislative precedents that included documents edited by John Rushworth, an antimonarchical historian who had fought in the English Civil War. “We were under [the] conviction of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy into which they had fallen as to passing events,” Jefferson recalled, “and thought that the appointment of a day of general fasting and prayer would be most likely to call up and alarm their attention.”

  The Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution of Tuesday, May 24, 1774, was one in a series of lessons in the politics of revolution that, from the unseasonably frosty May of 1774 through June and July of 1776, offered Jefferson opportunities to manage and marshal the American mind. He had learned the art of pragmatism during the Stamp Act debates, watching more experienced lawmakers find ways to exert their will against that of Patrick Henry. Now Jefferson turned his attention from the chambers of Williamsburg to the broad countryside, from the mechanics of legislation to the leadership of a mass movement. Jefferson’s role in the adoption and promotion of the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution illustrated his growing understanding of the importance of engaging the emotions of one’s followers.

  For Jefferson, the decision to base a revolutionary appeal on religious grounds was expedient, reflecting more an understanding of politics than a belief that the Lord God of Hosts was about to intervene in British America. Though not a conventional Christian, Jefferson appreciated the power of spiritual appeals. To frame an anti-British argument in the language of faith took the rhetorical fight to the enemy in a way that was difficult to combat. Jefferson and his colleagues could argue that they were only humbling themselves before the Lord, calling on a largely religious populace to fast and pray, not to resist authority.