Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Reaction was swift and predictable. From Pennsylvania, a colonist wrote a friend overseas: “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than his design of emancipating our slaves.” Colonists with slaveholding sympathies either began or accelerated their preparations for war, Jefferson among them.

  Jefferson was obsessed with politics of the continental crisis. In a Sunday, May 7, 1775, letter to his old teacher William Small in England, Jefferson interrupted himself at one point to say: “But for God’s sake where am I got to? Forever absorbed in the distresses of my country I cannot for three sentences keep clear of its political struggles.”

  Yet he could not help himself. “Within this week,” he wrote to Small, “we have received the unhappy news of an action of considerable magnitude between the king’s troops and our brethren of Boston.” The fact that blood was shed under such circumstances, Jefferson said, seemed to doom prospects for a peaceful resolution. (Small died in Birmingham, England, before Jefferson’s letter reached him.)

  Dunmore’s seizure of the gunpowder and his statements about the slaves inflamed matters in Jefferson’s immediate world. In Albemarle County, the militia declared they wanted “to demand satisfaction of Dunmore for the powder, and his threatening to fix his standard and call over the Negroes.”

  To Jefferson, Dunmore was the particular manifestation of a universal truth. The British were unbending, apparently uninterested in even affecting an air of respect toward the Americans. The bolder the Americans grew, the surlier the British seemed. Ever sensitive to slights and conscious of the alchemy of human relationships in which respect, rivalry, affection, and deference were bound together in varying and changing proportions, Jefferson was able to detect such shifts in the political realm as well as in his personal one.

  He offered an astute analysis of the British approach: “A little knowledge of human nature and attention to its ordinary workings might have foreseen that the spirits of the people here were in a state in which they were more likely to be provoked than frightened by haughty deportment.”

  Jefferson’s political education continued during a spirited session when the House of Burgesses met in Williamsburg in June 1775. While the House considered conciliatory proposals from London, three Virginia colonists trying to break into the powder magazine were wounded by a shotgun rigged to fire if the magazine were tampered with. Dunmore felt the situation so precarious—and his security so tenuous—that he and his family left Williamsburg, seeking refuge aboard the HMS Fowey.

  Around Saturday, June 10, 1775, Jefferson replied to London’s conciliatory proposal on behalf of Virginia. Despite the passions of the hour—a fleeing royal governor, skirmishes over gunpowder, and the fear of slave rebellion—Jefferson took a measured tone, saying that the Virginians had “examined it minutely; we viewed it in every point of light in which we were able to place it; and with pain and disappointment we must ultimately declare it only changes the form of oppression, without lightening its burthen.”

  Others in Virginia were not so certain. As Jefferson recalled it, Robert Carter Nicholas and James Mercer, a lawyer from Stafford County, were more open to talk of reconciliation with London than was either Jefferson or, more important, Peyton Randolph, who believed Virginia should take a stronger revolutionary stance.

  In a sign of his standing with Peyton Randolph, Jefferson was asked to draft the House’s response, for Randolph “feared that Mr. Nicholas, whose mind was not yet up to the mark of the times, would undertake the answer.” With Jefferson’s text as the starting point, Randolph was able to exert a greater level of control than if Nicholas had been the initial author.

  It was still a contentious argument. Even after the Boston Tea Party, even after Lexington and Concord, even after Dunmore and the Gunpowder Affair and the talk of arming slaves, a permanent separation from Great Britain was a matter of intense debate for Jefferson and his contemporaries.

  Divided opinion was a recurring fact of life for Jefferson in these years of political formation. He came of age amid conflict, not certitude. To him statecraft was always a struggle between passionately held points of view. Smooth marches of like minds to glorious conclusions may have been the stuff of his dreams, but reality was far different—and it was reality that concerned him most.

  Randolph shepherded Jefferson’s draft through the assembly. There were, Jefferson said, “long and doubtful scruples from Mr. Nicholas and James Mercer, and a dash of cold water on it here and there, enfeebling it somewhat,” but it finally passed. For Jefferson and Randolph the key point was unity among the colonies.

  Such unity was on Jefferson’s mind, for he was to take his place on the national stage at last. He left Williamsburg for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on Sunday, June 11, 1775. A larger world beckoned.

  EIGHT

  THE FAMOUS MR. JEFFERSON

  As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775

  The present crisis is so full of danger and uncertainty that opinions here are various.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, from Philadelphia, 1775

  LODGING ON CHESTNUT between Third and Fourth streets in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress was meeting at the Pennsylvania State House (later known as Independence Hall), Jefferson effortlessly entered the flow of things. He sent accounts of the military situation to Virginia. He looked over Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for “Articles of confederation and perpetual Union.” He recorded the “Financial and Military Estimates for Continental Defense.”

  In a way, he had been preparing for this hour and for this work since he first stood in the lobby of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, listening, rapt, to Patrick Henry a decade before. There had been the glittering evenings in Fauquier’s Palace, full of music and ideas; the golden years in the Wythe house, immersed in law and history; the apprenticeship in politics under Peyton Randolph in the Raleigh Tavern, watching and learning. The Jefferson style—cultivate his elders, make himself pleasant to his contemporaries, and use his pen and his intellect to shape the debate—armed him well for the national arena. He was no longer in Williamsburg or Richmond, but he felt at home.

  In Virginia, Jefferson had known everything and everyone. In sessions of the Congress in Philadelphia and in hours of walking the city, he encountered new ideas, new people, new forces.

  Philadelphians, said the Anglican clergyman William Smith, were “a people, thrown together from various quarters of the world, differing in all things—language, manners, and sentiment.” Another clergyman, Jacob Duché, said, “The poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion and politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or the scholar.… For every man expects one day or another to be upon a footing with his wealthiest neighbor.”

  In Philadelphia, Jefferson was caught up in a whirlwind of war and the rumors of war. John Adams of Massachusetts had proposed the appointment of George Washington of Virginia as commanding general for the Continental forces, a choice the Congress approved on Thursday, June 15, 1775. Two days later came the battle at Bunker Hill in Boston.

  What Jefferson had heard Patrick Henry assert in the nave of St. John’s Church 250 miles south of Philadelphia in March was now fact. There was no peace.

  Jefferson’s arrival in Philadelphia was an occasion of note among the delegates. Samuel Ward of Rhode Island recorded seeing “the famous Mr. Jefferson,” and said the Virginian “looks like a very sensible spirited fine fellow and by the pamphlet which he wrote last summer [the Summary View] he certainly is one.” Later in the year John Adams reported a fellow delegate’s view that “Jefferson is the greatest Rubber off of Dust that he has ever met with, that he has learned French, Italian, Spanish and wants to learn German.”

>   Adams and Jefferson could hardly have appeared less alike. Adams was eight years older and about five inches shorter, as thoroughgoing a New Englander as Jefferson was a Virginian. Adams had difficulty holding his tongue or his temper; Jefferson was a master of keeping his emotions in check. Yet the two men—and, in time, Abigail, Adams’s wonderful wife—were to forge one of the greatest and most complicated alliances in American history.

  Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1735, John Adams was the son of a farmer and public servant. Like Peter Jefferson, John Adams, Sr., loomed large to his son. Young Adams was educated at Harvard, considered but decided against becoming a Congregational minister, and made his mark as a lawyer in Boston in the tumultuous years leading to the American Revolution.

  From 1775 until the politics of the first Washington administration drove them apart, Adams and Jefferson worked together often and well, particularly in their years as fellow American diplomats in Europe. Their falling-out over the direction of the nation in the 1790s and the first decade or so of the nineteenth century was profound, for their disagreements were deep. Yet after both men retired they would revive the friendship they formed in these early Philadelphia days. “I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution,” their fellow Revolutionary Benjamin Rush wrote Adams in February 1812. “Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.”

  Jefferson’s proximity to the action and his new connections to delegates from the northern colonies, particularly Adams, grew into an intense admiration for New England. To read of valor is one thing. To live among those who are following the news of bloodshed in their homes, who have a direct stake in the outcome, is to experience conflict at a more fundamental level. The ethos of war was all around him.

  The day after Jefferson came to the city the Congress authorized an invasion of Canada—a dramatic move that helped fix Canada’s place firmly in Jefferson’s political and military imaginations. Since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British had occupied large sections of Canada, once known as New France. In the face of American invasion in 1775, Montreal surrendered but Quebec held out. The failure to conquer the whole territory effectively left it in British hands, and Canada became a haven for Loyalists. After the war, Canada was, in the American mind, a possible staging ground for a reassertion of British force and influence in the new United States.

  Jefferson found an infectious courage in Philadelphia in 1775. “Nobody now entertains a doubt but that we are able to cope with the whole force of Great Britain, if we are but willing to exert ourselves,” he wrote in July. They were high hopes, but Jefferson was in a noble frame of mind, believing the Americans capable of vigor and virtue.

  Jefferson and John Dickinson, the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, consulted in these weeks at Dickinson’s Fair Hill estate outside Philadelphia on the Germantown Road. The result: a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which was adopted by the Congress on Thursday, July 6, 1775.

  The next day, Jefferson slipped away from the Congress and rode the ferry to the Woodlands, the botanist William Hamilton’s estate on the Schuylkill River. Hamilton and Jefferson shared a passion for landscape gardening. Walking the Woodlands on this summer’s day, Jefferson was likely imaginatively engaged by visions of creation, of bringing the natural world into harmony with the human. He also made a trip to the falls of the Schuylkill for an outing and dinner.

  Such excursions offered welcome, if brief, respites from politics and from war. On Saturday, July 8, 1775, having made the case for armed resistance with Dickinson and Jefferson’s Declaration of Causes, the Congress extended its hand to the king, dispatching an “Olive Branch Petition” to London.

  Nothing was to come of it.

  Jefferson rarely spoke in large assemblies, preferring to make his mark in different ways. As accomplished a student of politics and of history as John Adams believed Jefferson benefited enormously from holding his tongue in debate. From all that Adams had read and all that he had experienced firsthand, he had learned, he said, “eloquence in public assemblies is not the surest road to fame and preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great reserve.” Classing Jefferson with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were also reluctant to speak at length in public, Adams said, “A public speaker who inserts himself, or is urged by others into the conduct of affairs, by daily exertions to justify his measures and answer the objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the public, and unavoidably makes himself enemies.”

  To write public papers or to negotiate quietly, away from the floor of an assembly or even away from a largish committee, enabled a politician to exert his will with less risk of creating animosity. “Few persons can bear to be outdone in reasoning or declamation or wit, or sarcasm or repartee or satire, and all these things are very apt to grow out of public debate,” said Adams. “In this way in a course of years, a nation becomes full of a man’s enemies, or at least of such as have been galled in some controversy, and take a secret pleasure in assisting to humble and mortify him.”

  Jefferson was reflective yet practical, confident yet realistic in the middle of the maelstrom of 1775. “The continuance and the extent of this conflict we consider as among the secrets of providence; but we also reflect on the propriety of being prepared for the worst events, and, so far as human foresight can provide, to be guarded against probable evils at least,” he said. Perhaps “a few gentlemen of genius and spirit” should be sent to train under General Washington to learn the “necessary art” of war.

  So much was unknowable, but the political language of war had to celebrate what had been done and offer hope for darker moments. Jefferson was mastering this complex vocabulary. He knew, clearly, that Virginia faced a “deficiency” of military skill—a skill that “in these days of rapine can only be relied upon for public safety.” The use of “rapine” came from the lawyer in Jefferson. It was an ancient legal term for violent seizure of property, a rhetorical touch underscoring the view that anyone with property had a stake in the struggle.

  After a visit to Robert Bell’s shop on Third Street to buy a copy of James Burgh’s book Political Disquisitions, Jefferson left Philadelphia for Virginia on Tuesday, August 1, 1775. He stopped along the road at Mrs. Clay’s inn at New Castle, Delaware, then continued onward to Chestertown, Annapolis, and Port Royal en route home to Monticello.

  In the absence of any surviving letters between Jefferson and Patty we can only guess about the tone they used with each other when apart. Given Jefferson’s letters to his family and friends throughout his life, though, it is likely that he wrote to his wife in rather the way his contemporary Theodorick Bland, Jr., wrote his own wife. Bland was a Virginian, a physician, a politician, and a revolutionary. Writing his wife, also named Martha, from the front in New Jersey in 1777, he said: “For God’s sake, my dear, when you are writing, write of nothing but yourself, or at least exhaust that dear, ever dear subject, before you make a transition to another; tell me of your going to bed, of your rising, of the hour you breakfast, dine, sup, visit, tell me of anything, but leave me not in doubt about your health.… Fear not … yes, ‘you will again feel your husband’s lips flowing with love and affectionate warmth.’ Heaven never means to separate two who love so well, so soon; and if it does, with what transport shall we meet in heaven?”

  With Patty, Jefferson had built the kind of marriage and life he wanted on the mountain. Music and dancing were essential. Jefferson never stopped humming, ordered an Aeolian harp, and paid £5 for a new violin. In memory he could hear his sister Jane’s voice, singing. And in the moment he could sit and listen to Patty play the pianoforte or the harpsichord.

  “Mrs. Jefferson was small,” said the slave Isaac Granger Jefferson, and “pretty.” She was also bu
sy, both bearing children and presiding over the plantation during her husband’s absences. Her account book tracks her daily work, including supervising the slaughter of ducks, turkeys, hogs, sheep, and lambs. She also managed the slaves in the house.

  The “first” Monticello—Jefferson eventually tore down the house and started anew in the 1790s—was smaller than the second and final version, but it was still a grand place. “The house was built quite recently, in the latest Italian style,” a visitor wrote of the first Monticello. “There is a colonnade around the structure and the frieze is very charmingly decorated with all kinds of sculptures drawn from mythology.” He acquired a chessboard and pieces, a backgammon table, a refracting telescope, eight Venetian blinds, and Scotch carpet: He was always on the watch for lovely things—and always, always books. Even the first Monticello had, a visitor noted, “a copious and well-chosen library.”

  The house itself—“an elegant building,” the visitor recalled—was only the most vivid expression of Jefferson’s wide-ranging mind. From books to languages to music to entertaining to art to architecture, he was constantly learning, experiencing, experimenting, tasting, living: At Shadwell and at the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg he had been taught that there was a vast world to engage and shape.

  His architectural sense was informed by, among other works, James Gibbs’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture and an edition of The Architecture of A. Palladio. He mused on the painting scheme for his dining room, ordered a copy of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, and sent for a clothespress.

  Jefferson had joined the Philosophical Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge, founded by Virginians (including his friend John Page) on the model of the American Philosophical Society, to which Jefferson was elected in 1780. In 1772, James McClurg, the future director of hospitals for Virginia during the Revolutionary War, published a book entitled Experiments upon the Human Bile. Jefferson bought a copy.