Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  In his Notes on the State of Virginia, a book written a few years after his service revising the laws in the General Assembly, Jefferson was honest about his state’s abysmal record on liberty of conscience. It was a crime in Virginia not to baptize infants in the Anglican church; dissenters were denied office, civil or military; children could be taken from their parents if the parents failed to profess the prescribed creeds. It was said that James Madison heard Baptist ministers preaching from prison in these years. The church was all too evidently an institution as susceptible to corruption as any other. In 1767, Jefferson was involved in a case in which the parishioners of St. Anne’s in Albemarle—the Monticello parish—sought to remove the Reverend John Ramsay for drunkenness and the attempted seduction of a woman not his wife. One allegation: that Ramsay “got drunk with the sacrament wine.”

  Though Jefferson had long cultivated a skeptical religious worldview, he undertook his work in the General Assembly because of freedom, not because of a lack of faith. In political terms, Jefferson believed it unjust (and unwise) to use public funds to support an established church and to link civil rights to religious observance. He said such a system led to “spiritual tyranny.” In theological terms, according to notes he made on John Locke, Jefferson concurred with a Christian tradition that held the church should not depend on state-enforced compulsion. Summarizing Locke, Jefferson wrote that “our Savior chose not to propagate his religion by temporal punishments or civil incapacitation”; had Jesus chosen to do so, “it was in his almighty power” to force belief. Instead, “he chose to … extend it by its influence on reason, thereby showing to others how [they] should proceed.” Or as Jefferson’s notes on the issue say:

  Obj[ection]. Religion will decline if not supported

  Ans[wer]. Gates of Hell shall not prevail

  It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.

  Dissenters across Virginia petitioned the assembly for relief from legislated fealty to the Anglican Church in the autumn of 1776. The cries for religious liberty, Jefferson recalled, “brought on the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.” Edmund Pendleton and Robert Carter Nicholas—“honest men, but zealous churchmen,” as Jefferson called them—supported the established church. It took incremental legislation and several years, but in the end, in 1786, a statute for religious liberty from Jefferson’s pen became law. The bill, Jefferson said, was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

  Slavery was perhaps the only issue more emotionally and politically charged in Virginia than religion. Jefferson’s experience with the question of emancipation in the General Assembly affirmed the tragic view that he had come to when he had earlier failed to make progress against slavery in the House of Burgesses—a view further validated when the delegates to the Continental Congress had cut his attack on the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence.

  At the General Assembly, as part of the revisal of the laws, Jefferson and his allies prepared an amendment stipulating “the freedom of all [slaves] born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age”—deportation because it was inconceivable to Jefferson that free whites and free blacks could live together peaceably.

  Recalling the episode in his retirement at Monticello after he served as president, Jefferson wrote, “It was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition [of emancipation and deportation], nor will it bear it even at this day.” Jefferson took a bleak view. “Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow,” he wrote in retirement, reflecting on the General Assembly days. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

  Jefferson was never able to move public opinion on slavery. His powers failed him—and they failed America.

  Whether there would be an independent America to stand “among the powers of the earth” (as Jefferson had put it in the Declaration of Independence) at all was an open question as 1776 ended. The year closed much as it had begun: in uncertainty and danger. “The enemy,” a correspondent told Jefferson from the American camp on the Delaware River, were “like locusts.”

  George Washington’s army did what it could, but the military situation was dire. “No man … ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means of extricating himself than I have,” Washington said at the end of the year. The American enterprise seemed unlikely to survive the winter.

  Worries about destruction from British forces within were constant. Richard Henry Lee told Jefferson of reports that Germany was attempting to supply Tories in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. The plan, Lee told Jefferson, was for the British officer John Burgoyne, with “10,000 men chiefly Germans,” to attack Virginia and Maryland. “The Southern and Middle colonies [were then] to be put under military government.”

  His work in Williamsburg at the General Assembly done for the season, Jefferson moved his family—Patty was again pregnant—back to Monticello, where, on Wednesday, May 28, 1777, Patty gave birth to a son.

  The little boy lived only seventeen days. If the Jeffersons gave him a name it does not survive. In their grief they sought consolation in each other, for Patty was soon pregnant again. At home on the first of August 1778, at one-thirty in the morning, Patty gave birth to a little girl who was baptized Mary and called Polly. She was to become the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Jefferson other than her older sister Patsy to survive into adulthood.

  Despite her illnesses and pregnancies, Patty Jefferson remained resilient, recording the domestic details of life at Monticello in an account book. Her handwriting was strong and clear. There are doodles, too, suggesting a dreaminess and an active imagination. As in the case of her husband, there was also a perfectionist streak. According to a granddaughter, a book of music that Patty Jefferson copied down was “free from blot and blemish”—which, taken together with her notes on the household, “told of neatness, order, good housewifery and womanly accomplishment.” The description went on: “She was not only an excellent housekeeper and notable mistress of a family, but a graceful, ladylike and accomplished woman, with considerable powers of conversation, some skill in music, all the habits of good society, and the art of welcoming her husband’s friends to perfection.”

  Patty engaged with the war effort. Replying to a request from Martha Washington to sew clothes and supply the army, Patty enlisted James Madison’s mother, Eleanor Conway Madison, to help as well. “Mrs. Washington has done me the honor of communicating the enclosed proposition of our sisters of Pennsylvania and of informing me that the same grateful sentiments are displaying themselves in Maryland,” Patty wrote. “Justified by the sanction of her letter in handing forward the scheme I undertake with cheerfulness the duty of furnishing to my countrywomen an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth to it.”

  The soldiers needed what they could get, for the Revolutionary War was about to come south with ferocity. In Baltimore, Thomas Nelson unsuccessfully tried to take a cheerier view. “Could we but get a good regular army we should soon clear the continent of these damned invaders,” Nelson had written Jefferson in January 1777. “They play the very Devil with the girls and even old women to satisfy their libidinous appetites. There is scarcely a virgin to be found in the part of the country that they have passed through.”

  The sense of threat was constant. “We have pretty certain intelligence that a considerable reinforcement (the N. York papers of the 1st of May say 8000 men) will be sent over immediately,” a correspondent wrote Jefferson in May 1779, “and if so there will, no
doubt, be an active campaign, which it is generally supposed will be chiefly confined to the southern states, where we are the most vulnerable—and from thence the enemy can more easily withdraw their troops to the West Indies, if occasion should require it.”

  Amid rising concerns over British designs to invade and subjugate Virginia as a critical element in London’s bid to defeat the American rebellion and restore order in the empire, Thomas Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia, succeeding Patrick Henry as chief executive.

  In accepting the post Jefferson was explicit about the significance he saw in the good opinion of the public. “In a virtuous and free state, no rewards can be so pleasing to sensible minds, as those which include the approbation of our fellow citizens,” Jefferson wrote. His “great pain,” he said, was the fear that “my poor endeavors should fall short of the kind expectations of my country.”

  The balloting had pitted John Page against Jefferson. In the first round, Jefferson led 55–38, and Thomas Nelson had 32. In a runoff between Jefferson and Page, Jefferson won 67–61.

  After two decades of friendship, Jefferson and John Page were compelled to explain themselves to each other, pledging that neither harbored any of what Page called “low dirty feelings” over the gubernatorial election. Page had been unable to see Jefferson since the balloting and, scheduled to be away from Williamsburg for a brief time, he wanted the new governor to understand he was not avoiding such a meeting. “I can assure you … that were it not for the world who may put a wrong construction on my conduct I should scarcely trouble you with this apology,” Page told Jefferson on Wednesday, June 2, 1779.

  Jefferson replied that “it had given me much pain that the zeal of our respective friends should ever have placed you and me in the situation of competitors. I was comforted however with the reflection that it was their competition, not ours, and that the difference of the numbers which decided between us, was too insignificant to give you a pain or me a pleasure [had] our dispositions towards each other been such as to have admitted those sensations.”

  By pointing out the narrowness of the margin between the two, Jefferson was trying to soothe his friend’s feelings, but he knew that no one likes to come up short in any contest. Picking up on Page’s allusion to the opinion of others, Jefferson sought to create a sense of unbreakable camaraderie with his friend: “I know you too well to need an apology for anything you do, and hope you will be forever assured of this; and as to the constructions of the world, they would only have added one to [the many sig]ns for which they [are] to go to the devil.”

  However kind the two men were to each other, though, the contest had still been a contest, with one winner and one loser. Jefferson, who knew how he would have felt had the results been reversed and who hated such tensions, moved to assuage Page. “As this is the first, so I hope it will be the last instance of ceremony between us,” he wrote, adding that Mrs. Page’s company in Williamsburg would be one of the only consolations for Patty when she came to the capital.

  Jefferson wanted familiar faces around him, people he could trust, as he assumed his post. Isaac Granger Jefferson recalled riding down to Williamsburg in a wagon; James Hemings, Robert Hemings, and Martin Hemings came, too.

  Governor Jefferson was to serve for two years, from June 1779 until June 1781. He was to preside over the destiny of his beloved Virginia at a time when the future of everything he cared about was anything but certain.

  TWELVE

  A TROUBLESOME OFFICE

  They certainly mean another campaign, a last effort; as Georgia and South Carolina, with the frontiers and sea coasts appear to be their objects at present.

  —RICHARD HENRY LEE, on British military plans, 1779

  I am thoroughly satisfied that the attachment of the people to the cause in which we are engaged and their hatred to Great Britain remain unshaken.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, amid rising military pressures from the British

  They formed in line and marched up to the palace with drums beating; it was an awful sight—seemed like the Day of Judgment was come.

  —ISAAC GRANGER JEFFERSON, describing the British attack on Richmond, January 1781

  IN WILLIAMSBURG, the royal Governor’s Palace of Thomas Jefferson’s youth—that enormous residence on the green, with its elaborate gardens—was to be his. Hardly twenty years had passed since Jefferson had been a fortunate guest of Francis Fauquier’s, dining and talking and listening and playing music, a student in the presence of greater, more learned, and more powerful men. Now Jefferson was thirty-six, a husband, a father, the governor of Virginia, and a statesman of the United States of America.

  Jefferson’s two-year tenure as governor would be consumed with the threat and then the reality of British invasion. Up until this point, military concerns in Virginia had centered on threats by proxy (Indians, slaves), not direct danger from the full force of British troops. The war in Virginia had been real but still somehow abstract—more theoretical than tangible—from the time of Dunmore to 1779–81.

  That had changed not long before Jefferson took office. Georgia had collapsed after the British attacked Savannah. South Carolina was next for the British troops.

  For a man who loved control and appreciated order and harmony, Jefferson found himself facing the most disorderly and chaotic of crises: a two-front war. The regular British were a force to the east; to the west Jefferson had to contend with British soldiers and their Indian allies based in Detroit.

  As he walked the halls and surveyed the grounds of the palace, listening to the conversation of his wife and the voices of his children, he could not have helped but hear the echoes of his education in these rooms and at these tables. By any standard, Jefferson’s rise had been rapid, and the man who took over the governorship of Virginia in the early summer of 1779 was ambitious but not blindly so. Power meant much to him, but he cloaked his driven nature with a mien of intellectual curiosity and aristocratic confidence.

  Like many legislators, Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power—until he bore executive responsibility. He emerged from his wartime governorship with a different view of authority than the one he had held on first accepting the office, and with a deeper appreciation of the perils and possibilities of command. His sense of the price of public service was also to become keener than it had been. Jefferson foresaw years of “intense labor and great private loss” ahead, and by “loss” he meant more than money. The approval and esteem that led to election rarely endured, and Jefferson knew that few men left office with the standing they enjoyed on entering it.

  From Philadelphia, a correspondent sent qualified salutations. “I will not congratulate you, but my country on their choice of a chief magistrate,” the writer told Jefferson. “It will break in on your domestic plan and you’ll find it a troublesome office during the war.” Jefferson would indeed.

  From captives to defense to frontier security to suppressing Tory dissent, Governor Jefferson proved himself capable of making difficult, even harsh, decisions.

  The capture of Henry Hamilton, the Irish-born British commander of Fort Detroit, offered one such case. Reputed to have given bounties to Indians for white scalps—hence his nickname “the Hair Buyer General”—Hamilton was kept in irons at Jefferson’s direction and over British objections.

  Jefferson’s willingness to do whatever it took for the sake of security was already on record. In May 1778 he had drafted a bill of attainder—an automatic conviction of an individual by legislative fiat—for a man named Josiah Philips for “committing murders, burning houses, wasting farms and doing other acts of hostility.” Philips was given a certain amount of time to surrender himself for trial; if he failed to turn himself in, he would be declared guilty.

  Jefferson’s bill was an extraordinary expression of power and the work of a pragmatic politician. Essentially it denied Philips the rights th
e Americans said they were fighting for. For Jefferson, the practical need to end the Philips insurrection outweighed the ideal application of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

  Noting the failure to recruit sufficient infantry volunteers in June 1778, he suggested that the Congress “commute a good part of the infantry required from us for an equivalent force in horse. This service opens to us a new fund of young men, who have not yet stepped forth; I mean those whose indolence or education has unfitted them for foot-service.” As governor he also lamented the state of Virginia’s navy, noting that a shipbuilding effort had been “unsuccessful beyond all my fears. But it is my opinion we should still persevere in spite of disappointment, for this plain reason that we can never be otherwise defended.” He had made a point of touring Virginia’s gunnery east of Fredericksburg.

  And he insisted on attempting to secure the West. He and George Rogers Clark planned an expedition against Britain’s Fort Detroit. A decade younger than Jefferson, Clark was a tall, adventurous Virginian who had studied surveying in his youth. Clark was a pioneering figure in Kentucky and played a critical role in defending the western lands from British-supported Indian attack. He captured Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River and Vincennes (a point roughly halfway between St. Louis and Louisville) under pressure from “Hair Buyer” Hamilton. His exploits in the Northwest in the icy winter of 1778–79 secured American influence over the Illinois country. He was a tough man. Years later, after severely burning his leg in an accident, Clark watched a parade of Kentucky militia out the window of the doctor’s office where he was undergoing an amputation. Listening to the martial music, he is said to have endured the brutal operation, turning to the doctor only afterward, asking, “Well, is it off?” Clark was the kind of man Jefferson needed: a bold commander who could execute the vision Jefferson formulated and fought for in the political world.