Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  This was where Jefferson believed Washington came in. “The confidence of the whole union is centered in you.… North and South will hang together, if they have you to hang on.”

  Give us a few years, Jefferson said, and perhaps all would be well. “One or two sessions will determine the crisis: and I cannot but hope that you can resolve to add one or two more to the many years you have already sacrificed to the good of mankind.”

  Jefferson dined at Washington’s on Thursday, June 7, 1792. At the table with John Jay, Jefferson recalled that he and Jay “got, towards the close of the afternoon, into a little contest whether hereditary descent or election was most likely to bring wise and honest men into public councils.” Jefferson argued for democracy; Jay for aristocracy.

  Washington was listening to the exchange. “I was not displeased to find the P. attended to the conversation as it will be a corroboration of the design imputed to that party in my letter.”

  Jefferson confided his fears to Lafayette. “Too many of these stock jobbers and King-jobbers have come into our legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become stock jobbers and king-jobbers.”

  Washington gently tried to calm Jefferson’s rising anxieties about a monarchical threat. “There might be desires, but he did not believe there were designs to change the form of government into a monarchy,” Jefferson recalled Washington telling him in July 1792. It was hardly a full-throated reassurance.

  In August, Washington returned to the divide between Jefferson and Hamilton, writing Jefferson:

  How unfortunate, and how much is it to be regretted then, that whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissensions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.… I believe it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to manage the reins of government or to keep the parts of it together: for if, instead of laying our shoulders to the machine after measures are decided on, one pulls this way and another that, before the utility of the thing is fairly tried, it must inevitably be torn asunder—And, in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness and prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps for ever!

  Jefferson replied with passion and at length, mounting his case with a new level of intensity. The sharper tone he took with Washington—still diplomatic, but nonetheless more confrontational than usual—was in reaction to the implicit criticism in the president’s August letter. Jefferson hated to be told he was wrong, and he defended himself with ferocity. “That I have utterly, in my private conversations, disapproved of the system of the Secretary of the Treasury, I acknowledge and avow: and this was not merely a speculative difference.”

  He was challenging Washington directly, answering the president’s assertion that differences of opinion should be worked out in the forge of experience. No, Jefferson was saying, something deeper and more fundamental was at stake between him and Hamilton. Hamilton’s system, Jefferson said, “flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature.”

  Bureaucratic struggles assumed epic dimensions, with Jefferson casting himself as a loyal lieutenant victimized by an ambitious, bullying Treasury secretary. “He undertook, of his own authority, the conferences with the ministers of [France and Britain], and … on every consultation [he] provided … some report of a conversation with the one or the other of them, adapted to his views.”

  Finally, Jefferson told Washington that, once in private life, he reserved the right to take his stand in “newspaper contests” if events required it: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.”

  Early on the morning of the first day of October 1792, Jefferson spoke again with the president, this time at Mount Vernon on the banks above the Potomac. Washington still hoped Jefferson would not leave the government. According to Jefferson, the president “thought it important to preserve the check of my opinions in the administration in order to keep things in their proper channel and prevent them from going too far.”

  The president and the secretary of state disagreed anew on the scope of the threat of monarchy. Washington said that he “did not believe there were ten men in the U.S. whose opinions were worth attention who entertained such a thought.” Jefferson replied that “there were many more than he imagined.… I told him that though the people were sound, there was a numerous sect who had monarchy in contemplation. That the Secretary of the Treasury was one of these. That I had heard him say that this constitution was a shilly shally thing of mere milk and water which could not last, and was only good as a step to something better.” Soon breakfast ended the conversation.

  Washington took a sensible view of the conflict between his top two lieutenants. “For I will frankly and solemnly declare that I believe the views of both of you are pure, and well-meant; and that experience alone will decide with respect to the salubrity of the measures which are the subjects of dispute,” he wrote Jefferson on Thursday, October 18, 1792. It was an understandable way for a president, who saw the whole picture, to frame the issue.

  “Why, then,” Washington continued, “when some of the best citizens in the United States—men of discernment—uniform and tried patriots, who have no sinister views to promote, but are chaste in their ways of thinking and acting are to be found, some on one side, and some on the other of the questions which have caused these agitations, should either of you be so tenacious of your opinions as to make no allowances for those of the other?”

  At the same time he was dealing with Jefferson and Hamilton, Washington worried about rebellion in western Pennsylvania over the excise tax. Opposition in the region, he told Jefferson, was now “too open, violent and serious to be longer winked at by the government without prostrating its authority and involving the executive in censurable inattention to the outrages which are threatened.” Particularly anxious about the resistance to this tax on distilled spirits, Hamilton drafted a harsh proclamation to be issued by the president. Washington took care to include Jefferson in the consultations and won the secretary of state’s signature on the document. The president wanted the appearance of a unified administration, even if it were, in fact, an administration at war with itself.

  Jefferson may have been exaggerating the threat of monarchy, but he was not inventing it. “Should Congress adopt a Prince of the House of Brunswick for their future President or King, the happiness of the two nations would be interwoven and united—all jealousies removed and the most durable affections cemented that perhaps ever were formed between two independent nations,” the lieutenant governor of Canada, John Graves Simcoe, wrote in August 1792—the same season in which Washington was securing Jefferson’s endorsement of the excise-tax proclamation. “This is an object worthy [of] the attention of Great Britain and which many of the most temperate men of the United States have in contemplation. And which many events, if once systematically begun, may hasten and bring to maturity.” Jefferson’s friends fed such fears. One reported an after-dinner conversation with Hamilton in which the Treasury secretary said, “there was no stability, no security, in any kind of government but a monarchy.”

  Hamilton had other worries as well. In late 1792 there were revelations of an affair between Hamilton and a married woman, Maria Reynolds, whose husband, James, colluded in the seduction of the Treasury secretary—a seduction which, by Hamilton’s own account, was not difficult. The couple blackmailed Hamilton, and word of the affair, embellished by rumors of financial impropriety, led a delegation of lawmakers to investigate. They found Hamilton guilty of adultery but nothing else.

  In early 1793, Congressman William Branch G
iles of Virginia introduced resolutions designed to force Hamilton to explain something more important than his private life. Giles wanted to hear more about the Treasury’s fiscal policies.

  Viewed by Federalists as a partisan attack on Hamilton allegedly orchestrated by the Virginian Republican interest—including Jefferson—the resolutions burned intensely but quickly as a political issue. One draft attributed to Jefferson concluded dramatically: “Resolved, That the Secretary of the Treasury has been guilty of maladministration in the duties of his office, and should, in the opinion of Congress, be removed from his office by the President of the United States.” The final submission to the House by Giles did not include a call for Hamilton’s dismissal, and even the somewhat milder resolutions failed to pass.

  Jefferson let his frustration show only in private. In March 1793, in a note about Giles’s resolutions, he wrote that Giles “and one or two others were sanguine enough to believe that the palpableness of these resolutions rendered it impossible the House could reject them.”

  It was not a surprise, Jefferson said, to those, like him, who were more familiar with a House he believed made up of:

  1.Of bank directors.

  2.Holders of bank stock.

  3.Stock jobbers.

  4.Blind devotees.

  5.ignorant persons who did not comprehend [the resolutions].

  6.Lazy and good humored persons, who comprehended and acknowledged them, yet were too lazy to examine, or unwilling to pronounce censure.

  Despite the legislative defeat, Jefferson thought perhaps the episode would play well for the Republican interest. “The public will see from this the extent of their danger,” he said. Or so Jefferson hoped.

  In the end, Washington had consented to reelection to the presidency, and Jefferson agreed to stay on in office for a time. Under assault in the papers, Jefferson hated to think that people might believe he was driven from office. His pride was too great for that. He would remain at his post until “those who troubled the waters before” withdrew. “When they suffer them to get calm,” Jefferson said, “I will go into port.”

  Reports of rising violence in France grew from the autumn of 1792, reaching a historic height with the September 1793 declaration of the Reign of Terror by revolutionaries determined to slaughter those they viewed as enemies of the cause. The seemingly endless bloodshed gave fresh strength to the pro-British forces in America.

  Support for the French Revolution had once been a unifying factor in American politics. “We were all strongly attached to France—scarcely any man more strongly than myself,” recalled John Marshall. “I sincerely believed human liberty to depend in a great measure on the success of the French Revolution.” Despite some Federalist misgivings from the start, common wisdom held that the French struggle for liberty was of a piece with the American Revolution. From the autumn of 1792 forward, though, as the French Revolution became ever bloodier, American opinion came to be divided—especially after extremists fomented ever-deadlier riots and purges, drove Lafayette abroad, and took Louis XVI to the scaffold in January 1793.

  Jefferson’s reaction to the events in Paris was complicated. He lost friends to the guillotine. After being driven from his homeland, Lafayette spent five years in captivity in Europe, the prisoner of Austrian and Prussian powers. Yet Jefferson saw the disturbances in France in the context of the larger contest between republicanism and absolutism he believed defined the age. “In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent,” he wrote William Short on Thursday, January 3, 1793. He continued:

  These I deplore as much as anybody, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle.… The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is. I have expressed to you my sentiments, because they are really those of 99 of a hundred of our citizens.

  The passage’s hyperbole is partly rooted in the symbolic role France continued to play in American politics. To Jefferson, to be for the French Revolution was to be a republican and friend to liberty; to be against it, or to have reservations about it, was to be a monarchist and a traitor to freedom.

  This was not a radical interpretation of current political sentiment. As late as Tuesday, January 29, 1793, pro-French organizers in Boston announced plans for a rally in support of the revolutionaries, noting that “a number of citizens anxious to celebrate the success of our Allies, the French, in their present glorious struggles for liberty and equality … have agreed to provide an ox, with suitable liquors.”

  In February 1793, Washington approached Jefferson with a new thought. Would he consider returning to Paris for a year or two to represent American interests there? Jefferson refused.

  Washington’s reply was pointed. Jefferson, he said, “had pressed him to a continuance in public service and [now] refused to do the same myself.”

  Jefferson struck back with a determination masked, if thinly, by flattery and modesty. “I said the case was very different: he united the confidence of all America, and was the only person who did so: his services were therefore of the last importance: but for myself my going out would not be noted or known, a thousand others could supply my place to equal advantage. Therefore I felt myself free.”

  In retreat, Washington coolly asked Jefferson “to consider maturely what arrangement should be made.” There the matter closed.

  Jefferson had secured the fulfillment of his own wishes over those of the most popular and powerful man in the nation. He had done so with a mixture of politeness and pragmatism, praising Washington while noting that he could manage the affairs of the hour better in America than in France—a compelling argument.

  It was not an easy thing to do, to defy George Washington, but Jefferson’s subtlety enabled him to assert his own will against that of the president in such a seemingly gracious way that Washington was unable to counterattack. The moment illuminates the political Jefferson—a man who got his way quietly but unmistakably, without bluster or bombast, his words congenial but his will unwavering.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE END OF A STORMY TOUR

  I feel for your situation but you must bear it. Every consideration private as well as public requires a further sacrifice of your longings for the repose of Monticello.

  —JAMES MADISON to Thomas Jefferson

  THE PLANTATION WAS CALLED Bizarre. Home to Richard Randolph—a distant Jefferson cousin, inevitably—the estate on the Appomattox River in Cumberland County, Virginia, was the center of intense speculation and scandal in 1792–93 after a brutal and disturbing episode that tested even Jefferson’s outward equanimity.

  The unmarried Ann Cary Randolph, a sister of Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (and thus Jefferson’s daughter Patsy’s sister-in-law), was apparently impregnated by her brother-in-law, Richard Randolph. Ann, called Nancy, delivered the baby (though she may have suffered a miscarriage), while on a visit to a neighboring plantation with her brother-in-law and her sister. The dead infant was taken outdoors; no corpse was ever found. The story was so mysterious and tantalizing that it rapidly spread, leading to a trial at which Richard Randolph was defended by lawyers that included John Marshall and Patrick Henry.

  For Jefferson, the violence in Virginia was an occasion to think about the harmony so little in evidence in the capital. Urging Patsy to be generous of spirit with their besieged kin, he wrote: “Never throw off the best affections of nature in the moment when they become most precious to their object; nor fear to extend your ha
nd to save another, lest you should sink yourself.” He believed in the virtues of civility, understanding that they were the most required when they were the least convenient. Jefferson faced such tests of harmony every hour in Philadelphia.

  As Washington’s second inauguration approached, the national experiment still felt provisional. In a small session to discuss the ceremonies for the president’s swearing-in, Henry Knox’s anxiety led to an outburst. “In the course of our conversation Knox, stickling for parade, got into great warmth and swore that our government must either be entirely new modeled or it would be knocked to pieces in less than 10 years,” Jefferson wrote, “and that as it is at present he would not give a copper for it, that it is the President’s character, and not the written constitution, which keeps it together.”

  In a letter he never sent, Robert R. Livingston of New York wrote that he hoped Jefferson would not resign amid the attacks of 1792–93. Jefferson, Livingston said, should not “suffer yourself in appearance to be drummed out of the regiment and that too when there is every reasonable ground to hope that upon the first vacancy you will be promoted to the command of the troops.” He referred, too, to Jefferson’s position in Washington’s cabinet as a “post in an enemies’ country.”

  The war between Hamilton and Jefferson was unending. In September 1792, in the Gazette of the United States, Hamilton wrote: “Mr. Jefferson [is] … distinguished as the quiet, modest, retiring philosopher—as the plain, simple, unambitious republican. He shall not now for the first time be regarded as the intriguing incendiary—the aspiring turbulent competitor.”

  In late 1792, Jefferson moved out of the city of Philadelphia to a house on the Schuylkill River. He was hungry for news of home. “From Monticello you have everything to write about which I have any care,” he told his family. “How do my young chestnut trees? How comes on your garden? How fare the fruit blossoms etc.”