Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  The outward reformation of Federalist America began on the morning of the inauguration, when Jefferson declined to wear a ceremonial sword to the swearing-in, breaking tradition with Washington and Adams. After the solemnities, Jefferson took his dinner as usual at Conrad and McMunn’s. He soon sold President Adams’s coaches and silver harnesses, another symbolic strike against Federalist trappings.

  The Adamses had moved into the President’s House on the first day of November 1800. Abigail Adams hung laundry in the East Room, which Mrs. Adams had called the “great unfinished audience-room.” Jefferson now installed his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, there. For his own office the president took a room in the southwest corner of the first floor looking out toward the Potomac. There was a table with drawers for Jefferson’s tools and knickknacks; he kept geraniums in the window and mockingbirds at hand.

  He liked quiet but could not stand silence. He was usually humming or singing softly to himself, and from the early 1770s forward Jefferson kept pet mockingbirds. He cherished the birds for their music, and in hours of contemplative leisure he sometimes opened their cage to allow them to flit about his private suite at Monticello or his President’s House office.

  Jefferson bought his first bird from a slave of his father-in-law John Wayles in Charles City County in November 1772. It took another twenty years for mockingbirds to reach Monticello naturally. “Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs,” Jefferson wrote home, when he learned of the mockingbirds’ arrival on the mountaintop.

  As president, Jefferson kept a bird he named Dick, hanging its cage in the window in his office amid geraniums and roses. According to Margaret Bayard Smith, Dick “was the constant companion of his solitary and studious hours,” sometimes settling on Jefferson’s shoulder or accepting “food from his lips. Often when he retired to his chamber it would hop up the stairs after him and while he took his siesta, would sit on his couch and pour forth its melodious strains.”

  As Jefferson took over the presidential mansion, he ordered the demolition of an existing wooden privy on the lawn and had the parts for “water closets … of superior construction” sent from Philadelphia. Accustomed to mastery at Monticello, Jefferson sought to establish the same dynamic at the President’s House. He decided which pieces of furniture should stay and which should go. The room Adams had used for levees (the modern State Dining Room) was the one he had chosen for his working office, and an oval room on the first floor (the modern Blue Room) was made into a drawing room. He ordered the hanging of household bells in the mansion so that he could summon servants at will—a convenience contemplated by the Adamses but completed by Jefferson in his first months. His chief domestic, Rapin, kept Jefferson informed about the progress of renovations and construction. (Etienne Lemaire soon became Jefferson’s majordomo in Washington.)

  The members of his cabinet represented the major regions of the country. James Madison of Virginia was appointed secretary of state; Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania accepted the Treasury Department; Henry Dearborn from Massachusetts became secretary of war; Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts was to be attorney general; Robert Smith of Maryland became secretary of the navy.

  The appointment of Gallatin was one of the shrewdest. Born in Geneva in 1761, Gallatin came to the United States in 1780, served in the Revolution, taught French at Harvard, mastered finance, and held a variety of elective posts (including, briefly, the Senate seat from which he was ejected in 1794 for failing to meet the citizenship requirement). He was a key Republican leader in the House of Representatives during the tumultuous years of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Quasi-War with France from 1798 to 1800. Gallatin and his second wife, Hannah, got along well with Jefferson, who trusted Gallatin’s financial and political counsel. He would serve as secretary of the Treasury from 1801 until 1814.

  Listing the Republican gains in Congress and in the states, the French diplomat Louis-André Pichon told Paris that Jefferson stood at a remarkable pinnacle. The fall of the Federalists from their seeming invincibility during the fever of the Quasi-War was striking—“one cannot help,” Pichon said, “but be astonished by its rapidity.” Even New England was not immune to the rise of the Republicans. “Henceforth, we can predict that Mr. Jefferson will have only a weak opposition,” Pichon wrote, noting that the expansion of western populations would only add to Jefferson’s power since such people would be “invariably opposed to the cities on the coast.”

  In Jefferson’s enthusiasm, the new president fell back on his favored nautical imagery. “The storm through which we have passed has been tremendous indeed,” Jefferson wrote John Dickinson two days after the inauguration. “The tough sides of our Argosy have been thoroughly tried. Her strength has stood the waves into which she was steered with a view to sink her. We shall put her on her republican tack, and she will now show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.”

  To the English scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley he allowed his historical imagination to take flight. “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new.”

  Such was the idealistic Jefferson. But he was also realistic. “I am sensible how far I should fall short of effecting all the reformation which reason would suggest and experience approve, were I free to do whatever I thought best,” he wrote. “But when we reflect how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society, how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right, we see the wisdom of Solon’s remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear, and that will be chiefly to reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it, and improve some little on old routines.”

  Even more bluntly and vividly, Jefferson referred to the Federalists as madmen: “Their leaders are a hospital of incurables, and as such entitled to be protected and taken care of as other insane persons are.” Still, there was hope—for to Jefferson, where there was freedom there was always hope. “The times have been awful,” he said, “but they have proved a useful truth that the good citizen must never despair of the commonwealth.”

  Priestley hoped, too, that “Politics will not make you forget what is due to science.” Jefferson, in fact, saw them as connected. A politics of personal liberty created a sense of free inquiry. A man liberated from monarchical or hereditary limitations stood a greater chance of possessing a mind free to roam and to grow and to create and to innovate in a climate in which citizens lived together in essential harmony and affection. This was Jefferson’s ideal republic—and he was committed to making it real.

  He did not lack for advice on how to govern in the wake of the narrow decision in the House. “Many friends may grow cool from disappointment,” wrote James Monroe, “the violent who have their passions too much excited will experience mortification in not finding them fully gratified: in addition .… the discomfited Tory party, profiting of past divisions and follies which have contributed much to overwhelm them, will reunite their scattered force against us… It will intrigue with foreign powers and therefore ought to be watched.” Tench Coxe issued a warning: “The dangers to our form of government, at home and abroad, yet exist,” he wrote Jefferson.

  According to Virginia’s William Branch Giles, “The ejected party is now almost universally considered as having been employed in conjunction with G.B. in a scheme for the total destruction of the liberties of the people.”

  On any given day Jefferson dealt with a range of issues and problems from his office on the first floor of the presidential mansion. Appointments to office, politics in New England, the Barbary Coast, agricultural policy, the West Indies, French and English diplomacy:
Paper flowed in and out of Jefferson’s hands.

  Neither Patsy nor Polly came to live with him in Washington, nor is there any record that Sally Hemings ever left Albemarle County to visit the President’s House. A social creature, Jefferson nevertheless lived in relative domestic isolation in Washington. Only Meriwether Lewis kept house with him in the unfinished mansion. Jefferson said the two of them lived like “mice in a church.”

  He felt lonely early in his tenure. His colleagues were slow to assemble. “I am still at a great loss,” he said as he settled in. Neither the James Madisons nor the Albert Gallatins were yet in residence in the capital. When the Gallatins arrived, they received a blanket invitation from Jefferson, who asked them to dine every day. It would, he said, be “a real favor.” But he was disappointed when the Gallatins decided to move farther away from the President’s House. “The city is rather sickly, my family has their share, and they are extremely anxious on that account to move on Capitol hill,” Gallatin wrote Jefferson in August. The Treasury secretary was quick to reassure the president that he would remain nearby: “It is substituting precisely 20 minutes ride to ten.”

  Unlike many of his fellow officials and lawmakers, Jefferson liked the new capital city. “We find this a very agreeable country residence,” he wrote. “Good society, and enough of it, and free from the noise, the heat, the stench, and the bustle of a close built town.”

  Building a new American future required redeeming the excesses of the Federalist past, and Jefferson issued presidential pardons for some of the printers convicted under the Sedition Act. The case of his old ally James Thomson Callender, who had been convicted, fined, and imprisoned, was the most personal for him; Callender’s pardon was dated Monday, March 16, 1801.

  Callender had three children to support and wanted his $200 fine to the government refunded. It was not forthcoming, and by Sunday, April 12, 1801, Callender was “hurt” by the “disappointment” of not having his fine repaid. “I now begin to know what ingratitude is,” he said.

  Jefferson wanted to keep the Republican version of reality alive in the minds of the people. On Friday, March 20, 1801, he asked Albert Gallatin to reply to a circular letter by the Federalist Robert Goodloe Harper that extolled the virtues of the Washington-Adams years. It was, Jefferson said, a “false and frivolous” account, and “the other side of the medal requires to be shown.” In a sign of good care, Jefferson did not put his name to the request.

  Orchestrating Republican writings from behind the scenes was nothing new for Jefferson, and it is revealing that he turned to Gallatin now that the administration had commenced. Callender, whom Jefferson had patronized in years gone by, had been out of favor since 1800.

  Why did Jefferson turn on Callender? Part of the reason may lie in a recurring feature of American politics: a successful president’s discomfort with the less respectable men and means that got him to victory. There is usually a moment in the life of a new president when he begins to see himself not as an aspirant desperate to win but as a statesman above the squalor and the sweat of actual vote getting. Rising men do not like to be reminded of the smell of the stables; dignitaries dislike recollections of the dust through which they have come. The polemicist had been useful on the journey, but there was apparently no place for his acidic attacks now that the popular votes were cast and his machinations had been put on display at trial. In Callender, in the pursuit of power, Jefferson made a devil’s bargain: He supported and consorted with a man skilled in the dark arts of partisan warfare, but he seems not to have considered that the same man might one day turn on him.

  When repayment for the fine was not forthcoming, Callender told Madison, “Mr. Jefferson has not returned one shilling of my fine.… I am not a man who is either to be oppressed or plundered with impunity.” Callender decided that the fine was important, but perhaps a sinecure as postmaster of Richmond would be even better. Traveling to Washington, he met with Madison. “The money was refused with cold disdain, which is quite as provoking as direct insolence,” Callender wrote. “Little Madison … exerted a great deal of eloquence to show that it would be improper to repay the money at Washington.”

  There were many factors at work. “Do you know that besides his other passions he is under the tyranny of that of love?” Madison asked Monroe. “The object of his flame is in Richmond. I did not ask her name; but presume her to be young and beautiful, in his eyes at least, and in a sphere above him. He has flattered himself into a persuasion that the emoluments and reputation of a post-office would obtain her in marriage. Of these recommendations, however, he is sent back in despair.”

  Madison also briefed the president, who dispatched Meriwether Lewis to give Callender fifty dollars to tide him over until the fine could be repaid in full. Callender’s attitude toward Lewis suggested that Jefferson might well have a larger problem on his hands than he realized. “His language to Capt. Lewis was very high toned,” Jefferson wrote Monroe. “He intimated that he was in possession of things which he could and would use of a certain case: that he received the 50 D not as charity but as a due, in fact as hush money; that I knew what he expected, viz, a certain office, and more to this effect.”

  Angry and hurt, Callender awaited the hour of vengeance.

  In the President’s House, Jefferson craved control. In November 1801, he sent a note to his cabinet about how his government was to work—and as usual with questions of process, it was a document about power.

  Jefferson wanted to be in on every detail, and he framed his approach to the public business in terms of following President Washington’s precedent. Nearly all letters of business had passed through Washington’s hands. “By this means,” Jefferson told his own cabinet, President Washington “was always in accurate possession of all facts and proceedings in every part of the Union, and to whatsoever department they related,” Jefferson said.

  This was how Jefferson wanted things, too. He felt, he said, “a sense of obligation imposed on me by the public will to meet personally the duties to which they have appointed me.” And so it would be. He looked forward to intelligence of any kind, telling Gallatin that papers “conveying information of what is passing or of the state of things, are … desirable.”

  He wanted to know everything. He had to know everything.

  THIRTY-THREE

  A CONFIDENT PRESIDENT

  The measures recommended by the President are all popular in all parts of the nation.

  —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

  Here are so many wants, so many affections and passions engaged, so varying in their interests and objects, that no one can be conciliated without revolting others.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, on the political culture of Washington, D.C.

  BY MID-NOVEMBER 1801, the presidency settled into what Jefferson called “a steady and uniform course.” He worked from ten to thirteen hours a day at his writing table, doing paperwork and receiving callers from early morning until midday; that gave him, he figured, “an interval of 4 hours for riding, dining and a little unbending.” At noon he tried to leave the President’s House for a ride or a walk before returning to be “engaged with company till candle-light.” It was only at night—and it was the rare night—that he spent time on the “mechanics, mathematics, philosophy etc.” that he loved.

  Jefferson was keen about his privacy. He was glad to see one particular servant at the President’s House go. “I had good reason to believe he read the papers which happened to be on my table whenever I went out of my cabinet; and it was impossible for me to lock them up every time I stepped out of the room.”

  Jefferson’s hours were vulnerable. On one occasion he had to move quickly to quell some tension with a supporter. “Some enemy, whom we know not, is sowing tares among us,” Jefferson wrote Nathaniel Macon, the Republican Speaker of the House from North Carolina. There was nothing to it, Jefferson said, but they should t
alk things over. “This evening my company may perhaps stay late: but tomorrow evening or the next I can be alone,” he told Macon.

  On the eve of each congressional session, he held engagements with friends whom he knew he would not see again until the lawmakers left Washington. “As Congress will meet this day week, we begin now to be in the bustle of preparation. I am this week getting through the dining all my friends of this place, to be ready for the Congressional campaign,” he wrote his granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge. “When that begins, between the occupations of business and of entertainment, I shall become an unpunctual correspondent.”

  One such friend was Margaret Bayard Smith, who, with her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith, grew close to Jefferson and to Dolley and James Madison in these years. The Madisons stayed briefly with Jefferson in the President’s House before setting up their own home, first on Pennsylvania Avenue four blocks toward Georgetown; they finally settled at 1333 F Street. There Dolley established a hospitable salon within their three-story brick house; her dining room and parlors were full of politics and what she called “fashionable talk” (and the occasional game of cards; she was fond of gambling).

  In May 1801, with the gathering of the cabinet, Mrs. Smith said the capital was “as gay as in the winter; the arrival of all the secretaries seems to give new animation to business, and the settlements of their families affords employment to some of our tradesmen.” At a small dinner in the President’s House with the Madisons, Mrs. Smith sat next to Jefferson and was entranced anew by his “easy, candid and gentle manners.” Watching the president and James Madison in the drawing room later, Mrs. Smith thought the two “were so easy and familiar that they produced no restraint.”

  The Gallatins were also familiar faces in the president’s circle. They decided to live on M Street near Thirty-second, and Mrs. Gallatin was a congenial, if less than beautiful, woman. “Her person is far less attractive than either her mind or her heart, and yet I do not wish her to have any other than that which she has got,” Albert Gallatin had candidly written of his wife at the time of their marriage. “Her understanding is good; she is as well informed as most young ladies; she is perfectly simple and unaffected; she loves me and she is a pretty good democrat.”