Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Jefferson had now done all he could to control the largely uncontrollable nature of the mission that was to take Lewis, Clark, and their party of forty or so up the Missouri River, into the winter of present-day North Dakota, then along the Columbia River to the Pacific. Jefferson had written detailed instructions, offered counsel, and worried over details. At last it was in the hands of the explorers, and Jefferson waited, eagerly, for word from the fields he had long traveled in his mind.

  The Fourth of July fell on Monday. The President’s House was filled with festive callers. Samuel Harrison Smith thought there were more visitors than usual. The party was abuzz with the Louisiana news and “enlivened too by the presence of between 40 and 50 ladies clothed in their best attire, cakes, punch, wine, etc. in profusion,” Smith wrote.

  In the flush of success, Jefferson was sanguine about everything—even the fate of the Union. “The future inhabitants of the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons,” Jefferson wrote John Breckinridge. “We leave them in distinct but bordering establishments. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove it otherwise; and if they see their interest in separation, why should we take side with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants? It is the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.”

  To Joseph Priestley he boasted of his diplomatic subtlety. “I very early saw that Louisiana was indeed a speck in our horizon which was to burst in a tornado; and the public are unapprised how near this catastrophe was. Nothing but a frank and friendly development of causes and effects on our part, and good sense enough in Bonaparte to see that the train was unavoidable, and would change the face of the world, saved us from that storm.” He closed the letter with a scholarly query: “Have you seen the new work of Malthus on population? It is one of the ablest I have ever seen.”

  How like Jefferson—amid the greatest of possible events affecting every aspect of American life and beyond, he was reading Malthus.

  The treaty had to be ratified by Sunday, October 30, 1803. Jefferson consulted with the cabinet and called for Congress to meet on Monday, October 17, 1803, to consider what he called “great and weighty matters.”

  Jefferson’s initial view was that purchasing Louisiana and then governing it required a constitutional amendment. To John Breckinridge, he wrote: “This treaty must of course be laid before both houses because both have important functions to exercise respecting it. They I presume will see their duty to their country in ratifying and paying for it so as to secure a good which would otherwise probably be never again in their person. But I suppose they must then appeal to the nation for an additional article to the Constitution, approving and confirming an act which the nation had not previously authorized.”

  What he had done thus far by allowing his representatives to negotiate and sign the treaty with France was, in his current view, beyond the scope of his powers. “The Executive in seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advanced the good of their country, have done an act beyond the Constitution. The legislature in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties, and risking themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and throw themselves on their country for doing for them unauthorized what we know they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.” He used a lawyerly analogy to underscore his point. “It is the case of a guardian investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; and saying to him when of age, I did this for your good; I pretend to no right to bind you. You may disavow me, and I must get out of the scrape as I can. I thought it my duty to risk myself for you.”

  Jefferson’s opinion in the second week of August 1803, then, was that the laborious machinery of amendment was crucial to ratify the purchase. Six days after writing Breckinridge, though, Jefferson hurriedly wrote him again, essentially calling back the point. “I wrote you on the 12th. inst. on the subject of Louisiana, and the constitutional provision which might be necessary for it,” he wrote on Thursday, August 18. “A letter received yesterday shows that nothing must be said on that subject which may give a pretext for retracting but that we should do sub silentio what shall be found necessary. Be so good therefore as to consider that part of my letter as confidential. It strengthens the reasons for desiring the presence of every friend to the treaty on the first day of the session.”

  The unwelcome letter received on Wednesday, August 17, had come from Paris. Reporting from the French capital, Livingston and Monroe warned that France was growing uncomfortable with the deal. Fearing trouble, Jefferson moved decisively, pressing for a fast congressional vote in October and changing his mind about the need for a constitutional amendment. “You will find that the French government, dissatisfied perhaps with their late bargain with us, will be glad of a pretext to declare it void,” Jefferson wrote Gallatin on Tuesday, August 23, 1803. “It will be necessary therefore that we execute it with punctuality and without delay.”

  Speed was essential. “Whatever Congress shall think it necessary to do should be done with as little debate as possible; and particularly so far as respects the constitutional difficulty,” Jefferson wrote Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia from Monticello on Wednesday, September 7.

  Attorney General Levi Lincoln worried that there could be opposition to an acquisition, which was all the more reason for Jefferson to move quickly and unilaterally. “Is there not danger that the Eastern States, including even Rhode Island and Vermont, if not New York, and other States further South, would object to the ratification of a treaty directly introducing a state of things, involving the idea of adding to the weight of the southern States in one branch of the Govt. of which there is already too great a jealousy and dread … ? No plea of necessity, of commercial utility, or national security, will have weight with a violent party, or be any security against their hostile efforts and opposition clamor.”

  Thomas Paine suggested an extraordinary scenario to Jefferson on Friday, September 23, 1803. What if Napoleon successfully defeated and subjugated England? “The English Government is but in a tottering condition, and if Bonaparte succeeds the Government will break up,” Paine wrote Jefferson. “In that case it is not improbable we may obtain Canada, and I think that Bermuda ought to belong to the United States.”

  Paine mused about Bonaparte’s war plans for England, too. The First Consul, Paine said, had only to choose “a dark night and a calm” to land along the North Sea coast. Paine’s implied point: With such momentous things afoot, it was foolish to worry over constitutional niceties.

  Alexander Hamilton could not have put it better.

  The philosophical Jefferson had believed an amendment necessary. The political Jefferson, however, was not going to allow theory to get in the way of reality. “I confess … I think it important in the present case to set an example against broad construction by appealing for new power to the people,” he wrote Wilson Cary Nicholas. “If however our friends shall think differently, certainly I shall acquiesce with satisfaction, confiding that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill effects.”

  So he left himself room to maneuver. It was the same kind of political craft he had practiced in the debate over the Bank of the United States, when he made the case against Hamilton’s broad construction only to (wisely) leave open the possibility that Washington could sign the bill.

  Jefferson’s decision to acquire Louisiana without seeking a constitutional amendment expanded the powers of the executive in ways that would likely have driven Jefferson to distraction had another man been president. Much of his political life, though, had been devoted to the study and the wise exercise of power. He did what had to be done to preserve the possibility of republicanism and progress. Things were neat only in theory. And despite his love of ideas and i
mage of himself, Thomas Jefferson was as much a man of action as he was of theory.

  Indian tribes knew this well. Though he would not live to see the Trail of Tears of the 1830s, Jefferson was among the architects of Indian removal. He eagerly acquired lands from the tribes throughout the American interior—up to two hundred thousand square miles—and, as in the case of the Louisiana Purchase, did all he could to encourage white settlement ever farther west and south. In 1803, writing to William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, Jefferson said that he believed the Indians “will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States or remove beyond the Mississippi.” He threatened to retaliate against any attacking tribes by “seizing … the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace.”

  Jefferson was triumphant on every front. “Our business is to march straight forward to the object which has occupied us for eight and twenty years, without either turning to the right or left,” Jefferson wrote former New York governor George Clinton on New Year’s Eve 1803. “In the hour of death we shall have the consolation to see established in the land of our fathers the most wonderful work of wisdom and disinterested patriotism that has ever yet appeared on the globe.”

  To his opponents, Jefferson’s success seemed insurmountable and unendurable. “The [Republicans] have, as I expected, done more to strengthen the executive than Federalists dared think of even in Washington’s day,” Gouverneur Morris wrote to Roger Griswold in November 1803.

  In January 1804, the Federalist senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts suggested secession and the formation of a northern confederacy. “If, I say, Federalism is crumbling away in New England, there is no time to be lost, lest it should be overwhelmed and become unable to attempt its own relief,” he said. New York would be essential if the project—what Griswold euphemistically called “a reunion of the Northern states”—were to succeed. “The people of the East cannot reconcile their habits, views, and interests with those of the South and West,” said Pickering. “The latter are beginning to rule with a rod of iron.” The opposition was more than a little desperate. “Many persons are at this moment prepared to declare Jefferson President for life,” Griswold wrote on Tuesday, January 10, 1804.

  Which was what the Federalists feared most.

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE PEOPLE WERE NEVER MORE HAPPY

  If we can keep the vessel of state as steady in her course for another four years, my earthly purposes will be accomplished.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  I think you ought to get a damn kicking, you red-headed son of a bitch. You are a pretty fellow to be President of the United States of America, you dirty scoundrel.

  —ANONYMOUS

  ON MOST AFTERNOONS when he was in Washington, Jefferson received his dinner guests at the President’s House around three thirty or four o’clock. He entertained constantly, handsomely, and with a purpose. His instinct to open his house and table was natural, something he had learned growing up amid the rites of Virginia hospitality.

  Jefferson believed, too, that sociability was essential to republicanism. Men who liked and respected and enjoyed one another were more likely to cultivate the virtuous habits that would enable the country’s citizens to engage in “the pursuit of happiness.” An affectionate man living in harmony with his neighbors was more likely to understand the mutual sacrifice of opinion of which Jefferson had spoken, and to make those sacrifices.

  There was, of course, a more immediate point to frequent gatherings of lawmakers, diplomats, and cabinet officers at the president’s table. It tends to be more difficult to oppose—or at least to vilify—someone with whom you have broken bread and drunk wine. Caricatures crack as courses are served; imagined demonic plots fade with dessert.

  Jefferson understood this, but he was ruthless about the use of his limited time in power. To create an ethos of supra-partisan civility would have required bringing politicians of opposing views together under his aegis. Jefferson disliked confrontation so much, however, that he forewent inviting Republicans and Federalists to dine together with him. He had only four or eight years to impress himself on the country and was unwilling to waste any of those hours presiding over arguments, even polite ones, between differing factions at his table. The possibilities of conflict in a setting designed to promote comity were too great.

  Jefferson chose, then, to use dinner at the President’s House partly as a means of weaving attachments to him. It was his stage and his production. He ended the more formal arrangements common to Presidents Washington and Adams, forbidding seating by precedence—he preferred “pell-mell,” or the more democratic practice of having guests sit where they chose—and the drinking of toasts to one’s health, a tedious custom he replaced with more free-flowing, eclectic conversation. Like his aristocratic habit of dressing as though he were at Monticello rather than the capital—with his old slippers, which made such an impression on so many—the gentle creation of disorder at dinner magnified his own strengths as a conversationalist.

  The architect Benjamin H. Latrobe reveled in his first dinner at the President’s House. The food, Latrobe wrote his wife, “was excellent, cooked rather in the French style (larded venison), the dessert was profuse and extremely elegant, and the knickknacks, after withdrawing the cloths, profuse and numberless. Wine in great variety, from sherry to champagne, and a few decanters of rare Spanish wine. ” At first Jefferson hung back, playing the host, then joined the stream of talk brilliantly.

  Latrobe loved it all. “It is a long time since I have been present at so elegant a mental treat,” he said. “Literature, wit, and a little business, with a great deal of miscellaneous remarks on agriculture and building, filled every minute. There is a degree of ease in Mr. Jefferson’s company that everyone seems to feel and to enjoy.”

  Jefferson had a conservationist’s turn of mind and once mused on the subject of the rapidly depleting number of trees along the sides of Capitol Hill and on the banks of the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers. “Such as grew on the public grounds ought to have been preserved, but in a government such as ours, where the people are sovereign, this could not be done,” Margaret Bayard Smith recalled. “The people, the poorer inhabitants, cut down these noble and beautiful trees for fuel”; others felled trees for profit.

  “How I wish that I possessed the power of a despot,” Jefferson said one day, surprising his guests. “Yes,” he went on, “I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifices to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor.”

  A guest asked, “And have you not authority to save those on the public grounds?”

  “No,” said Jefferson, “only an armed guard could save them. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder, [and] it pains me to an unspeakable degree.”

  Jefferson’s social civility softened the more strident hours of partisanship. The Federalist senator William Plumer of New Hampshire had begun his Washington career with a predictably harsh view of Jefferson. Early in the decade of the 1800s, Plumer dismissed the president as the leader of a “feeble, nerveless administration,” later adding: “I did think he had great talents, wisdom and a portion of those virtues that render a man amiable and useful; but craft and cunning are as distant from wisdom as meanness is from economy, or his views from true greatness.”

  As the years passed, Plumer’s opinion of Jefferson, formed at close quarters as a guest in the President’s House, evolved from hostility to one of partial respect. “The more critically and impartially I examine the character and conduct of Mr. Jefferson the more favorably I think of his integrity,” Plumer wrote in 1806. The senator still disagreed strongly with the president on policy, but Jefferson’s grace and hospitality did its work. “I
have a curiosity, which is gratified, by seeing and conversing” with Jefferson, Plumer wrote. “I gain a more thorough knowledge of his character, and of his views, and those of his party—for he is naturally communicative.”

  At the President’s House, Jefferson gave Plumer some pecans to cultivate, and the two men engaged in the most chivalrous of exchanges. “After twenty years they will bear,” Jefferson said.

  “I shall, then, despair of eating of them,” Plumer said.

  “Your children will eat with pleasure the fruit of your industry,” said Jefferson.

  “I will teach them to bear in remembrance to whose politeness they are indebted for the nuts that produced these trees of fruit,” replied Plumer.

  Jefferson left no guest behind. Struggling to make small talk with the president, the wife of the mayor of Georgetown could remember only that she had heard of Carters Mountain—the redoubt where Jefferson was alleged to have run away from the British in 1781. Unaware of the trauma and embarrassment evoked by even the mention of the place, she asked Jefferson if he lived near Carters Mountain.

  “Very close,” he said, “it is the adjoining mountain to Monticello.”

  “I suppose it’s a very convenient, pleasant place,” the wife said, plunging on unknowingly as her husband sat awkwardly, powerless to stop her.

  Jefferson maintained his poise, replying simply, “Why, yes, I certainly found it so, in the war time.” There the subject was dropped.

  At dinner late on another afternoon, the table talk was dominated by a few men whom Mrs. Smith, who was also there, described as “distinguished persons.” The conversation was “earnest and animated,” but one guest, who had lived in Europe for a time, sat “silent and unnoticed,” apparently feeling overwhelmed by the high-powered company. He began thinking himself “a stranger in his own country [who] was totally unknown to the present company.”