Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  What lived and ruled was quintessentially Jeffersonian. The vibrant, breathing, prevailing politics of the hour reflected the complicated character of the triumphant president. The America of Jefferson was neither wholly Federal nor wholly Republican. It was, rather, a marbled blend of the two, confected by a practical man of affairs. The significance of the case of Louisiana in shaping the destinies of the country and in illuminating Jefferson’s political leadership cannot be overstated. He believed, for instance, in a limited government, except when he thought the nation was best served by a more expansive one. It was a moment to savor success.

  The capital was quiet. “We have but few strangers in town,” Jefferson wrote Patsy on Monday, January 7, 1805.

  His second inaugural at hand, Jefferson’s thoughts drifted back over the trials he and his compatriots had faced in the past forty years. “We entered young into the first revolution and saw it terminate happily,” Jefferson wrote the New Hampshire statesman John Langdon. “We had to engage when old in a second more perilous, because our people were divided. But we have weathered this too and seen all come round and to rights.”

  Yet even in victory Jefferson felt the weight of expectation. He knew political serenity never lasted. In December 1804, the Federalist senator William Plumer of New Hampshire had been invited to dine with Jefferson. The president was dressed well (“A new suit of black—silk hose—shoes—clean linen, and his hair highly powdered”) and the company ate well (“His dinner was elegant and rich”). To Plumer, though, Jefferson did not seem a man at the height of his political fortunes. “He was today reserved—appeared rather low spirited—conversed little,” Plumer wrote in his diary.

  The president had much on his mind. It was the age of Napoleon and Nelson, of contending powers who seemed never truly at peace, and America remained what it had been for so long: a target for the designs of enemies determined to dominate all or part of it. His final four years in public office were like the previous decades: Jefferson still struggled to secure the nation.

  It began—but hardly ended—with Britain, which still harbored doubts about the wherewithal of the United States. “We drove them into being a nation when they were no more fit for it than the convicts of Botany Bay,” the British diplomat Augustus Foster wrote his mother in 1805.

  On Saturday, March 2, 1805, Vice President Burr took his leave of the capital with a paean to the Senate, which he called “a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of popular frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of a demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.”

  William Plumer thought Burr was finished in political life—then thought again. “He can never, I think, rise again,” Plumer wrote in his diary. “But surely he is a very extraordinary man, and is an exception to all rules.” Plumer could not yet know how close to the mark he was.

  All is now business, hurry, interruption,” Jefferson said on the eve of his second inauguration.

  His political dominance over the nation was a given. In a private letter, Augustus Foster referred to him sarcastically as “the successor of Montezuma”—an allusion to the sixteenth-century Aztec god-king—but the irony was a tribute to Jefferson’s power.

  Jefferson’s second inauguration fell on a Monday. He dressed in black and left the grounds of the President’s House on horseback. In the Senate chamber, again speaking too softly to be widely heard, Jefferson gave his second inaugural address. “During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare,” he said. “These abuses of an institution, so important to freedom and science, are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.” The marketplace, however, should decide. Censorship should be in the hands of the people.

  Afterward Jefferson opened the President’s House to callers. It, too, was run according to “pell-mell,” and Foster, who made his way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the celebration, reported that “all those who chose attended and even towards the close blacks and dirty boys, who drunk his wine and lolled upon his couches before us all.” Some music capped the day, Foster noted—“a few pipes and drums”—and the festivities, such as they were, came to a close.

  Jefferson was now the second two-term president of the United States. As he returned to greet the public—even the “blacks and dirty boys” of Foster’s formulation—he had every intention of following Washington’s example and retiring in four years’ time. Only one contingency could tempt him to a third election—a contingency he mentioned to John Taylor of Caroline in early 1805. “My opinion originally was that the President of the U.S. should have been elected for 7 years, and forever ineligible afterwards.” Now he was not so sure:

  I have since become sensible that 7 years is too long to be unremovable, and that there should be a peaceable way of withdrawing a man in midway who is doing wrong. The service for 8 years with a power to remove at the end of the first four, comes nearly to my principle as corrected by experience. And it is in adherence to that that I determine to withdraw at the end of my second term. The danger is that the indulgence and attachments of the people will keep a man in the chair after he becomes a dotard, that reelection through life shall become habitual, and election for life follow that. Genl. Washington set the example of voluntary retirement after 8 years. I shall follow it and a few more precedents will oppose the obstacle of habit to anyone after a while who shall endeavor to extend his term. Perhaps it may beget a disposition to establish it by an amendment of the Constitution.… There is however but one circumstance which could engage my acquiescence in another election, to wit, such a division about a successor as might bring in a monarchist. But this circumstance is impossible.

  Visions of a crown worried him still.

  In the spring of 1805, the first fruits of the Lewis and Clark expedition started coming east. “It being the wish of Captain Lewis, I take the liberty to send you, for your own perusal, the notes which I have taken in the form of a journal in their original state,” William Clark wrote Jefferson in April. Briefing Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis wrote: “I can foresee no material or probable obstruction to our progress, and entertain therefore the most sanguine hopes of complete success.”

  From Fort Mandan, the expedition’s winter encampment on the Missouri River in North Dakota, the two leaders sent Jefferson a collection of artifacts. There was a box with the skins and skeletons of antelope and weasels and wolves. There were elk horns. There were scores of plants, and four living magpies. For Jefferson, it was a joyous delivery.

  Accounts of Lewis and Clark fascinated the public. “The voyage of discovery of Capt. Lewis has engaged the attention of the curious and attracted the notice of many who were prejudiced against that country,” wrote William Eustis from Massachusetts in August 1805. “This nation was never more respected abroad. The people were never more happy at home.”

  In late 1805, on a tree overlooking the Pacific, after a journey of more than three thousand miles, Clark staked the claim Jefferson had long dreamt of:

  Capt. William Clark

  December 3rd, 1805.

  By Land.

  U States in 1804 & 1805

  A mission conceived on the Potomac had culminated on the Pacific. It was a staggering achievement, a Jeffersonian projection of power to find a path through the wilderness—and to master a continent.

  Jefferson delighted in receiving things from the West and the East. From London he ordered an eight-volume edition of Baxter’s History of England; copies of essays on brewing, geometry, and astronomy; and maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America
. He wanted a telescope, too, and a pair of British globes “with the new discoveries to 1800.”

  It all fit. In his years in office he turned the presidency—and the President’s House—into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, a vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.

  Jefferson set aside a room in the mansion for fossils. There were pieces of skulls, jawbones and teeth, tusks and a foreleg, “one horn of a colossal animal,” and two hundred small bones collected by William Clark. “The bones are spread in a large room where you can work at your leisure, undisturbed by any mortal, from morning to night, taking your breakfast and dinner with us,” he wrote Caspar Wistar, Jr., the Philadelphia physician who later published A System of Anatomy.

  The bones were the least of it. The explorer Zebulon Pike purchased two bear cubs for Jefferson from an Indian along the Rio Grande. His men nursed them with milk, and they arrived safely at the President’s House in 1808. “I would recommend if practicable that they should be confined together in a cell (without chains) and regularly supplied with food and water, when I am nearly convinced that they will harmonize and become much more docile than if chained and confined asunder,” Pike told the president.

  Jefferson took Pike’s advice. “I put them together while here in a place 10.f. square,” Jefferson wrote the naturalist and painter Charles Willson Peale. “For the first day they worried one another very much with play, but after that they played at times, but were extremely happy together.” Unsurprisingly, it proved impracticable to keep bears at the President’s House, and Jefferson sent them to Peale’s zoo in Philadelphia.

  Considering a request from a man seeking counsel on determining whether a stone had been a meteor, Jefferson said: “We certainly are not to deny whatever we cannot account for.” He was not always as skeptical as he ought to have been. He could be hopelessly wrong about scientific matters. Alluding to the maneuvering between Madison and Monroe for the presidential succession, Timothy Pickering said that while the Republicans fought for 1808, “the actual President is exploring the wilds of Louisiana—its salt plains—its rock or mineral salt—its immense prairies—in which he has discovered the earthly paradise—its numerous tribes and remnants of tribes of Indians and how many languages they speak—the hot springs and the warm mud-puddles in their vicinity—and the wonderful phenomena in one of a small or ‘very minute shell fish’ in shape resembling a mussel, but having four legs; and in another ‘a vermes about half an inch long, moving with a serpentine or vermicular motion’!”

  Jefferson could be prideful about his passions. “A jealous sense of praise and censure [are] among the most striking features of Mr. Jefferson’s character, and his gratitude for the former [is] in exact proportion to his implacable resentment against the latter,” wrote the British diplomat Edward Thornton. Jefferson, Thornton said, “is well-placed to be considered as an able statesman; but he is still more proud of being thought to combine a capacity for public affairs with the abstraction necessary for scientific pursuit.”

  The British even attributed some of Jefferson’s longstanding hostility toward London to the French cultivation of his love of science and letters. “I really believe that the little account made in England of his literary talents at an early period added considerably to the bitterness which other causes had excited in his mind against her,” Thornton wrote. “The French, under the monarchy at least, seem to have understood better this part of his character, and they gained his heart by associating him in their literary societies.”

  Still, his curiosity was perennial. “Will you come and take an Indian dinner with us tomorrow?” Jefferson wrote John Breckinridge in March 1806. “There is one of the chiefs who is really a curiosity, as possessing the art of speaking by signs, of which we have often heard, but never before seen an example. The hour, as usual, half after three.” With William Dunlap, the playwright and painter, Jefferson shared notes on the croaking of frogs in Washington, “the early approach of spring, of gardening French and English, preferring the latter and praising their great taste in laying out their ground.” With Samuel and Margaret Bayard Smith, over tea in the President’s House, Jefferson spoke of “agriculture, gardening, the differences of both in different countries and of the produce of different climates.” He sent Mrs. Smith home with winter melon seed from Malta.

  The subject did not matter; he was forever working over political and philosophical problems. “What would you think of raising a force for the defense of New Orleans in this manner?” Jefferson wrote to Madison, Gallatin, and Dearborn in February 1806. “Give a bounty of 50 acres of land, to be delivered immediately, to every able bodied man who will immediately settle on it, and hold himself in readiness to perform 2 years military service (on the usual pay) if called on within the first seven years of his residence.”

  He was always ready with suggestions for the young. “I would … advise him to read Livy, Tacitus, and Horace this summer,” he wrote a friend with a son. “The two former will give him a good knowledge of the Roman history, while they instruct him in the language. He may at the same time read Anacharsis in French, which will strengthen his knowledge of that language and possess him of the Grecian history. I would advise him to read too Baxter’s history of England as a corrective of Hume, which he has read. Indeed it is Hume republicanized.”

  Much of the nation’s political energy in 1805 was devoted to dealing with tensions with Spain over the exact boundaries of the Louisiana territory, the fate of the Floridas, which Madrid declined to hand over, and financial claims. Spain remained a presence in North America, and it was allied with France. A mission of Monroe’s to the Spanish capital failed, giving rise to a debate within the Jefferson administration about the use of force against Spanish posts and holdings.

  Should the United States risk a broader war against Spain and France by taking a strong stand? In such a case, would it make sense for America to make common cause with England, which wanted allies against Napoleon, thus turning London, a potential enemy, into a friend, at least for the time being?

  Jefferson’s ultimate answer was no. Despite exploring the possibilities of a provisional treaty with Britain that would have created an alliance in the event of an American war with Spain or France, Jefferson decided that neutrality was still the country’s best course. “Our Constitution is a peace establishment—it is not calculated for war,” Jefferson said. “War would endanger its existence.” In Jefferson’s reading of history, war was about armies and navies and debt and honors, all of which had played their part in the fall of republics and the rise of empires.

  Yet occasionally one had to fight to preserve liberty. Jefferson knew this, and he recognized that combat, though a last resort, was still a resort. The man who had been hunted by Tarleton would use every other weapon he could think of before projecting American military force. Measures short of traditional warfare—the fortification of harbors with cannons, the building of gunboats for coastal defense, and the preparation of the militia for possible deployment—were to be aggressively pursued, and Jefferson called for all of these in his annual message to Congress at the end of 1805.

  As the year drew to a close, Jefferson saw foes wherever he looked. The British and, to a lesser extent, the French were harassing American ships. Napoleon won a glorious victory at Austerlitz. Nelson had died a hero’s death in his triumph at Trafalgar. Closest to home, Burr, his old vice president, was allegedly plotting against the United States.

  Thinking of France and England, Jefferson tried to make the best of a troubling hour. “What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit at this instant,” Jefferson wrote in January 1806. “Our wish ought to be that he who has armies may not have the dominion of the sea, and that he who has dominion of the sea may be one who has no armies. In this way we may be quiet, at home at least.” Jefferson had
to face the inevitable question: How long would the quiet last—how long could it last?

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  A DEEP, DARK, AND WIDESPREAD CONSPIRACY

  The designs of our Cataline are as real as they are romantic.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, on Aaron Burr’s western maneuvers

  JEFFERSON’S WINTER WAS BRIGHTENED by Patsy’s family’s long stay in the President’s House, where his only surviving daughter from his marriage gave birth to a grandson, James Madison Randolph, named in honor of the grandfather’s secretary of state. Dolley Madison had helped Patsy prepare for the season, acquiring a “fashionable wig … a set of combs for dressing the hair, a bonnet, shawl and white lace veil” from Baltimore, as well as two lace half handkerchiefs.

  The president also took a moment to tend to his cellar in Washington, checking to make sure he had sufficient Bordeaux (he did) but sending for some additional sparkling wines. He thought his current holdings “dry without any softness.”

  On Capitol Hill, though, a cousin brought whatever serenity Jefferson was enjoying to an end. Once an ally, always an eccentric, John Randolph of Roanoke broke with Jefferson in March 1806. The year before, Randolph had stopped a Jefferson-sponsored compromise settlement of a longstanding dispute involving the Yazoo land companies (a corrupt Georgia legislature had sold lands rightly belonging to the Creeks, creating a speculative market). That episode was a prelude to Randolph’s more decisive move into opposition.

  The new occasion was debate over resolutions to limit or even ban British imports in retaliation for British depredations against American shipping. On the floor of the House, Randolph declared war on the administration.