Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  William Plumer left the Senate chamber that day to go to the House to hear him. “He considered Great Britain as now contending for her existence—as fighting the battles of the civilized world against Bonaparte who is usurping the dominion of the world,” Plumer wrote of Randolph’s speech. Randolph singled out Jefferson and Madison for particular assault. “It was the most bitter, severe and eloquent philippic I ever heard,” wrote Plumer. Randolph struck again the next day and was, Plumer said, “uncommonly severe on the President.… Mr. Randolph has passed the Rubicon, neither the President or Secretary of State can after this be on terms with him. He has set them and their measures at defiance.”

  Cutting and sarcastic, Randolph seemed to spare no one. A colleague who rose to speak was waved away. “Sit down, Sir, I say sit down, Sir, learn to keep your proper level,” Randolph said. (“Indeed he has treated the House as so many inferior beings,” said Navy Secretary Robert Smith, “and all submit.”) On the subject of the president himself, Randolph “astonished all his hearers by the boldness of his animosity on executive conduct,” Smith wrote.

  Eventually known as either the “Quids” (after “tertium quid,” which in Latin means “a third something”) or the “Old Republicans,” Randolph’s faction was a manifestation of purer, simpler Republican principles. Randolph’s followers held that Jefferson had moved too far in a Federalist direction and that they, not the president or his men, were the true believers.

  The break was in some ways a sign that Jefferson had transcended the simpler rhetorical categories of the post-1798 period. It was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is seeking power. The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing. Jefferson had achieved something that his Federalist foes would not have thought possible: He was, to some, no longer Republican enough. John Randolph had attacked Jefferson in a speech one observer thought “replete with invective” that was “the most severe that the English language can present.” Jefferson was, in other words, a man who had displeased the extremes of his day—a sign that he had been guided not by dogma but by principled pragmatism.

  As Randolph saw it, Jefferson’s largely moderate politics was a path to disaster. “Never, in my opinion, had the cause of free government more to fear than now,” Randolph wrote in 1806. Republicans loyal to the president had become “secret enemies, or lukewarm advocates” of the cause of republicanism, “ ‘damning with faint praise’ the principles they had sworn to support.” Melodramatically, Randolph asked: “Is the present executive perfect? Amidst the various agents of that department has there been, or can there be, no wrong committed?”

  To Randolph the answer was self-evident. Jefferson had proved too much of a compromiser. Moderation, Randolph said, was “the mask which ambition has worn” through the ages. By the last year of the president’s term, Randolph would tell James Monroe, “The old republican party is already ruined, past redemption.”

  Jefferson affected an air of calm about the events of the current session, but the telltale headache was back, suggesting the Republican split and the complications of the European situation—which included the possibility of an American war—weighed heavily.

  In late April 1806 in New York, the HMS Leander was screening American ships in search of British seamen. Firing a warning shot, the Leander mistakenly killed an American sailor. Two other British ships—the Driver and the Cambrian—were nearby. Ordering the three ships out of U.S. waters, Jefferson called for the arrest of the Leander captain for murder.

  His headache was debilitating. “My present malady keeps me through the whole day incapable of business or conversation,” Jefferson wrote the Pennsylvania senator George Logan; Jefferson could stand face-to-face meetings only in the evenings, when the pain seems to have ebbed. He was suffering pain in his leg, too (he called it “a lameness in the knee”). And he was worried about money. “I have gotten so into arrears at Washington, as to render it necessary for me not only to avoid new engagements, but to suspend every expense which is not indispensable: otherwise I shall leave that place with burdens contracted there, which if they should fall on my private fortune, will doom me to a comfortless old age,” Jefferson wrote John Wayles Eppes in May 1806.

  He lost his oldest mentor in early summer. George Wythe had risen as usual on Sunday, May 25, 1806, and eaten breakfast at home. By nine o’clock that morning, he was sick to his stomach; the rest of his household was stricken, too. One member, a mixed-race teenager named Michael Brown, died a few days later. William Duval, a magistrate, was suspicious and ordered an autopsy. Four physicians attended, and Duval told Jefferson “from the inflammation on the stomach and bowels they said that it was the kind of inflammation produced by poison.” The culprit was presumably George Sweeney, a Wythe grandnephew whose motive, if he did it, was likely money, for Sweeney was not Wythe’s primary (or even secondary) heir.

  “I am murdered,” Wythe said on May 25, 1806, but Duval reported that Wythe “mentioned no name.” As he faded, he said, “Let me die righteous.”

  It was a sensational story, one that raised interesting questions about George Wythe’s private life. Married twice and now widowed, Wythe lived in Williamsburg with young Michael Brown and with his housekeeper Lydia Broadnax, a free woman of color. In Wythe’s will, Broadnax was to inherit the Wythe house, among other property, and Wythe had included provisions asking Jefferson to oversee the education of Michael Brown in the event of Wythe’s death.

  The implications of these arrangements—that Brown was the son of Broadnax and Wythe—are clear but unproven. “Whether Brown, who was described as ‘yellow’ skinned, was his biological son or not, Wythe treated him as if he were taking pains with his education,” wrote the historian Annette Gordon-Reed. “Certainly asking his own favorite and most famous pupil, the current president of the United States, to become Michael’s guardian shows the depth of his affection for the boy.”

  Wythe left Jefferson, whom he had loved, his books, silver cups, and a gold-headed cane. The crime disturbed and distressed the president, who told Duval that he would have happily taken on the education of Michael Brown. The task, he said, would have “gratified me unceasingly with the constant recollection and execution of the wishes of my friend.” Did Jefferson believe Michael Brown to be the son of his old teacher? If so, what emotions would news of the alleged murder of his mentor by a disgruntled member of Wythe’s white family have stirred up in Jefferson, who knew much about the living of such a life? We do not know, but it is interesting that Jefferson sought to understand the story as a severe aberration, not as something that could happen in the ordinary course of life. “Such an instance of depravity has been hitherto known to us only in the fables of the poets,” Jefferson wrote Duval in June 1806. The more imaginative distance Jefferson could put between himself and Wythe’s fate, the better.

  In the summer there was something new—a debilitating drought in Virginia—and in the autumn something by now familiar: reports that Aaron Burr was making trouble.

  Since the duel with Hamilton, Burr had set out on a Wanderjahr. He traveled west, and rumors had him variously plotting to convince some states to secede and form a western empire or planning an independent strike into Mexico.

  The most fevered speculation carried matters even further by suggesting that Burr was contemplating raising troops to march on Washington and take over the United States. “Burr is unquestionably very actively engaged in the Westward in preparations to sever that from this part of the Union,” Jefferson wrote in November 1806. The former vice president was allegedly recruiting men, stocking arms, and building boats.

  Jefferson heard nothing to alleviate his concerns. “This is indeed a deep, dark and widespread conspiracy,” the American general James Wilkinson wrote Jefferson in November, “embracing the young and t
he old, the democrat and the Federalist, the native and the foreigner, the patriot of 76 and the exotic of yesterday, the opulent and the needy, the Ins and the Outs, and I fear it will receive strong support in New Orleans.”

  Wilkinson himself was trouble. An officer long in the pay of the Spanish, he was a scoundrel of the first order and had been in conversations with Burr about possible plots. At some point Wilkinson decided it was in his interest to inform Jefferson of Burr’s alleged treachery, thus saving himself for another day.

  By November 27, 1806, Jefferson was worried enough to issue a proclamation warning that “sundry persons,” including “citizens of the United States,” were “conspiring and confederating together” to take over Spanish holdings.

  What was Burr doing? It is not certain even now, more than two centuries later. At first he seemed interested in a military venture to seize control of Texas and other parts of Spanish America. Such an operation was known as a filibuster—an independent strike. Burr and his sundry compatriots seemed to be preparing for an expedition of some kind. The goal was unclear, except that Jefferson believed it involved Burr assuming power and land in the West, possibly as far south as Mexico, and perhaps forming an empire of his own.

  On Saturday, December 27, 1806, New Hampshire senator William Plumer dined with Jefferson, who, over coffee, said he believed all would be well. Jefferson, Plumer said, “had no doubt the conspiracy would be crushed, extensive as it was, with little trouble and expense to the United States.” Incriminating papers soon emerged, and Jefferson forwarded them to Congress in January 1807.

  In the meantime, Jefferson was seeking sufficient power to deal with any domestic crisis. Eight days before his chat with Plumer, Jefferson had drafted a bill “authorizing the employment of the land or naval forces of the U.S. in cases of insurrection.” He sent the proposed legislation to Virginia congressman John Dawson with this revealing note: “Th:Jefferson presents his compliments to Mr. Dawson, and his request that he will be so good as to copy the within and burn this original, as he is very unwilling to meddle personally with the details of the proceedings of the legislature.”

  This was the pure political Jefferson, fighting to defend the nation by asking for a grant of power while disguising his own role in the acquisition of that authority. His adversaries might see such maneuvers as hypocritical or underhanded, but in Jefferson’s mind he was doing the right thing the right way. To seize power grandly would threaten the democratic ethos of the country—an ethos he thought essential. Better to work through allies in Congress, he thought, than to risk appearing monarchical—even if the control he sought was the kind a Federalist president might want, too. It was the method of a practical man.

  Jefferson pursued Burr unapologetically. He did so less out of personal ambition or jealousy—since the killing of Hamilton, Burr could pose no threat within the traditional political system—than out of his concern for the security and sanctity of the nation. As in the case of Louisiana, the cause of preserving the Union was more important than what Jefferson called the “strict line of the law.” In his report on Burr to Congress on Thursday, January 22, 1807, Jefferson took the extraordinary step of declaring that his former vice president’s “guilt is placed beyond question”—a decision not unlike the ones he had made long ago in the Josiah Philips case and in the arrest of the “Hair Buyer General.” If the liberties of the suspects, including Burr, were violated, then so be it.

  By late March 1807, Burr was under arrest. Jefferson paid careful attention to the proceedings. “No man’s history proves better the value of honesty,” Jefferson wrote. “With that, what might he not have been!” Unfortunately his headache, he said, “leaves me but an hour and a half each morning capable of any business at all.”

  Burr was brought to Richmond for trial, where John Marshall presided over a courtroom set up in the Eagle Tavern. Jefferson took an obsessive interest in the case, gathering information and advising the prosecution counsel. He believed serious issues were at stake and characteristically threw himself into the matter in detail—but at a distance.

  Though Burr was indicted for treason, the weaknesses of the case against him grew evident as the trial progressed. Coconspirator-turned-prosecution-witness James Wilkinson had charged that Burr intended to capture New Orleans—an allegation that had led Jefferson to declare martial law there to defend against any treachery—and to lead an attack on Spanish holdings. (A problematic allegation, since filibusters were not illegal.)

  The messenger from Richmond rode up Jefferson’s mountain in darkness. The vacationing president was still awake, and he perused the communication—and its enclosure—with care. It was no ordinary delivery: U.S. attorney George Hay, the prosecutor in the Burr case, was subpoenaing the president to testify at the trial in person. After consulting with Madison, a houseguest at Monticello, Jefferson refused to submit himself and his office to the control of others. Writing Hay the next day, he said: “As I do not believe that the district courts have a power of commanding the Executive government to abandon superior duties and attend on them, at whatever distance, I am unwilling by any notice of the subpoena to set a precedent which might sanction a proceeding so preposterous.”

  Jefferson’s decision to reserve unto himself the authority to decide whether to obey a summons to testify set a significant precedent in executive power: The president, Jefferson was saying, had higher obligations to the common good than to answer the importunings of the legal system. He would, instead, send Hay relevant documents—a wise compromise that prevented a president from holding himself above the law but preserved his ability to do his job without being forced to travel at the command of distant courts. He enclosed the subpoena to Hay and dispatched it whence it had come.

  Marshall’s decisions and demeanor as the trial judge exacerbated matters for Jefferson, who tended to ascribe any setback for the prosecution to the chief justice’s politics. The proceedings in Virginia joined the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, the reaction to Marbury, and the impeachment of Samuel Chase as a front in Jefferson’s long struggle against a judicial system that he disliked and distrusted more and more as the years passed.

  Burr’s eventual acquittal enraged the president. In truth, the evidence on the treason charge against the defendant was weak. Jefferson nevertheless hoped that the country would join him in seeing the hand of Marshall as the decisive force in thwarting the prosecution. “The nation will judge both the offender, and judges for themselves,” Jefferson wrote William Branch Giles. “If a member of the Executive or Legislature does wrong, the day is never far distant when the people will remove him.” Perhaps, Jefferson thought, outrage over the Burr verdict could be channeled into a constitutional amendment making judges more accountable to the public.

  He had been miserable for a week. “I am now in the 7th day of a periodical head-ache, and I write this in the morning before the fit has come on,” he wrote Patsy in March 1807. “The fits are by no means as severe as I have felt in former times, but they hold me very long, from 9 or 10 in the morning till dark. Neither Calomel nor bark has as yet made the least impression on them.”

  There were also the usual complaints and stresses. “I am tired of an office where I can do no more good than many others who would be glad to be employed in it,” he wrote his old Revolutionary colleague John Dickinson in early 1807. “To myself personally it brings nothing but unceasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.”

  In this period a proposed treaty with Britain arrived in Washington. It did little for American interests. “The British commissioners appear to have screwed every article as far as it would bear, to have taken everything, and yielded nothing,” Jefferson wrote of the treaty in March 1807. Diplomacy, in short, had not resolved conflict with Britain, particularly in terms of stopping the humiliating impressment of American seamen. Jefferson refused to send it to the Senate.

  In February 1807, i
n a passing conversation with his sons-in-law, Jefferson invited John Wayles Eppes to join him on some occasion (the details are unknown) but did not include Randolph. The slight, however unintentional, at once enraged and depressed Randolph, who wrote Jefferson an emotional letter complaining that the president favored Eppes, whom Randolph envied and saw as an all-too-successful rival for the affections and attentions of their father-in-law.

  Jefferson was taken aback by the complaints. He had, he said, detected some tension between the two congressmen who had married daughters of his, but—typically for Jefferson—he had chosen not to inquire about the unease; avoiding overt conflict was a Jeffersonian specialty. “What acts of mine can have induced you to suppose that I felt or manifested a preference for [Eppes], I cannot conceive,” Jefferson soothingly wrote Randolph.

  In his apparent anger and anguish, Randolph had moved out of the President’s House. “Your return to the house would indeed be a consolation to me,” wrote Jefferson, who could not take his mind off the question. “Really loving you as I would a son (for I protest I know no difference) I took it too much for granted you were as sensible of it as myself,” he said in a second note on February 19, 1807.

  Randolph, who had decided not to stand for reelection to Congress, fell ill in his new lodgings, and Jefferson dispatched a retainer to keep watch over his condition.

  Jefferson’s paternal feelings toward Randolph were genuine. “I certainly would not urge anything that would be strongly repugnant to your feelings, but I wish, my dear Sir, you could consent to return to your former room here,” Jefferson wrote Randolph on February 28.

  Randolph did come back, but he was very sick and very depressed. He mused about suicide. Jefferson kept track of the number of paces the recuperating Randolph was able to walk in the circular room on the second floor of the President’s House (500 or 600 steps the first day he tried; 1,200 the next) and wrote Patsy frequent optimistic reports. Domestic harmony mattered as much to him as political harmony did.