Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  So who was he, really? In the most literal sense, the only real Jefferson is the man who lived and loved and led and was carried to his grave in a wooden coffin on a wet summer’s day in 1826. The real Jefferson was like so many of us: a bundle of contradictions, competing passions, flaws, sins, and virtues that can never be neatly smoothed out into a tidy whole. The closest thing to a constant in his life was his need for power and for control. He tended to mask these drives so effectively, however, that even the most astute of observers of his life and work have had trouble detecting them. “The leadership he sought was one of sympathy and love, not of command,” wrote Henry Adams, but that was not quite the case. For him sympathy and love among the members of his political circle were means to an end—and the end was command. If he had found that affection was insufficient to accumulate the power he wanted, he would have found other ways to govern.

  All the other Jeffersons—the emblematic ones, the metaphorical ones, the ones different generations and differing partisans interpret and invent, seeking inspiration from his example and sanction from his name—all these Jeffersons tell us more about ourselves than they do about the man himself. He can be claimed by many, and always will be.

  The greatest of men often are. They are spoken of and thought about because their ideas resonate and their battles recur. His most significant successors have defined him in terms of his vision of liberty and union. To do so, of course, requires choosing between the author of the Declaration of Independence and the author of the Kentucky Resolutions; of deciding to trumpet the voice of the man who believed secession fatal to America instead of the man who wrote about the primacy of states’ rights.

  The finest presidents working in Jefferson’s wake have made those choices and taken those decisions, creating a Jefferson that represents the best of the American spirit and the possibilities of politics in an imperfect world.

  In the early days of April 1859, from Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln wrote to a group in Boston declining its invitation to speak to a Jefferson birthday celebration. The moment gave Lincoln the chance, though, to link Jefferson to the cause of freedom in an hour of danger for the Union. “The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” Lincoln wrote. “And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success.… Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”

  The slave owner was thus being drafted to serve as an emblem of liberty not only for white men but for blacks. Such, in Lincoln’s view, was the core of the Jefferson vision, and he hailed the author of the Declaration of Independence for turning the ideal into the real amid the war and chaos of the Revolution. “All honor to Jefferson,” said Lincoln, “to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

  Seventy years later, in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt did what Lincoln had done in 1859: He sought the mantle of Jefferson. “It is not necessary for us in any way to discredit the great financial genius of Alexander Hamilton or the school of thought of the early Federalists to point out that they were frank in their belief that certain sections of the Nation and certain individuals within those sections were more fitted than others to conduct Government,” Roosevelt told the Jefferson Day dinner in St. Paul. “It was the purpose of Jefferson to teach the country that the solidarity of Federalism was only a partial one, that it represented only a minority of the people, that to build a great Nation the interests of all groups in every part must be considered, and that only in a large, national unity could real security be found.”

  A master of politics himself, FDR appreciated a kindred spirit. Jefferson, he said, “has been called a politician because he devoted years to the building of a political party. But this labor was in itself a definite and practical act aimed at the unification of all parts of the country in support of common principles. When people carelessly or snobbishly deride political parties, they overlook the fact that the party system of Government is one of the greatest methods of unification and of teaching people to think in common terms of our civilization.”

  Jefferson’s words were elemental parts of the language of America. In September 1948, at the Bonham High School football stadium in Bonham, Texas, hometown of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Harry S. Truman invoked Jefferson:

  I have a profound faith in the people of this country. I believe in their commonsense. They love freedom and that love for freedom and justice is not dead. Our people believe today, as Jefferson did, that men were not born with saddles on their backs to be ridden by the privileged few.

  We believe, as Jefferson did, that [the] “God who gave us life gave us liberty.” We protect our liberty against those who threaten it from abroad, and we do not propose to give it up to those who threaten it at home. We will not give up our democratic way to a dictatorship of the left; neither will we give it up to a despotism of special privilege.

  In the waning days of his own presidency, in December 1988, Ronald Reagan traveled to the lawn of Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia to speak to students. For Reagan, Jefferson’s pure republicanism and quotations about a limited national government had long been sacred texts.

  Saluting Jefferson’s “transforming genius,” Reagan said: “The pursuit of science, the study of the great works, the value of free inquiry, in short, the very idea of living the life of the mind—yes, these formative and abiding principles of higher education in America had their first and firmest advocate, and their greatest embodiment, in a tall, fair-headed, friendly man who watched this university take form from the mountainside where he lived, the university whose founding he called a crowning achievement to a long and well-spent life.”

  The men—and now the women—of the university were not alone in feeling the great man’s living spirit. “Presidents know about this, too,” Reagan said. Jefferson was a permanent guardian over his successors, for “directly down the lawn and across the Ellipse from the White House are those ordered, classic lines of the Jefferson Memorial and the eyes of the 19-foot statue that gaze directly into the White House, a reminder to any of us who might occupy that mansion of the quality of mind and generosity of heart that once abided there and has been so rarely seen there again.”

  Reagan—himself a visionary with a pragmatic streak, a deft communicator of political ideals, a transformative leader—intuitively understood the third president. “He knew how disorderly a place the world could be,” Reagan said. “Indeed, as a leader of a rebellion, he was himself an architect, if you will, of disorder. But he also believed that man had received from God a precious gift of enlightenment—the gift of reason, a gift that could extract from the chaos of life meaning, truth, order.” Jefferson would have been hard put to describe the matter more clearly.

  From Roosevelt to Reagan, Jefferson provided inspiration for radically different understandings of government and culture. Yet it was not Jefferson who had changed. It was his nation, tacking this way and then that way. That Jefferson has been a lodestar from generation to generation, from agenda to agenda, from vision to vision, speaks as much to his own literary versatility as to anything the real Jefferson did when he stood at the helm, directing America through the storms of his own time.

  One thing is unmistakably consistent, however, in his successors’ understanding of Jefferson: Like him, they believed in the power of words in public life, in the molding of popular opinion—and in the centrality of presidential power to keep the nation safe and strong in the most difficult of hours.

  The three achievements he ordered carved on his tombs
tone—as author of the American Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, and as founder of the University of Virginia—speak to his love of the liberty of the mind and of the heart, and to his faith in the future. They point toward the least disputable elements of his long, turbulent life, to the primacy of reason and the possibilities of freedom and the eternal quest for wisdom. They point, too, to the making of things, to leadership. He fought for each of these causes, convincing enough of the world of the rightness of his vision that he left behind living monuments. And there is no greater monument to Jefferson than the nation itself, dedicated to the realization, however gradual and however painful, of the ideal amid the realities of a political world driven by ambition and selfishness.

  For Jefferson never gave up on America, a country in many ways he brought into being and which he nurtured through tender, fragile hours. “And I have observed this march of civilization advancing from the sea coast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition … and where this progress will stop no one can say,” he wrote in 1824.

  Jefferson arranged the world as he wanted it until the very end, and beyond. When he died in the midsummer of 1826, he was borne across the sprawling West Lawn, past willow trees and down the hill to the graveyard. The cemetery was, of course, of his own design. Here he had buried his mother, his wife, his children, his best friend. Here he was to be buried.

  The little graveyard sits on the western side of the mountain. When dusk comes, darkness seems to fall slowly. To the east shadows lengthen over the Rivanna and over Shadwell. They fall over Monticello itself and over Mulberry Row. They fall over his pavilions and his gardens. Only then do the shadows fall over the remains of Thomas Jefferson, a man who always loved the light.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN LATE 1803, the French chargé d’affaires in Washington, Louis-André Pichon, drafted a special letter about President Jefferson to send back to the foreign ministry in Paris. “It is difficult, Citizen Minister,” Pichon began, “to give a definitive judgment on the character of Mr. Jefferson, as well as on the effect that could be produced internally by his policy and his systems.”

  It is indeed. It is not, however, impossible. This book, I hope, neither lionizes nor indicts Jefferson, but instead restores him to his full and rich role as an American statesman who resists easy categorization.

  Jefferson has not had an easy time of it in recent years. The 1998 DNA findings and subsequent scholarly reevaluation that established the high likelihood of his sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings—a liaison long denied by mainstream white historians—gave fresh energy to the image of Jefferson-as-hypocrite. Then came nearly two decades of highly acclaimed biographies of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington that understandably emphasized the virtues of their protagonists, often at Jefferson’s expense. (My friend Joseph J. Ellis started this trend with his 1993 book Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, published twenty years ago.) Even in his own day Jefferson faced the seemingly contradictory charges that he was at once an unrealistic philosopher and a scheming political creature.

  The truth in Jefferson’s case (as in so many lives) is complex. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were great men and impressive presidents, but only Thomas Jefferson ranged across so many different aspects of American life over such a long period of time. Cool and cerebral, Jefferson could not resist the heat of political combat, and he adapted his brilliantly expressed principles to the realities of elections and of governing with seeming effortlessness. Many Americans idolized him; others shared the views of an anonymous letter writer who told him, “You are the damdest fool that God put life into. God dam you.”

  My view is that at his core, from year to year and age to age, Thomas Jefferson was a politician who sought office and, once in office, tried to solve the problems of his day and set a course for the future within the constraints of his time and place. That he often did so with skill and effectiveness is a tribute to his life and is, I think, the heart of his legacy. For without a compelling political figure making the case for the principles and practices in which he believed against the Federalist interest of the time—and Jefferson was surely a compelling political figure—American life and politics could have turned out very differently. Jefferson the politician, then, was a man who stood on the ramparts of history, fighting for a particular habit of mind and of government that gave the many more of a role to play in the fullness of time than the few.

  I did not set out to write a full life and times of Jefferson; too much happened to him and around him for a single volume to do justice to the immensity of scholarship about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This book is a portrait, rather, of the man and of the world in which he lived and which he longed to bend to his purposes. The Jefferson I found in my reading and research was a public man of Renaissance interests but with an abiding, overarching concern: the survival and success of democratic republicanism in America.

  The most remarkable stories are those of politicians who do the best they can given time and chance, and whose faults are at once personal and universal. The most accomplished presidents manage, however briefly, to transcend those constraints and overcome those faults in order to leave the nation a better, more just place than they found it. The test cannot be perfection or an American Valhalla, for no one can meet such a standard. Thomas Jefferson surely did not.

  He did his best, though, and his best left the world a definition, if not a realization, of human liberty that has endured, and gave America the means to ascend to global power.

  I do not believe we can make sense of Jefferson without a grasp of how seriously he took the possibility of the imminent end of the American experiment and the return of a monarchical government. Beginning with George Washington himself, contemporaries and later historians have treated Jefferson’s fears of monarchy as fanciful, paranoid, or at best exaggerated to the point of unseriousness. Based on my reading of Jefferson’s papers and archival explorations in the United States and in Britain, however, I contend that the threat of a revival of British authority in the United States was as fundamental to Jefferson’s thought and actions as the cold war with the Soviet Union was to American presidents from Truman to George H. W. Bush. The analogy is imprecise, to be sure, for Britain and the United States alternated between friendship and enmity. Another imprecise analogy, but one worth considering, is that Jefferson was to Washington and Adams what Dwight Eisenhower was to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman: a president who reformed but essentially ratified an existing course of government.

  It is also impossible to understand the historical, human Jefferson without appreciating the perennial place the events and legacy of the English Civil War played in his imagination and in the imaginations of many of his contemporaries. The important role of the Whig tradition of individual liberty has been long noted. Less remarked upon is the frequency with which the battles and incidents of the struggle appear in Jefferson’s correspondence—a sign that the war and the fate of the Commonwealth, which was a military dictatorship followed by restoration of monarchy, were never far from Jefferson’s consciousness. As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid. For America, Jefferson wanted neither a Cromwellian absolutism nor the restoration of Charles II in 1660 nor even the installation of William and Mary in 1688—two monarchs who had fewer prerogatives but who were still monarchs. Such outcomes, Jefferson believed, were all too plausible.

  This project began with a delightful lunch in Princeton with Barbara Oberg, the editor of the Jefferson Papers, which is one of the most formidable and significant scholarly undertakings in American life. Barbara and her colleagues were welcoming and generous, providing me with digital files of correspondence for the volumes-in-p
rogress covering Jefferson’s presidency after early 1803. Anyone writing about Jefferson or early America is indebted to the illuminating annotations of the papers stretching back to the very first volume, which was published in 1950. Barbara and her team are brilliantly carrying on the tradition begun by Julian P. Boyd. I am especially indebted to Martha King and Elaine Pascu, both of whom assisted Barbara in a review of my manuscript.

  Jefferson’s papers from 1809 until his death in 1826, known as the Retirement Series, are being edited in Charlottesville. J. Jefferson Looney, the general editor, took time out to answer queries and spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon talking things Jeffersonian and was kind about follow-up queries. I am deeply grateful to him and to his colleagues in Virginia.

  Leslie Greene Bowman, the president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, has been an enthusiastic and tireless friend to me on this book. I am grateful to her for her grace, hospitality, and insights. Thanks, too, to her husband, Cortland Neuhoff, for putting up with itinerant biographers who turn up in his house and borrow his clothes. Among many other acts of generosity, Leslie agreed to take me on a horseback ride along the road Jefferson would have traveled up Monticello; to the best of my knowledge she managed not to laugh openly at my rather poor horsemanship.

  I am indebted to many people at Monticello. Susan Stein was generous with her time and expertise, as were Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy and Melanie Bowyer. I am also grateful to Anna Berkes, Monticello’s reference librarian.

  One of the great pleasures of this project came in November 2011, when I was graciously granted permission to spend the night in Jefferson’s bedroom at Monticello—on a pallet, I hasten to add. I am grateful to H. Eugene Lockhart, chairman of the board of trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, who was instrumental in the approval of the request to stay in the house. The curatorial staff helped arrange the evening and gave me invaluable guidance on the house as it would have been in Jefferson’s day: my thanks to Susan Stein, Richard Gilder Senior Curator and vice president for museum programs; to Elizabeth V. Chew, curator; and to Jodi Frederickson, curatorial assistant. Thanks as well to Barry Claytor, safety and security administrator; and to Fred O’Brien, Bryan Glover, and Terrell Thompson.