Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  A DELEGATE TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION Ibid., 222–42.

  SAID TO BE “AMAZINGLY FOND” Julian P. Boyd, Number 7: Alexander Hamilton’s Secret Attempts to Control American Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1964), 23.

  IN A SPEECH Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 233.

  “THE EYE SETTLED WITH A DEEPER INTEREST” Randall, Jefferson, III, 336.

  “HIS LOOK WAS SOMBER” PTJ, XVII, 205.

  IN HIS REPORT ON THE PUBLIC CREDIT IN EARLY 1790 Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 34–35.

  BY TARIFFS ON IMPORTS AND EXCISE TAXES ON DISTILLED SPIRITS Ibid., 34.

  FUNDING THE DEBT Ibid., 35.

  SHREWDER SPECULATORS, MADISON TOLD JEFFERSON Ibid.

  THE SECOND ELEMENT OF HAMILTON’S PLAN Ibid., 36.

  INSTANTLY DIVIDED THE NATION Ibid. In Sharp’s estimation, “Hamilton’s assumption proposal threatened to destroy the newly organized government.” (Ibid.)

  VOTED DOWN FEDERAL ASSUMPTION Ibid.

  HE ASKED FOR A WORD PTJ, XVII, 205.

  “IT WAS A REAL FACT” Ibid., 206. Jefferson also said: “And … it has become probable that unless they can be reconciled by some plan of compromise, there will be no funding bill agreed to, our credit … will burst and vanish, and the states separate to take care everyone of itself.” (Ibid., XVI, 537.)

  UNLIKE MANY OF HIS FELLOW VIRGINIANS Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 36. Sharp quoted “Light-Horse Harry” Lee on the subject. Lee said he “had rather myself submit to all the hazards of war and risk the loss of everything dear to me in life than to live under the rule of an … insolent northern majority.” One hope, Lee noted, was moving the capital to “the territorial center” of the country. (Ibid.)

  THE LOCATION OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL JHT, II, 287–99, is a good account of the politics of the decision about the capital.

  “THE POTOMAC STANDS A BAD CHANCE” Ibid., 298.

  HE CONVENED A DINNER Ibid., 301. “On considering the situation of things,” Jefferson said, “I thought the first step towards some conciliation of views would be to bring Mr. Madison and Col. Hamilton to a friendly discussion of the subject.” (Ibid., 298.)

  “MEN OF SOUND HEADS” Ibid., 301.

  “THAT IF EVERYONE RETAINS” PTJ, XVI, 540. Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 37, described Jefferson’s thinking as well.

  MADISON AGREED TO EASE HIS OPPOSITION JHT, II, 301.

  “AS THE PILL WOULD BE A BITTER ONE” PTJ, XVII, 207. “This is the real history of the assumption,” Jefferson said. (Ibid.)

  “THE LEAST BAD OF ALL THE TURNS” Ibid., XVI, 575.

  “IT IS MUCH TO BE WISHED” Ibid., VIII, 399. He added: “No man can have a natural right to enter on a calling by which it is at least ten to one he will ruin many better men than himself. Yet these are the actual links which hold us whether we will or no to Great Britain.” (Ibid.)

  “EVERY HUMAN BEING, MY DEAR” Ibid., XVII, 215.

  “ONE PARTY CHARGES THE CONGRESS” Ibid., XVIII, 131.

  TWENTY-FOUR · MR. JEFFERSON IS GREATLY TOO DEMOCRATIC

  “I OWN IT IS MY OWN OPINION” PTJ, XXII, 38.

  NOOTKA SOUND, A DISTANT INLET ON THE WESTERN COAST JHT, II, 310–14.

  “BEEN AMONGST SUCH INSOLENT BULLIES” PTJ, XVI, 414.

  JEFFERSON FRETTED ABOUT A SPRAWLING WAR JHT, II, 310–11. Jefferson was cold-eyed about the threat. “I am so deeply impressed with the magnitude of the dangers which will attend our government if Louisiana and the Floridas be added to the British empire,” he wrote Washington in August 1790, “that in my opinion we ought to make ourselves parties in the general war expected to take place, should this be the only means of preventing the calamity.” (PTJ, XVII, 129.)

  WAR, JEFFERSON SAID PTJ, XVII, 127.

  ENCIRCLEMENT BY THE BRITISH JHT, II, 310. See also PTJ, XVII, 138.

  VICE PRESIDENT ADAMS AGREED PTJ, XVII, 138. Adams wrote: “The consequences … on the general security and tranquility of the American confederation of having them in our rear, and on both our flanks, with their navy in front, are very obvious.” (Ibid.)

  SECRETARY OF WAR KNOX BELIEVED Ibid., 140.

  TO MARCH THROUGH U.S. TERRITORY Ibid., 128–29.

  “A MIDDLE COURSE” Ibid., 130.

  “WAR IS FULL OF CHANCES” Ibid., 129.

  CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE SHAWNEE AND MIAMI INDIANS Ibid., 131–32.

  SHOULD KEEP THE INDIAN MISSION Ibid., 131.

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON HAD ALREADY Ibid., 133.

  GEORGE BECKWITH, WHO HAD PLAYED A ROLE Scheer and Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats, 379–84, is a general account of the Arnold treason. See Frank T. Reuter, “ ‘Petty Spy’ or Effective Diplomat: The Role of George Beckwith,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Winter 1990), 471–92, for more on Beckwith.

  HAMILTON’S RELATIONSHIP WITH BECKWITH As the title suggests, Julian P. Boyd’s Number 7: Alexander Hamilton’s Secret Attempts to Control American Foreign Policy offers a considered indictment of Hamilton’s conduct. See also Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 294–95, for a kinder interpretation than Boyd’s.

  “I HAVE ALWAYS PREFERRED” Boyd, Number 7, 24. At stake, perhaps, were the British West Indies, which Hamilton noted would be protected in an alliance with London but endangered if the Americans were more closely linked with France. (Ibid., 24–25.)

  AMERICA’S “NAVAL EXERTIONS” Ibid., 25.

  “MAY BE DEPENDED UPON” Ibid. One of the questions raised by the Nootka Sound episode was about control of the British forts along the western borders of the United States. Despite the provisions of the Treaty of Paris, London had refused to give them up. Now the British were interested in taking advantage of any fighting related to Nootka Sound to secure their hold on the forts and possibly expand their influence within the United States—a sign that the war between America and Britain was not fully and forever over. (Ibid., 34–35.)

  “MR. JEFFERSON … IS GREATLY TOO DEMOCRATIC” Ibid., 27.

  “MR. JEFFERSON … IS A MAN” Ibid., 32.

  SPAIN BACKED DOWN JHT, II, 310.

  STOPPED AT MOUNT VERNON PTJ, XVIII, 2. In August 1790 Jefferson had joined Washington for a journey to Rhode Island. Beginning on August 15, 1790, they enjoyed “a very pleasant sail of two days going and two days returning” through Long Island Sound, and at Newport and Providence the president was received with what Jefferson called “great cordiality.” (PTJ, XVII, 402.)

  “THE RICHEST GROUND” Ibid., 45. “The grain, though small, is always plump,” Jefferson wrote. “The President is so excellent a farmer that I place full confidence in his recommendation.” (Ibid.)

  LEASING A FOUR-STORY BRICK HOUSE FROM THOMAS LEIPER PTJ, XVII, 309–10.

  ORDERED WINE FOR HIMSELF Ibid., 493.

  THREE SEPARATE BUT RELATED ISSUES See PTJ, XVIII, 220, 310, 369.

  THE PROPOSAL FOR A NATIONAL BANK EOL, 143–45.

  JEFFERSON AND MADISON OBJECTED JHT, II, 338. See also PTJ, XIX, 275–82.

  THE BANK BILL’S CONSTITUTIONALITY PTJ, XIX, 281.

  “TO TAKE A SINGLE STEP BEYOND” Ibid., 276.

  “IF THE PRO AND THE CON HANG SO EVEN” Ibid., 280.

  HAMILTON REPLIED BRILLIANTLY JHT, II, 347.

  “AN ADHERENCE TO THE LETTER” Ibid.

  WASHINGTON HAD MADISON DRAFT A VETO MESSAGE EOL, 144.

  “CONGRESS MAY GO HOME” JHT, II, 340.

  RECORDED THE BURST OF COLORS PTJ, XX, 250.

  “WE ARE RUINED, SIR” Ibid., 236.

  “MRS. TRIST HAS OBSERVED” Ibid.

  JONATHAN B. SMITH, A PHILADELPHIA MERCHANT Ibid., 290. Also see ibid., 268–313. In defense of his father in the face of Jefferson’s “heresies” remark, John Quincy Adams launched a counterattack (“took up the cudgel
s,” in Jefferson’s phrase) in the newspapers under the pseudonym Publicola. PTJ, XX, 298–301. Adams himself was long believed to be the author, but it was his son’s work, and the Publicola assaults on Jefferson were powerful. Publicola, Madison reported to Jefferson, “is probably the manufacture of his son out of materials furnished by himself.… There is more of method also in the arguments, and much less of clumsiness and heaviness in the style, than characterize [the senior Adams’s] writings.” (Ibid., 298–99.)

  By midsummer 1791 the controversy over Jefferson’s attack on Adams had expanded to include the secretary of state’s antagonism to Hamilton as well. The tensions at the highest levels of government were palpable. “A host of writers have risen in favor of Paine, and prove that in this quarter at least the spirit of republicanism is sound,” Jefferson told Monroe on July 10, 1791. “The contrary spirit of the high officers of government is more understood than I expected. Col. Hamilton, avowing that he never made a secret of his principles, yet taxes the imprudence of Mr. Adams in having stirred the question and agrees that ‘his business is done.’ ” (Ibid., 297.)

  Jefferson was flummoxed. What to do about Adams, whom he had unquestionably attacked in the note about the Rights of Man? He wanted to explain himself to the vice president but wavered about how to go about it. “I have a dozen times taken up my pen to write to you and as often laid it down again, suspended between opposing considerations,” Jefferson wrote Adams on July 17, 1791. “I determine however to write from a conviction that truth, between candid minds, can never do harm.”

  Yes, he had written the words attributed to him; and yes, he believed Adams’s views to be among the “heresies” he mentioned. What Jefferson regretted most, he told Adams, was how they had been “thrown on the public stage as public antagonists. That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government is well known to us both: but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confining our difference of opinion to private conversation. And I can declare with truth in the presence of the Almighty that nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have had either my own or your name brought before the public on this occasion.” (Ibid., 302.)

  Adams accepted the thrust of Jefferson’s explanation, but his anguished reply shows how far-reaching the implications of the affair had become. The publisher who printed Jefferson’s note, Adams said, “has sown the seeds of more evils than he can ever atone for. The pamphlet, with your name … was generally considered as a direct and open personal attack upon me, by countenancing the false interpretation of my writings as favoring the introduction of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy into this country.”

  Adams’s sensitivity about Davila was self-evident. “The question everywhere was what heresies are intended by the Secretary of State?” he told Jefferson. “The answer in the newspapers was, the Vice President’s notions of a limited monarchy, an hereditary government of king and lords, with only elective commons.” The charge had set off a “hue and cry [among] all my enemies and rivals,” Adams said. “It is thought by some, that Mr. Hancock’s friends are preparing the way, by my destruction, for his election to the place of Vice President, and that of Mr. Samuel Adams to be Governor of this Commonwealth, and then [the anti-Adams faction] will be sure of all the loaves and fishes in the national government and the state government as they hope.” In sum, it had been a miserable summer for the vice president. (Ibid., 305–7.)

  All in all, Jefferson drew some comfort from the episode, for the public reaction tended to favor Paine over Davila or Publicola. The people, Jefferson wrote Paine on July 29, 1791, “appear firm in their republicanism, notwithstanding the contrary hopes and assertions of a sect here, high in names, but small in numbers.” (Ibid., 308.)

  HE WAS “EXTREMELY PLEASED” Ibid., 290.

  “THAT I HAD IN MY VIEW” Ibid., 291.

  “TO TAKE OFF A LITTLE OF THE DRYNESS” Ibid., 293.

  “OPPOSITION TO THE GOVERNMENT” Ibid., 294.

  “MEANT FOR THE ENEMIES OF THE GOVERNMENT” Ibid.

  “I HAVE REASON TO THINK” Ibid., 300.

  A CONTEST BETWEEN JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON See, for instance, Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (Boston, 1966).

  “WE WERE EDUCATED IN ROYALISM” Ibid., XIV, 661.

  “COURTS LOVE THE PEOPLE ALWAYS” Ibid., 431.

  “IF THE DUKE OF ANGOULEME” Ibid., XII, 220–21.

  “IN SHORT, MY DEAR FRIEND” Ibid., 221.

  “THE POLITICS OF THE WESTERN COUNTRY” Dunbar, Study of “Monarchical” Tendencies, 106. Wilkinson added that only a “high toned monarchy” could remedy the Confederation government’s “imbecility, distraction and capricious policy.” (Ibid.)

  “THERE IS SUCH A ROOTED AVERSION” PTJ, XIII, 461–62.

  IN A REPORT OF A CONVERSATION “Governor Simcoe’s Conversation with Peirce Duffy,” June 1793, Niagara. George Beckwith also reported that an American informant had told him that there was no gentleman “who does not view the present government with contempt, who is not convinced of its inefficiency, and who is not desirous of changing it for a Monarchy.” (Boyd, Number 7, 7.)

  “TO MY MIND A TRUE ESTIMATE” Hamilton, Writings, 978. The quotation is found in the course of a revealing letter of Hamilton’s to James Bayard about Jefferson, Burr, and the 1800 election. (Ibid., 977–81.)

  IN 1790 AND IN 1791 EOL, 200–201; 533–34. See also Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 62–63.

  FOUGHT TO WIN THE LIBERTIES Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 133.

  “THE SITUATION OF THE SAINT-DOMINGUE FUGITIVES” PTJ, XXVI, 503.

  “IT IS HIGH TIME” Ibid.

  THE LONG-DREADED SLAVE WAR Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 133–34.

  “EVERY ACCOUNT OF THE SUCCESS” Edward Thornton to Lord Hawkesbury, May 1, 1802, FO 5/35, National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew.

  MIGHT BECOME THE ASYLUM Ibid., 133.

  THE LEADERSHIP OF TOUSSAINT-LOUVERTURE Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 105–6.

  REASSESS ITS AMBITIONS Ibid.

  “I WRITE TODAY” PTJ, XX, 342–43.

  A TRIP OF THEIR OWN Ibid., 434–73, covers the journey and its sundry purposes. See also Andrea Wulf, The Founding Gardeners, 90–110. In New York, Sir John Temple, the British consul general, told London that Jefferson’s “party and politics” were popular. (Ibid., XVIII, 240–41.) Robert Troup, a Hamiltonian, told the Treasury secretary that he believed the Jefferson interest, which in his view included Chancellor Robert R. Livingston and Aaron Burr—was moving toward total war. “There was every appearance of a passionate courtship between the Chancellor—Burr—Jefferson and Madison when the latter two were in town,” Troup wrote Hamilton on June 15, 1791. “Delenda est Carthago [Carthage must be destroyed] I suppose is the maxim adopted with respect to you.” (Ibid., XX, 434.)

  IN THEIR BRIEF TIME TOGETHER Ibid., 435.

  PHILIP FRENEAU, A WRITER Ibid., 453, 657, and 718. For the full account of the Freneau chapter in early national Jeffersonian politics, see ibid., 718–59.

  See also Philip M. Marsh, “Philip Freneau and His Circle,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 63, no. 1 (January 1939): 37–59, and Marsh, “Freneau and Jefferson: The Poet-Editor Speaks for Himself About the National Gazette Episode,” American Literature 8 (May 1936); 180–89.

  WHOM MADISON HAD KNOWN Marsh, “Philip Freneau and His Circle,” 39.

  SUBSIDIZED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE Ibid., 45–47. “I should have given him the perusal of all my letters of foreign intelligence and all foreign newspapers; the publication of all proclamations and other public notices within my department, and the printing of the laws, which added to his salary would have been a considerable aid,” Jefferson wrote Madison on July 21, 1791. (PTJ, XX, 657.)

  A CRITICAL ST
EP Todd Estes, “Jefferson as Party Leader,” in Cogliano, ed., A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, 132–34.

  JOHN BECKLEY Ibid., 139.

  “THE FLOATING ARDOR” Bailey, “Jefferson on Public Opinion and the Executive” in Ibid., 194. The context was the enforcement of the embargo in 1807, but as Bailey notes, the remark “reveals nicely the relationship between executive action and public judgment.” (Ibid.)

  “NOTHING NEW IS TALKED OF HERE” Ibid., 617.

  “YOU MENTIONED FORMERLY” Ibid., 706.

  JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON SPOKE PRIVATELY Ibid., XXII, 38–39. Hamilton added of the republican experiment: “The success indeed so far is greater than I had expected, and therefore at present success seems more possible than it had done heretofore, and there are still other stages of improvement which, if the present does not succeed, may be tried and ought to be tried before we give up the republican form altogether, for that mind must be really depraved which would not prefer the equality of political rights which is the foundation of pure republicanism, if it can be obtained with order.” (Ibid.)

  “WHETHER THESE MEASURES” Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 436.

  “THE PEOPLE IN YOUR QUARTER” Ibid., 437.

  “THERE IS A VAST MASS” Ibid., 436.

  LAWMAKERS WERE BECOMING FINANCIALLY ENMESHED PTJ, XXIII, 537–41. See also Ibid., XXIV, 25–27. On a separate but related matter, EOL, 299, alludes to Jefferson’s broader concerns about the corrupting possibilities of patronage.

  TWENTY-FIVE · TWO COCKS IN THE PIT

  “HOW UNFORTUNATE … THAT WHILST” PTJ, XXIV, 317.

  DINNER WAS OVER PTJRS, III, 305.

  PRESIDENT WASHINGTON WAS OUT OF TOWN Ibid.

  DOMINATED BY A “COLLISION OF OPINION” Ibid.

  IN HIS VIEW “IF SOME OF ITS” Ibid.

  “IT WAS THE MOST PERFECT MODEL” Ibid. See also Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 393–94.

  SIR FRANCIS BACON, JOHN LOCKE, AND SIR ISAAC NEWTON Ibid.

  HAMILTON ASKED JEFFERSON Ibid.

  “I TOLD HIM” Ibid.

  HAMILTON PAUSED Ibid.

  “THE GREATEST MAN” Ibid.