Thomas Jefferson
Thomas
Jefferson, (b. April 2 [April 13, New
Style], 1743, Shadwell, Virginia
[U.S.]—d. July 4, 1826, Monticello,
Virginia, U.S.), draftsman of the
Declaration of Independence of the
United States and the nation’s first
secretary of state (1789–94), second
vice president (1797–1801), and, as the
third president (1801–09), the statesman
responsible for the Louisiana Purchase.
An early advocate of total separation of
church and state, he also was the
founder and architect of the University
of Virginia and the most eloquent
American proponent of individual freedom
as the core meaning of the American
Revolution. (For a discussion of the
history and nature of the presidency,
see presidency of the United States of
America.)
Long
regarded as America’s most distinguished
“apostle of liberty,” Jefferson has come
under increasingly critical scrutiny
within the scholarly world. At the
popular level, both in the United States
and abroad, he remains an incandescent
icon, an inspirational symbol for both
major U.S. political parties, as well as
for dissenters in communist China,
liberal reformers in central and eastern
Europe, and aspiring democrats in Africa
and Latin America. His image within
scholarly circles has suffered, however,
as the focus on racial equality has
prompted a more negative reappraisal of
his dependence upon slavery and his
conviction that American society remain
a white man’s domain. The huge gap
between his lyrical expression of
liberal ideals and the more attenuated
reality of his own life has transformed
Jefferson into America’s most
problematic and paradoxical hero. The
Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
was dedicated to him on April 13, 1943,
the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Early
years
Albermarle county, where he was born,
lay in the foothills of the Blue Ridge
Mountains in what was then regarded as a
western province of the Old Dominion.
His father, Peter Jefferson, was a
self-educated surveyor who amassed a
tidy estate that included 60 slaves.
According to family lore, Jefferson’s
earliest memory was as a three-year-old
boy “being carried on a pillow by a
mounted slave” when the family moved
from Shadwell to Tuckahoe. His mother,
Jane Randolph Jefferson, was descended
from one of the most prominent families
in Virginia. She raised two sons, of
whom Jefferson was the eldest, and six
daughters. There is reason to believe
that Jefferson’s relationship with his
mother was strained, especially after
his father died in 1757, because he did
everything he could to escape her
supervision and had almost nothing to
say about her in his memoirs. He boarded
with the local schoolmaster to learn his
Latin and Greek until 1760, when he
entered the College of William and Mary
in Williamsburg.
By all
accounts he was an obsessive student,
often spending 15 hours of the day with
his books, 3 hours practicing his
violin, and the remaining 6 hours eating
and sleeping. The two chief influences
on his learning were William Small, a
Scottish-born teacher of mathematics and
science, and George Wythe, the leading
legal scholar in Virginia. From them
Jefferson learned a keen appreciation of
supportive mentors, a concept he later
institutionalized at the University of
Virginia. He read law with Wythe from
1762 to 1767, then left Williamsburg to
practice, mostly representing
small-scale planters from the western
counties in cases involving land claims
and titles. Although he handled no
landmark cases and came across as a
nervous and somewhat indifferent speaker
before the bench, he earned a reputation
as a formidable legal scholar. He was a
shy and extremely serious young man.
In 1768
he made two important decisions: first,
to build his own home atop an 867-foot-
(264-metre-) high mountain near Shadwell
that he eventually named Monticello and,
second, to stand as a candidate for the
House of Burgesses. These decisions
nicely embodied the two competing
impulses that would persist throughout
his life—namely, to combine an active
career in politics with periodic
seclusion in his own private haven. His
political timing was also impeccable,
for he entered the Virginia legislature
just as opposition to the taxation
policies of the British Parliament was
congealing. Although he made few
speeches and tended to follow the lead
of the Tidewater elite, his support for
resolutions opposing Parliament’s
authority over the colonies was
resolute.
In the
early 1770s his own character was also
congealing. In 1772 he married Martha
Wayles Skelton (Martha Jefferson), an
attractive and delicate young widow
whose dowry more than doubled his
holdings in land and slaves. In 1774 he
wrote A Summary View of the Rights of
British America, which was quickly
published, though without his
permission, and catapulted him into
visibility beyond Virginia as an early
advocate of American independence from
Parliament’s authority; the American
colonies were tied to Great Britain, he
believed, only by wholly voluntary bonds
of loyalty to the king.
His
reputation thus enhanced, the Virginia
legislature appointed him a delegate to
the Second Continental Congress in the
spring of 1775. He rode into
Philadelphia—and into American
history—on June 20, 1775, a tall
(slightly above 6 feet 2 inches [1.88
metres]) and gangly young man with
reddish blond hair, hazel eyes, a
burnished complexion, and rock-ribbed
certainty about the American cause. In
retrospect, the central paradox of his
life was also on display, for the man
who the following year was to craft the
most famous manifesto for human equality
in world history arrived in an ornate
carriage drawn by four handsome horses
and accompanied by three slaves.
Declaring independence
Jefferson’s inveterate shyness prevented
him from playing a significant role in
the debates within the Congress. John
Adams, a leader in those debates,
remembered that Jefferson was silent
even in committee meetings, though
consistently staunch in his support for
independence. His chief role was as a
draftsman of resolutions. In that
capacity, on June 11, 1776, he was
appointed to a five-person committee,
which also included Adams and Benjamin
Franklin, to draft a formal statement of
the reasons why a break with Great
Britain was justified. Adams asked him
to prepare the first draft, which he did
within a few days. He later claimed that
he was not striving for “originality of
principle or sentiment,” only seeking to
provide “an expression of the American
mind”; that is, putting into words those
ideas already accepted by a majority of
Americans. This accurately describes the
longest section of the Declaration of
Independence, which lists the grievances
against George III. It does not,
however, describe the following 55
words, which are generally regarded as
the seminal statement of American
political culture:
We hold
these truths to be self-evident; that
all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness; that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed.
On July
3–4 the Congress debated and edited
Jefferson’s draft, deleting and revising
fully one-fifth of the text. But they
made no changes whatsoever in this
passage, which over succeeding
generations became the lyrical sanction
for every liberal movement in American
history. At the time, Jefferson himself
was disconsolate that the Congress had
seen fit to make any changes in his
language. Nevertheless, he was not
regarded by his contemporaries as the
author of the Declaration, which was
seen as a collective effort by the
entire Congress. Indeed, he was not
known by most Americans as the principal
author until the 1790s. (See primary
source document: Declaration of
Independence.)
He
returned to Virginia in October 1776 and
immediately launched an extensive
project for the reform of the state’s
legal code to bring it in line with the
principles of the American Revolution.
Three areas of reform suggest the arc of
his political vision: first, he sought
and secured abolition of primogeniture,
entail, and all those remnants of
feudalism that discouraged a broad
distribution of property; second, he
proposed a comprehensive plan of
educational reform designed to assure
access at the lowest level for all
citizens and state support at the higher
levels for the most talented; third, he
advocated a law prohibiting any
religious establishment and requiring
complete separation of church and state.
The last two proposals were bitterly
contested, especially the statute for
religious freedom, which was not enacted
until 1786. (See primary source
documents: An American Education for
American Youth, The Education of Women,
and The Sphere of Religion.)
Taken
together, these legal reforms capture
the essence of Jefferson’s political
philosophy, which was less a
comprehensive body of thought than a
visionary prescription. He regarded the
past as a “dead hand” of encrusted
privileges and impediments that must be
cast off to permit the natural energies
of individual citizens to flow freely.
The American Revolution, as he saw it,
was the first shot in what would
eventually became a global battle for
human liberation from despotic
institutions and all coercive versions
of government.
At the
end of what was probably the most
creative phase of his public career,
personal misfortune struck in two
successive episodes. Elected governor of
Virginia in 1779, he was caught
off-guard by a surprise British invasion
in 1780 against which the state was
defenseless. His flight from approaching
British troops was described in the
local press, somewhat unfairly, as a
cowardly act of abdication. (Critics
would recall this awkward moment
throughout the remainder of his long
career.) Then, in September 1782, his
wife died after a difficult delivery in
May of their third daughter. These two
disasters caused him to vow that he
would never again desert his family for
his country.
American in Paris
The vow was sincere but short-lived.
Jefferson agreed, albeit reluctantly, to
serve as a delegate to the Continental
Congress in December 1782, where his
major contribution was to set forth the
principle that territories in the West
should not be treated as colonies but
rather should enter the Union with
status equal to the original states once
certain conditions were met. Then, in
1784, recognizing the need to escape the
memories of Martha that haunted the
hallways at Monticello, he agreed to
replace Franklin as American minister to
France; or, as legend tells the story,
he agreed to succeed Franklin, noting
that no one could replace him.
During
his five-year sojourn in Paris,
Jefferson accomplished very little in
any official sense. Several intractable
conditions rendered his best diplomatic
efforts futile: the United States was
heavily in debt owing to the recent war,
so few European nations were interested
in signing treaties of amity and
commerce with the infant American
republic; the federal government created
under the Articles of Confederation was
notoriously weak, so clear foreign
policy directives proved impossible;
Great Britain already enjoyed a
monopoly, controlling more than 80
percent of America’s foreign trade, so
it had no incentive to negotiate
commercial treaties on less favourable
terms; and France was drifting toward a
cataclysmic political crisis of its own,
so relations with the upstart new nation
across the Atlantic were hardly a high
priority.
As a
result, Jefferson’s diplomatic overtures
to establish a market for American
tobacco and to reopen French ports to
whale oil produced meagre results, his
efforts to create an alliance of
American and European powers to contest
the terrorism of the Barbary pirates
proved stillborn, and his vision of open
markets for all nations, a world without
tariffs, seemed excessively visionary.
His only significant achievement was the
negotiation of a $400,000 loan from
Dutch bankers that allowed the American
government to consolidate its European
debts, but even that piece of diplomacy
was conducted primarily by John Adams,
then serving as American minister to the
Court of St. James’s in London.
But the
Paris years were important to Jefferson
for personal reasons and are important
to biographers and historians for the
new light they shed on his famously
elusive personality. The dominant
pattern would seem to be the capacity to
live comfortably with contradiction. For
example, he immersed himself
wholeheartedly in the art, architecture,
wine, and food of Parisian society but
warned all prospective American tourists
to remain in America so as to avoid the
avarice, luxury, and sheer sinfulness of
European fleshpots. He made a point of
bringing along his elder daughter,
Martha (called Patsy as a girl), and
later sent for his younger daughter,
Maria (called Polly), all as part of his
genuine devotion as a single parent. But
he then placed both daughters in a
convent, wrote them stern lecturelike
letters about proper female etiquette,
and enforced a patriarchal distance that
was in practice completely at odds with
his theoretical commitment to intimacy.
With
women in general his letters convey a
message of conspicuous gallantry,
playfully flirtatious in the manner of a
male coquette. The most self-revealing
letter he ever wrote, “a dialogue
between the head and the heart,” was
sent to Maria Cosway, an Anglo-Italian
beauty who left him utterly infatuated.
Jefferson and Cosway, who was married to
a prominent if somewhat degenerate
English miniaturist, spent several
months in a romantic haze, touring
Parisian gardens, museums, and art shows
together, but whether Jefferson’s head
or heart prevailed, either in the letter
or in life, is impossible to know.
Meanwhile, there is considerable
evidence to suggest, but not to prove
conclusively, that Jefferson initiated a
sexual liaison with his attractive young
mulatto slave Sally Hemings in 1788,
about the time his torrid affair with
Cosway cooled down—this despite his
public statements denouncing blacks as
biologically inferior and sexual
relations between the races as taboo.
(See Sidebar: “Tom and Sally”: the
Jefferson-Hemings paternity debate.)
During
the latter stages of Jefferson’s stay in
Paris, Louis XVI, the French king, was
forced to convene the Assembly of
Notables in Versailles to deal with
France’s deep financial crisis.
Jefferson initially regarded the
assembly as a French version of the
Constitutional Convention, then meeting
in Philadelphia. Much influenced by
moderate leaders such as the Marquis de
Lafayette, he expected the French
Revolution to remain a bloodless affair
that would culminate in a revised French
government, probably a constitutional
monarchy along English lines. He
remained oblivious to the resentments
and volatile energies pent up within
French society that were about to
explode in the Reign of Terror, mostly
because he thought the French Revolution
would follow the American model. He was
fortunate to depart France late in 1789,
just at the onset of mob violence.
Slavery and racism
Even before his departure from France,
Jefferson had overseen the publication
of Notes on the State of Virginia. This
book, the only one Jefferson ever
published, was part travel guide, part
scientific treatise, and part
philosophical meditation. Jefferson had
written it in the fall of 1781 and had
agreed to a French edition only after
learning that an unauthorized version
was already in press. Notes contained an
extensive discussion of slavery,
including a graphic description of its
horrific effects on both blacks and
whites, a strong assertion that it
violated the principles on which the
American Revolution was based, and an
apocalyptic prediction that failure to
end slavery would lead to “convulsions
which will probably never end but in the
extermination of one or the other race.”
It also contained the most explicit
assessment that Jefferson ever wrote of
what he believed were the biological
differences between blacks and whites,
an assessment that exposed the
deep-rooted racism that he, like most
Americans and almost all Virginians of
his day, harboured throughout his life.
To his
critics in later generations,
Jefferson’s views on race seemed
particularly virulent because of his
purported relationship with Sally
Hemings, who bore several children
obviously fathered by a white man and
some of whom had features resembling
those of Jefferson. The public assertion
of this relationship was originally made
in 1802 by a disreputable journalist
interested in injuring Jefferson’s
political career. His claim was
corroborated, however, by one of
Hemings’s children in an 1873 newspaper
interview and then again in a 1968 book
by Winthrop Jordan revealing that
Hemings became pregnant only when
Jefferson was present at Monticello.
Finally, in 1998, DNA samples were
gathered from living descendants of
Jefferson and Hemings. Tests revealed
that Jefferson was almost certainly the
father of some of Hemings’s children.
What remained unclear was the character
of the relationship—consensual or
coercive, a matter of love or rape, or a
mutually satisfactory arrangement.
Jefferson’s admirers preferred to
consider it a love affair and to see
Jefferson and Hemings as America’s
preeminent biracial couple. His critics,
on the other hand, considered Jefferson
a sexual predator whose eloquent
statements about human freedom and
equality were hypocritical.
In any
case, coming as it did at the midpoint
of Jefferson’s career, the publication
of Notes affords the opportunity to
review Jefferson’s previous and
subsequent positions on the most
volatile and therefore most forbidden
topic in the revolutionary era (see
primary source document: On
Accommodating African Americans). Early
in his career Jefferson had taken a
leadership role in pushing slavery onto
the political agenda in the Virginia
assembly and the federal Congress. In
the 1760s and ’70s, like most Virginia
planters, he endorsed the end of the
slave trade. (Virginia’s plantations
were already well stocked with slaves,
so ending the slave trade posed no
economic threat and even enhanced the
value of the existent slave population.)
In his original draft of the Declaration
of Independence, he included a passage,
subsequently deleted by the Continental
Congress, blaming both the slave trade
and slavery itself on George III. Unlike
most of his fellow Virginians, Jefferson
was prepared to acknowledge that slavery
was an anomaly in the American republic
established in 1776. His two most
practical proposals came in the early
1780s: a gradual emancipation scheme by
which all slaves born after 1800 would
be freed and their owners compensated,
and a prohibition of slavery in all the
territories of the West as a condition
for admission to the Union. By the time
of the publication of Notes, then,
Jefferson’s record on slavery placed him
among the most progressive elements of
southern society. Rather than ask how he
could possibly tolerate the persistence
of slavery, it is more historically
correct to wonder how this member of
Virginia’s planter class had managed to
develop such liberal convictions.
Dating
the onset of a long silence is
inevitably an imprecise business, but by
the time of his return to the United
States in 1789 Jefferson had backed away
from a leadership position on slavery.
The ringing denunciations of slavery
presented in Notes had generated
controversy, especially within the
planter class of Virginia, and
Jefferson’s deep aversion to controversy
made him withdraw from the cutting edge
of the antislavery movement once he
experienced the sharp feelings it
aroused. Moreover, the very logic of his
argument in Notes exposed the inherent
intractability of his position. Although
he believed that slavery was a gross
violation of the principles celebrated
in the Declaration of Independence, he
also believed that people of African
descent were biologically inferior to
whites and could never live alongside
whites in peace and harmony. They would
have to be transported elsewhere, back
to Africa or perhaps the Caribbean,
after emancipation. Because such a
massive deportation was a logistical and
economic impossibility, the unavoidable
conclusion was that, though slavery was
wrong, ending it, at least at present,
was inconceivable. That became
Jefferson’s public position throughout
the remainder of his life.
It also
shaped his personal posture as a slave
owner. Jefferson owned, on average,
about 200 slaves at any point in time,
and slightly over 600 over his lifetime.
To protect himself from facing the
reality of his problematic status as
plantation master, he constructed a
paternalistic self-image as a benevolent
father caring for what he called “my
family.” Believing that he and his
slaves were the victims of history’s
failure to proceed along the enlightened
path, he saw himself as the steward for
those entrusted to his care until a
better future arrived for them all. In
the meantime, his own lavish lifestyle
and all the incessant and expensive
renovations of his Monticello mansion
were wholly dependent on slave labour.
Whatever silent thoughts he might have
harboured about freeing his slaves never
found their way into the record. (He
freed only five slaves, all members of
the Hemings family.) His mounting
indebtedness rendered all such thoughts
superfluous toward the end, because his
slaves, like all his possessions, were
mortgaged to his creditors and therefore
not really his to free.
Party politics
Jefferson returned to the United States
in 1789 to serve as the first secretary
of state under President George
Washington. He was entering the most
uncharted waters in American history.
There had never been an enduring
republican government in a nation as
large as the United States, and no one
was sure if it was possible or how it
would work. The Constitution ratified in
1788 was still a work-in-progress, less
a blueprint that provided answers than a
framework for arguing about the salient
questions. And because Jefferson had
been serving in France when the
constitutional battles of 1787–88 were
waged in Philadelphia and then in the
state ratifying conventions, he entered
the volatile debates of the 1790s
without a clear track record of his
constitutional convictions. In truth,
unlike his friend and disciple James
Madison, Jefferson did not think
primarily in constitutional categories.
His major concern about the new
Constitution was the absence of any bill
of rights. He was less interested in
defining the powers of government than
in identifying those regions where
government could not intrude (see
primary source documents: On the New
Constitution and On the Omission of a
Bill of Rights).
During
his tenure as secretary of state
(1790–93), foreign policy was his chief
responsibility. Within the cabinet a
three-pronged division soon emerged over
American policy toward the European
powers. While all parties embraced some
version of the neutrality doctrine, the
specific choices posed by the ongoing
competition for supremacy in Europe
between England and France produced a
bitter conflict. Washington and Adams,
who was serving as vice president,
insisted on complete neutrality, which
in practice meant tacking back and forth
between the two dominant world powers of
the moment. Alexander Hamilton pushed
for a pro-English version of
neutrality—chiefly commercial ties with
the most potent mercantile power in the
world. Jefferson favoured a pro-French
version of neutrality, arguing that the
Franco-American treaty of 1778 obliged
the United States to honour past French
support during the war for independence,
and that the French Revolution embodied
the “spirit of ’76” on European soil.
Even when the French Revolution spun out
of control and began to devour its own
partisans, Jefferson insisted that these
bloody convulsions were only temporary
excesses justified by the larger
ideological issues at stake.
This
remained his unwavering position
throughout the decade. Even after he
retired from office late in 1793, he
issued directives from Monticello
opposing the Neutrality Act (1793) and
the Jay Treaty (1795) as pacts with the
British harlot and betrayals of our
French brethren. Serving as vice
president during the Adams presidency
(1797–1801), Jefferson worked behind the
scenes to undermine Adams’s efforts to
sustain strict neutrality and blamed the
outbreak of the “quasi-war” with France
in 1797–98 on what he called “our
American Anglophiles” rather than the
French Directory. His foreign-policy
vision was resolutely moralistic and
highly ideological, dominated by a
dichotomous view of England as a corrupt
and degenerate engine of despotism and
France as the enlightened wave of the
future.
Jefferson’s position on domestic policy
during the 1790s was a variation on the
same ideological dichotomy. As Hamilton
began to construct his extensive
financial program—to include funding the
national debt, assuming the state debts,
and creating a national bank—Jefferson
came to regard the consolidation of
power at the federal level as a
diabolical plot to subvert the true
meaning of the American Revolution. As
Jefferson saw it, the entire Federalist
commitment to an energetic central
government with broad powers over the
domestic economy replicated the
arbitrary policies of Parliament and
George III, which the American
Revolution had supposedly repudiated as
monarchical and aristocratic practices,
incompatible with the principles of
republicanism. Jefferson sincerely
believed that the “principles of ’76”
were being betrayed by a Federalist
version of the “court party,” whose
covert scheme was to install monarchy
and a pseudo-aristocracy of bankers and
“monocrats” to rule over the American
yeomanry.
All the
major events of the decade—the creation
of a national bank, the debate over the
location of a national capital, the
suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in
western Pennsylvania, the passage of the
Jay Treaty, and, most notoriously, the
enforcement of the Alien and Sedition
Acts—were viewed through this
ideological lens. By the middle years of
the decade two distinctive political
camps had emerged, calling themselves
Federalists and Republicans (later
Democratic-Republicans). Not that
modern-day political parties, with their
mechanisms for raising money, selecting
candidates, and waging election
campaigns, were fully formed at this
stage. (Full-blooded political parties
date from the 1830s and ’40s.) But an
embryonic version of the party structure
was congealing, and Jefferson, assisted
and advised by Madison, established the
rudiments of the first opposition party
in American politics under the
Republican banner.
The
partnership between Jefferson and
Madison, labeled by subsequent
historians as “the great collaboration,”
deserves special attention. John Quincy
Adams put it nicely when he observed
that “the mutual influence of these two
mighty minds on each other is a
phenomenon, like the invisible and
mysterious movements of the magnet in
the physical world.” Because the notion
of a legitimate opposition to the
elected government did not yet exist,
and because the term party remained an
epithet that was synonymous with
faction, meaning an organized effort to
undermine the public interest, Jefferson
and Madison were labeled as traitors by
the Federalist press. They were, in
effect, inventing a modern form of
political behaviour before there was any
neutral vocabulary for talking about it.
Jefferson’s own capacity to live
comfortably with contradictions served
him well in this context, since he was
creating and leading a political party
while insisting that parties were evil
agents. In 1796 he ran for the
presidency against Adams, all the while
claiming not to know that he was even a
candidate. Most negative assessments of
Jefferson’s character date from this
period, especially the charge of
hypocrisy and duplicity.
The
highly combustible political culture of
the early republic reached a crescendo
in the election of 1800, one of the most
fiercely contested campaigns in American
history. (See primary source document:
Jefferson and Liberty.) The Federalist
press described Jefferson as a pagan and
atheist, a treasonable conspirator
against the duly elected administrations
of Washington and Adams, a utopian
dreamer with anarchistic tendencies
toward the role of government, and a
cunning behind-the-scenes manipulator of
Republican propaganda. All these charges
were gross exaggerations, save the last.
Always operating through intermediaries,
Jefferson paid several journalists to
libel Adams, his old friend but current
political enemy, and offered the vice
presidency to Aaron Burr in return for
delivering the electoral votes of New
York. In the final tally the 12 New York
votes made the difference, with the
tandem of Jefferson and Burr winning 73
to 65. A quirk in the Constitution,
subsequently corrected in the Twelfth
Amendment, prevented electors from
distinguishing between their choice of
president and vice president, so
Jefferson and Burr tied for the top
spot, even though voter preference for
Jefferson was incontestable. The
decision was thrown into the House of
Representatives where, after several
weeks of debate and backroom wheeling
and dealing, Jefferson was elected on
the 36th ballot.
Presidency
There was a good deal of nervous
speculation whether the new American
nation could survive a Jefferson
presidency. The entire thrust of
Jefferson’s political position
throughout the 1790s had been defiantly
negative, rejecting as excessive the
powers vested in the national government
by the Federalists. In his Virginia
Resolutions of 1798, written in protest
of the Alien and Sedition Acts, he had
described any projection of federal
authority over the domestic policy of
the states as a violation of “the spirit
of ’76” and therefore a justification
for secession from the Union. (This
became the position of the Confederacy
in 1861.) His Federalist critics
wondered how he could take an oath to
preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution of the United States if his
primary goal as president was to
dismantle the federal institutions
created by that very document. As he
rose to deliver his inaugural address on
March 4, 1801, in the still-unfinished
Capitol of the equally unfinished
national capital on the Potomac, the
mood was apprehensive. The most rabid
alarmists had already been proved wrong,
since the first transfer of power from
one political regime to another had
occurred peacefully, even routinely. But
it was still very much an open question
whether, as Lincoln later put it, “any
nation so conceived and so dedicated
could long endure” in the absence of a
central government along Federalist
lines.
The
major message of Jefferson’s inaugural
address was conciliatory. Its most
famous line (“We are all republicans—we
are all federalists”) suggested that the
scatological party battles of the
previous decade must cease. He described
his election as a recovery of the
original intentions of the American
Revolution, this after the hostile
takeover of those “ancient and sacred
truths” by the Federalists, who had
erroneously assumed that a stable
American nation required a powerful
central government. In Jefferson’s truly
distinctive and original formulation,
the coherence of the American republic
did not require the mechanisms of a
powerful state to survive or flourish.
Indeed, the health of the emerging
American nation was inversely
proportional to the power of the federal
government, for in the end the sovereign
source of republican government was
voluntary popular opinion, “the people,”
and the latent energies these liberated
individuals released when unburdened by
government restrictions.
In 1804
Jefferson was easily reelected over
Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney,
winning 162 electoral votes to
Pinckney’s 14. Initially, at least, his
policies as president reflected his
desire for decentralization, which meant
dismantling the embryonic federal
government, the army and navy, and all
federal taxation programs, as well as
placing the national debt, which stood
at $112 million, on the road to
extinction. These reforms enjoyed
considerable success for two reasons.
First, the temporary cessation of the
war between England and France for
European supremacy permitted American
merchants to trade with both sides and
produced unprecedented national
prosperity. Second, in selecting Albert
Gallatin as secretary of the Treasury,
Jefferson placed one of the most capable
managers of fiscal policy in the most
strategic location. Gallatin, a
Swiss-born prodigy with impeccable
Republican credentials, dominated the
cabinet discussions alongside Madison,
the ever-loyal Jefferson disciple who
served as secretary of state.
Actually there were very few cabinet
discussions because Jefferson preferred
to do the bulk of business within the
executive branch in writing. Crafting
language on the page was his most
obvious talent, and he required all
cabinet officers to submit drafts of
their recommendations, which he then
edited and returned for their comments.
The same textual approach applied to his
dealings with Congress. All of his
annual messages were delivered in
writing rather than in person. Indeed,
apart from his two inaugural addresses
(see primary source documents: First
Inaugural Address and Second Inaugural
Address), there is no record of
Jefferson delivering any public speeches
whatsoever. In part this was a function
of his notoriously inadequate abilities
as an orator, but it also reflected his
desire to make the office of the
presidency almost invisible. His one
gesture at visibility was to schedule
weekly dinners when Congress was in
session, which became famous for the
quality of the wine, the pell-mell
seating arrangements, and informal
approach to etiquette—a clear defiance
of European-style decorum.
The
major achievement of his first term was
also an act of defiance, though this
time it involved defying his own
principles. In 1803 Napoleon decided to
consolidate his resources for a new
round of the conflict with England by
selling the vast Louisiana region, which
stretched from the Mississippi Valley to
the Rocky Mountains. Although the asking
price, $15 million, was a stupendous
bargain, assuming the cost meant
substantially increasing the national
debt. More significantly, what became
known as the Louisiana Purchase violated
Jefferson’s constitutional scruples.
Indeed, many historians regard it as the
boldest executive action in American
history. But Jefferson never wavered,
reasoning that the opportunity to double
the national domain was too good to
miss. The American West always triggered
Jefferson’s most visionary energies,
seeing it, as he did, as America’s
future, the place where the simple
republican principles could be
constantly renewed. In one fell swoop he
removed the threat of a major European
power from America’s borders and
extended the life span of the
uncluttered agrarian values he so
cherished. Even before news that the
purchase was approved reached the United
States in July 1803, Jefferson
dispatched his private secretary,
Meriwether Lewis, to lead an expedition
to explore the new acquisition and the
lands beyond, all the way to the
Pacific.
If the
Louisiana Purchase was the crowning
achievement of Jefferson’s presidency,
it also proved to be the high point from
which events moved steadily in the other
direction. Although the Federalist Party
was dead as a national force, pockets of
Federalist opposition still survived,
especially in New England. Despite his
eloquent testimonials to the need for a
free press, Jefferson was outraged by
the persistent attacks on his policies
and character from those quarters, and
he instructed the attorneys general in
the recalcitrant states to seek
indictments, in clear violation of his
principled commitment to freedom of
expression (see primary source document:
On Misreporting by the Press). He was
equally heavy-handed in his treatment of
Aaron Burr, who was tried for treason
after leading a mysterious expedition
into the American Southwest allegedly
designed to detach that region from the
United States with Burr crowned as its
benevolent dictator. The charges were
never proved, but Jefferson demanded
Burr’s conviction despite the lack of
evidence. He was overruled in the end by
Chief Justice John Marshall, who sat as
the judge in the trial.
But
Jefferson’s major disappointment had its
origins in Europe with the resumption of
the Napoleonic Wars, which resulted in
naval blockades in the Atlantic and
Caribbean that severely curtailed
American trade and pressured the U.S.
government to take sides in the
conflict. Jefferson’s response was the
Embargo Act (1807), which essentially
closed American ports to all foreign
imports and American exports. The
embargo assumed that the loss of
American trade would force England and
France to alter their policies, but this
fond hope was always an illusion, since
the embryonic American economy lacked
the size to generate such influence and
was itself wrecked by Jefferson’s
action. Moreover, the enforcement of the
Embargo Act required the exercise of
precisely those coercive powers by the
federal government that Jefferson had
previously opposed. By the time he left
office in March 1809, Jefferson was a
tired and beaten man, anxious to escape
the consequences of his futile efforts
to preserve American neutrality and
eager to embrace the two-term precedent
established by Washington.
Retirement
During the last 17 years of his life
Jefferson maintained a crowded and
active schedule. He rose with the dawn
each day, bathed his feet in cold water,
then spent the morning on his
correspondence (one year he counted
writing 1,268 letters) and working in
his garden. Each afternoon he took a
two-hour ride around his grounds.
Dinner, served in the late afternoon,
was usually an occasion to gather his
daughter Martha and her 12 children,
along with the inevitable visitors.
Monticello became a veritable hotel
during these years, on occasion housing
50 guests. The lack of privacy caused
Jefferson to build a separate house on
his Bedford estate about 90 miles (140
km) from Monticello, where he
periodically fled for seclusion.
Three
architectural projects claimed a
considerable share of his attention.
Throughout his life Monticello remained
a work-in-progress that had the
appearance of a construction site. Even
during his retirement years, Jefferson’s
intensive efforts at completing the
renovations never quite produced the
masterpiece of neoclassical design he
wanted to achieve and that modern-day
visitors to Monticello find so
compelling. A smaller but more
architecturally distinctive mansion at
Bedford, called Poplar Forest, was
completed on schedule. It too embodied
neoclassical principles but was shaped
as a perfect octagon. Finally there was
the campus of the University of Virginia
at Charlottesville, which Jefferson
called his “academical village.”
Jefferson surveyed the site, which he
could view in the distance from his
mountaintop, and chose the Pantheon of
Rome as the model for the rotunda, the
centrepiece flanked by two rows of
living quarters for students and
faculty. In 1976 the American Institute
of Architects voted it “the proudest
achievement of American architecture in
the past 200 years.” Even the “interior”
design of the University of Virginia
embodied Jeffersonian principles, in
that he selected all the books for the
library, defined the curriculum, picked
the faculty, and chaired the Board of
Visitors. Unlike every other American
college at the time, “Mr. Jefferson’s
university” had no religious affiliation
and imposed no religious requirement on
its students. As befitted an institution
shaped by a believer in wholly voluntary
and consensual networks of governance,
there were no curricular requirements,
no mandatory code of conduct except the
self-enforced honour system, no
president or administration. Every
aspect of life at the University of
Virginia reflected Jefferson’s belief
that the only legitimate form of
governance was self-governance.
In 1812
his vast correspondence began to include
an exchange with his former friend and
more recent rival John Adams. The
reconciliation between the two
patriarchs was arranged by their mutual
friend Benjamin Rush, who described them
as “the North and South poles of the
American Revolution.” That description
suggested more than merely geographic
symbolism, since Adams and Jefferson
effectively, even dramatically, embodied
the twin impulses of the revolutionary
generation. As the “Sage of Monticello,”
Jefferson represented the Revolution as
a clean break with the past, the
rejection of all European versions of
political discipline as feudal vestiges,
the ingrained hostility toward all
mechanisms of governmental authority
that originated in faraway places. As
the “Sage of Quincy (Massachusetts),”
Adams resembled an American version of
Edmund Burke, which meant that he
attributed the success of the American
Revolution to its linkage with past
practices, most especially the tradition
of representative government established
in the colonial assemblies. He regarded
the constitutional settlement of 1787–88
as a shrewd compromise with the
political necessities of a nation-state
exercising jurisdiction over an
extensive, eventually continental,
empire, not as a betrayal of the
American Revolution but an evolutionary
fulfillment of its promise.
These
genuine differences of opinion made
Adams and Jefferson the odd couple of
the American Revolution and were the
primary reasons why they had drifted to
different sides of the divide during the
party wars of the 1790s. The exchange of
158 letters between 1812 and 1826
permitted the two sages to pose as
philosopher-kings and create what is
arguably the most intellectually
impressive correspondence between
statesmen in all of American history.
Beyond the elegiac tone and almost
sculpted serenity of the letters, the
correspondence exposed the fundamental
contradictions that the American
Revolution managed to contain. As Adams
so poignantly put it, “You and I ought
not to die before we have explained
ourselves to each other.” And because of
Adams’s incessant prodding, Jefferson
was frequently forced to clarify his
mature position on the most salient
issues of the era.
One
issue that even Adams and Jefferson
could not discuss candidly was slavery.
Jefferson’s mature position on that
forbidden subject represented a further
retreat from any leadership role in
ending the “peculiar institution.” In
1819, during the debate in Congress over
the Missouri Compromise, he endorsed the
expansion of slavery into all the
western territories, precisely the
opposite of the position he had taken in
the 1780s. Though he continued to insist
that slavery was a massive anomaly, he
insisted even more strongly that it was
wrong for the federal government to
attempt any effort at emancipation. In
fact he described any federal intrusion
in the matter as a despotic act
analogous to George III’s imperial
interference in colonial affairs or
Hamilton’s corrupt scheme to establish a
disguised form of monarchy in the early
republic. His letters to fellow
Virginians during his last years reflect
a conspiratorial mentality toward the
national government and a clear
preference for secession if threatened
with any mandatory plan for abolition.
Apart
from slavery, the other shadow that
darkened Monticello during Jefferson’s
twilight years was debt. Jefferson was
chronically in debt throughout most of
his life, in part because of obligations
inherited from his father-in-law in his
wife’s dowry, mostly because of his own
lavish lifestyle, which never came to
terms with the proverbial bottom line
despite careful entries in his account
books that provided him with only the
illusion of control. In truth, by the
1820s the interest on his debt was
compounding at a faster rate than any
repayment schedule could meet. By the
end, he was more than $100,000—in modern
terms several million dollars—in debt.
An exception was made in Virginia law to
permit a lottery that Jefferson hoped
would allow his heirs to retain at least
a portion of his property. But the
massiveness of his debt overwhelmed all
such hopes. Monticello, including land,
mansion, furnishings, and the vast bulk
of the slave population, was auctioned
off the year after his death, and his
surviving daughter, Martha, was forced
to accept charitable contributions to
sustain her family.
Before
that ignominious end, which Jefferson
never lived to see, he managed to sound
one last triumphant note that projected
his most enduring and attractive message
to posterity. In late June 1826
Jefferson was asked to join the
Independence Day celebrations in
Washington, D.C., on the 50th
anniversary of the defining event in his
and the nation’s life. He declined,
explaining that he was in no condition
to leave his mountaintop. But he
mustered up one final surge of energy to
draft a statement that would be read in
his absence at the ceremony. He clearly
intended it as his final testament.
Though some of the language, like the
language of the Declaration itself, was
borrowed from others, here was the
vintage Jeffersonian vision:
May it
be to the world, what I believe it will
be, (to some parts sooner, to others
later, but finally to all,) the signal
of arousing men to burst the chains
under which monkish ignorance and
superstition had persuaded them to bind
themselves, and to assume the blessings
and security of self-government.… All
eyes are opened or opening to the rights
of men. The general spread of the light
of science has already laid open to
every view the palpable truth, that the
mass of mankind has not been born with
saddles on their backs, nor a favored
few, booted and spurred, ready to ride
them legitimately by the grace of God.
These are grounds of hope for others;
for ourselves, let the annual return of
this day forever refresh our
recollections of these rights, and an
undiminished devotion to them.
Even as
these words were being read in
Washington, Jefferson went to his maker
in his bed at Monticello at about half
past noon on July 4, 1826. His last
conscious words, uttered the preceding
evening, were “Is it the Fourth?” Always
a man given to Herculean feats of
self-control, he somehow managed to time
his own death to coincide with history.
More remarkably, up in Quincy on that
same day his old rival and friend also
managed to die on schedule. John Adams
passed away later in the afternoon. His
last words—“Thomas Jefferson still
lives”—were wrong at the moment but
right for the future, since Jefferson’s
complex legacy was destined to become
the most resonant and controversial
touchstone in all of American history.
(For
additional writings by Jefferson, see
Debates on Independence; On the Need for
a Little Rebellion Now and Then; A
Firebell in the Night; On Civil and
Natural Rights; A Simple and Inexpensive
Government; On Republican Government;
The Rulers and the Ruled; On the
Censorship of Religious Books; On the
Civil and Religious Powers of
Government; and On Science and the
Perfectibility of Man.)
Joseph J. Ellis
