How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (4 page)

The worst crime I could commit as author of this book would be to let the brilliance of Jefferson’s mind and the eloquence of his pen overshadow what a top-to-bottom, balls-out, unflinching badass he was.

Jefferson
was
a great thinker, and he
did
make a greater impact on American politics than any other person in history, but he was also supremely cool-as-shit, a fact that is rarely brought up in high school history classes. It’s not
just
that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the single most important American document ever printed (until now!), and it’s not
just
that he personally invented more useful and persistent devices than any president before or since; Jefferson was one cold, above-the-law motherfucker with a taste for rebellion. (It says a lot about a president when the words used to describe him wouldn’t feel out of place in the summary of a direct-to-DVD Steven Seagal movie.)

Jefferson may not have been skilled in actual combat, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t see the value in some violence every once in a while. When discussing war and freedom with William Stephens Smith, a U.S. representative from New York, Jefferson said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Basically, “Blood is the poop of freedom.”

Jefferson truly believed that a country couldn’t preserve its liberties if the government wasn’t regularly warned that the people could rise up and take it down. He not only believed that the people should always be ready to question and threaten authority with violence, he encouraged it.
And he was the authority!
He basically took the office with his head tilted and his arms extended: the timeless physical representation of “Come at me, bro.”

But Jefferson wasn’t just about straight-up
begging
for a rebellion on his own soil (and encouraging future generations of informed Americans to take up arms whenever their freedoms get threatened), he also knew how to protect America abroad. For fifteen straight years, America was paying anywhere from $80,000 to $1 million every year to the Barbary States in exchange for protection from North African pirates. It was basically a mafia shakedown; if you wanted to trade anywhere in the Mediterranean, the Barbary States wanted you to pay “tribute,” and as long as the checks cleared, the pirates wouldn’t hassle your ships. For a while, everyone paid the pirates off.

All of that shit stopped on a dime (or nickel!) when Jefferson took office. Upon Jefferson’s inauguration, the Barbary States demanded over $200,000 from the new administration, and Jefferson responded with the nineteenth-century version of “Go fuck yourself, pirates” (in sum: “Verily, good gentlemen of Barbary, go forth and fornicate upon thyself until the sun rises in the West and sets in the East”). The pirates responded with the nineteenth-century version of “No,” which meant they declared war on America.

Now, at this time, it wasn’t really clear
what
powers a president had when it came to war or defending the country. America was still
new enough that we didn’t yet have a system in place, and the Constitution wasn’t super-clear, but that didn’t stop Jefferson from sending out the newly formed American navy. Jefferson didn’t
ask;
he told Congress, “I communicate [to you] all material information on this subject … I instruct[ed] the commanders of armed American vessels to seize all vessels and goods of [those asshole pirates].” Congress couldn’t ask when Jefferson was going to send out the ships, because he already had and was only telling them as a courtesy. Congress was welcome to sit around and figure out exactly what he was allowed to do, and in the meantime he went ahead and sent out his navy to just wreck house on those pirates.

And wreck house they did. The war between America and the pirates—what became known as the “First Barbary War”—was quickly won by the United States and was the first time in history that the U.S. flag was raised on foreign land. It was also proof that America could command and win a war from home, and proof that the strength of the American military was not
just
reserved for the easy-to-fight-for cause of Independence. This was a military that knew how to fight
together
, under one flag. And who rallied those troops and made this war happen? Who started and ended a war in
just one presidential term?
Jefferson.

Still, don’t let Jefferson’s image as a badass overshadow the strength of his brilliant mind. He perfected designs for the plow, the macaroni machine, the polygraph, the dumbwaiter, and full-on invented the portable copy press, revolving chairs, and pedometers. We know he invented these things because he wrote about it in letters and his journal, but he never actually sought to get patents for any of them. This isn’t included in this chapter to make you feel inferior (though, yes, you should), it’s included because
someone
needs to give Jefferson credit for his inventions. Jefferson didn’t think anyone should hold patents over inventions, so he never once filed for a patent, even though he was one invention-making son of a bitch. These are the actions of a man guided by principle, and a man guided by principle is incredibly dangerous in a fight. If Jefferson is committed to fighting you, not only does that mean that he’s unflinchingly
convinced himself that your defeat at his hands is absolutely necessary, he’s already invented at least a
few
ways to kick your ass (though his methods likely won’t be patented, so feel free to steal some of those moves).

Of course, Jefferson wouldn’t be a badass president if he didn’t run his own life with the same iron fist he used to run America. Jefferson liked being in control, and his death was no exception. Jefferson had been sick for almost a full year before being committed to his
deathbed. On July 3, 1826, he woke up and asked, “Is it the Fourth yet?” His doctor told him that it wasn’t. Jefferson didn’t say another word, but he peacefully held out for
seventeen more hours
specifically so he could die on the Fourth of July, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wanted a dramatic exit. He had a plan, and he wasn’t going to let something as silly as old age, kidney failure, or pneumonia get in the way.

Even Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone is impressive. It’s fitting that he left detailed instructions regarding his tombstone. He designed his own marker and demanded that it read, “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, Father of the University of Virginia.” Notice anything missing? At the time of his death, Jefferson was one of only
six people in history
to serve as president of the United States of America, but he was so casual about this fact that he explicitly told people not to include it on his tombstone, because it just wasn’t a big deal to him. If “leaving your presidency off of your tombstone” isn’t the nineteenth-century equivalent of “walking away from an explosion without turning around to look at it,” then I don’t know what is.

In his lifetime, James Madison was called the “Father of the Constitution” by his peers, and while the importance of his role in shaping the laws that govern this country could not be overstated, they
really
should have called him Tiny Impossible Nightmare. But they didn’t. Because none of the people who gave out nicknames in the 1700s were worth a damn.

Sure, Madison had one of the sharpest political minds America would ever have access to, but to understand how impressive Madison was, we need to spend some time talking about how terrible he was. Madison’s life is one defined by being great at the things he was supposed to be bad at. He looked like anything
but
a president; he was 5’4” and only broke 100 lbs on his
best day
and before his midafternoon poop. His speaking voice was high and weak, so much so that reporters who came to see him speak often left blanks in their transcripts when they couldn’t hear him, or simply gave up out
of frustration. The man was a
president
, but his voice was so pansy-assed that reporters just couldn’t be bothered.

It wasn’t only that Madison’s
voice
was awful; for a very long time, the things he used his voice to say were
also
terrible. Madison was part of a poetry/debate club in college and his work was
so bad
that he was the laughingstock of the nerd club. When he heard his work read out loud, he was so embarrassed that he vowed never to be a part of something like that again. Picture that. A 5′4″, thin-voiced wuss who was the least cool member of his
college poetry club
. That is not the portrait of a future president. “A Poem Against the Tories,” one of three Madison poems that have actually survived, concludes with Madison calling his debate opponents smelly.
That was his closer
. This is supposed to be one of the brightest thinkers in history and “You stink” is the most potent weapon in his insult arsenal? Come on, Madison, just because you’re the size of a sixth grader doesn’t mean you need to ape the trash-talk of one.

That said, calling his mean opponents smelly was maybe the only thing Madison did wrong while in college. When he wasn’t wasting his time in strange, slam-poetry word-fight clubs, Madison was getting only four hours of sleep every night. Not because, like most college students, he wanted to party and eat too much; he simply wanted to get two years of work done in a single year so he could graduate earlier. And he did it.
While at Princeton
.

But he didn’t major in fighting at Princeton, and you’re getting a crash course right now, which means
Advantage: You
. Also, unless you’re a child (don’t be, there are bad words in this book), you’re most likely fucking taller than Madison. Still, he may have been small, but he was
fierce
, like Napoleon, or a goblin. Despite or perhaps because of his height, Madison exercised regularly to make sure that his tiny frame could pack a punch. Unfortunately (for him, not you), he also suffered from epilepsy and arthritis, and there’s no amount of exercising one can do to overcome that. One historian said he had the “frail and discernibly fragile appearance of a career librarian or a schoolmaster, forever lingering on the edge of some fatal ailment.” Doesn’t sound like much of a fighter.