Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (13 page)

Jefferson spared nothing in his attacks on England and on George III, including harsh language condemning the slave trade. Despite his defeats on antislavery measures in Virginia, both in court and in the House of Burgesses, Jefferson tried once more to lead an American institution—in this case, the Continental Congress—to a relatively progressive position on slavery.

Yet he failed again. Adams long remembered these passages of Jefferson's.

A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose.…

We reported it to the committee.… We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson's handwriting, as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was.

The declaration was introduced on Friday, June 28, 1776, and debate began on Monday, July 1. As Adams remembered, large passages were cut, irritating Jefferson. “The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many,” he said. “For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offense.”

The denunciation of slavery was also eliminated. “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving [of] the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and to Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it,” said Jefferson. “Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” He had tried anew on slavery and fallen short anew. His political instinct to fight only those battles he believed he could win now took even firmer hold.

Jefferson hated being edited by such a large group. He fairly writhed as he sat in the Pennsylvania State House, listening to member after member offering his thoughts, wanting to change this and cut that. Benjamin Franklin had sufficiently conquered his gout to attend the sessions. Sympathetic about Jefferson's evident distress, Franklin tried to soothe his young colleague, to whom every suggestion and demand on the floor was a fresh agony, as though each objection was directed not at the document but at Jefferson himself. As Franklin told Jefferson, “I have made it a rule, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.” Yet for all his momentary discomfort, Jefferson exercised an extraordinary measure of power by taking on drafting duties: However many changes came in, it was still his voice and vision at the core of the enterprise.

On Tuesday, July 2, 1776, the delegates voted to adopt the resolution for independence. Two days later, on a pleasant summertime Thursday—at midday the temperature was 76 degrees—they ratified the declaration. Overnight the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap produced the approved text on broadside, creating the first set of published copies; on July 6, Benjamin Towne, publisher of
The
Pennsylvania Evening Post,
ran the declaration on his front page.

The following Monday, July 8, the news was announced in Philadelphia in front of the State House; the crowd cheered, “God bless the free states of North America!”

It was a nervous time. The delegates knew they had committed themselves to a treasonous course. They relieved the tension where they could, in small moments of grim levity. Horseflies buzzed through the Pennsylvania State House from a nearby stable, Jefferson said in later years, bedeviling what James Parton called “the silk-stockinged legs of honorable members. Handkerchief in hand, they lashed the flies with such vigor as they could command
 … 
but the annoyance became at length so extreme as to render them impatient of delay, and they made haste to bring the momentous business to a conclusion.”

Jefferson loved the story of an exchange between the fat Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and the wispy Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. “Gerry, when the hanging comes, I shall have the advantage; you'll kick in the air half an hour after it is all over with me!”

In later years there was much back-and-forth over the declaration and its significance, with John Adams, jealous of Jefferson's authorial fame, complaining that the declaration was “a theatrical show,” not a substantive document. “Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that, i.e. all the glory of it,” Adams remarked in 1811.

The revolutionary nature of Jefferson's words was, nevertheless, clear from the beginning. With the power of the pen, he had articulated a new premise for the government of humanity: that all men were created equal. He basically meant all white men, especially propertied ones, but the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, for one, recognized the import of the document adopted in Philadelphia. Attacking the declaration from London, Bentham scoffed at the idea that every man had a natural, God-given right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; such assertions, Bentham said, were “absurd and visionary,” and he likened the American political thinking to the old New England fury over witchcraft.

“ ‘
All men,
' they tell us, ‘are created equal,' ” Bentham wrote. “This surely is a new discovery; now, for the first time, we learn, that a child, at the moment of his birth, has the same quantity of
natural
power as the parent, the same quantity of
political
power as the magistrate.”

Ultimately, though, this
was
the essential American view. Bentham had read Jefferson right. Jefferson's pride in authorship, meanwhile, was contemporaneous and clear. He dispatched copies of his original version to friends. “You will judge whether it is the better or worse for the critics,” he wrote a colleague. His friend John Page reassured Jefferson by complimenting him, and then Page suggested, gently, that the event of independence transcended the querulous editors of the Pennsylvania State House. “I am highly pleased with your Declaration,” said Page. “God preserve the United States. We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?”

TEN

THE PULL OF DUTY

I pray you to come. I am under a sacred obligation to go home.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
to Richard Henry Lee, 1776

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—American motto suggested by Jefferson

I
N
1776,
WITH
J
EFFERSON
at work in the cause of the nation in Philadelphia, Patty suffered a disastrous miscarriage. In the same days and weeks in which he drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson could not rest easy about his wife, desperately watching out for letters from her hand. “I wish I could be better satisfied on the point of Patty's recovery,” he wrote a brother-in-law in July 1776. “I had not heard from her at all for two posts before, and no letter from herself now.”

Jefferson hated not hearing, and he feared the worst. His 1772 marriage had proved an enviable one; Patty Jefferson was a good and loving wife. She was, a granddaughter wrote, “a favorite with her husband's sisters (we all know that this is a delicate and difficult relation), with his family generally, and with her neighbors.… She commanded his respect by her good sense and domestic virtues, and his admiration and love by her wit, her vivacity, and her agreeable person and manners.”

Jefferson knew that it was his duty to remain in Philadelphia, and he felt inescapably drawn to political life. Still, he longed to be home with his wife and family.

W
hen we think of Jefferson in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, we think of a philosopher at work with a quill pen and an agile mind shaped by, and suffused with, Enlightenment ideas about the rights of man. The drafting of the Declaration of Independence, however, was only one of many things that Jefferson did and that happened around him in those critical months. The onslaught of military reports, wartime supply issues, and intelligence and rumor about subversion from within taught him about the centrality of national security, the dangers of conspiracy, and the eternal need to manage public opinion.

The work was exhausting. The politics of the moment were fraught with fears over conspiracies, of Loyalists plotting at home, and of Indian attacks on the frontier. Nothing—and no one—was to be counted on.

It was a season of schemes and secrets. In late June came word of a Loyalist plot in New York within the Continental army to kill George Washington and desert the American cause. The mayor of New York was said to be part of the conspiracy. A member of Washington's personal bodyguard detail was condemned to death. The British, meanwhile, were gathering force.

Depressed and harried, Jefferson could find little good news. “Our camps recruit slowly, amazing slowly,” he told Richard Henry Lee in July. “God knows in what it will end.”

In the context of the time—the drafting of the declaration, which was treason, and the ongoing, not particularly successful military operations—the atmosphere in America was charged. On learning that he had received the fewest votes of any Virginia incumbent in his reelection to the Continental Congress, Jefferson assumed that he had been criticized and undermined at home. “It is a painful situation to be 300 miles from one's country, and thereby open to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defense,” he said.

Jefferson believed the work of his hands would vindicate him. “If any doubt has arisen as to me, my country will have my political creed in the form of a ‘Declaration etc' which I was lately directed to draw.”

V
irginians were particularly frustrated by a war with the Cherokees. Jefferson's views of Native Americans were a bit more nuanced than those of many of his fellow white contemporaries, but only a bit. Fascinated by Indian language and culture, Jefferson often sought artifacts and information to satisfy a genuine curiosity about America's original inhabitants. He believed Indians a noble race. At his core, though, Jefferson shared the prevailing views of white landowners: that Indian lands were destined to belong to whites, and the Indians themselves should be inculcated in the ways of the whites.

Tribes who allied with Britain (or with any of the other European powers) were direct threats to the Revolutionary enterprise. In August 1776, Jefferson reacted viscerally to word of Cherokee assaults to the south. “Nothing will reduce these wretches as soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country,” Jefferson wrote. “But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi.” It was a telling reaction, one that foreshadowed the fate of a race.

I
n the summer of 1776 Jefferson spent time planning for the difficult work of government. In one case he wrote a proposed constitution for Virginia. In another, he closely followed the Congress's debates over a national government and the content of what Jefferson referred to as “the articles of confederation.”

Jefferson also helped draft rules of procedure for the Congress. His suggestions speak to a hunger for order and the appearance of civility: “No Member shall read any printed paper in the House during the sitting thereof without Leave of the Congress.” Another: “No Member in coming into the House or in removing from his Place shall pass between the President and the Member then speaking.” And another: “When the House is sitting no Member shall speak [or whisper] to another as to interrupt any Member who may be speaking in the Debate.”

Jefferson believed civility an important political virtue, and he largely practiced what he preached. He and John Adams once disagreed on the floor over a proposal to call for a day of prayer. Though he had seen the good uses of public appeals to religious sentiments in Virginia, Jefferson grew ever more uncomfortable with frequent political resorts to orthodox belief. “You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson's objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments from a gentleman whom you so highly respected and with whom you agreed upon so many subjects, and that it was the only instance you had ever known of a man of sound sense and real genius that was an enemy to Christianity,” Benjamin Rush recalled to Adams years later. “You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.”

Jefferson understood a timeless truth: that politics is kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting, and the morning's foe may well be the afternoon's friend.

H
is wife's health remained such a concern that Jefferson sought to leave Philadelphia to return to Patty in Virginia. “I receive by every post such accounts of the state of Mrs. Jefferson's health, that it will be impossible for me to disappoint her expectation of seeing me at the time I have promised, which supposed my leaving this place on the 11th of next month,” he wrote Richard Henry Lee. The letter finished, Jefferson added a postscript begging Lee to come relieve him.

Yet Jefferson had to stay to keep Virginia's quorum. He hated it. “I am under the painful necessity of putting off my departure, notwithstanding the unfavorable situation of Mrs. Jefferson's health,” he told John Page in August.

T
here is no mistaking how significant Jefferson and his colleagues believed the scale of the American struggle to be. One of Jefferson's duties in Philadelphia was the design of a seal for the new nation, a task he shared with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

Reacting to a proposal of Franklin's that invoked the parting of the Red Sea, Jefferson suggested: “Pharaoh sitting in an open chariot, a crown on his head and a sword in his hand passing through the divided waters of the Red Sea in pursuit of the Israelites: rays from a pillar of fire in the cloud, expressive of the divine presence, and command, reaching to Moses who stands on the shore and, extending his hand over the sea, causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh. Motto: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The Founders were Moses; George III was Pharaoh; Americans were the Israelites being led from bondage.

In truth the British demands on the colonists were hardly outrageous. The expense of defending the borders was considerable; American wealth was substantial; and Edmund Burke made a compelling case in London for “virtual representation”—the argument that the king and Parliament were stewards of the whole empire whether particular colonists could vote for members of the House of Commons or not.

So why did the colonists take such extreme steps—arming themselves and putting their lives and their families' lives at risk? There is no single answer. The intellectual and political legacy of the English Civil War was vital, for it was both a beacon and a warning. John Locke and others articulated what became known as the liberal tradition—the collection of insights and convictions that emphasized individual freedom in civic, economic, and religious life. The classical republican ethos that centered on virtue, harmony, balance, and fear of corruption had come to the Anglo-American world through Renaissance Florence, where Machiavelli and others sought to preserve the best of the ancient republics. The revivals of the First Great Awakening were critical, too, for the preaching of the mid-eighteenth century tended to focus on the centrality of the individual soul in relation to God. It was a Protestant movement, and for all its variations, Protestantism was largely about the importance of all believers, not the importance of priests and bishops and eccleisastical systems. Then there was capitalism and its discontents. Americans were blessed with enormous natural resources and endless economic energy, yet many—including Jefferson—found themselves in perpetual debt to British creditors.

Scholars often wish to isolate one of these phenomena as the origin of the Revolution. It seems most convincing, though, to think of Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism via the Renaissance, the Great Awakening, the promise of capitalism, and the hatred of debt (and the British merchants and banks who were owed the debts) as tributaries that all helped form the larger rushing river of the American Revolution.

The debate over declaring independence took on such significance in part because a permanent break with London was not foreordained. For years colonists chose to believe that the monarchy was in the hands of nefarious, anti-American ministers. The hope from the 1750s to 1776 was that somehow the sovereign would put things to rights. It is a measure of the confidence Jefferson had in this possibility, for instance, that he maintained a tone of respect and deference to George III in his 1774
Summary View
. And it is a measure of the depth of his sense of betrayal and disappointment in the king that the Declaration of Independence struck such virulent antimonarchical notes.

Jefferson's service in the Congress in 1776 left him thoroughly versed in the ways and means politics. He had defined an ideal in the declaration, using words to transform principle into policy, and he had lived with the reality of managing both a war and a fledgling government. A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled. It was a task that Jefferson, at the age of thirty-three, had found that he liked. He had found out something else, too. He was good at it.

T
he leaves were just beginning to turn as Jefferson rode from Philadelphia to Monticello in the early autumn of 1776. At home on the mountaintop, he was relieved to be with his wife and with little Patsy, who celebrated her fourth birthday in the last week of September.

The action, though, was elsewhere—in Philadelphia, of course, and in Williamsburg, where state delegates were at work on creating a new government for Virginia. Jefferson had long been exultant about the prospect of building a new Virginian order. He longed to be in the thick of shaping the government once led by Peyton Randolph and mastered by Wythe.

Torn between the joys and demands of family and the demands and excitements of statecraft, he quickly found that his thoughts and emotions changed with the hour:
I must go home; I must engage; I must go home; I must engage,
and back and forth, and back and forth. His wife was still in precarious health, her frequent pregnancies exacerbating matters.

In Williamsburg, meanwhile, there was the remaking of Virginia; in Philadelphia, the making of a nation; and everywhere there was war.

His contemporaries believed Jefferson essential. The Virginia lawyer Edmund Pendleton looked forward to having Jefferson back in Williamsburg as the work of the new government began. “I hope you'll get cured of your wish to retire so early in life from the memory of man, and exercise your talents for the nurture of our new constitution, which will require all the attention of its friends to prune exuberances and cherish the plant,” Pendleton wrote. Virginia needed him.

Jefferson decided he could serve in Williamsburg and still be attentive to his family. He and Patty accepted an offer from George and Elizabeth Wythe to use the Wythe house on the green in Williamsburg. This meant that Jefferson could take his family with him to Williamsburg, an arrangement that was not possible in far-off Philadelphia. The young family settled into the handsome brick house, giving Jefferson a rare hour of balance between his public and private lives. He spent his nonworking hours with Patty and Patsy. They slept upstairs, entertained on the first floor, and enjoyed the symmetrical gardens.

It was perfect.

But only for a moment.