Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (14 page)

ELEVEN

AN AGENDA FOR LIBERTY

It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
, on freedom of religion

I
N
W
ILLIAMSBURG
, Jefferson soon faced a new decision. The Congress needed reliable men to represent America's interests in France and elected a delegation to go to Paris to make an alliance between the French and the Americans. On the floor of the Pennsylvania State House, the representatives chose to entrust the mission to Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, to Silas Deane of Connecticut—and to Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.

Without a successful alliance with France, the outmatched Americans were likely to lose the war. Britain was simply too strong. There were worries, moreover, that Russia might dispatch troops to aid the British, overwhelming the patriots. Writing as president of the Congress, John Hancock assumed Jefferson's acceptance of the mission to France, asking him “to acquaint me, by the return of the express … at what time and place it will be most convenient for you to embark.” The express reached Jefferson in Williamsburg, where he was with his family and at work on the new government of Virginia.

He asked the messenger to await his reply.

T
hus began three days of agony. One of the benefits of being in Williamsburg was that Patty could be with him. Given her health, she could not go to France. If he went to Paris, he would be making a decision that would separate them once more. How could he sail the Atlantic, and possibly never see her again?

Yet how could Jefferson say no to one of the great assignments—one of the great honors—of the age? Power, drama, glamour were at hand; all could be savored while he engaged in serious, essential public service. He had traveled the world in his imagination for so long. Here was the opportunity to do it not only in dreams but in fact.

The messenger waited. It was temptation on a sweeping scale. Jefferson loved the esteem the selection implied. “It would argue great insensibility in me could I receive with indifference so confidential an appointment from your body,” he would write Hancock. “My thanks are a poor return for the partiality they have been pleased to entertain for me.” He veered back and forth, talking himself first into one decision, then into another. He could not leave his family; might he bring them with him after all?

Not, he thought, with Patty's health. As excruciating as it was, he made his choice.

Jefferson loved his family; he loved Virginia; he loved his nascent nation. Raised in a tight-knit universe of kith and kin, accustomed to spending his hours reading in his father's first-floor library, singing on the banks of the Rivanna with his sister Jane, and learning to supervise his lands at his mother's side, he cherished his domestic worlds while being simultaneously drawn to politics.

In the fall of 1776, he could not have both in France; he could in Virginia.

He called the messenger. “No cares for my own person, nor yet for my private affairs would have induced one moment's hesitation to accept the charge,” he wrote in a note to Hancock. “But circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my family, such as neither permit me to leave nor to carry it, compel me to ask leave to decline a service so honorable and at the same time so important to the American cause.”

J
efferson spent the period after the writing of the Declaration of Independence learning how to translate ideas about human nature into political action. Like the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution during the Stamp Act crisis, the declaration had taught him the power of language in the art of leadership. To project a vision of what might be and to inspire people to share that vision was, and is, an essential element of statesmanship. So, too, was the capacity to exert one's will in the legislative arena, convincing other politicians to enlist in a cause.

October 1776 marked the beginning of Jefferson's pursuit of a remarkable legislative agenda for liberty in Virginia. With Patty in Williamsburg with him, he fought to transform the promise of the Declaration of Independence into reality in a series of bills in the new General Assembly.

For him politics was informed by philosophy, but one could achieve the good only by putting philosophy into action. To do so required the acquisition of power. He moved carefully in Williamsburg, first introducing bills in order to test “the strength of the general pulse of reformation.” Satisfied that the lawmakers were, in fact, interested in a new order, Jefferson pressed on—but only after becoming sure of his ground.

As a delegate to the General Assembly in Williamsburg and through his consistent work among his fellow Virginians, cajoling and seeking to convince, Jefferson put himself in a position to effect genuine change—to make the world into something it had not been before.

J
efferson's first significant initiative in Williamsburg in the fall of 1776 was a strike against entail and primogeniture, ancient conventions under which large landowners were compelled to pass their property to a single heir, creating, in Jefferson's words, “a distinct set of families, who, being privileged by law in the perpetuation of their wealth were thus formed into a patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments.” Jefferson had benefited from just this system but believed the greater good demanded reform.

No part of the legal code governing life in Virginia went unexamined. There were bills altering criminal justice by ending the harshest of punishments (including limiting the death penalty to murder and treason); for creating a system of general public education to broaden opportunities for many white Virginians; for speeding the naturalization of the foreign-born into citizens (Jefferson favored a two-year residence requirement).

As he worked, Jefferson took note of a newcomer on the political scene, a young, diminutive man who had grown up near Orange, Virginia, about thirty miles northeast of Charlottesville. He was twenty-five; Jefferson was thirty-three. He was small; Jefferson was tall. He was assiduously understated; Jefferson was given to making grand pronouncements.

The newcomer, James Madison, was to become Thomas Jefferson's most trusted and invaluable counselor. Born in 1751 to tobacco-growing gentry, Madison had gone north to be educated at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Quiet, intense, and tireless, Madison “acquired a habit of self-possession, which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous and discriminating mind, and of his extensive information, and rendered him the first of every assembly afterwards, of which he became a member,” Jefferson recalled.

When Madison became Jefferson's successor as president of the United States three and a half decades later, the writer Washington Irving would describe him as “but a withered little apple-John.” In Madison's case appearances were misleading. Despite his small stature, Madison possessed a powerful political personality. As Jefferson once observed: “Never wandering from his subject into vain declamation, but pursuing it closely, in language pure, classical, and copious, soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of expression,” Madison rose to national greatness—and through loyal and wise counsel, Madison was an invaluable architect of Jefferson's own career.

Their first battle together was waged in Virginia over freedom of religion. As a student of William Small's at William and Mary, Jefferson had become a reader of several Enlightenment-era skeptics about traditional Christianity. (Madison shared Jefferson's convictions about the necessity of freedom of conscience.) Jefferson had come to believe the apostolic faith was superstitious and therefore unreasonable—one of the most damning of Jeffersonian indictments.

In his
Notes on the State of Virginia,
a book written a few years after his service revising the laws in the General Assembly, Jefferson was honest about his state's abysmal record on liberty of conscience. It was a crime in Virginia not to baptize infants in the Anglican church; dissenters were denied office, civil or military; children could be taken from their parents if the parents failed to profess the prescribed creeds. It was said that James Madison heard Baptist ministers preaching from prison in these years. The church was all too evidently an institution as susceptible to corruption as any other. In 1767, Jefferson was involved in a case in which the parishioners of St. Anne's in Albemarle—the Monticello parish—sought to remove the Reverend John Ramsay for drunkenness and the attempted seduction of a woman not his wife. One allegation: that Ramsay “got drunk with the sacrament wine.”

Though Jefferson had long cultivated a skeptical religious worldview, he undertook his work in the General Assembly because of freedom, not because of a lack of faith. In political terms, Jefferson believed it unjust (and unwise) to use public funds to support an established church and to link civil rights to religious observance. He said such a system led to “spiritual tyranny.” In theological terms, according to notes he made on John Locke, Jefferson concurred with a Christian tradition that held the church should not depend on state-enforced compulsion. Summarizing Locke, Jefferson wrote that “our Savior chose not to propagate his religion by temporal punishments or civil incapacitation”; had Jesus chosen to do so, “it was in his almighty power” to force belief. Instead, “he chose to … extend it by its influence on reason, thereby showing to others how [they] should proceed.” Or as Jefferson's notes on the issue say:

Obj[ection]. Religion will decline if not supported

Ans[wer]. Gates of Hell shall not prevail

It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.

Dissenters across Virginia petitioned the assembly for relief from legislated fealty to the Anglican Church in the autumn of 1776. The cries for religious liberty, Jefferson recalled, “brought on the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.” Edmund Pendleton and Robert Carter Nicholas—“honest men, but zealous churchmen,” as Jefferson called them—supported the established church. It took incremental legislation and several years, but in the end, in 1786, a statute for religious liberty from Jefferson's pen became law. The bill, Jefferson said, was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

S
lavery was perhaps the only issue more emotionally and politically charged in Virginia than religion. Jefferson's experience with the question of emancipation in the General Assembly affirmed the tragic view that he had come to when he had earlier failed to make progress against slavery in the House of Burgesses—a view further validated when the delegates to the Continental Congress had cut his attack on the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence.

At the General Assembly, as part of the revisal of the laws, Jefferson and his allies prepared an amendment stipulating “the freedom of all [slaves] born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age”—deportation because it was inconceivable to Jefferson that free whites and free blacks could live together peaceably.

Recalling the episode in his retirement at Monticello after he served as president, Jefferson wrote, “It was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition [of emancipation and deportation], nor will it bear it even at this day.” Jefferson took a bleak view. “Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow,” he wrote in retirement, reflecting on the General Assembly days. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

Jefferson was never able to move public opinion on slavery. His powers failed him—and they failed America.

W
hether there would be an independent America to stand “among the powers of the earth” (as Jefferson had put it in the Declaration of Independence) at all was an open question as 1776 ended. The year closed much as it had begun: in uncertainty and danger. “The enemy,” a correspondent told Jefferson from the American camp on the Delaware River, were “like locusts.”

George Washington's army did what it could, but the military situation was dire. “No man … ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means of extricating himself than I have,” Washington said at the end of the year. The American enterprise seemed unlikely to survive the winter.

Worries about destruction from British forces within were constant. Richard Henry Lee told Jefferson of reports that Germany was attempting to supply Tories in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. The plan, Lee told Jefferson, was for the British officer John Burgoyne, with “10,000 men chiefly Germans,” to attack Virginia and Maryland. “The Southern and Middle colonies [were then] to be put under
military government
.”

H
is work in Williamsburg at the General Assembly done for the season, Jefferson moved his family—Patty was again pregnant—back to Monticello, where, on Wednesday, May 28, 1777, Patty gave birth to a son.

The little boy lived only seventeen days. If the Jeffersons gave him a name it does not survive. In their grief they sought consolation in each other, for Patty was soon pregnant again. At home on the first of August 1778, at one-thirty in the morning, Patty gave birth to a little girl who was baptized Mary and called Polly. She was to become the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Jefferson other than her older sister Patsy to survive into adulthood.

Despite her illnesses and pregnancies, Patty Jefferson remained resilient, recording the domestic details of life at Monticello in an account book. Her handwriting was strong and clear. There are doodles, too, suggesting a dreaminess and an active imagination. As in the case of her husband, there was also a perfectionist streak. According to a granddaughter, a book of music that Patty Jefferson copied down was “free from blot and blemish”—which, taken together with her notes on the household, “told of neatness, order, good housewifery and womanly accomplishment.” The description went on: “She was not only an excellent housekeeper and notable mistress of a family, but a graceful, ladylike and accomplished woman, with considerable powers of conversation, some skill in music, all the habits of good society, and the art of welcoming her husband's friends to perfection.”