Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (16 page)

The lessons Jefferson was learning—painfully—in Virginia would help him immensely in later years when his responsibilities were even larger. Boldness and decisiveness were sometimes virtues in a leader. Having failed to be either bold or decisive during the invasions of Virginia, he gained valuable experience about the price of waiting. At the time, however, he could not have known that one day he would owe something of his presidential success to his failures of 1781.

THIRTEEN

REDCOATS AT MONTICELLO

Such terror and confusion you have no idea of. Governor, Council, everybody scampering.

—B
ETSY
A
MBLER
, daughter of Rebecca Burwell

J
EFFERSON
'
S
V
IRGINIA
WAS
TEETERING
in the face of British force. Lord Cornwallis and Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who was noted for his ferocious tactics, turned their attention toward the state in the late spring of 1781. Fearing the conquering redcoats, Governor Jefferson and the Virginia General Assembly retreated from Richmond to Charlottesville, but even there the legislature could barely muster a quorum.

In this difficult period the Jeffersons endured a by-now all-too-familiar tragedy: the death of yet another child—three of their children had now died. This one, Lucy Elizabeth, not quite six months old, died at about ten o'clock on an April morning in 1781. Jefferson chose to stay with Patty the next day, declining to attend a meeting of the state council. The weather was bad in any event, Jefferson wrote his colleagues, “and there being nothing that I know of very pressing, and Mrs. Jefferson in a situation in which I would not wish to leave her, I shall not attend today.”

His day with Patty as they grieved together was a rare moment of domestic communion, for there were now few respites from the press of business. By Monday, May 28, 1781, Jefferson knew a reckoning was at hand. British troops were advancing inland, toward Charlottesville. There were riots over a draft for militiamen across Virginia. Jefferson was reduced to asking George Washington for the general's personal assistance.

As things stood, Jefferson wrote to Washington, with an inadequate militia facing British regulars, “the minds of the people” could conceive of “no human power … to ward off” the inevitable victory of British forces. Only Washington's “appearance among them, I say, would restore full confidence of salvation, and would render them equal to whatever is not impossible.”

Jefferson wrote these words on the twenty-eighth, and he intended to stand down as governor at the expiration of his term a few days hence, on June 2. As he told Washington, his “long declared resolution of relinquishing [the governorship] to abler hands has prepared my way for retirement to a private station.”

To speak of private stations and the end of one's burdens (what he called “the labors of my office”) in such an emergency does not put Jefferson in a flattering light. With the assembly on the run and the state in jeopardy, one wishes Jefferson had transformed himself into a heroic savior on horseback, rallying Virginians to the field to stop the British.

He was not, however, a savior on horseback. The tragedy of the British invasion of Virginia in the spring of 1781 was that no patriot leader rose to the occasion to repel Arnold, Cornwallis, or Tarleton. The war was too diffuse, the circumstances too fluid to be in anyone's control—even Jefferson's, and he had spent the previous two years working on the military defense of Virginia's borders.

H
e spent Saturday, June 2, 1781 at Monticello with his family and houseguests, including the speakers of the Virginia House and Senate. The lawmakers were availing themselves of Jefferson's hospitality as they waited for the legislative session scheduled to take place in Charlottesville on Monday, June 4. Jefferson's successor was to be elected at this meeting.

Jefferson's considered counsel to his colleagues in the government was that they elect Thomas Nelson, Jr., a man with political and military experience. It was time, Jefferson said, for a “union of the civil and military power in the same hands”—a move that the previous two years had taught him “would greatly facilitate military measures.”

Unbeknownst to the party at Monticello, Cornwallis had ordered Tarleton to pursue the government to Charlottesville. Riding fast, the British dragoons passed the Cuckoo Tavern in Louisa on Sunday, June 3, 1781. It was late—somewhere between nine and ten p.m.—when the British rode by. A giant of a Virginia militiaman named Jack Jouett (said to be six foot four and 220 pounds) was in Louisa. Realizing that the enemy was en route to capture Jefferson, Jouett broke away for a daring nighttime ride of forty miles.

Mounted on a horse said to be “the best and fleetest of foot of any nag in seven counties,” Jouett crashed through the wilderness. Careering through woodlands and along ridges, Jouett avoided well-known roads in order to stay clear of the enemy. According to one account, his face was “cruelly lashed by tree-branches as he rode forward, and scars which are said to have remained the rest of his life were the result of lacerations sustained from these low-hanging limbs.” The British broke their march at a plantation around eleven p.m. There they rested for about three hours, thus giving Jouett a bit of time. Tarleton stopped again deep in the night to set fire to a wagon train of supplies en route to confronting the rebel troops.

Jouett arrived at Monticello just before dawn and told Jefferson of the impending strike. Coolly, Jefferson ordered breakfast served to the household, summoned a carriage for his family, and bade farewell to the legislators, who descended the mountain back to Charlottesville. Patty and the two children and a number of slaves set out in search of safety at neighboring plantations.

At Monticello, Jefferson was largely alone. At least two slaves were still there—one was Martin Hemings—and were hiding silver in anticipation of the raid. Jefferson tried to rescue his documents; “In preparing for flight, I shoved in papers where I could.”

He then did something in character. He decided to see things for himself. His instincts for control and for action drove him from Monticello to a neighboring peak known both as Montalto and as Carters Mountain. He took his spyglass with him. Looking out at Charlottesville he did not note anything extraordinary. He turned to go, but realized that his sword cane had slipped to the ground. As he retrieved it, his curiosity got the better of him. He peered through his glass again.

That was when he saw the British.

B
ack at Monticello, Jefferson mounted his best horse, Caractacus, and took off after his family. The redcoats arrived five minutes after he left. One cocked a pistol, aimed it at Martin Hemings's chest, and demanded to be told where Jefferson was or he would fire. “Fire away, then,” Hemings said.

There would be no gunfire at Monticello during its brief occupation by the British, nor would there be any looting. (One exception: The redcoats drank some of Jefferson's wine; legend has it that they used it to toast George III's birthday.) Cornwallis was far less circumspect about Jefferson's other plantations, especially Elk Hill, where the British scattered his slaves and burned crops. Twenty-three of Jefferson's slaves ran away from his plantations amid the Tarleton-Cornwallis invasion; at least fifteen of these died of disease in British camps at Yorktown or Portsmouth.

Riding away from Monticello, Jefferson caught up with Patty and the children, and they ultimately sought refuge at Poplar Forest, the family's Bedford County estate. His family was safe, and he was safe.

His reputation was not.

O
n Tuesday, June 12, 1781, the legislature, now meeting at Trinity Church in Staunton, Virginia, expressed its gratitude to Jack Jouett with a brace of pistols and a sword—tokens to honor his brave journey through the darkness. It also passed a resolution that cut Jefferson to the core:

Resolved,
That at the next session of the Assembly an inquiry be made into the conduct of the Executive of this State for the last twelve months.

Jefferson could imagine nothing worse. His courage and his competence were both in the dock. It was bad enough that such calamities had struck while he was in office. Though he might not have admitted it even to himself as he played and replayed recent history in his mind, he must have known that two invasions and the chasing of the state government from Charlottesville to Staunton were debacles to be charged to his political account. Those he could probably handle. George Washington's standing had survived defeats. What he needed was time—time to decide in tranquillity how best to serve the cause in which he so believed.

Instead he was now forced into a fight over his own past. He did not bother to conceal his anger. In a tart note, Jefferson wrote that since the motion “could not be intended just to stab a reputation by a general suggestion under a bare expectation that facts might be afterwards hunted up to bolster it, I hope you will not think me improper in asking the favor of you to specify to me the unfortunate passages in my conduct which you mean to adduce against me.”

In the same Trinity Church session in which the lawmakers voted to investigate Jefferson, they debated a motion that implicitly suggested the fault for the chaos of the invasions lay not with the officeholder but with the office itself. It was argued that the time had come for a “dictator … who should have the power of disposing of the lives and fortunes of the citizens thereof without being subject to account.”

Patrick Henry spoke in favor of the “dictator” measure, saying that executive, whatever he was called, needed to be “armed with such powers … necessary to restrain the unbridled fury of a licentious enemy.” The motion and the debate tend to exculpate Jefferson, suggesting as they do that those closest to the events believed the problems of authority were structural. The problem had been the governorship, not the governor. (The motion failed, narrowly.)

Accounts of Jefferson's terrible time as governor often fail to try to reconcile the two votes. The first, the vote for an inquiry, amounted to an indictment of Jefferson's conduct. Yet the second, the vote for new powers for Jefferson's successors, amounted to a tacit admission that Jefferson had not possessed authority commensurate with the challenges of the time. To blame Jefferson for failure in an executive office while simultaneously attempting to reform that office logically shifts responsibility from the individual to the institution.

Logic, however, is rarely a big part of politics. Jefferson's foes saw an opportunity to embarrass him. Though the house inquiry was short-lived—the assembly ended up commending, not condemning, Jefferson—the episode lived on in the mind of Jefferson and in the memories of his political opponents. His bitterness at the charge that he had been derelict in his duty was palpable. There was, Jefferson said, “no foundation” for any official aspersion.

A
nother opportunity for Jefferson to serve as an envoy in France came in September—a further sign that Jefferson's performance as governor, while no one's finest hour (with the possible exceptions of Jouett and of Martin Hemings), was not politically fatal. Yet Jefferson declined the diplomatic appointment. He had, he said, “taken my final leave of everything of that nature, have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will evermore separate me.”

With this disinterested assertion of bucolic retirement, though, came a determination to stay in Virginia politics long enough to clear his name. “A desire to leave public office with a reputation not more blotted than it has deserved will oblige me to emerge at the next session of our assembly and perhaps to accept of a seat in it, but as I go with a single object, I shall withdraw when that shall be accomplished,” he said in September 1781. He was to stay out of office for about a year and a half—a period in which he suffered much from the pain of the rumors about his governorship. Yet he could never totally withdraw from the world—and the world's opinion still mattered to him.

I
n October 1781, the Americans triumphed at Yorktown, effectively ending the war. Still captive, as were several other Jefferson slaves, Isaac Granger Jefferson witnessed the battle. “There was tremendous firing and smoke—seemed like heaven and earth was come together,” he recalled. He remembered hearing the cries of the wounded. “When the smoke blow off, you see the dead men laying on the ground.”

The war was won, and to most appearances, Thomas Jefferson had triumphed, his cause vindicated and victorious. A French visitor to Monticello in 1782, the Marquis de Chastellux, came away dazzled by its master.

Let me describe to you a man, not yet forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance, but whose mind and understanding are ample substitutes for every exterior grace. An American, who without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesman. A senator of America, who sat for two years in that famous Congress which brought about the revolution … a governor of Virginia, who filled this difficult station during the invasions of Arnold, of Phillips, and of Cornwallis; a philosopher, in voluntary retirement from the world and public business because he loves the world, inasmuch only as he can flatter himself with being useful to mankind.… For no object had escaped Mr. Jefferson; and it seemed as if from his youth he had placed his mind, as he has done his house, on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.

This was how Jefferson wanted to be seen. The reality, he felt, was rather different. He believed himself a failure. Even the American victory could not take Jefferson's mind completely off his controversial final hours as governor. He told James Monroe that one of the worst aspects of the legislative inquiry was the possibility that the public would believe that he “stood arraigned for treasons of the heart and not mere weakness of the head.” Attacks on his service, he said, “had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”

He added a final note: “Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family.” The child was named Lucy Elizabeth, after the sister who had died not long before her own birth. Patty had no more strength. There were no reserves to draw on, no means by which to rally. “She has been ever since,” Jefferson said, “and still continues, very dangerously ill.”