Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (30 page)

Drama, Jefferson knew, was one of the prices one paid for democracy.

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efferson's love of control was evident when he was at home. He was precise and demanding about his horses. When he was younger and his mount was brought to him, he would use a white cambric handkerchief to brush the horse's shoulders. If there were dust, the horse was returned to the stables. Only the perfect would suffice.

His horses were sources of immense pleasure—he loved riding—but he also disliked animals with wills of their own, and his mask of equanimity could slip occasionally when it came to his horses. “The only impatience of temper he ever exhibited was with his horse, which he subdued to his will by a fearless application of the whip on the slightest manifestation of restiveness,” said a grandson.

His family preserved two other stories about significant displays of anger. Both outbursts were the result of being contradicted. The first came when Jefferson ordered a slave to fetch a carriage horse for an errand. Jupiter, the slave who was in charge of those horses, refused not once but twice. “Tell Jupiter to come to me at once,” Jefferson said, furious that his orders had been thwarted. The rebuke that Jupiter endured, according to the family story, was no ordinary one. It was epic, delivered by Jefferson “in tones and with a look which neither he nor the terrified bystanders ever forgot.” Jefferson's commands were not to be challenged or questioned—ever.

A second hour of fury that lived on in the family's history unfolded on a river crossing. Two ferrymen had been fighting between themselves when they took Jefferson and his daughter Patsy aboard for the passage. The peace did not last long, and soon the two men were about to become violent again. According to the story, Jefferson, “his eyes flashing,” then “snatched up an oar, and, in a voice which rung out above the angry tones of the men, flourished it over their heads.” Weapon in hand, Jefferson issued an unmistakable command. “Row for your lives, or I will knock you both overboard!”

There, in the midst of the waters, his safety and that of his daughter in danger from the quarrels of other men, Jefferson seized control and forced his will on others. “And they did row for their lives; nor, I imagine, did they soon forget the fiery looks and excited appearance of that tall weird-like-looking figure brandishing the heavy oar over their offending heads,” his granddaughter wrote. He let his true emotions show when something he loved—in this case, his daughter—was in danger.

He loved his country, too, and was growing ever more convinced that it, too, was in peril.

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f you visit me as a farmer, it must be as a condisciple: for I am but a learner; an eager one indeed but yet desperate, being too old now to learn a new art,” Jefferson wrote William Branch Giles. He liked being with old friends. “Come then … and let us take our soup and wine together every day, and talk over the stories of our youth, and the tales of other times,” he wrote one.

Madison struck at this idyll. “You ought to be preparing yourself … to hear truths which no inflexibility will be able to withstand,” Madison wrote to Jefferson in March 1795. For Madison the central truth was this: Thomas Jefferson was destined to seek the presidency of the United States.

Jefferson admitted that the subject had been on his mind. Compelled, he said, by his enemies' “continual insinuations in the public papers” that he was contending to succeed Washington, Jefferson told Madison that he had felt “my own quiet required that I should face it and examine it.” His decision, he wrote in April 1795, was no. He would not stand for the office. “The little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set still less store by a posthumous than present name.” That was not strictly true, but Jefferson liked to tell himself it was. Public men were not to be seen as anxious for office or place, and Jefferson frequently denied his self-evident drive to shape the era in which he lived.

In this springtime of 1795, though, there may have been more conviction behind his rote protestations than usual. He had been sick with rheumatism, consumed with farming and financial matters long overlooked, delighted by grandchildren, and presumably enjoying, for the first extended period of time in four years, his liaison with Sally Hemings.

He was not lying when he wrote Madison and other friends of his permanent retirement. He was finding rest and refuge at Monticello. What he himself may not have fully realized was how intimately—how naturally and unthinkingly—he remained connected to politics. By now—nearly a quarter century since his first election to the House of Burgesses—the life of the nation was as much an element of his own life as science or music or Monticello. He could no more unwind himself from the affairs of the republic than he could have chosen to cease being interested in science or books.

He needed the world of politics and of consequence. It was crucial to his health, and to his sense of self and well-being. “I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes; and that every person who retires from free communication with it is severely punished afterwards by the state of mind into which they get, and which can only be prevented by feeding our sociable principles,” Jefferson wrote to Polly after he became president. “I can speak from experience on this subject. From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives into it: and it will be a lesson I shall never forget as to myself.”

The articulation of his beliefs, the holding of office, the championing of things republican against things monarchical: Politics was not only what Thomas Jefferson practiced. It was part of who he was, even if he himself sometimes failed to see it.

In June 1795, he asked the Philadelphia editor Benjamin Franklin Bache to “make me up a set of your papers for the year 1794.” Madison sent along what he called “a fugitive publication” of his own: a pamphlet entitled
Political Observations
. William Branch Giles announced he was going to see Jefferson “before I go to winter quarters”—the Congress. In the fall, Aaron Burr of New York called at Monticello, leading to Federalist charges that the two men had “planned and approved” the Republican agenda in the ensuing Congress.

It had been a brief visit on Jefferson's mountaintop, only a single day. However few the hours they spent together this autumn, though, Jefferson and Burr were to be intimately linked for the next dozen years—first as allies, then as foes.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1756, Aaron Burr was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the theologian, preacher, and president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). Burr's father, the Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr., married Edwards's daughter Elizabeth and himself became president of the college, where his son was educated.

Handsome, charming, adventurous, and ambitious, the younger Aaron Burr was a Revolutionary officer, a lawyer, and one of the most intriguing politicians of the age. He married the widow of a British officer, Theodosia Prevost, and they had a beautiful daughter, also named Theodosia.

Burr was an architect of Republican politics in New York, rising through the ranks from the state assembly to become the state attorney general and, in 1791, U.S. senator. Mastering the mechanics of election, Burr was to prove invaluable to the Jeffersonian cause—until, in Jefferson's view, the two men's causes came into conflict in the presidential election of 1800.

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ut that still lay in the future. For now, the issue confronting politicians of every sort, and indeed the country, was the possibility of war with Britain.

John Jay's mission to London had not produced the result Jefferson had hoped. Far from it: The treaty, which President Washington received on Saturday, March 7, 1795, appeared to concede too much to London, essentially codifying the economic ties between the two nations that Hamilton had been nurturing for years.

The political reaction was swift and, for Washington, brutal. Angry crowds burned Jay in effigy; there was even talk of impeaching Washington. Jefferson despised the treaty as a Hamiltonian document, and much of the country joined him. “From North to South this monument of folly or venality is universally execrated,” Jefferson told Thomas Mann Randolph in August 1795.

Even mid-August floods could not replace the Jay Treaty as the overriding topic of the day. “So general a burst of dissatisfaction never before appeared against any transaction,” said Jefferson.

Worried that Hamilton—“really a colossus to the antirepublican party,” Jefferson called him—might somehow win the war for public opinion, Jefferson urged Madison to write against the treaty, fretting about “the quietism into which the people naturally fall, after first sensations are over.”

As Jefferson read the treaty, he saw that Hamilton had successfully managed to legislate through Jay's diplomacy. “A bolder party-stroke was never struck,” Jefferson told Madison. “For it certainly is an attempt of a party, which finds they have lost their majority in one branch of the legislature, to make a law by the aid of the other branch and the executive, under color of a treaty, which shall bind up the hands of the adverse branch from ever restraining the commerce of their patron-nation.”

The treaty was nevertheless narrowly ratified. Washington believed, as did a bare two-thirds majority of the Senate, that the pact was preferable to going to war.

The agreement with London faced an unusual additional obstacle: The House needed to approve funding for some elements of the treaty. Washington, under attack as “a supercilious tyrant” and a “ruler who tramples on the laws and Constitution,” went to the House chamber in December 1795 to deliver his annual message.

He had enjoyed more hospitable greetings. “Never, till a few months preceding this session, had the tongue of the most factious slander dared to make a public attack on his character,” wrote William Cobbett, the pamphleteer who wrote under the name Peter Porcupine. “This was the first time he had ever entered the walls of Congress without a full assurance of meeting a welcome from every heart.” Now he was looking out over a crowd of members who “were ready to thwart his measures, and present him the cup of humiliation filled to the brim.”

Yet the House joined the Senate in grudgingly voting to support the treaty. Finally, on May 6, 1796, Washington signed the Jay Treaty. “The N. England States have been ready to rise in mass against the H. of Reps.,” Madison wrote Jefferson three days after Washington signed the documents. “Such have been the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism in that quarter, that Republicanism is perfectly overwhelmed.” The day belonged to the Federalists.

The price of this diplomatic and political victory, however, was high, for the approval of the Jay Treaty by the Federalists gave the nascent Republicans a palpable and energizing sense of purpose.

They knew where to turn, and to whom.

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efferson was already thinking about the politics of the hour in practical terms, turning a scientific eye to the world around him. In notes he drafted sometime after mid-October 1795, he sketched out his sense of the state of play.

Two parties then do exist within the US. They embrace respectively the following descriptions of persons.

The Anti-republicans consist of

1. The old refugees and tories.

2. British merchants residing among us, and composing the main body of our merchants

3. American merchants trading on British capital. Another great portion.

4. Speculators and Holders in the banks and public funds.

5. Officers of the federal government with some exceptions.

6. Office-hunters, willing to give up principles for places. A numerous and noisy tribe.

7. Nervous persons, whose languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than active state of things.

The Republican part of our Union comprehends

1. The entire body of landholders throughout the United States

2. The body of laborers, not being landholders, whether in husbandry or the arts

The latter is to the aggregate of the former probably as 500 to one; but their wealth is not as disproportionate, though it is also greatly superior, and is in truth the foundation of that of their antagonists. Trifling as are the numbers of the Anti-republican party, there are circumstances which give them an appearance of strength and numbers. They all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times; they give chief employment to the newspapers, and therefore have most of them under their command. The agricultural interest is dispersed over a great extent of country, have little means of intercommunication with each other, and feeling their own strength and will, are conscious that a single exertion of these will at any time crush the machinations against their government.

Jefferson's assessment of the foe mixed fear and pride. He worried about the Federalists but believed the Republicans capable of victory whenever they chose to bestir themselves. The anxiety produced by the enemy fueled the politician's sense of urgency; the faith in the virtues of his own cause gave him the power to endure the most hopeless and despairing of moments.

On the day after Christmas, 1795, Jefferson wrote Bache to subscribe to his newspaper, the
Aurora,
as well as to other editors in Philadelphia and Richmond to begin receiving their papers. Though he had hardly left the arena, he was now unmistakably back in it.

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efferson had never doubted the power of the presidency. From his first reading of the draft Constitution while in France, he sensed that the office could become the center of action for the whole government. Experience had proved his instincts right. Reflecting on Washington's Jay Treaty victory, Jefferson wrote Monroe: “You will have seen … that one man outweighs them all in influence over the people who have supported his judgment against their own and that of their representatives. Republicanism must lie on its oars, resign the vessel to its pilot, and themselves to the course he thinks best for them.”