Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (47 page)

Thus an ancient friendship, shattered by politics, was restored. When Adams answered from Quincy on Monday, February 10, 1812, he was already writing as though the intervening years had been nothing. He asked Jefferson about a pamphlet published in Virginia that predicted the apocalypse was set for June 1812. To Adams it was a wonder that such prophets endured despite the “continual refutation of all their prognostications by time and experience.”

They wrote of history and books and grief; of their families and farming and of their common past. “On the subject of the history of the American revolution, you ask who shall write it?” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1815. “Who can write it? And who ever will be able to write it? Nobody; except merely its external facts. All its councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.”

Adams proved the more prolific correspondent. “So many subjects crowd upon me that I know not with which to begin,” he wrote Jefferson. The second president saw the renewed connection in grand terms. “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.”

Jefferson loved the letters. “Mr. Adams and myself are in habitual correspondence,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush in March 1813. “I owe him a letter at this time, and shall pay the debt as soon as I have something to write about. For with the commonplace topic of politics, we do not meddle. When there are so many others on which we agree why should we introduce the only one on which we differ?”

Of the vagaries of politics, Adams wrote: “My reputation has been so much the sport of the public for fifty years, and will be with posterity, that I hold it a bubble, a gossamer, that idles in the wanton summer's air.” Jefferson took the same tone, musing: “The summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind; and to these I wish to consign my remaining days,” he wrote Adams in June 1813.

Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the [best men; nobles] should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions.… As we had been longer than most others on the public theatre, and our names therefore were more familiar to our countrymen, the party which considered you as thinking with them, placed your name at their head; the other, for the same reason, selected mine.

It was past time, Jefferson said, for the political wars of the first decades of the republic to end. “And shall you and I, my dear Sir, like Priam of old, gird on the ‘
arma, diu desueta, trementibus aevo humeris
'? Shall we, at our age, become the Athletae of party, and exhibit ourselves, as gladiators, in the arena of the newspapers? Nothing in the universe could induce me to it. My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts, and will never take counsel from me as to what that judgment should be.”

Adams was gracious but unyielding about their differences of opinion. “I believe in the integrity of both, at least as undoubtingly as in that of Washington,” Adams wrote of Jefferson and Madison. “In the measures of administration I have neither agreed with you or Mr. Madison. Whether you or I were right posterity must judge.” Adams acknowledged that the “nation was with you. But neither your authority nor that of the nation has convinced me. Nor, I am bold to pronounce, will convince posterity.”

Their debates about the nature of democracy and the future of the country were fascinating, and the correspondence forced both men to clarity of thought and a kind of reasonableness. Gone were the pejorative exclamations of partisan days. “The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society,” wrote Jefferson. “And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?” He added:

I have thus stated my opinion on a point on which we differ, not with a view to controversy, for we are both too old to change opinions, which are the result of a long life of inquiry and reflection; but on the suggestion of a former letter of yours that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other. We acted in perfect harmony through a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, though neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow-citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. If we do not think exactly alike as to its imperfections, it matters little to our country which, after devoting to it long lives of disinterested labor, we have delivered over to our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it, and of themselves.

By the time they died in 1826, Jefferson and Adams had exchanged a total of 329 letters in their lifetime, with a substantial number—158—coming from 1812 until the end.

W
e have had a wretched winter for the farmer,” Jefferson had written Madison in March 1811. It had not been much better for statesmen. “The rancor of party was revived with all its bitterness during the last session of Congress,” his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes wrote Jefferson the same month. “United by no fixed principles or objects and destitute of everything like American feeling, so detestable a minority never existed in any country—Their whole political creed is contained in a single word ‘opposition'—They pursue it without regard to principle, to personal reputation or the best interests of their country.”

From Monticello Jefferson watched as his anxieties of the decades—the fear of British power over America—were realized. Beginning in 1812, the scenario Jefferson had so often warned against came to pass as the United States once more went to war against England. Jefferson had begun his post–President's House life still believing that Britain could be dealt with short of armed conflict. Yet he advised Madison to rule nothing out. “War however may become a less losing business than unresisted depredation.”

In September 1811, Jefferson wrote John Wayles Eppes that the President and Mrs. Madison as well as the secretaries of war and of the navy were expected at Monticello with their families. News of a British frigate and sloop of war “stationing themselves in the Delaware and refusing to withdraw” might, however, keep the cabinet officers away.

Benjamin Rush saw the whole. “Our country has twice declared itself independent of Great Britain—once in 1776, and again 1800.… Are we upon the eve of a declaration … being repeated a
third
time, not by the pen, or by a general suffrage but by the mouths of our cannon?”

As war approached Jefferson returned home from Poplar Forest. Rain and hail were damaging the wheat crops—ten inches of rain fell in ten days in May—as Virginians awaited word from Washington. In Jefferson's mind the conflict with Britain was also with Americans sympathetic to London. “Your declaration of war is expected with perfect calmness; and if those in the North mean systematically to govern the majority it is as good a time for trying them as we can expect,” Jefferson wrote Madison in May 1812.

President Madison sent a war-preparation message to Congress on Tuesday, November 5, 1811. He argued that the depredations along the borders and on the oceans were too much to bear. The time had come to put the question of America's permanent independence to the test.

“We are to have war then? I believe so and that it is necessary,” Jefferson wrote Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. “Every hope from time, patience and the love of peace is exhausted, and war or abject submission are the only alternatives left us.”

On the last day of 1811, Jefferson offered warm words to Madison. “Your message had all the qualities it should possess, firm, rational, and dignified.… Heaven help you through all your difficulties.”

FORTY
-
ONE

TO FORM STATESMEN, LEGISLATORS AND JUDGES

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

J
EFFERSON
HAD
BE
EN
HERE
before: the king's armies on the move, the American cause in jeopardy. For Jefferson and his generation, the conflict that had begun so long ago in the wake of the French and Indian War had reached a climactic hour. For half a century, from the Stamp Act to impressments at sea, the British had never wholly accepted the idea that America was truly a sovereign power. As late as 1810, an American congressman could still say, “The people will not submit to be colonized and give up their independence.” For the second time in Jefferson's life, then, war came between Britain and America.

For a long time, the War of 1812 was disastrous for the Americans. In August 1814 the British burned Washington; the salvation of documents and a portrait of George Washington was left to Dolley Madison, who fled the President's House just ahead of the enemy. Jefferson reacted fiercely to reports that some Americans were welcoming the British. “No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty,” Jefferson wrote John Wayles Eppes in 1814. “Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only.”

After victories at Baltimore and at Plattsburgh, America found its footing. Peace with Britain came with the Treaty of Ghent, a document that brought the half a century of hostilities with the mother country to an end. Another battle was done, too: that between Jeffersonian Republicans and unrepentant Federalists in New England. At a meeting in Connecticut—it was known as the Hartford Convention of 1814–15—the Federalists issued a pro-British manifesto amid renewed talk of secession. News of the gathering, though, came as word of the peace with Britain spread, thus casting the Federalists in an extreme and unpopular light. “The cement of the Union is in the heartblood of every American,” said Jefferson. “I do not believe there is on earth a government established on so immovable a basis.”

By the middle of 1815, then, the America Jefferson had so long envisioned and fought for was at last largely secure from enemies without and within.

I
n 1814 the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina arrived unannounced, yet found Monticello and its master welcoming and impressive. The bishop, Theodore Dehon, was forcibly struck by Jefferson's physical presence. “Mr. Jefferson's large person seemed the appropriate tenement of his capacious and largely stored mind,” wrote the bishop's biographer. “He moved with great ease and more rapidity, than one unaccustomed to it could have done, over his well-waxed, tessellated mahogany floor.”

Jefferson dazzled in conversation: “He spoke, almost constantly, on various topics seasonably introduced, very sensibly, and seemed never to hesitate for a thought or a word. The impression was unavoidable that he was a master mind.” After spending the night and breakfasting with Jefferson, the bishop's party departed for Montpelier.

At home Jefferson was under constant siege from the public. Patsy guessed she had at least once been asked to find beds for fifty overnight guests.

The smashing of glass alerted the household to one visitor: A lady caller once jabbed her parasol through a window to clear her field of vision as she strained to see the great man. Strangers hoping for a glimpse of him were known to fill the hall between his study and the main part of the house, “consulting their watches, and waiting for him to pass from one to the other to his dinner, so that they could momentarily stare at him.” Other groups would gather near the porticoes in the gathering evening, “approach within a dozen yards, and gaze at him point-blank until they had looked their fill, as they would have gazed on a lion in a menagerie.”

After Jefferson's death, the nineteenth-century biographer Henry Randall once walked over Monticello with Wormley Hughes, a former slave of Jefferson's. Pointing to the three carriage bays under the North Terrace (each could accommodate a four-horse coach), Randall asked, “Wormley, how often were these filled, in Mr. Jefferson's time?”

“Every night, sir, in summer, and we commonly had two or three carriages under that tree,” Hughes said, gesturing to another spot.

“It took all hands to take care of your visitors?” Randall asked.

“Yes, sir, and the whole farm to feed them.”

A Virginia gentleman who had fallen out with Jefferson years before was visiting Montpelier, and Madison encouraged him to join another friend who was en route to Monticello. He decided to go. When the gentleman appeared at the house on the mountain, he was worried about his unannounced call.

On seeing him, Jefferson looked surprised for “about a second,” but then “advanced instantly and saluted his guest with as prompt cordiality as if he had been looking for him.” Jefferson seated the unexpected guest next to him at dinner and called for Madeira, which Jefferson had somehow remembered was a favorite. The guest demurred, saying he would drink Jefferson's wine.

Afterward, when Jefferson excused himself, the guest asked his Montpelier companion, “Do you suppose I could get a glass of good brandy here? I have been so amused by Jefferson that here I have been sipping his … acid, cold French wine, until I am sure I shall die in the night … unless I take an antidote.” But Jefferson was not to know: The guest would give no offense.

The next day the guest returned to Madison's, “lauding Jefferson to the skies.” Yet he could not see “ ‘why a man of so much taste should drink cold, sour French wine!' He insisted to Mr. Madison that it would injure Jefferson's health. He talked himself warm on the topic. He declared it would kill him—that some night he would be carried off by it! Finally, he insisted that Madison write and urge him to change his wine. His altered tone towards Jefferson, and his warm solicitude in the particular just named, afforded great amusement to Madison and Jefferson. The trio thenceforth remained fast friends.”

H
is hearing was failing a bit, and he needed eyeglasses more often. Ill in early 1818, he recovered, but his contemporaries continued to fall.

Late in the year he learned that Abigail Adams had died. He wrote warmly to John Adams, noting that words could do little in such an hour of grief, a lesson Jefferson had learned, he said, “in the school of affliction.” Still, “mingling sincerely my tears with yours,” Jefferson said, “it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

J
efferson took pleasure in his family, but his kith and kin were also sources of anxiety. Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., was in chronic financial trouble, appears to have drunk too much, and is said to have grown jealous of Jefferson's centrality in the life of the family. He served three terms as governor of Virginia, but as he grew older Randolph never really found peace. He and his son Thomas Jefferson Randolph fell out over the fate of Edgehill, the heavily indebted Randolph plantation, and the father grew erratic. He could be violent; his son said he was “more ferocious than the wolf and more fell than the hyena”—hardly a warm familial characterization. (Randolph died in 1828.)

Another concern was Charles L. Bankhead, the husband of Ann Cary Randolph, Jefferson's beloved granddaughter. He was a drinker whose alcoholism and tendency to violence—including violence toward his wife—grew worse as the years passed. Bankhead tried the law and tried farming, never making much of himself. Jefferson once sent Ann a copy of the novel
The Modern Griselda: A Tale,
by Maria Edgeworth, about a failing marriage.

Though son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., could be unstable, it was Bankhead who posed the most persistent threat to Jefferson's sense of order and harmony. “He was a fine-looking man, but a terrible drunkard,” said the overseer Edmund Bacon. Bankhead made a dangerous spectacle of himself in Charlottesville and at Monticello. “I have seen him ride his horse into the barroom at Charlottesville and get a drink of liquor,” said Bacon. “I have seen his wife run from him when he was drunk and hide in a potato hole to get out of danger.”

Early in his retirement, Jefferson took Bankhead to Poplar Forest in a bid to encourage a move to Bedford County (one reason may have been to put more distance between Bankhead and the barroom). In the end, though, the Bankheads settled at Carlton, a plantation adjacent to Monticello.

By 1815, Jefferson felt compelled to ask Charles's father, a medical doctor, to treat his own son before it was too late. Promises of reform had been broken; Bankhead would come back from Charlottesville so drunk that Jefferson thought him “in a state approaching insanity.”

Bankhead could be vicious toward Ann. Jefferson described “an assault on his wife of great violence” after which Bankhead “ordered her out of the room, forbidding her to enter it again and she was obliged to take refuge for the night in her mother's room. Nor was this a new thing.”

One night Bankhead was berating Jefferson's butler Burwell Colbert at Monticello for refusing to hand over the keys to the liquor cabinet. Colbert “would not give him any more brandy,” according to Bacon. Patsy tried to calm Bankhead down but failed, and called for Bacon. (“She would never call on Mr. Randolph at such a time, he was so excitable,” Bacon said.) Nevertheless, Randolph heard the fight. “He entered the room just as I did, and Bankhead, thinking he was Burwell, began to curse him,” Bacon wrote. Randolph seized a hot poker from a hearth and struck his son-in-law in the head, burning off a chunk of flesh and nearly killing him.

On Monday, February 1, 1819, outside the courthouse in Charlottesville, Bankhead got into a fight with his brother-in-law Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the former president's favorite grandson. The causes of the clash are unclear, but the result was not. Randolph horsewhipped Bankhead, leaving wounds on his head, and Bankhead gravely wounded Randolph by stabbing him twice.

Jefferson had just arrived back at Monticello from his daily ride when news of the attack reached him. He immediately set off for Charlottesville, riding furiously. Finding his grandson lying in Leitch's store on the square, Jefferson knelt and wept. Young Randolph survived, but the bloody episode only worsened Jefferson's fears for Ann.

“With respect to Bankhead,” Jefferson wrote, “there is much room to fear, and mostly for his wife. I have for some time taken for granted that she would fall by his hands.” Ann died in childbirth in 1826.

D
espite all, Jefferson struggled to be optimistic. “I think, with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us,” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1816. Jefferson took the broadest of views: “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”

Adams was always less sanguine. “I dare not look beyond my nose into futurity,” he wrote Jefferson. “Our money, our commerce, our religion, our national and state constitutions, even our arts and sciences, are so many seedplots of division, faction, sedition and rebellion. Everything is transmuted into an instrument of electioneering.”

Jefferson believed in the future, and why not? His own lifetime was testament to the possibility of political and intellectual progress. The past, he thought, should hold no magical, unexamined claim over the present. “Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” he wrote in 1816.

They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions … but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

He loved the spirit of innovation. “The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.” The future was full of infinite possibilities. “When I contemplate the immense advances in science, and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation; and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been, as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches,” he wrote in retirement.

There was now world enough and time to build as well as defend. In the wake of the British army's burning of the roughly 3,000 books belonging to Congress at Washington, Jefferson offered to sell the nation his own collection. There were 6,487 volumes in Jefferson's hands; in the words of the
National Intelligencer,
the library “for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond all price.” They formed the core of the new Library of Congress.

And as the years passed, he turned more and more of his attention to a project in Charlottesville that he believed would create the conditions in which succeeding generations could surpass those that came before.