PROLOGUE
Washington, D.C., Winter 1801
HE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT. Lean and loose-limbed, Thomas Jefferson tossed back the sheets in his rooms at Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill, swung his long legs out of bed, and plunged his feet into a basin of cold water—a lifelong habit he believed good for his health. At Monticello, his plantation in the Southwest Mountains near the Blue Ridge of Virginia, the metal bucket brought to Jefferson every morning wore a groove on the floor next to the alcove where he slept.
Six foot two and a half, Jefferson was nearly fifty-eight years old in the Washington winter of 1800–1801. His sandy hair, reddish in his youth, was graying; his freckled skin—always susceptible to the sun—was wrinkling a bit. His eyes were penetrating but elusive, alternately described as blue, hazel, or brown. He had great teeth.
It was early February 1801. The capital, with its muddy avenues and scattered buildings, was in chaos, and had been for weeks. The future of the presidency was uncertain, the stability of the Constitution in question, and, secluded inside Conrad and McMunn’s on New Jersey Avenue—a new establishment with stables for sixty horses just two hundred paces away from the unfinished Capitol building—Jefferson was in a quiet agony.
He soaked his feet and gathered his thoughts. After a vicious election in which he had challenged the incumbent president, John Adams, it turned out that while Jefferson had defeated Adams in the popular vote, the tall Virginian had received the same number of electoral votes for president as the dashing, charismatic, and unpredictable Aaron Burr of New York, who had been running as Jefferson’s vice president. Under the rules in effect in 1800, there was no way to distinguish between a vote for president and one for vice president. What was supposed to have been a peaceful transfer of power from one rival to another—from Adams to Jefferson—had instead produced a constitutional crisis.
Anxious and unhappy, Jefferson was, he wrote to his eldest daughter, “worn down here with pursuits in which I take no delight, surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word which falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.” His fate was in the hands of other men, the last place he wanted it to be. He hated the waiting, the whispers, the not knowing. But there was nothing he could do. And so Thomas Jefferson waited.
The election, Jefferson said, was “the theme of all conversation.” The electoral tie between Jefferson and Burr, with Adams not so far behind, threw the contest to the House of Representatives—and no one knew what would happen. It was suddenly a whole new election, taking place in the House where each of the sixteen state delegations had one vote to cast. Whoever won nine of those votes would become president. “THE CRISIS is momentous … !” the Washington Federalist newspaper declared in the second week of February. Could Burr, who admitted that he thought of politics as “fun and honor and profit,” be made president by mischievous Federalists, taking the election from Jefferson, a fellow Republican? Or could Jefferson’s foes elect an interim president, denying Jefferson and his Republicans ultimate power?
In the claustrophobic atmosphere of Washington, anything seemed possible—and Jefferson, who liked to cultivate the air of a philosopher who was above the merely political, found himself in a struggle to secure his own election and, in his mind, rescue the nation from the allegedly monarchical tendencies of the Federalist Party. As a young man in 1776 he had hazarded all for the American experiment in liberty. Now, a quarter of a century later, Jefferson believed that the United States as he knew it and loved it might not long endure. During the 1800 campaign, the patriot-physician Benjamin Rush told Jefferson that he had “heard a member of Congress lament our separation from Great Britain and express his sincere wishes that we were again dependent on her.”
Such thoughts terrified Jefferson, who confessed that he felt bound to protect the principles of ’76 he had articulated in the Declaration of Independence. If he—the choice of the majority of the people—lost the presidency, then what had Americans been fighting for all these years? So much was at stake. An old Revolutionary ally from Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, said Jefferson’s foes were acting from “a desire to promote … division among the people, which they have excited and nourished as the germ of a civil war.”
There had been a rumor that John Marshall, the secretary of state who had just been named chief justice, might be appointed president, blocking Jefferson from the office. “If the union could be broken, that would do it,” said James Monroe, who was told that twenty-two thousand men in Pennsylvania were “prepared to take up arms in the event of extremities.”
Disorder, which Jefferson hated, threatened harmony, which he loved.
In the end, after a snowstorm struck Washington, Jefferson narrowly prevailed on the thirty-sixth ballot in the House to become the third president of the United States. And so began the Age of Jefferson, a political achievement without parallel in American life. George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton are sometimes depicted as wiser, more practical men than the philosophical master of Monticello. Judged by the raw standard of the winning and the keeping of power, however, Thomas Jefferson was the most successful political figure of the first half century of the American republic. For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren. (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.) This unofficial and little-noted Jeffersonian dynasty is unmatched in American history.
He had a defining vision, a compelling goal—the survival and success of popular government in America. Jefferson believed the will of an educated, enlightened majority should prevail. His opponents had less faith in the people. Alexander Hamilton referred to the broad American public as an “unthinking multitude”; Jefferson thought that same public was the salvation of liberty, the soul of the nation, and the hope of the republic.
In pursuit of his ends, Jefferson sought, acquired, and wielded power, which is the bending of the world to one’s will, the remaking of reality in one’s own image. Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma. Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic. To realize his vision, he compromised and improvised. The willingness to do what he needed to do in a given moment makes him an elusive historical figure. Yet in the real world, in real time, when he was charged with the safety of the country, his creative flexibility made him a transformative leader.
America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises. So was Jefferson. In his head and in his heart, as in the nation itself, the perfect warred with the good, the intellectual with the visceral. In him as in America, that conflict was, and is, a war without end. Jefferson’s story resonates not least because he embodies an eternal drama: the struggle of the leadership of the nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding world.
More than any of the other early presidents—more than Washington, more than Adams—Jefferson believed in the possibilities of humanity. He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes. Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.
He loved his wife, his books, his farms, good wine, architecture, Homer, horseback riding, history, France, the Commonwealth of Virginia, spending money, and the very latest in ideas and insights. He believed in America, and in Americans. The nation, he said in his first inaugural address in 1801, was “the world’s best hope.” He thought Americans themselves capable of virtually anything they put their minds to. “Whatever they can, they will,” Jefferson said of his countrymen in 1814.
A formidable man, “Mr. Jefferson was as tall, straight-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered,” said Isaac Granger Jefferson, a Monticello slave. “Neat a built man as ever was seen … a straight-up man, long face, high nose.” Edmund Bacon, a Monticello overseer, said that Jefferson “was like a fine horse; he had no surplus flesh.… His countenance was always mild and pleasant.”
To be tall and forbidding might command respect for a time, but not affection. To be overly familiar might command affection for a time, but not respect. Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it. His bearing gave him unusual opportunities to make the thoughts in his head the work of his hands, transforming the world around him from what it was to what he thought it ought to be.
A philosopher and a scientist, a naturalist and a historian, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge. He adored detail, noting the temperature each day and carrying a tiny, ivory-leaved notebook in his pocket to track his daily expenditures. He drove his horses hard and fast and considered the sun his “almighty physician.” Jefferson was fit and virile, a terrific horseman and inveterate walker. He drank no hard liquor but loved wine, taking perhaps three glasses a day. He did not smoke. When he received gifts of Havana cigars from well-wishers, he passed them along to friends.
Jefferson never tired of invention and inquiry, designing dumbwaiters and hidden mechanisms to open doors at Monticello. He delighted in archaeology, paleontology, astronomy, botany, and meteorology, and once created his own version of the Gospels by excising the New Testament passages he found supernatural or implausible and arranging the remaining verses in the order he believed they should be read. He drew sustenance from music and found joy in gardening. He bought and built beautiful things, creating Palladian plans for Monticello and the Roman-inspired capitol of Virginia, which he designed after seeing an ancient temple in Nîmes, in the south of France. He was an enthusiastic patron of pasta, took the trouble to copy down a French recipe for ice cream, and enjoyed the search for the perfect dressing for his salads. He kept shepherd dogs (two favorites were named Bergere and Grizzle). He knew Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish.
He was also a student of human nature, a keen observer of what drove other men, and he loved knowing the details of other lives. He admired the letters of Madame de Sévigné, whose correspondence offered a panoramic view of the France of Louis XIV, and Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, a romantic picaresque novel. In his library at Monticello was a collection of what a guest called “regal scandal” that he had put together under the title The Book of Kings. It included the Mémoires de la Princesse de Bareith (by the princess royal of Prussia, sister of Frederick the Great); Les Mémoires de la Comtesse de la Motte (by a key figure in a scandal involving a diamond necklace and Marie-Antoinette); and an account of the trial of the Duke of York, the commander in chief of the British army who had been forced to resign amid charges that he had allowed his mistress to sell officer commissions. Jefferson pointed out these tales, his guest recalled, “with a satisfaction somewhat inconsistent with the measured gravity he claims in relation to such subjects generally.”
A guest at a country inn was said to have once struck up a conversation with a “plainly-dressed and unassuming traveler” whom the stranger did not recognize. The two covered subject after subject, and the unremarkable traveler was “perfectly acquainted with each.” Afterward, “filled with wonder,” the guest asked the landlord who this extraordinary man was. When the topic was the law, the traveler said, “he thought he was a lawyer”; when it was medicine, he “felt sure he was a physician”; when it was theology, “he became convinced that he was a clergyman.”
The landlord’s reply was brief. “Oh, why I thought you knew the Squire.”
To his friends, who were numerous and devoted, Jefferson was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying.
Yet to his foes, who were numerous and prolific, Jefferson was an atheist and a fanatic, a demagogue and a dreamer, a womanly Francophile who could not be trusted with the government of a great nation. His task was to change those views as best he could. He longed for affection and for approval.
A master of emotional and political manipulation, sensitive to criticism, obsessed with his reputation, and devoted to America, he was drawn to the world beyond Monticello, endlessly at work, as he put it, “to see the standard of reason at length erected after so many ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles.” As a planter, lawyer, legislator, governor, diplomat, secretary of state, vice president, and president, Jefferson spent much of his life seeking control over himself and power over the lives and destinies of others. For Jefferson, politics was not a dispiriting distraction but a sacred duty, an undertaking that made everything else possible.
Inspired by his own father’s example, he long sought to play the part of a patriarch, accepting—even embracing—the accompanying burdens of responsibility. He was the father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of the American West. He led the first democratic movement in the new republic to check the power and influence of established forces. And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country’s finest hours lay ahead.
The story of Jefferson’s life fascinates still in part because he found the means to endure and, in many cases, to prevail in the face of extreme partisanship, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Jefferson’s political leadership is instructive, offering us the example of a president who can operate at two levels, cultivating the hope of a brighter future while preserving the political flexibility and skill to bring the ideal as close as possible to reality.
He has most commonly been thought of as the author or designer of America: a figure who articulated a vision of what the country could be but was otherwise a kind of detached dreamer. Yet Jefferson did not rest once his words were written or his ideas entered circulation. He was a builder and a fighter. “What is practicable must often control what is pure theory,” he said during his presidency; moreover, “the habits of the governed determine in a great degree what is practicable.”
Jefferson fought for the greatest of causes yet fell short of delivering justice to the persecuted and the enslaved. In the end, for all the debate and the division and the scholarship and the symposia, there may be only one thing about Thomas Jefferson that is indisputable: that the man who lived and worked from 1743 to 1826 was a breathing human being who was subject to the passion and prejudice and pride and love and ambition and hope and fear that drive most other breathing human beings. Recovering a sense of that mortal Jefferson—the Jefferson who sought office, defined human rights for a new age, explored expanding frontiers in science and philosophy, loved women, owned slaves, and helped forge a nation—is my object in the following pages.
He is not a man of our time but of his own, formed by the historical realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He must be seen in context. It is also true, however, that many of his concerns were universal. His was a particular life of perennial significance.
And the world—or at least much of it—found him charming, brilliant, and gracious. Engaged in a constant campaign to win the affection of whoever happened to be in front of him at a given moment, Jefferson flirted with women and men alike. “It is a charming thing to be loved by everybody,” he told his grandchildren, “and the way to obtain it is, never to quarrel or be angry with anybody.” He hated arguing face-to-face, preferring to smooth out the rough edges of conversation, leading some people to believe Jefferson agreed with them when, in fact, he was seeking to avoid conflict. He paid a price for this obsession with congeniality among those who mistook his reticence for duplicity.
Yet women in particular loved him. Calling on Samuel Harrison Smith, the Republican publisher of the Washington National Intelligencer, Jefferson was shown into the Smiths’ parlor, where he spent a few minutes alone with Smith’s wife, Margaret, a writer and hostess. The child of a Federalist family, Mrs. Smith did not at first realize who Jefferson was, and found herself “somewhat checked by the dignified and reserved air” of the caller. What she experienced as a “chilled feeling,” however, passed almost instantly. Offered a chair, the stranger assumed “a free and easy manner, and, carelessly throwing his arm on the table near which he sat, he turned towards me with a countenance beaming with an expression of benevolence and with a manner and voice almost femininely soft and gentle.” Gifted in the arts of the morning call, he “entered into conversation on the commonplace topics of the day,” Mrs. Smith said, “from which, before I was conscious of it, he had drawn me into observations of a more personal and interesting nature.”
Such was his charm that though she did not know quite why, here she was, saying things she had not meant to say. “There was something in his manner, his countenance and voice that at once unlocked my heart.” The caller was in a kind of control, reversing the usual order of things in which the host, not the hosted, set the terms and conditions of conversation. “I found myself frankly telling him what I liked or disliked in our present circumstances and abode,” Mrs. Smith said. “I knew not who he was, but the interest with which he listened to my artless details … put me perfectly at my ease; in truth, so kind and conciliating were his looks and manners that I forgot he was not a friend of my own.”
At this point the door to the parlor opened, and Mr. Smith walked in. Learning that the caller was “Mr. Jefferson,” Mrs. Smith was at once thrilled and embarrassed. “I felt my cheeks burn and my heart throb, and not a word more could I speak while he remained.” She was struck by the gulf between the image and the man. “And is this the violent democrat, the vulgar demagogue, the bold atheist and profligate man I have so often heard denounced by the Federalists?” she asked. “Can this man so meek and mild, yet dignified in his manners, with a voice so soft and low, with a countenance so benignant and intelligent, can he be that daring leader of a faction, that disturber of the peace, that enemy of all rank and order?” Taking his leave, Jefferson “shook hands cordially with us … and in a manner which said as plain as words could do, ‘I am your friend.’ ”
Jefferson did not limit his sensuous appetites to the beauties of art, the power of music, or the splendor of landscapes. He pursued two women before he met his future wife, leading to more than a decade of domestic happiness. Her death devastated him into insensibility, and he wandered the woods of Monticello in a grief that led him to thoughts of suicide.
He had promised his dying wife he would never remarry. He kept his word but embarked on a love affair with one woman, the beautiful (and married) Maria Cosway. Finally, Jefferson maintained a decades-long liaison with Sally Hemings, his late wife’s enslaved half sister who tended to his personal quarters at Monticello. They produced six children (four of whom lived) and gave rise to two centuries of speculation about the true nature of the affair. Was it about love? Power? Both? And if both, how much was affection, how much coercion? Jefferson’s connection with Sally Hemings lasted from about 1787 to Jefferson’s death in 1826—almost forty years.
The power of America’s founding myth—or myths, if one divides the stories into a seventeenth-century one of Jamestown and Plymouth and an eighteenth-century one of the Revolution—is such that it is difficult to envision the story of the country as it actually unfolded. By force of nearly two and a half centuries of habit, we tend to view our history as an inevitable chain of events leading to a sure conclusion. There was, however, nothing foreordained about the American experiment. To treat it as a set piece pitting an evil empire of Englishmen against a noble band of Americans does a disservice to both, for it caricatures Britain and minimizes the complexities that Jefferson and his contemporaries faced in choosing accommodation or rebellion.
Most Americans were, after all, of British descent, and American culture in the decades leading up to the Revolution was deferential to—and even celebratory of—the monarchy. The whole structure of the lives of Jefferson’s American ancestors and of his generation was built around membership in the British Empire. For many if not most Americans, the hatred of King George III that marked the active Revolutionary period was the exception, not the rule.
Jefferson lived and worked in a time when nothing was certain. He knew—he felt—that America’s enemies were everywhere. The greatest of these was Britain, and not only during the struggle for independence. Rather than recalling the Revolutionary War in its traditional way—as the armed struggle that lasted from Lexington and Concord in 1775 until the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781—it is illuminating in considering Jefferson to think of the struggle against Great Britain and its influence in American life as one that opened in 1764 and did not end until the Treaty of Ghent and the Battle of New Orleans brought the War of 1812 to a close in 1815.
Seen this way—which is how Jefferson saw it, or at least implicitly experienced it—Jefferson lived and governed in a Fifty Years’ War. It was a war that was sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but was always unfolding. It took different forms. There were traditional battlefield confrontations from 1775 to 1783 and again from 1812 to 1815. There were battles by proxy with Loyalists and British allies among the Indians. There were commercial strikes and counterstrikes. There were fears of political encroachment within the United States that could be aided by British military movements from Canada, Nova Scotia, or Britain’s western posts (posts they declined to surrender after the Revolution). There were anxieties about disunionist sentiment in New England and New York. There were terrors about monarchical tendencies.
Anything that happened in either foreign or domestic politics was interpreted through the prism of the ongoing conflict with Britain. Even talk of potential alliances with London in the event of war with France was driven not by affection for Britain but by calculations of national interest. Jefferson did not trust the old mother country, and he did not trust those Americans who maintained even imaginative ties to monarchy and its trappings—aristocracy of birth, hereditary executives, lifetime legislatures, standing armies, large naval establishments, and grand, centralized financial systems. When Jefferson sensed any trend in the general direction of such things, he reacted viscerally, fearing that the work of the Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention was at risk. The proximity of British officials and troops to the north of the United States and the strength of the British fleet exacerbated these anxieties.
Was Jefferson paranoid about such possibilities, especially in the period from the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which marked the end of the Revolutionary War, through his presidency, which ended in 1809? Perhaps. Was he engaging in conspiracy mongering? Yes. But sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize. Jefferson’s fevered fears about a return of monarchy, which was often his shorthand for a restoration of British influence and an end to the uniquely American enterprise in self-government, were dismissed as fanciful by no less a figure than George Washington. But in the climate of the time—a time of revolution, of espionage, and of well-founded terrors that the American republic might meet the dismal fate all other republics had ever met—Jefferson’s sense of Britain as a perennial foe is unsurprising and essential to understand. He thought he was in a perennial war. And if we are to understand what he was like, and what life was like for him, then we must see the world as he saw it, not as how we know it turned out.
To Jefferson, little in America was secure, for the military success of the Revolution had marked only the end of one battle in a larger, half-century war. From Alexander Hamilton’s financial program to John Adams’s weakness for British forms to the overt New England hostility toward his presidency, he judged political life in the context of the British threat to democratic republicanism. In retrospect, Jefferson’s fears about the British may seem overheated—they surely did to some who lived through the same years and the same pressures—but they were real to him.
Jefferson hungered for greatness, and the drama of his age provided him a stage which he never really left. Writing his William and Mary schoolmate and Revolutionary colleague John Page in 1803—Page was governor of Virginia, Jefferson president of the United States—Jefferson said: “We have both been drawn from our natural passion for study and tranquility, by times which took from us the freedom of choice: times however which, planting a new world with the seeds of just government, will produce a remarkable era in the history of mankind. It was incumbent on those therefore who fell into them, to give up every favorite pursuit, and lay their shoulder to the work of the day.”
In his retirement at Monticello, he looked back over the years, through the haze of war and struggle and peril, and knew that he had done his duty. “The circumstances of our country at my entrance into life,” he remarked to a visitor, “were such that every honest man felt himself compelled to take a part, and to act up to the best of his abilities.” He could have done no other. The Revolution, Jefferson once said, had been nothing less than a “bold and doubtful election … for our country, between submission, or the sword.”
The point of departure for understanding Jefferson, however, lies not at Conrad and McMunn’s, nor at the President’s House nor even at Jefferson’s beloved plantation on the hill. Before Monticello there was another house in the woods of the Southwest Mountains of Virginia. The search for Thomas Jefferson must begin there, on the banks of the Rivanna River, a tributary of the James, at a vanished plantation called Shadwell.