TWENTY-SEVEN
I live on my horse from an early breakfast to a late dinner, and very often after that till dark.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
ITHINK IT IS MONTAIGNE who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head,” Jefferson wrote a friend from Monticello in February 1794. “I am sure it is true as to everything political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character.” Within weeks of being home from Philadelphia Jefferson was struck by how distant the politics of the capital could seem to many Americans. “I could not have supposed, when at Philadelphia, that so little of what was passing there could be known … as is the case here,” he told James Madison. “Judging from this … it is evident to me that the people are not in a condition either to approve or disapprove of their government, nor consequently to influence it.”
Jefferson’s stay at Monticello between his resignation from Washington’s cabinet and his return to national politics as a candidate for president against John Adams in 1796 lasted only about two years. This period was entirely characteristic, for in these years he practiced a kind of quiet politics at a distance, allowing himself to serve as an emblem of Republican hope as events in Britain, Philadelphia, western Pennsylvania, and among Democratic-Republican societies around the country cast the Federalists in a harsher monarchical light. Jefferson knew that heroes are often summoned from afar—after all, Washington himself had been, not so long ago. Americans had turned to a tall, retired Virginian for rescue before. They might do so again.
John Adams, serving still as vice president, sent a friendly note along with a book to Monticello in April 1794. “I congratulate you on the charming opening of the spring and heartily wish I was enjoying of it as you are upon a plantation, out of the hearing of the din of politics and the rumors of war.” Thanking Adams, Jefferson wrote, “Instead of writing 10 or 12 letters a day, which I have been in the habit of doing as a thing of course, I put off answering my letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day, and then find it sometimes postponed by other necessary occupations.” Yet he could not forbear a comment on foreign policy. “My countrymen are groaning under the insults of Gr. Britain. I hope some means will turn up of reconciling our faith and honor with peace: for I confess to you I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.”
This was an interesting point, for in New York and in Philadelphia Jefferson had rarely mentioned the military side of the Revolution. In Albemarle County, though, he may not have been able to keep his mind from the scenes of terror and the depredations of the British. Confronted with renewed reminders about the horrors of war, he had a perspective on events he might not have had in the hurry of a diplomatic struggle. Arnold, Cornwallis, and Tarleton were not forgotten.
Adams, too, abhorred the prospect of war and echoed Jefferson’s hopes for peace with Britain. He closed with his own wish that he, like Jefferson, might soon “get out of the Fumum et Opes Strepitumque Romae”—“the smoke, wealth, and din of Rome.”
The latest threat to the peace both men wanted came from a series of British naval outrages on American shipping with the French West Indies. Now that Britain and France were at war, London had issued a secret Order in Council aimed essentially at closing down the lucrative (for the French) trade out of the islands—a trade largely carried on by American vessels. Americans also worried about unfair British trade policies, encouragement of the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, and support for hostile Indian tribes on the American frontier. “We must adopt such a mode of retaliation as will stake their kingdom to the centre,” a Republican newspaper declared.
Resisting pressure for war, George Washington dispatched John Jay to London. The former Confederation foreign affairs secretary who was now serving as the nation’s first chief justice, Jay was undertaking a diplomatic mission that Jefferson hoped “may extricate us from the event of a war, if this can be done saving our faith and our rights.” It would not be easy. “The spirit of war has grown much stronger in this part of the country,” Jefferson told Monroe in April 1794.
Back on his mountain, Jefferson wanted to construct as self-sufficient a world as possible. In the mid-1790s he decided to pull down much of his house in order to build even more grandly; the first Monticello thus gave way to the Monticello familiar to ensuing generations. The estate was undergoing constant construction and renovation. “We are now living in a brick-kiln, for my house, in its present state, is nothing better,” Jefferson had written George Wythe during the building of the first house, and now, years later, it had all started again.
The house he wanted would not be finished until after he left the presidency in 1809, but he seems to have rarely been happier than when he was in the midst of construction. “He is a very long time maturing his projects,” a visitor once remarked, not particularly insightfully, given that Jefferson began work on the mountaintop in 1768 and was still at it four decades later. Jefferson himself admitted, “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements.”
As work progressed through the years on the expansion of Monticello, Jefferson’s workmen—Irish joiners and enslaved men—also built the L-shaped terraces adjoining the house that he envisioned in 1770; the terraces largely concealed the work and living spaces below—the kitchen, dairy, smokehouse, wash house, ice cellar, store rooms, carriabe bays, and some slave quarters). While construction was underway, Mulberry Row, which ran along the southeastern edge of the main house, expanded to meet his needs. He added new slave quarters, a smokehouse, dairy, blacksmith’s shop, carpenter’s shop, wash house, sawpit, and, in April 1794, he launched a new manufacturing enterprise there: a nailery, where enslaved boys produced as many as 10,000 nails a day. Visiting Jefferson at Monticello in 1796, a French caller was impressed by Jefferson’s easy sense of command and grasp of detail on the estate. “As he cannot expect any assistance from the two small neighboring towns, every article is made on his farm; his negroes are cabinet-makers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc.,” the visitor wrote. “The children he employs in a nail factory.… The young and old negresses spin for the clothing of the rest.”
As he built and farmed, he fought bouts with rheumatism (which kept him “in incessant torment”) yet found joy in his family. Writing of grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Patsy’s son, in early 1795, he said: “Jefferson is very robust. His hands are constantly like lumps of ice, yet he will not warm them. He has not worn his shoes an hour this winter. If put on him, he takes them off immediately and uses one to carry his nuts etc. in. Within these two days we have put both him and Anne into moccasins, which being made of soft leather, fitting well and lacing up, they have never been able to take them off.”
He loved his guns and his horses; he loved to hunt and to fish. His mounts tended to have noble names, from Allycroker, Jefferson’s first known horse, to Gustavus to Cucullin to The General to Alfred, Caractacus, Ethelinda, Silvertail, Orra Moor, Peggy Waffington, Zanga, Polly Peachum, and the carriage horses Romulus and Remus. There was also a Raleigh, a Tarquin, a Castor, a Diomede, a Bremo, a Wellington, a Tecumseh, a Peacemaker, and The Eagle, Jefferson’s last horse, which was purchased in 1820.
Jefferson liked to fish at home and while away. He had a favorite spot “below the old dam” on the Rivanna, he enjoyed outings on the Schuylkill River when he was in Philadelphia, and he relished a day at Lake George in the Adirondacks on his trip through the north with James Madison in 1791. “An abundance of speckled trout, salmon trout, bass and other fish with which it is stored, have added to our other amusements the sport of taking them,” Jefferson had written Patsy. He had been as unhappy with Lake Champlain as he had been happy with Lake George, noting that the larger Champlain was “a far less pleasant water. It is muddy, turbulent, and yields little game”—all things Jefferson disliked in fishing as in life.
He kept guns and traveled armed (he once left behind a gun locked in a box at the inn at Orange Courthouse, and had to write the innkeeper to track it down). To Jefferson hunting was the best form of exercise. He often recommended it, though riding was the great solace and activity of his later years. Jefferson hunted “squirrels and partridges,” recalled Isaac Jefferson. “Old Master wouldn’t shoot partridges settin’.” A fair-minded sportsman, Jefferson would “scare … up” partridges or rabbits before firing. He would also drive hunters away from Monticello’s deer park.
Jefferson’s gun collection included a “two shot-double barrel” and a set of Turkish pistols that he recalled having “20 inch barrels so well made that I never missed a squirrel at 30 yards with them.” He was a man of his time on the question of guns, writing in 1822 that “every American who wishes to protect his farm from the ravages of quadrupeds and his country from those of biped invaders” should be a “gun-man,” adding: “I am a great friend to the manly and healthy exercises of the gun.”
Led by James Madison, correspondents kept Jefferson current on politics and foreign affairs. Animosity between Federalists and Republicans was a constant theme. “Personalities, which lessen the pleasures of society, or prevent their being sought, have occurred in private and at tables,” Tench Coxe, an American economist who served as Hamilton’s assistant secretary of the Treasury, wrote from Philadelphia. The next week James Monroe detailed the fight over resolutions connected to Jefferson’s commerce report; the Senate’s vote to expel Albert Gallatin, a Pennsylvania Republican, on the grounds that when elected he had not been a citizen of the United States for the requisite nine years; a battle over a congressional call to see Gouverneur Morris’s correspondence; an Indian treaty; and, of course, the disastrous mission of Edmond-Charles Genet. Jefferson was living in relative isolation, but details of the world were in constant supply.
In March 1794, Federalist congressman Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts had introduced legislation to create a new army of fifteen thousand men and give the president extraordinary powers to control sea traffic. The argument, Monroe told Jefferson, was “founded upon the idea of providing for our defense against invasion, and the probability of such an event, considering the unfriendly conduct of G.B. towards us for sometime past.” However concerned the Republicans were about Great Britain, they were also skeptical of the Federalist plan, fearing that this was but a first step toward creating an army that might be raised to defend America but could end up being used to undermine the Constitution in a time of crisis. Republics tended to fall to military dictatorships, and military dictators needed a military. “A change so extraordinary must have a serious object in view,” Monroe wrote Jefferson. “They are to be raised in no given quarter, and although they may be deemed a kind of minute men in respect to their situation except in time of war, yet in every other respect they will be regulars… . The order of Cincinnati will be placed in the command of it.”
The Republicans struck where they could. As part of a naturalization bill, William Branch Giles proposed requiring new American citizens to renounce any hereditary titles they held in other countries—thus, the Jeffersonians hoped, reducing the chance of emigrant aristocrats creating an old-world ethos in America.
In reaction, the Federalist congressman Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts suggested that slaveholding immigrants disclose their human property. “You want to hold us up to the public as aristocrats,” said Dexter. “I, as a retaliation, will hold you up to the same public as dealers in slaves.” Giles’s amendment passed; Dexter’s failed. Both efforts illuminated the emotional issues shaping American politics—Republican fear of the prospect of hereditary power and the Federalist anxiety about the strength of slaveholders.
The accumulation of power in the hands of Federalists was a running source of worry to Jefferson and his comrades. As Congress gathered in the late autumn of 1794, lawmakers who attended Washington’s delivery of his annual message heard the president’s account of the Whiskey Rebellion—and an unapologetic attack on the Democratic-Republican societies.
The Whiskey Rebellion in the West was rooted in farmers’ fury over Hamilton’s excise taxes. Episode built upon episode until there were attacks on Bower Hill, the home of General John Neville, a federal tax inspector. A leader of the protesters, James McFarlane, was shot and killed. A large government force under both Hamilton and “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was mustered and dispatched to western Pennsylvania; Washington himself rode out with the troops for a time. Though the rebellion collapsed, the violence was connected in Washington’s mind with the political agitation of the Democratic-Republican societies, and he attacked both the Whiskey Rebellion and the societies in 1794.
Jefferson took a sage tone with William Branch Giles in mid-December. “The attempt which has been made to restrain the liberty of our citizens meeting together, interchanging sentiments on what subjects they please, and stating these sentiments in the public papers, has come upon us, a full century earlier than I expected.”
Taking the view that the administration was trying not only to quell the Pennsylvania uprising but to curtail peaceable freedom of assembly, Jefferson made himself plain to Madison. “The denunciation of the democratic societies is one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the faction of Monocrats.” And what did the Whiskey Rebellion amount to, really? To Jefferson it was hardly worth noting. “There was indeed a meeting to consult about a separation,” he wrote Madison in December 1794. “But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination.”
Drama, Jefferson knew, was one of the prices one paid for democracy.
Jefferson’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.
If 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.
But 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.
Jefferson 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.
Jefferson 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.”
Given the season of these remarks—the middle of June 1796, almost six months to the day before the electoral college was to meet to choose a successor to Washington—Jefferson entertained thoughts about America’s prospects should the pilot of the vessel be a Republican. And, more to the point, whether he himself should be that pilot. Decorous silence on the explicit question of a candidacy for the office was to be maintained, but Jefferson was about to face the most momentous decision of his public life since he chose country over king in the hurly-burly of the Revolution: Would he allow his name to go forward as a candidate for president of the United States after all?
First, he wanted to clear up some worrisome business with Washington himself. Always sensitive about the opinions of others and particularly anxious for Washington to think well of him, Jefferson had read a report in the June 9, 1796, Aurora that drew on a confidential document Washington had given to members of his cabinet during the neutrality debates. Jefferson was determined to convince Washington that he, at least, had not betrayed the president’s trust. Swearing on “everything sacred and honorable,” Jefferson promised Washington on June 19 that the document had “never been from under my own lock and key.”
Jefferson was concerned about what Washington thought of him in these early summer weeks of 1796, for he knew that the president was hearing rumors that Jefferson had been privately critical of—even condescending toward—his old chief. Worried about such impressions, Jefferson wrote Washington warning that some people may “try to sow tares between you and me” by presenting Jefferson as “still engaged in the bustle of politics, and in turbulence and intrigue against the government.”
When Washington replied in July 1796, he absolved Jefferson of responsibility for the Aurora matter but used the occasion to address Jefferson’s views of the administration. “As you have mentioned the subject yourself,” said Washington, “it would not be frank, candid, or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as derogating from that opinion I had conceived you entertained of me.”
The Federalists were busy maneuvering for the approaching presidential election. Their tactics included overtures to Jefferson nemesis Patrick Henry to stand for president. Henry was uninterested, but the latter suggestion, which, if adopted, would have divided Virginia, underscored the Federalists’ conviction that Jefferson was likely to be their main foe.
From the West, the legislator William Cocke, a native Virginian now among the leading men of Tennessee, made himself plain to Jefferson in August 1796. It was Cocke’s happy duty, he wrote, “to inform you that the people of this State, of every description, express a wish that you should be the next President of the United States, and Mr. Burr, Vice President.”
Jefferson’s reply was at once clear and equivocal. “I have not the arrogance to say I would refuse the honorable office you mention to me; but I can say with truth that I would rather be thought worthy of it than to be appointed to it,” he wrote Cocke. For “well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.”