Jon Meacham - Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

A LSO BY J ON M EACHAM

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Copyright 2012 by Jon Meacham

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Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA
Meacham, Jon.
Thomas Jefferson: the art of power / Jon Meacham.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6766-4
e ISBN 978-0-679-64536-8
1. Jefferson, Thomas, 17431826. 2. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. 3. United StatesPolitics and government17831809. I. Title.
E 332. M 48 2012 973.46092dc23 2012013700
[B]

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

www.atrandom.com

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FIRST EDITION

Book design by Simon M. Sullivan

T O H ERBERT W ENTZ

And, as ever, for Mary, Maggie, Sam, and Keith

A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception. Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.

H ENRY A DA MS , History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

P RESIDENT J OHN F. K ENNEDY , at a dinner in honor of all living recipients of the Nobel Prize, 1962

CONTENTS

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

T HOMAS J EFFERSON LEFT POSTERITY an immense correspondence, and I am particularly indebted to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, published by Princeton University Press and first edited by Julian P. Boyd. I am, moreover, grateful to the incumbent editors of the Papers, especially general editor Barbara B. Oberg, for sharing unpublished transcripts of letters gathered for future volumes. The goal of the Princeton edition was, and continues to be, to present as accurate a text as possible and to preserve as many of Jeffersons distinctive mannerisms of writing as can be done. To provide clarity and readability for a modern audience, however, I have taken the liberty of regularizing much of the quoted language from Jefferson and from his contemporaries. I have, for instance, silently corrected Jeffersons frequent use of its for its and recieve for receive, and have, in most cases, expanded contractions and abbreviations and followed generally accepted practices of capitalization.

PROLOGUE

THE WORLDS BEST HOPE

Washington, D.C., Winter 1801

H E WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT . Lean and loose-limbed, Thomas Jefferson tossed back the sheets in his rooms at Conrad and McMunns boardinghouse on Capitol Hill, swung his long legs out of bed, and plunged his feet into a basin of cold watera 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 18001801. His sandy hair, reddish in his youth, was graying; his freckled skinalways susceptible to the sunwas 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 McMunns on New Jersey Avenuea new establishment with stables for sixty horses just two hundred paces away from the unfinished Capitol buildingJefferson 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 Jeffersons 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 anotherfrom Adams to Jeffersonhad 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.

T he 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 Representativesand 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 Jeffersons foes elect an interim president, denying Jefferson and his Republicans ultimate power?

In the claustrophobic atmosphere of Washington, anything seemed possibleand 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.