Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (11 page)

EIGHT

THE FAMOUS MR. JEFFERSON

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
, July 5, 1775

The present crisis is so full of danger and uncertainty that opinions here are various.

—T
HOMAS
J
EF
FERSON
, from Philadelphia, 1775

L
ODGING
ON
C
HESTNUT
between Third and Fourth streets in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress was meeting at the Pennsylvania State House (later known as Independence Hall), Jefferson effortlessly entered the flow of things. He sent accounts of the military situation to Virginia. He looked over Benjamin Franklin's proposal for “Articles of confederation and perpetual Union.” He recorded the “Financial and Military Estimates for Continental Defense.”

In a way, he had been preparing for this hour and for this work since he first stood in the lobby of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, listening, rapt, to Patrick Henry a decade before. There had been the glittering evenings in Fauquier's Palace, full of music and ideas; the golden years in the Wythe house, immersed in law and history; the apprenticeship in politics under Peyton Randolph in the Raleigh Tavern, watching and learning. The Jefferson style—cultivate his elders, make himself pleasant to his contemporaries, and use his pen and his intellect to shape the debate—armed him well for the national arena. He was no longer in Williamsburg or Richmond, but he felt at home.

In Virginia, Jefferson had known everything and everyone. In sessions of the Congress in Philadelphia and in hours of walking the city, he encountered new ideas, new people, new forces.

Philadelphians, said the Anglican clergyman William Smith, were “a people, thrown together from various quarters of the world, differing in all things—language, manners, and sentiment.” Another clergyman, Jacob Duché, said, “The poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion and politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or the scholar.… For every man expects one day or another to be upon a footing with his wealthiest neighbor.”

In Philadelphia, Jefferson was caught up in a whirlwind of war and the rumors of war. John Adams of Massachusetts had proposed the appointment of George Washington of Virginia as commanding general for the Continental forces, a choice the Congress approved on Thursday, June 15, 1775. Two days later came the battle at Bunker Hill in Boston.

What Jefferson had heard Patrick Henry assert in the nave of St. John's Church 250 miles south of Philadelphia in March was now fact. There was no peace.

J
efferson's arrival in Philadelphia was an occasion of note among the delegates. Samuel Ward of Rhode Island recorded seeing “the famous Mr. Jefferson,” and said the Virginian “looks like a very sensible spirited fine fellow and by the pamphlet which he wrote last summer [the
Summary View
] he certainly is one.” Later in the year John Adams reported a fellow delegate's view that “Jefferson is the greatest Rubber off of Dust that he has ever met with, that he has learned French, Italian, Spanish and wants to learn German.”

Adams and Jefferson could hardly have appeared less alike. Adams was eight years older and about five inches shorter, as thoroughgoing a New Englander as Jefferson was a Virginian. Adams had difficulty holding his tongue or his temper; Jefferson was a master of keeping his emotions in check. Yet the two men—and, in time, Abigail, Adams's wonderful wife—were to forge one of the greatest and most complicated alliances in American history.

Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1735, John Adams was the son of a farmer and public servant. Like Peter Jefferson, John Adams, Sr., loomed large to his son. Young Adams was educated at Harvard, considered but decided against becoming a Congregational minister, and made his mark as a lawyer in Boston in the tumultuous years leading to the American Revolution.

From 1775 until the politics of the first Washington administration drove them apart, Adams and Jefferson worked together often and well, particularly in their years as fellow American diplomats in Europe. Their falling-out over the direction of the nation in the 1790s and the first decade or so of the nineteenth century was profound, for their disagreements were deep. Yet after both men retired they would revive the friendship they formed in these early Philadelphia days. “I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution,” their fellow Revolutionary Benjamin Rush wrote Adams in February 1812. “Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson
thought
for us all.”

J
efferson's proximity to the action and his new connections to delegates from the northern colonies, particularly Adams, grew into an intense admiration for New England. To read of valor is one thing. To live among those who are following the news of bloodshed in their homes, who have a direct stake in the outcome, is to experience conflict at a more fundamental level. The ethos of war was all around him.

The day after Jefferson came to the city the Congress authorized an invasion of Canada—a dramatic move that helped fix Canada's place firmly in Jefferson's political and military imaginations. Since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British had occupied large sections of Canada, once known as New France. In the face of American invasion in 1775, Montreal surrendered but Quebec held out. The failure to conquer the whole territory effectively left it in British hands, and Canada became a haven for Loyalists. After the war, Canada was, in the American mind, a possible staging ground for a reassertion of British force and influence in the new United States.

Jefferson found an infectious courage in Philadelphia in 1775. “Nobody now entertains a doubt but that we are able to cope with the whole force of Great Britain, if we are but willing to exert ourselves,” he wrote in July. They were high hopes, but Jefferson was in a noble frame of mind, believing the Americans capable of vigor and virtue.

Jefferson and John Dickinson, the author of
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,
consulted in these weeks at Dickinson's Fair Hill estate outside Philadelphia on the Germantown Road. The result: a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which was adopted by the Congress on Thursday, July 6, 1775.

The next day, Jefferson slipped away from the Congress and rode the ferry to the Woodlands, the botanist William Hamilton's estate on the Schuylkill River. Hamilton and Jefferson shared a passion for landscape gardening. Walking the Woodlands on this summer's day, Jefferson was likely imaginatively engaged by visions of creation, of bringing the natural world into harmony with the human. He also made a trip to the falls of the Schuylkill for an outing and dinner.

Such excursions offered welcome, if brief, respites from politics and from war. On Saturday, July 8, 1775, having made the case for armed resistance with Dickinson and Jefferson's Declaration of Causes, the Congress extended its hand to the king, dispatching an “Olive Branch Petition” to London.

Nothing was to come of it.

J
efferson rarely spoke in large assemblies, preferring to make his mark in different ways. As accomplished a student of politics and of history as John Adams believed Jefferson benefited enormously from holding his tongue in debate. From all that Adams had read and all that he had experienced firsthand, he had learned, he said, “eloquence in public assemblies is not the surest road to fame and preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great reserve.” Classing Jefferson with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were also reluctant to speak at length in public, Adams said, “A public speaker who inserts himself, or is urged by others into the conduct of affairs, by daily exertions to justify his measures and answer the objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the public, and unavoidably makes himself enemies.”

To write public papers or to negotiate quietly, away from the floor of an assembly or even away from a largish committee, enabled a politician to exert his will with less risk of creating animosity. “Few persons can bear to be outdone in reasoning or declamation or wit, or sarcasm or repartee or satire, and all these things are very apt to grow out of public debate,” said Adams. “In this way in a course of years, a nation becomes full of a man's enemies, or at least of such as have been galled in some controversy, and take a secret pleasure in assisting to humble and mortify him.”

J
efferson was reflective yet practical, confident yet realistic in the middle of the maelstrom of 1775. “The continuance and the extent of this conflict we consider as among the secrets of providence; but we also reflect on the propriety of being prepared for the worst events, and, so far as human foresight can provide, to be guarded against probable evils at least,” he said. Perhaps “a few gentlemen of genius and spirit” should be sent to train under General Washington to learn the “necessary art” of war.

So much was unknowable, but the political language of war had to celebrate what had been done and offer hope for darker moments. Jefferson was mastering this complex vocabulary. He knew, clearly, that Virginia faced a “deficiency” of military skill—a skill that “in these days of rapine can only be relied upon for public safety.” The use of “rapine” came from the lawyer in Jefferson. It was an ancient legal term for violent seizure of property, a rhetorical touch underscoring the view that anyone with property had a stake in the struggle.

After a visit to Robert Bell's shop on Third Street to buy a copy of James Burgh's book
Political Disquisitions,
Jefferson left Philadelphia for Virginia on Tuesday, August 1, 1775. He stopped along the road at Mrs. Clay's inn at New Castle, Delaware, then continued onward to Chestertown, Annapolis, and Port Royal en route home to Monticello.

I
n the absence of any surviving letters between Jefferson and Patty we can only guess about the tone they used with each other when apart. Given Jefferson's letters to his family and friends throughout his life, though, it is likely that he wrote to his wife in rather the way his contemporary Theodorick Bland, Jr., wrote his own wife. Bland was a Virginian, a physician, a politician, and a revolutionary. Writing his wife, also named Martha, from the front in New Jersey in 1777, he said: “For God's sake, my dear, when you are writing, write of nothing but yourself, or at least exhaust that dear, ever dear subject, before you make a transition to another; tell me of your going to bed, of your rising, of the hour you breakfast, dine, sup, visit, tell me of anything, but leave me not in doubt about your health.… Fear not … yes, ‘you will again feel your husband's lips flowing with love and affectionate warmth.' Heaven never means to separate two who love so well, so soon; and if it does, with what transport shall we meet in heaven?”

W
ith Patty, Jefferson had built the kind of marriage and life he wanted on the mountain. Music and dancing were essential. Jefferson never stopped humming, ordered an Aeolian harp, and paid £5 for a new violin. In memory he could hear his sister Jane's voice, singing. And in the moment he could sit and listen to Patty play the pianoforte or the harpsichord.

“Mrs. Jefferson was small,” said the slave Isaac Granger Jefferson, and “pretty.” She was also busy, both bearing children and presiding over the plantation during her husband's absences. Her account book tracks her daily work, including supervising the slaughter of ducks, turkeys, hogs, sheep, and lambs. She also managed the slaves in the house.

The “first” Monticello—Jefferson eventually tore down the house and started anew in the 1790s—was smaller than the second and final version, but it was still a grand place. “The house was built quite recently, in the latest
Italian
style,” a visitor wrote of the first Monticello. “There is a colonnade around the structure and the frieze is very charmingly decorated with all kinds of sculptures drawn from mythology.” He acquired a chessboard and pieces, a backgammon table, a refracting telescope, eight Venetian blinds, and Scotch carpet: He was always on the watch for lovely things—and always, always books. Even the first Monticello had, a visitor noted, “a copious and well-chosen library.”

The house itself—“an elegant building,” the visitor recalled—was only the most vivid expression of Jefferson's wide-ranging mind. From books to languages to music to entertaining to art to architecture, he was constantly learning, experiencing, experimenting, tasting,
living:
At Shadwell and at the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg he had been taught that there was a vast world to engage and shape.

His architectural sense was informed by, among other works, James Gibbs's
Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture
and an edition of
The Architecture of A. Palladio
. He mused on the painting scheme for his dining room, ordered a copy of Hannah Glasse's
Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy,
and sent for a clothespress.

Jefferson had joined the Philosophical Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge, founded by Virginians (including his friend John Page) on the model of the American Philosophical Society, to which Jefferson was elected in 1780. In 1772, James McClurg, the future director of hospitals for Virginia during the Revolutionary War, published a book entitled
Experiments upon the Human Bile
. Jefferson bought a copy.

Following in the tradition of his kinsman John Randolph, the attorney general who lived in a beautiful house, Tazewell Hall, on a ninety-nine-acre estate on South England Street in Williamsburg, Jefferson was fascinated by gardening. Randolph, a Loyalist, owned perhaps the best violin in Virginia—Jefferson long envied it—and had written a book,
A Treatise on Gardening by a Citizen of Virginia.
The works of William Shenstone and of Thomas Whately also influenced Jefferson's understanding of gardening and landscaping—an understanding centered on the idea of creating and controlling the illusion of wildness and of the natural.