Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (46 page)

On her own promised visit to Monticello in the middle of 1809, Margaret Bayard Smith thought Jefferson in a perfect place and frame of mind. “The sun never sees him in bed, and his mind designs more than the day can fulfill, even his long day,” she wrote. “There is a tranquility about him, which an inward peace could alone bestow.”

As he began his retirement, Jefferson enjoyed reading of the public's confidence in him and the course he had set. “We have been permitted to hear the thunder of war at a distance, and peaceably tread the arduous path of intellectual improvement, unmolested by the awful din of battle, or the more dreadful scenes of devastation that now desolate the nations of the world,” a group of college students wrote on Inauguration Day 1809. An anonymous writer praised him as the greatest of men: “You have, in your public capacity, been to me a father, a protector, a preserver. For these services I will forever render you the tribute of a grateful heart.” An old friend from France offered him the highest flattery: “Though I am convinced that Mr. Madison, your friend and your student, will govern according to the same principles as you have, I cannot help regretting that you did not want to retain the presidency for four more years,” Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours wrote Jefferson in June 1809.

The world still looked to him, and to America, as emblems of hope. “No one knows better than you how difficult it is to do good: men are very evil; their heads are filled with nonsense, and it is so contagious, so tenacious, that not even the great, philosophical chemist Jefferson is able to reduce it to gas so that it evaporates from human judgment,” wrote a Spanish diplomat at Philadelphia.

“What would become of mankind if republican government did not survive in your country?” asked a French correspondent. “I shudder to think of the consequences!”

In his cabinet he wrote with his legs stretched out along a red-leather bench beneath a plantation writing table. He grudgingly spent hours at his table, reading and keeping up with his correspondence, for he was a fully engaged farmer. “My present course of life admits less reading than I wish,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush from Monticello. “From breakfast, or noon at latest, to dinner, I am mostly on horseback, attending to my farms or other concerns, which I find healthful to my body, mind, and affairs.” He ordered samplings of the English mulberry and peach-apricot, as well as wild geese and a ram for the farm. “I am now on horseback among my farms from an early breakfast to a late dinner, with little regard to weather,” he told Lafayette in January 1811. “I find it gives health to body, mind and affairs.”

He had a ready refrain on the subject of politics. “I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing,” he wrote in 1819. “I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy … of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too.”

Yet Jefferson could never fully remove himself from the life of the present. To Lafayette he expressed the hope that the tumults of Europe would work themselves out. “If there be a God, and he is just, his day will come. He will never abandon the whole race of man to be eaten up by the leviathans and mammoths of a day.” He subscribed to the papers, telling Madison that he was “reading the newspapers but little and that little but as the romance of the day, a word of truth now and then comes like a drop of water on the tongue of Dives.” One thing was very clear as he settled back into life on the mountain: He loved, he said, the “ineffable luxury of being owner of my own time.”

With those hours he stayed in close touch with the scientific, educational, and philosophical worlds. William Clark continued to dispatch specimens to the President's House, and Madison sent the skin of a bighorn sheep from the Rocky Mountains to Monticello on July 4, 1809. (“The bundle being too large for the mail, I shall forward it by some other opportunity.”) Jefferson oversaw the English translation of a French commentary on Montesquieu's
Spirit of the Laws,
debated the origins of the potato with a correspondent, wrote for vine cuttings to cultivate wine, and mused on the role of libraries. “I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the county under such regulations as would secure their safe return in due time,” he said.

In the fall, John Walker, his onetime friend whose wife Jefferson had tried to woo, was sick, and said that he would like to see his old friend. James Monroe wrote Jefferson to tell him “a visit by you to Col. Walker would at this time be considered by him an act of great kindness, and be received with much sensibility.” Betsy Walker was ill, too. Apparently unwilling to risk a scene, Jefferson decided not to pay the call at Belvoir, declining to make the short journey he had so often made in that distant summer during his bachelor days. He sent a gift of a basket of ripe figs, prompting Hugh Nelson, a Walker son-in-law, to thank him and report the sad news that both Walkers were “still very feeble and low.”

He was also forever prepared to refight the years of his governorship. Writing a historian seeking information on the Revolutionary period, he argued that Virginia had always contributed “above par” to the national efforts. Indeed, he said, “our whole occupation was in straining the resources of the state to their utmost, to furnish men, money, provisions and other necessaries to the common cause.”

Word arrived of the brutal death of his old secretary Meriwether Lewis. As Jefferson heard the story, a sleeping servant had heard two pistol shots. Lewis, who had been thought “deranged,” was found “weltering in his blood” with a wound to his head and a fatal shot to the heart; the first had apparently failed to kill him, and he tried to finish the job with the second. This, too, seemed to have been insufficient, and the poor man was left to stab himself with his dirk.

E
lijah Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont, left an unsparing account of Jefferson. “Mr. Jefferson is tall, spare, straight in body,” Fletcher wrote in 1811. “His face not handsome but savage—I learnt he was but little esteemed by his neighbors.… The story of Black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts—This conduct may receive a little palliation when we consider that such proceedings are so common that they cease here to be disgraceful.”

Jefferson coolly recorded the births of Hemings's children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops. Jefferson was apparently able to consign his children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they grew up in his midst. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children,” said Madison Hemings, who added that Jefferson was, however, “affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”

It was, to say the least, an odd way to live, but Jefferson was a creature of his culture. “The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter,” Josiah Quincy, Jr., of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the Carolinas. “It is far from being uncommon to see a gentleman at dinner, and his reputed offspring a slave to the master of the table.”

This was daily reality at Monticello. In a letter to James Parton, Henry Randall reported some observations of Thomas Jefferson Randolph's from the mountain. Discussing the physical similarities between Jefferson and the children of Sally Hemings, Randolph “said in one case that the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” On one occasion, Randolph reported, “a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.” (Randolph offered these reminiscences to support the theory that Jefferson's nephew Peter Carr was the father of Sally Hemings's children—a theory ultimately disproved by DNA research.

For Jefferson such ambiguities and unacknowledged truths were part of life. “I asked Col. R[andolph] why on earth Mr. Jefferson did not put these slaves who looked like him out of the public sight by sending them to his Bedford estate or elsewhere,” Randall wrote Parton. “He said Mr. Jefferson never betrayed the least consciousness of the resemblance—and although he (Col. R[andolph]) had no doubt his mother would have been very glad to have them removed, that both and all venerated Mr. Jefferson too deeply to broach such a topic to him. What suited him, satisfied them.”

What suited Jefferson was the code of denial that defined life in the slave-owning states. It was his plantation, his world, and he would live as he wished. “The secrets of an old Virginia manor house,” wrote Henry Randall, “were like the secrets of an Old Norman Castle.” And such secrets were to be kept as well as they could be. That was how Jefferson wanted it, and in this matter, as in so many others, he was to have his way.

J
efferson sometimes felt his age. “I am little able to walk about,” he wrote Philip Mazzei in July 1811. “Most of my exercise is on horseback, and the powers of life are very sensibly decayed.” Jefferson was acutely aware of his own capacities. “It is wonderful to me that old men should not be sensible that their minds keep pace with their bodies in the progress of decay,” he wrote Benjamin Rush in August 1811. He was proud of his own insights on this score, mildly but unmistakably congratulating himself for recognizing human limitations: “Had not a conviction of the danger to which an unlimited occupation of the executive chair would expose the republican constitution of our government made it conscientiously a duty to retire when I did, the fear of becoming a dotard and of being insensible of it, would of itself have resisted all solicitations to remain.”

His curiosity endured. “How do you do?” he wrote his friend and former attorney general Levi Lincoln in Massachusetts. “What are you doing? Does the farm or the study occupy your time, or each by turns? Do you read law or divinity? And which affords the most curious and cunning learning? Which is most disinterested? And which was it that crucified its Savior?”

On the second day of 1811, Benjamin Rush opened a quiet campaign to bring Jefferson and Adams back into correspondence. “Such an intercourse will be honorable to talents, and patriotism, and highly useful to the cause of republicanism not only in the United States but all over the world,” Rush wrote Jefferson. “Posterity will revere the friendship of two ex-presidents that were once opposed to each other. Human nature will be a gainer by it.” If Jefferson would make the first move, Rush said, all would be well. Adams was ready, and time was likely short. “Tottering over the grave,” Rush said, Adams “now leans wholly upon the shoulders of his old revolutionary friends.”

The Adams-Jefferson friendship had been a victim of the passions of the 1790s. “You remember the machinery which the Federalists played off, about that time,” Jefferson wrote Rush. He recalled the Alien and Sedition Acts, which to Jefferson's mind were meant “to beat down the friends to the real principles of our Constitution, to silence by terror every expression in their favor, to bring us into war with France and alliance with England, and finally to homologise our Constitution with that of England.”

Rush pressed ahead with his cause, if gently. “Many are the evils of a political life, but none so great as the dissolution of friendships, and the implacable hatreds which too often take their place,” Rush replied.

The second president spent two days at home in Quincy with two visiting neighbors of Jefferson's. The conversation ranged widely. “Mr. Adams talked very freely of men and of things, and detailed many highly interesting facts in the history of our country, and particularly of his own administration, and of incidents connected with the presidential election of 1800,” wrote Edward Coles, one of the callers. Adams “complained,” too, about Jefferson. “I told him I could not reconcile what he had heard of Mr. Jefferson's language and conduct to him, with what I had heard [Jefferson] repeatedly say, and that too to friends who were political opponents of Mr. Adams,” Coles wrote. “Upon repeating some of the complimentary remarks thus made by Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Adams not only seemed but expressed himself highly pleased.”

Reassured and surprised by the warm report from the Virginians, Adams changed his tone about Jefferson, displaying, Coles said, “an exalted admiration of his character, and appreciation of his services to his country, as well during the Revolution as subsequently.” Adams then criticized the press for its harshness toward Jefferson, adding: “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”

These eight words were all it took for Jefferson. “This is enough for me,” he wrote Rush. “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.” Rush sent word of Jefferson's sentiments to Adams, who, in turn, wrote Jefferson on New Year's Day 1812, sending him a copy of John Quincy Adams's inaugural lectures at Harvard on rhetoric and oratory.

Replying, Jefferson struck the right notes. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he wrote from Monticello on Tuesday, January 21, 1812. “It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.”