Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (48 page)

It was a university—a university so thoroughly the work of his hands that it was to become known simply as “Mr. Jefferson's.” In 1818, he left his mountain for a twenty-five-mile journey to the Mountain Top Tavern in Rockfish Gap between Nelson and Augusta counties in the Blue Ridge. There Jefferson and others approved a plan for a university to be built in Charlottesville. It was a formidable gathering. Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall were on hand, as were other notable Virginia politicians. Jefferson was clearly in charge and relished the role.

The mission, in Jefferson's words, was to “form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity, and individual happiness are so much to depend.” He invested the enterprise with the highest of stakes, writing: “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

The making of the University of Virginia was Jefferson's last great effort of will and leadership. It called on his political, intellectual, and architectural gifts. As with so much in his life, there were compromises and problems (he spent too much money), but also as with so much else, Jefferson created something that endured. The Declaration of Independence's words lived on past him. The nation built from the addition of Louisiana lived on past him. His conception of the possibilities of a strong presidency lived on past him. The university did, too.

Education had been a perennial interest. “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people,” Jefferson had written George Wythe in the 1780s. “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”

Jefferson conceived the work of the university as a critical element of the kind of American world he had long worked to bring about. “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” he said. Echoing his first inaugural address, he added: “For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

There was also a provincial element in his enthusiasm. “If our legislature does not heartily push our University we must send our children for education to Kentucky or Cambridge,” Jefferson said in 1820, alluding to Transylvania College in Kentucky and to Harvard College. “The latter will return them to us fanatics and tories, the former will keep them to add to their population.”

He envisioned a great new institution, and nothing could keep him away when he wanted to be on hand. In 1819, Eliza House Trist noted that Jefferson rode through “a perfect hurricane … to visit the college.” He was said to have installed a telescope on a terrace at Monticello to watch the construction.

H
is first university appointment fell victim to the kind of sectarian religious strife that drove him to distraction. In 1820, Thomas Cooper, a Unitarian, was asked to come to the university as a professor. The state's religious world reacted ferociously, mounting what Jefferson called a “Holy Inquisition,” but the zealots won. Jefferson was forced to back down.

The old man never lost his capacity to learn from his mistakes, however, and two years later, amid enduring criticism that the state university was hostile to religion, he offered a brilliant plan to assuage concerns that the institution was failing to nurture religious belief among its pupils. The immediate cause of worry for sectarian observers was Jefferson's refusal to include a professor of divinity on the faculty. In his 1822 annual report as rector, Jefferson gently but unmistakably shifted the burden back to the individual faiths themselves, offering any sect the opportunity to build and fund its own school on the grounds of the university. The library would be open to all, and officials would allow students the ability to attend classes of a sectarian nature as well as ordinary university courses—“but always understanding,” Jefferson wrote, “that these schools shall be independent of the University and of each other.”

Jefferson was once again exercising power passively and achieving his own ends under the guise of being reasonable and open. And he was being reasonable and open: The proposed compromise had much to recommend it as a sensible accommodation of interests. Faced with the prospect of having to build their own institutions, though, the different denominations declined. There would still be no professor of divinity, and there would be no separate seminaries. Jefferson may have lost Cooper, but he won the larger war.

The same year his belief in the power of reason led him into the regions of hyperbole. “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free enquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests,” he said in 1822, “the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a
young man
now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.” (On the other side of the prediction ledger, Jefferson correctly foresaw the rise of coffee. The coffee bean, he wrote, “is become the favorite beverage of the civilized world.”)

He was also closer to the mark—though, given the perennial popularity of traditional Christianity and Judaism, still wide of it—when he mused about the spread of less conventional spiritual beliefs. “Were I to be the founder of a new sect, I would call them Apiarians, and, after the example of the bee, advise them to extract the honey of every sect,” he said. “My fundamental principle would be … that we are to be saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power.”

Jefferson believed in the existence of a creator God and in an afterlife. Most significantly, he defended the moral lessons of the life and teachings of Jesus, whose divinity Jefferson rejected but whose words and example he embraced. In his presidential years he had completed a forty-six-page work entitled
The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth extracted from the account of his life and doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
. In retirement he returned to the project, privately creating a more ambitious work he called
The Life and Morals of Jesus
of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English
. “The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknowledged,” Jefferson wrote the Unitarian Jared Sparks in 1820. “Thinking men of all nations rallied readily to the doctrine of one only God, and embraced it with the pure-morals which Jesus inculcated.”

A churchgoer who carried his well-worn Book of Common Prayer to services, served as a vestryman, and invoked the divine in his public statements, Jefferson was, as he once put it, “of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” Though he fought against the establishment of religion, he understood and appreciated the cultural role faith played in the United States. As a politician and a devotee of republicanism, Jefferson hoped that subjecting religious sensibilities to free inquiry would transform faith from a source of contention into a force for good, for he knew that religion in one form or another was a perpetual factor in the world. The wisest course, then, was not to rail against it but to encourage the application of reason to questions of faith. The more rational men became about religion, Jefferson believed, the better lives they would lead; in turn the life of the nation would become more stable and virtuous.

It was not going to be a quick or easy war to win, especially given the power of traditional Christianity. To John Adams Jefferson wrote: “The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.”

Jefferson had a fairly detailed vision of the after-life, seeking comfort from the present pain of the loss of loved ones in the expectation that they would meet again beyond time and space. Of Heaven, he wrote Adams: “May we meet there again, in Congress, with our ancient colleagues, and receive with them the seal of approbation.”

At heart, he believed “the doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man”:

1. That there is only one God, and he all perfect.

2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.

3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself is the sum of religion.

His own faith, he told Adams, “is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.” As a young man, Jefferson recalled with pride, he had been “bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.”

He remained bold to the end. “It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three.… But this constitutes the craft, the power, and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.” Still, he donated money to the American Bible Society, agreeing that “there never was a more pure and sublime system of morality delivered to man than is to be found in the four evangelists.”

In October 1819, he was felled with a stricture of the ileum, an intestinal crisis that his doctors believed possibly fatal. He rallied, as he always had, but his convalescence gave way to a period of intense worry over the Union in 1820 and beyond. “The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave,” he wrote a correspondent that year. A powerful one from the West was coming fast.

FORTY
-
TWO

THE KNELL OF THE UNION

From the Battle of Bunker's Hill to the Treaty of Paris we never had so ominous a question.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
, on the admission of Missouri to the Union

J
EFFERSON
LIKED
TO
THINK
WELL
of the future. It suited the prevailing nature of his temperament. He knew, too, that the public preferred a promise of progress rather than reversal, of light rather than dark. “I have much confidence that we shall proceed successfully for ages to come,” he wrote the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois in 1817. “My hope of its duration is built much on the enlargement of the resources of life going hand in hand with the enlargement of territory.”

On Friday, December 10, 1819, Jefferson took note of a debate in Congress with vast implications: the conditions under which Missouri would be added to the Union. The House voted for admission only if antislavery provisions were part of the agreement; the Senate, where slave states held more sway, refused to go along.

From the Constitutional Convention through the Louisiana Purchase, the Northeast had feared that an expanding slaveholding South and West would give the slave interests permanent control over the country. At the same time, the South and West feared for the future of slavery.

To Jefferson it was the worst of hours. He knew slavery was a moral wrong and believed it would ultimately be abolished. He could not, however, bring himself to work for emancipation. As a politician he understood that sectional tensions represented the greatest threat to the union. In his own public career, they already had threatened it in the secessionist movements in the Northeast over the Louisiana Purchase and, later, over the embargo.

Yet slavery was a higher order of problem. Missouri, Jefferson said, was “like a fire bell in the night … the knell of the Union.” He added: “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”

By his own admission, Jefferson's solution for the problem of slavery was too complex to be executed. “The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and
expatriation
could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be,” he wrote. “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

To John Adams, Jefferson was candid about his anxieties. “The banks, bankrupt law, manufactures, Spanish treaty, are nothing,” he wrote in December. “These are occurrences which, like waves in a storm, will pass under the ship. But the Missouri question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what more, God only knows.”

The resolution was a compromise. Slavery was to be allowed below the 36th parallel but other than in Missouri itself it was forbidden any farther north. Fugitive slaves were to be returned to their owners in the event of escape into the free regions.

Jefferson saw the issue in terms of power. If the federal government began regulating slavery within the states, then a precedent would be established, for regulation could finally lead to abolition.

He believed, too, the North was trying to create new free states that would strengthen the national hand of the antislavery interest, possibly giving free states a lock on the electoral college. “It is not a moral question, but one merely of power,” he wrote Lafayette. “Its object is to raise a geographical principle for the choice of a president, and the noise will be kept up till that is effected.”

The terms in which he thought and spoke of the Missouri matter suggest the depth of his feeling about it. Jefferson linked the question to one that had driven him for so long: that of the threat of monarchy. “The leaders of Federalism, defeated in their schemes of obtaining power by rallying partisans to the principle of monarchism … have changed their tack,” he said, and were now attempting to build political support by appealing to antislavery sentiment.

In the end Jefferson could see slavery only as tragedy. He may have believed it to be “a hideous blot,” as he wrote in September 1823, but it was not a blot he felt capable of erasing. The man who believed in the acquisition and wielding of power—political power, intellectual power, domestic power, and mastering life from the fundamental definition of human liberty in the modern world down to the smallest details of the wine he served and the flowers he planted—chose to consider himself powerless over the central economic and social fact of his life.

Writing to a correspondent who asked him to devise a way to free the slaves of Virginia, Jefferson demurred. “This, my dear sir,” Jefferson said, “is like bidding old Priam to buckle the armor of Hector.… This enterprise is for the young.… It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.”

Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson's sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform. “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity,” he wrote in 1814, but that was not true. He was not willing to sacrifice his own way of life, though he characteristically left himself a rhetorical escape by introducing the subjective standard of practicability.

By his lights nothing other than a removal of blacks from the established United States would work—a removal that would have dwarfed even the removal of Indians from what was understood by Jefferson and so many of his contemporaries to be white America. Indians were to be unjustly driven across the Mississippi. Blacks would have to be dispatched not across a river but an ocean. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”

A multiracial society was beyond his imagination, except it was not beyond his experience, since he had created just such a society at Monticello. Mixed-race children such as those he had with Sally Hemings—children whom he saw every day, in his house, alongside his white family—suffered, in his general view, from an intrinsic “degradation” produced by the “amalgamation” of white and black.

How is it possible to explain the disorienting contradiction between his harsh views of “amalgamation” and his own paternity of such children? Perhaps Jefferson felt, as he often did, that if he were in control—which he was, in his eclectic domestic sphere—then he would be able to keep matters in hand. He felt this way about his debts, and he had felt this way about the country writ large when he was seeking and held the presidency. The human products of “amalgamation,” to use his term, were thought to be sources of chaos in the world beyond his own mountain. In his domain, though, he could have convinced himself that his centrality made Monticello the exception to what he supposed to be the rule in other realms.

Rendering moral judgments in retrospect can be hazardous. It is unfair to judge the past by the standards of the present. Yet we can assess a man's views on a moral issue—which slavery unquestionably was—by what others in the same age and facing the same realities thought and did. Beginning with Robert Carter, the planter who freed his slaves in 1791, some Virginians of Jefferson's class recognized that the blight of slavery had to go and did what was within their power by emancipating their slaves.

More broadly, the politicians of the North were steadily creating a climate in which antislavery rhetoric and sentiment could take root and thrive. The very fact of the debate over Missouri suggested that the antislavery forces were gathering strength—and were willing to use it. As important for a sophisticate such as Jefferson was the French view of the institution. He had lived in that world, and had presumably feared that the Hemingses, and particularly Sally Hemings, might have successfully sought their freedom while in France.

So it is not as though Jefferson lived in a time or in places where abolition was the remotest or most fanciful of prospects. It had not only been thought of but had been brought into being in his lifetime in lands he knew intimately. Jefferson was wrong about slavery, his attempts at reform at the beginning of his public life notwithstanding.

Here again, though, and in dramatic relief, we see that Jefferson the practical politician was a more powerful persona than Jefferson the moral theorist. He was driven by what he had once called, in a 1795 letter to Madison, “the Southern interest,” for the South was his personal home and his political base. He could not see a pragmatic way out of the conundrum, so he did what politicians often do: He suggested that the problem would be handled in the fullness of time—just not now. He did not believe full-scale colonization was feasible. “I do not say this to induce an inference that the getting rid of them is forever impossible,” he wrote in 1824. “For that is neither my opinion nor my hope. But only that it cannot be done in this way.”

Could it be done in any way? Jefferson did not know. “Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication,” he wrote in 1815, a point that reflects the sensibility of—as well as the sensitivities of—a vote counter accustomed to seeking popular approval for proposed courses of action.

“The march of events has not been such as to render its completion practicable within the limits of time allotted to me; and I leave its accomplishment as the work of another generation,” Jefferson wrote the reformer Frances Wright in 1825. “And I am cheered when I see that.… The abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.”

They just were not to be experiments he could undertake—an extremely rare case of the innovative, ever curious, inventive Jefferson refusing to engage in work he knew to be essential. And so he did what he almost never did: He gave up.

P
ersonal debt was another enduring irony of Jefferson's life. Planters of his time and place were often land rich and cash poor, borrowing heavily against their farms, their slaves, and their prospective crops. The need for ready money drove Jefferson, his father, and many of their contemporaries into the growing of tobacco, a cash crop that exhausted the soil but tended to command a greater price at market than wheat or other grains. As such, when tobacco was high, the Virginians made money; when tobacco was low, Virginians muddled along or lost money, depleting their land no matter how much cash came in. Thomas Jefferson tried to move away from tobacco at Monticello when he returned to Virginia in 1794, but he always grew the crop on his more distant plantations.

A confluence of factors kept Jefferson in debt. There was the gentry culture of his time. There were promissory notes to be signed for friends and family members. Most of all, there was the inherited debt. In an effort to pay it down, he sold inherited property worth £4,000, but skyrocketing inflation during the Revolutionary War made what was owed him under the land agreements worth “but a shadow”—while the debt remained, with the spiraling effect of accumulating interest.

Why would Jefferson, a man who sought power over men and events, concede his power to creditors and continue to incur debts when he was already so burdened? Part of the explanation may lie in his tendency, as he put it, to take things “by the smooth handle” and avoid difficult personal choices. It was always easier, it seemed, to sign another note and defer payment to another day, than it was to face a stark financial reckoning. Oddly, too, his innate sense of control and place may have enabled him to see debt as an abstract problem rather than a concrete one. He was part of a family and class in which borrowing money and mortgaging lands was as much a part of the culture as hospitality or hunting. The prospect of ruin was real but in Jefferson's mind remote—or at least remote enough for him to allow his essential sense of security about his standing in society to trump fiscal discipline. Ironically, then, Jefferson's feeling of power in general led him to sacrifice his power—and his family's future—in particular. As with slavery, Jefferson's capacity to live with contradiction was nothing less than epic.

T
he Missouri question made Jefferson even more eager to get on with the building of the University of Virginia, for he believed the rising generation of leaders should be trained at home, in climes hospitable to his view of the world, rather than sent north.

His had been a largely comfortable old age, particularly given the circumstances of the time. In his late seventies he was thought by a friend to look “as well as he did 10 years ago.”

That began to change in the 1820s. His wrist, injured in Paris in the late 1780s, grew worse, and he became ever more elegiac as the first years of the 1820s passed. Worried about Missouri, his wrist aching, he wrote to Adams on the first day of June 1822: “The papers tell us General Stark is off at the age of 93. Charles Thomson still lives at about the same age, cheerful, slender as a grasshopper, and so much without memory that he scarcely recognizes the members of his household. An intimate friend of his called on him not long since; it was difficult to make him recollect who he was, and, sitting one hour, he told him the same story four times over. Is this life? … It is at most but the life of a cabbage; surely not worth a wish.”

One day toward the end of 1822 he put a foot wrong at Monticello. A step down from a terrace gave way under his weight. He collapsed, struck the ground, and broke his left arm. It healed fairly well, but now both his right and left hands had been significantly injured. “During summer I enjoy its temperature,” Jefferson said, “but I shudder at the approach of winter, and wish I could sleep through it with the dormouse, and only wake with him in spring, if ever.”