Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (51 page)

And so he does.

EPILOGUE

ALL HONOR TO JEFFERSON

Jefferson's principles are sources of light because they are not made up of pure reason, but spring out of aspiration, impulse, vision, sympathy. They burn with the fervor of the heart.

—W
OODROW
W
ILSON
, 1912

H
E
SURVIVES
AS
HE
LIVED
—in many ways and in many different lights. In the immediate aftermath of his death he was, together with Adams, recognized chiefly for the Revolution of 1776, the virtues of which were beyond dispute in the American mind. “To have been the instrument of expressing, in one brief, decisive act, the concentrated will and resolution of a whole family of states,” said Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts in an 1826 eulogy, “of unfolding, in one all-important manifesto, the causes, the motives, and the justification of the great movement in human affairs … this is the glory of Thomas Jefferson.”

Jefferson's finished work was the creation of an imperfect but lasting democratic habit of mind and heart. “Mr. Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail,” wrote the historian Henry Adams. “Mr. Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.”

E
llen Wayles Coolidge was en route from Boston to Charlottesville when the news of her grandfather's death reached her in New York. She arrived at Monticello long after the funeral was over. To her, the place that had been home for so long was now a foreign land. “He was gone,” she wrote Henry Randall many years later, recalling the pain of her return. “His place was empty. I visited his grave, but the whole house at Monticello, with its large apartments and lofty ceilings, appeared to me one vast monument.”

Such was the power of Jefferson, though, that Ellen expected him to appear to her at any moment—to hear his voice, to look into his eyes, to feel his touch once more. “I wandered about the vacant rooms as if I were looking for him,” she said.

Had I not seen him there all the best years of my life? … I passed hours in his chamber. It was just as he had left it. There was the bed on which he had slept for so many years—the chair in which, when I entered the room, I always found him sitting—articles of dress still in their places—his clock by which he had told so many useful hours—In the cabinet adjoining were his books, the beloved companions of his leisure—his writing table from which I gathered some small relics, memoranda and scraps of written paper which I still preserve. All seemed as if he had just quitted the rooms and there were moments when I felt as if I expected his return.

She was in a curiously dreamlike state.

For days I started at what seemed the sound of his step or his voice, and caught myself listening for both. In the dining room where, in winter, we passed a good deal of time, there was the low arm chair which he always occupied by the fireside, with his little round table still standing as when it held his book or his candle.… In the tea-room was the sofa where, in summer, I had so often sat by his side—In the large parlor, with its parquet floor, stood the Campeachy chair … where, in the shady twilight, I was used to see him resting. In the great Hall, with its large glass doors, where, in bad weather, he liked to walk, how much I liked to walk with him!—Everything told of him. An invisible presence seemed everywhere to preside!

Finally she left the house, and the estate, never to return. Her grandfather lived, for her, in her heart and mind.

A
nd in her nation's. Like his grieving granddaughter in the summer of 1826, Americans have never quite let Jefferson go. “If Jefferson was wrong,” wrote the biographer James Parton in 1874, “America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.”

That is a remarkable burden to put on any one man or any one vision of politics, but the observation resonates because in death Jefferson remains much as he was in life: a vivid, engaging, breathing figure, brilliant and eloquent, at once monumental and human. It is difficult to imagine having a glass of claret with George Washington at Mount Vernon and talking of many things; it seems the most natural thing in the world to imagine doing so with Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, surrounded by paintings from France and busts from Philadelphia and artifacts from the dazzling world of the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Jefferson speaks to us now because he spoke so powerfully and evocatively to us then. His circumstances were particular, yet the general issues that consumed him are constant: liberty and power, rights and responsibilities, the keeping of peace and the waging of war. He was a politician, a public man, in a nation in which politics and public life became—and remain—so central. As Jefferson wrote, “Man … feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election, one day in the year, but every day.”

Had he been only a philosopher he would not have endured as he does. Had he been only a legislator, or only a diplomat, or only an inventor, or only an author, or only an educator, or even only a president he would not have endured as he does.

He endures because we can see in him all the varied and wondrous possibilities of the human experience—the thirst for knowledge, the capacity to create, the love of family and of friends, the hunger for accomplishment, the applause of the world, the marshaling of power, the bending of others to one's own vision. His genius lay in his versatility; his larger political legacy in his leadership of thought and of men.

With his brilliance and his accomplishment and his fame he is immortal. Yet because of his flaws and his sins and his failures he strikes us as mortal, too—a man of achievement who was nonetheless susceptible to the temptations and compromises that ensnare all of us. He was not all he could be. But no politician—no human being—ever is.

We sense his greatness because we know that perfection in politics is not possible but that Jefferson passed the fundamental test of leadership: Despite all his shortcomings and all the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred, he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.

Jefferson is the founding president who charms us most. George Washington inspires awe; John Adams respect. With his grace and hospitality, his sense of taste and love of beautiful things—of silver and art and architecture and gardening and food and wine—Jefferson is more alive, more convivial.

Nineteenth-century secessionists and twentieth-century states'-rights purists have found him a hero; progressive leaders from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Truman have believed him to embody the best impulses in the American tradition of popular government.

So who was he, really? In the most literal sense, the only real Jefferson is the man who lived and loved and led and was carried to his grave in a wooden coffin on a wet summer's day in 1826. The real Jefferson was like so many of us: a bundle of contradictions, competing passions, flaws, sins, and virtues that can never be neatly smoothed out into a tidy whole. The closest thing to a constant in his life was his need for power and for control. He tended to mask these drives so effectively, however, that even the most astute of observers of his life and work have had trouble detecting them. “The leadership he sought was one of sympathy and love, not of command,” wrote Henry Adams, but that was not quite the case. For him sympathy and love among the members of his political circle were means to an end—and the end was command. If he had found that affection was insufficient to accumulate the power he wanted, he would have found other ways to govern.

All the other Jeffersons—the emblematic ones, the metaphorical ones, the ones different generations and differing partisans interpret and invent, seeking inspiration from his example and sanction from his name—all these Jeffersons tell us more about ourselves than they do about the man himself. He can be claimed by many, and always will be.

The greatest of men often are. They are spoken of and thought about because their ideas resonate and their battles recur. His most significant successors have defined him in terms of his vision of liberty and union. To do so, of course, requires choosing between the author of the Declaration of Independence and the author of the Kentucky Resolutions; of deciding to trumpet the voice of the man who believed secession fatal to America instead of the man who wrote about the primacy of states' rights.

The finest presidents working in Jefferson's wake have made those choices and taken those decisions, creating a Jefferson that represents the best of the American spirit and the possibilities of politics in an imperfect world.

In the early days of April 1859, from Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln wrote to a group in Boston declining its invitation to speak to a Jefferson birthday celebration. The moment gave Lincoln the chance, though, to link Jefferson to the cause of freedom in an hour of danger for the Union. “The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” Lincoln wrote. “And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success.… Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”

The slave owner was thus being drafted to serve as an emblem of liberty not only for white men but for blacks. Such, in Lincoln's view, was the core of the Jefferson vision, and he hailed the author of the Declaration of Independence for turning the ideal into the real amid the war and chaos of the Revolution. “All honor to Jefferson,” said Lincoln, “to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

Seventy years later, in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt did what Lincoln had done in 1859: He sought the mantle of Jefferson. “It is not necessary for us in any way to discredit the great financial genius of Alexander Hamilton or the school of thought of the early Federalists to point out that they were frank in their belief that certain sections of the Nation and certain individuals within those sections were more fitted than others to conduct Government,” Roosevelt told the Jefferson Day dinner in St. Paul. “It was the purpose of Jefferson to teach the country that the solidarity of Federalism was only a partial one, that it represented only a minority of the people, that to build a great Nation the interests of all groups in every part must be considered, and that only in a large, national unity could real security be found.”

A master of politics himself, FDR appreciated a kindred spirit. Jefferson, he said, “has been called a politician because he devoted years to the building of a political party. But this labor was in itself a definite and practical act aimed at the unification of all parts of the country in support of common principles. When people carelessly or snobbishly deride political parties, they overlook the fact that the party system of Government is one of the greatest methods of unification and of teaching people to think in common terms of our civilization.”

Jefferson's words were elemental parts of the language of America. In September 1948, at the Bonham High School football stadium in Bonham, Texas, hometown of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Harry S. Truman invoked Jefferson:

I have a profound faith in the people of this country. I believe in their commonsense. They love freedom and that love for freedom and justice is not dead. Our people believe today, as Jefferson did, that men were not born with saddles on their backs to be ridden by the privileged few.

We believe, as Jefferson did, that [the] “God who gave us life gave us liberty.” We protect our liberty against those who threaten it from abroad, and we do not propose to give it up to those who threaten it at home. We will not give up our democratic way to a dictatorship of the left; neither will we give it up to a despotism of special privilege.

In the waning days of his own presidency, in December 1988, Ronald Reagan traveled to the lawn of Mr. Jefferson's University of Virginia to speak to students. For Reagan, Jefferson's pure republicanism and quotations about a limited national government had long been sacred texts.

Saluting Jefferson's “transforming genius,” Reagan said: “The pursuit of science, the study of the great works, the value of free inquiry, in short, the very idea of living the life of the mind—yes, these formative and abiding principles of higher education in America had their first and firmest advocate, and their greatest embodiment, in a tall, fair-headed, friendly man who watched this university take form from the mountainside where he lived, the university whose founding he called a crowning achievement to a long and well-spent life.”

The men—and now the women—of the university were not alone in feeling the great man's living spirit. “Presidents know about this, too,” Reagan said. Jefferson was a permanent guardian over his successors, for “directly down the lawn and across the Ellipse from the White House are those ordered, classic lines of the Jefferson Memorial and the eyes of the 19-foot statue that gaze directly into the White House, a reminder to any of us who might occupy that mansion of the quality of mind and generosity of heart that once abided there and has been so rarely seen there again.”

Reagan—himself a visionary with a pragmatic streak, a deft communicator of political ideals, a transformative leader—intuitively understood the third president. “He knew how disorderly a place the world could be,” Reagan said. “Indeed, as a leader of a rebellion, he was himself an architect, if you will, of disorder. But he also believed that man had received from God a precious gift of enlightenment—the gift of reason, a gift that could extract from the chaos of life meaning, truth, order.” Jefferson would have been hard put to describe the matter more clearly.