Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (7 page)

As night fell in Williamsburg, a triumphant Henry left the capital. He had won. Or so he thought.

T
he next morning—it was now Friday, May 31, 1765—Jefferson could not wait to return to the House. Intrigued by the cut and thrust, he arrived at the chamber early. Once there he discovered another Randolph cousin, Peter Randolph, already at work. Randolph was examining the records of the House to find a precedent for what the leadership hoped to accomplish once the bell rang the burgesses into session: rescind the Fifth Resolution, undoing Henry's victory and regaining command of the field.

Jefferson was therefore witness to a bid to overturn the previous day's result. An hour or so later, the House took up the matter and reversed itself from the day before. Henry's departure had given his foes an opportunity they did not fail to exploit. Though the records of the House are silent about the Stamp Act on May 31, Governor Francis Fauquier wrote the Board of Trade that after “a small alteration in the House”—presumably Henry's departure—“there was an attempt to strike all the Resolutions off the Journals. The 5th which was thought the most offensive was accordingly struck off.”

The lesson for Jefferson, the man who would come to be seen as the great democrat, tribune of liberty, and scourge of elite authority? Never give up the political fight and never shy away from using any and all means to carry the day. Only six weeks after his twenty-second birthday, Jefferson had been given a tutorial in the intricacies of power. On Thursday he had been thunderstruck by Homeric oratory evoking the glories of liberty and asserting that to give Parliament any control over Virginia or her sister colonies would do nothing less than “destroy
AMERICAN
FREEDOM
.”

Then on Friday, he watched the prior day's defeated faction become today's victors through resilience and opportunism. Unwilling to give up, Henry's foes were vigilant and resourceful, seeing their chance in his departure and taking steps to find precedent to give their course of action the color of authority. Important, too, was mastery of the means (in this case, the legislative process) to give oneself the ability to achieve the desired end. In later years, whenever Jefferson was able to seize unexpected political moments and turn them to his advantage, he appreciated the role of tactical skill. He had seen it all demonstrated late in a Williamsburg May.

Fauquier saw, too, that things were changing. On the following Tuesday, June 4, 1765, he hosted the annual birth-night ball in honor of George III, usually a spectacular occasion in Williamsburg. Not this year. “I went there in expectation of seeing a great deal of company,” wrote the anonymous French traveler, “but was disappointed for there was not above a dozen of people. I came away before supper.”

A
s the Stamp Act debates unfolded, Jefferson's own first significant public act, the memory of which he cherished, was an elaborate attempt to bend the natural world to his purposes. To do so he used his mind and the arts of quiet persuasion.

The Rivanna was not navigable for boats carrying crops from Albemarle farmers to market. Climbing into a canoe, Jefferson set out to learn whether anything could be done.

Paddling along the river his friend Margaret Bayard Smith once described as “wild and romantic,” Jefferson discovered that the removal of rocks below Milton Falls could transform the Rivanna into a vital route for his and his neighbors' crops. Jefferson raised private money to undertake the project, successfully making the case to individual investors. In October 1765, the colonial assembly praised Jefferson's “laudable and useful” work, and authorized the “clearing the great falls of [the] James River, the river Chickahominy and the north branch of [the] James River.”

Jefferson was thrilled. He was working in the tradition of his father, bringing order to the wilderness and—no small thing—being recognized and honored for it.

F
or Jefferson, the eleven years between the Stamp Act battle in Williamsburg and the Rivanna work in 1765 and the formal Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 was a time of steady maturation—intellectually, politically, and emotionally. Like many Americans, he was an unlikely revolutionary. His journey from loyal subject to leading rebel reveals Jefferson to be a pragmatist as well as an idealist, a man who understood the importance of using philosophy and history to create emotional appeals to shape broad public sentiment.

Leadership, Jefferson was learning, meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world. In 1766, Jefferson helped bring a Maryland publisher, William Rind, to Williamsburg to create a
Virginia Gazette
to rival the one that was controlled by Joseph Royle, John Dixon, and Alexander Purdie. “Until the beginning of our revolutionary disputes,” recalled Jefferson, “we had but one press, and that having the whole business of the government, and no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it.”

Fascinated with how to marshal men, he studied the political arts not only in books but in Williamsburg and Albemarle County. A poor public speaker himself, he admired gifted orators such as Patrick Henry. Shadwell, a convenient stopping place for those making their way to and from Williamsburg, was open to all sorts and conditions of travelers, including Ontassete, the Cherokee chief who crossed the Atlantic in 1762 for a celebrated visit to George III. “The moon was in full splendor,” Jefferson recalled, “and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence: His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated actions, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.”

When it came to the spoken word, Jefferson knew that he could not compete in such arenas with such men. Armed with this insight, he cultivated alternative means of influencing others. He studied the folkways of deliberative bodies. He learned to write with grace, with conviction, and—important in a revolutionary time—with speed.

He immersed himself in the subtle skills of engaging others, chiefly by offering people that which they value most: an attentive audience to listen to their own visions and views. Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think. Everyone wants to believe that what they have to say is fascinating, illuminating, and possibly even epochal. The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: “one of the choice ones of the earth.”

A grandson described Jefferson's tactical approach to personal exchanges. “His powers of conversation were great, yet he always turned it to subjects most familiar to those with whom he conversed, whether laborer, mechanic, or other.”

There was a method to this habit beyond the acquisition of information. Henry Randall tells the story of a “most intelligent and dignified Virginia matron of the old school” who often hosted Jefferson at her table. She was, Randall reported, “wont to boast that [Jefferson] never failed to inquire with great particularity how her best dishes were compounded and cooked.” Though she suspected that charm was at work—even flattery—she was also convinced by the apparent sincerity of Jefferson's manner of listening. “I know this was half to please me,” she allowed, “but he's a nice judge of things, and you may depend upon it, he won't throw away anything he learns worth knowing.” With her, as with so many others, Jefferson knew what he was doing.

T
he autumn of 1765 should have been a heady time for Jefferson. In July his sister Martha had married his friend Dabney Carr, an alliance that pleased Jefferson beyond measure. The Carrs set up housekeeping in Goochland County, at a place called Spring Forest that was along Jefferson's route to and from Williamsburg.

Young and bright, beloved and respected by his teachers in Williamsburg, popular in the aristocratic circles of Virginia, and with the Rebecca Burwell debacle fading from his memory, Jefferson thought the world a largely happy place.

Then, on Tuesday, October 1, 1765, his sister Jane died, reminding him anew, in the manner of his father's death and of the failed romance with Burwell, of the fragility of life.

He had loved Jane, and his grief as the autumn of 1765 gave way to the new year was so deep that it endured in family lore. “The loss of such a sister to such a brother was irreparable,” a great-granddaughter wrote. Drawing on the works of the English poet William Shenstone, a writer much interested in mourning and in the virtues of rural seclusion, Jefferson composed an epitaph in Latin for Jane, which reads in translation:

Ah, Joanna, best of girls.

Ah, torn away from the bloom of vigorous age.

May the earth be light upon you.

Farewell, forever and ever.

In the last week of March 1766, nearly six months after Jane died, Jefferson began his garden book, an episodic record of the lives—and deaths—of flowers and vegetables. He longed for spring. “Purple hyacinth begins to bloom,” he wrote on Sunday, March 30, 1766. “Narcissus and Puckoon open,” he noted on April 6. The “puckoons,” or bloodroot, were not long for this world. A week later, on his birthday, the “Puckoon flowers fallen.”

Still mourning Jane, he was torn between home and the larger world. As the weeks fell away, he planned an excursion north. His first journey outside Virginia foreshadowed much in his life: his ability to conceal anxiety beneath a cool veneer and his urge to engage the world of politics. Setting out in the spring of 1766, Jefferson, always concerned with combating and controlling diseases, stopped at Philadelphia to see Dr. William Shippen, Jr., to be inoculated against smallpox. Jefferson continued on to New York, where, in a sign of the intimacy of the American elite, he boarded in a house along with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a future Revolutionary friend and ally.

It was a perilous trip. Twice on the first day Jefferson's horse broke away from him, “greatly endanger[ing] the breaking [of] my neck.” The second day brought terrible rains, and Jefferson could find no shelter on the road. The third day he was fording a stream and was nearly swamped by unexpectedly deep water. He was among strangers, too, for the first time in his life, seeing “no face known to me before.”

Stopping in Annapolis, which he found “extremely beautiful” and whose houses he thought rather better than those in Williamsburg, Jefferson was drawn to the Maryland colonial assembly. His descriptions of the chambers, which he found wanting, and of the lawmakers, whom he also found wanting, are rich in detail. He was not impressed by the appearance and the seriousness of the Maryland legislators.

He was snobbish about his fellow colonists. “I was surprised on approaching it to hear as great a hubbub as you will usually observe at a public meeting of the planters in Virginia,” Jefferson told John Page. He noted that the Speaker's wig was yellowed, and, to the young Virginian, the man had “very little the air of a speaker.” The close cataloging of the assembly suggests his interest in the workings of power. It was natural for Jefferson, now a son of Williamsburg, to document his impressions of the seat of a neighboring colony. The spirit of the hour, meanwhile, was momentous: “I would give you an account of the rejoicings here on the repeal of the Stamp Act but this you will probably see in print before my letter can reach you.”

In London, Parliament had stood down from the stamp duties, but passed the Declaratory Act asserting its view that it possessed the power to levy taxes on its colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” For Jefferson, the story of the Stamp Act had begun in the lobby of the House of Burgesses. That it ended for him when he was on the road gave him his first tactile evidence that the American story, and the American cause, was larger than Williamsburg and larger than Virginia. His conception of the American nation may owe something to the celebrations he watched on the Maryland shore.

I
n 1767, Jefferson was admitted to the bar of the General Court of Virginia after his study with George Wythe. He lived at Shadwell with his mother but traveled often. Cases took him to courthouses from Staunton to Winchester. His sister Martha wrote him a report from the garden in early June, noting that his carnations were in bloom, seventy-one days after being planted. His interest in the garden and the farm was practical as well as ornamental. In late November 1767, he calculated how much hay he would need to store up to feed his horses through the winter nights.

Contemporaries recalled Jefferson as a bright, enthusiastic, and intellectually curious lawyer. His practice was eclectic. One case involved the theft of a bottle of whiskey and a shirt, another a charge of slander in which a David Frame sued a man for saying “he saw [Frame] who is a married man in bed with Elizabeth Burkin, etc.”

Jefferson's friends loved him, his clients appreciated him, his elders admired him. He was the kind of man other men thought well of and believed they could trust—unless, as one of his best friends was to discover, a beautiful young wife was in the picture.

FOUR

TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS

You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady.

—J
EFFERSON
, in an 1805 acknowledgment of his infatuation with Elizabeth Moore Walker

All men are born free [and] everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will.

—J
EFFERSON
in the
Howell
slavery case, 1770

I
T
WOULD
HAVE
BEEN
ADULTERY
,
but Jefferson was too much in love (or thought he was) to care. Attractive and virile, a powerful and charismatic man, he wanted what he wanted, and he did not give up easily.

Elizabeth Walker was what he wanted. She was the bride of his friend John Walker, a man he had known virtually all his life. The connections between the two men were old and deep. Peter Jefferson had made Walker's father one of his own executors: Dr. Thomas Walker of Castle Hill was among those who had watched over young Thomas. The two boys followed a similar path, boarding at James Maury's school before going to the College of William and Mary. “We had previously grown up together at a private school and our boys' acquaintance was strengthened at college,” John Walker recalled of his friendship with Jefferson. “We loved (at least I did sincerely) each other.”

Elizabeth Moore, known as Betsy, was a granddaughter of a royal governor and daughter of Bernard Moore, the master of Chelsea, a Tidewater plantation in King William County. Two of her brothers attended William and Mary with Jefferson and her future husband. In January 1764—a period in which he remained gloomy about Rebecca Burwell—Jefferson had reported his friend's impending marriage. “Jack Walker is engaged to Betsy Moore,” Jefferson wrote John Page from Williamsburg, “and desired all his brethren might be made acquainted with his happiness.”

There is irony in the phrasing, and perhaps envy. Still smarting from his rejection by Rebecca, Jefferson was in no mood to celebrate another man's romantic good fortune. His melancholy was exacerbated by the absence of his horses, which he had sent “up the country.” Without them he felt marooned, he said, for it was now “out of my power to take even an airing on horseback at any time.” The letter to John Page was dated from “Devilsburg,” Jefferson's dark rendering of a Williamsburg that had not given him the bride he thought he wanted. The world seemed bleak. Even poor John Walker, Jefferson thought, would have to forgo the joys of a pretty wife for a while longer: “But I hear he will not be married this year or two.”

Jefferson was wrong. Less than five months later, in the first week of June 1764, Betsy Moore and John Walker were married at her home at Chelsea. Jefferson was in attendance, John Walker recalled, as “the friend of my heart” and as a groomsman. By 1768 the Walkers were living, with an infant daughter, in a house known as Belvoir only five or so miles from Shadwell. Like Jefferson, Walker was a rising man in Virginia politics. Soon Walker agreed to join a delegation bound for Fort Stanwix, in New York, for Indian negotiations.

In the will John Walker made before he left, he appointed “Mr. Jefferson … my neighbor and fast friend” as “first among my executors.” Walker's delegation departed for New York in early summer.

Jefferson had just turned twenty-five, and Betsy Walker was about two years younger. In the warm months of 1768, in visits to Belvoir, he found himself in her exclusive company, and he seems to have fallen in love with his old friend's new wife.

Given the risks he was taking, the intensity of the passion Jefferson felt must have been acute. The young wife resisted, but Jefferson did not give up the chase. And though she kept Jefferson's advances secret, she allowed her anxiety to manifest itself to her husband indirectly. As John Walker recalled, his wife began to object to Jefferson's serving as Walker's executor, “telling me that she wondered why I could place such confidence in him.”

Over the next few years Jefferson kept up his quiet campaign. On a visit of the Walkers to Shadwell, Jefferson “renewed his caresses” toward Betsy, slipping a note into the cuff of the sleeve of her gown. The letter, John Walker later recalled, was “a paper tending to convince her of the innocence of promiscuous love.”

Perhaps from the hour of his humiliation in the Apollo Room with Rebecca Burwell, Jefferson knew he expressed himself better in writing. To write Mrs. Walker an argued love letter—one attempting to change her mind, “to convince her”—was in character. The ploy failed on this occasion: Mrs. Walker said that she “on the first glance tore [Jefferson's note] to pieces.”

Later, at a house party at the plantation of a mutual friend, John Coles, a noted hunter, Jefferson watched for a chance to steal a few moments with Betsy. One evening when the women retired for the night, Jefferson saw his opportunity. “He pretended to be sick, complained of a headache and left the gentlemen among whom I was,” John Walker recalled.

Slipping away, Jefferson found Betsy's room, where, her husband said, “my wife was undressing or in bed.” Jefferson failed again. “He was repulsed with indignation and menaces of alarm and ran off,” said John Walker.

Decades later, Jefferson confirmed the Walker story. It had come to light after a political break between Jefferson and John Walker, who had learned in the intervening years of his friend's pursuit of his wife. It had been, Jefferson said, an incorrect thing to do.

F
rustrated by his failure with Mrs. Walker in the summer of 1768, Jefferson took solace in a glorious autumn of plays and politics in Williamsburg. Some years before, the Reverend Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian clergyman, had chastised Virginia for its love of drama, saying “plays and romances” were “more read than the history of the blessed Jesus.” Offerings in the capital in the spring had included Joseph Addison's
Drummer,
Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice,
John Gay's
Beggar's Opera,
and Thomas Otway's
Venice Preserved
and
The Orphan
. Now Jefferson watched performances by William Verling's Virginia Company of Comedians and of John Home's
Douglas
and Henry Carey's farce
The Honest Yorkshireman
. Meanwhile, Jefferson was playing the part of patron to the arts, bringing the Italian musician Francis Alberti from Williamsburg to Albemarle; Alberti taught Jefferson on the violin.

T
he Wythe-Jefferson circle lost its most powerful member when Francis Fauquier died at the Governor's Palace in March 1768. In his will, Fauquier expressed regret that his slaves would have to be sold after his death, and he took the then-unusual step of allowing his dozen adult slaves to choose their new masters and stipulating that the women were not to be separated from their children. A man of the Enlightenment to the end, he also suggested that his body be autopsied should the cause of death be uncertain. His hope, he said in his will, was that he “may become more useful to my fellow creatures by my death than I have been in my life.”

Fauquier's burial five days later in the north aisle of Bruton Parish Church, not far from Wythe's house, marked the end of an era for Jefferson, Wythe, and the other Fauquier intimates at the Palace—the guests who had enjoyed the royal governor's hospitality and listened with pleasure to Jefferson's performances on the violin in the big rooms—as well as the end of a period of temperate local imperial governance. In later years Jefferson came to think of Fauquier as “the ablest man who had ever filled that office.”

Norborne Berkeley, 4th Baron Botetourt—popularly referred to as Lord Botetourt—succeeded Fauquier as governor, and he was determined to make himself pleasant. A family of Jefferson's friends were spending an evening singing on the steps to their Williamsburg house when they heard a passerby call out: “Charming, charming! Proceed for God's sake, or I will go home directly.” It was Botetourt, who happily joined them.

The good cheer could not last. On the same day
The
Virginia Gazette
reported Fauquier's death in a heavily black-bordered box, the paper published the eighth installment of a series of Farmer's Letters by John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian who argued that should London ignore American concerns, “let us then take
another step,
by withholding from
Great Britain
all the advantages she has been used to receive from us.… Let us all be united with one spirit, in one cause.”

With Fauquier dead, one world was beginning to end, and another was being born.

A
t the same time Jefferson was creating chaos at Belvoir and living a cosmopolitan life in Williamsburg, he was building a new home for himself two miles—or less than a half hour's ride—from his mother's house. He named it Monticello, Italian for “little mountain.” On Monday, August 3, 1767, Jefferson noted the grafting of cherry trees on the property; on Sunday, May 15, 1768, he reached an agreement to “level 250 ft. square on the top of the mountain at the N.E. end by Christmas” in exchange for 180 bushels of wheat and 24 bushels of corn (12 of those would not be due until the corn was harvested). If solid rock had to be dug, Jefferson noted in his garden book, then they would ask “indifferent men to settle that part between us”—“indifferent” in this context meaning “impartial.” What is striking about Jefferson's attention to the possibility of hitting what he called “solid rock” is not that it might present insuperable obstacles but that he was prepared to do whatever it took to have his way. He had decided to build there, and build he would.

T
he
Virginia Gazette
of Thursday, December 15, 1768, reported Thomas Jefferson's election to represent Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses. He was twenty-five years old.

He would serve with Dr. Thomas Walker, John Walker's father and Betsy Walker's father-in-law. The campaign consisted largely of buying drinks and cakes for the landowners who had the suffrage. Over the next forty-one years Jefferson was rarely out of public office. Even without formal duties, he was never far from the contentions of his times.

Since the Stamp Act debates and repeal, Parliament had, beginning in 1767, passed the Townshend Acts, taxes and duties named in honor of the chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend. Massachusetts led the opposition for the colonies. In Boston in February 1768 the Massachusetts legislature approved a circular letter protesting the acts and calling on other colonies to follow suit. This was the political climate when the Burgesses first sat with Jefferson as a member on Monday, May 8, 1769.

There was a sense of urgency in Williamsburg. London had ordered Botetourt to dissolve the House if the Burgesses joined Massachusetts in protesting the Townshend Acts. Within days Botetourt had the opportunity to obey the imperial command.

The colonial lawmakers had passed a resolution in support of Massachusetts. At noon on Wednesday, May 17, 1769, therefore, Botetourt summoned the Burgesses to the Council Chamber. “I have heard of your resolves, and augur ill of their effect,” Botetourt told them. “You have made it my duty to dissolve you; and you are dissolved accordingly.”

Jefferson had been seated in the House for not quite ten days. The very opening hours of his elective career, then, were suffused with conflict, crisis, and a creative search for a path forward that gave Americans, rather than distant authorities, control over their lives.

With his colleagues he left the Council Chamber and walked to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, the same place where he had once stammered before Rebecca Burwell. As the Burgesses passed beneath the lead bust of Sir Walter Raleigh above the front door of the two-story tavern, they were, in the words of the
Journal
of the House, to decide which “measures should be taken in their distressed situation for preserving the true and essential interests of the colony.” By the next day the Virginians had a plan. They would not import or consume anything from Great Britain.

When Jefferson left Williamsburg after his inaugural session, he was already steeped in the politics of protest and of power.

O
n Thursday, February 1, 1770, Jefferson was playing his accustomed role as head of the family, accompanying his mother on a visit to a neighbor, when word of disaster reached them: Shadwell had burned.

Jefferson was devastated. His first question to the slave who brought the news was whether his library had been rescued from the flames. The books were all burned, the slave replied, adding: “But, ah! we saved your fiddle!”

For a man who prized physical objects—he was to prove an inveterate collector, a tangible manifestation of his curious mind—the ash and the smoke and the ruins were especially galling and dispiriting. Fire was a reminder of those things—those many things—that lay beyond human control. Jefferson had spent almost a decade in the study and the practice of law, an undertaking based on the premise that men could, with some limitations, construct an order that enabled them to exert some power over the affairs of the world. The destruction of Shadwell was an example of how little control Jefferson—or any man—really had.

Nearly everything was gone. The burned books amounted to £200, Jefferson guessed, but that did not bother him so much. “Would to God it had been the money … [that would have] never cost me a sigh!” he wrote to John Page.

The real pain came from the loss of his books and his legal papers, including notes he had prepared for his work as a lawyer during the coming court term. Without them he was no longer master of the work at hand. He was desperate, even frantic, dispatching news of the fire and pleas for advice and reassurance. He contemplated moving from the neighborhood altogether—a remarkable thought for a man so engaged by his sense of place.