Thomas
Jefferson was a remarkable statesman from early in the American Revolution
through the American founding to the early decades of the new nation. His
lifetime of public service included the Virginia Assembly, the Continental
Congress, Governor of Virginia, the Confederation Congress, minister to France,
Secretary of State, Vice-President, and finally President for two terms. This incredible record places him among
the highest ranks of founding fathers.
For a long time, Jefferson has been seen as an
idealistic visionary who had a wholly optimistic view of human nature and
trusted ordinary Americans to govern themselves as yeoman farmers in his
agricultural republic. Moreover,
he advocated consistently throughout his life for rights of mankind. Never was Jefferson more idealistic
than in his nearly uncritical support for the French Revolution that sought to
bring radical French Enlightenment to life. Of course, scholars recognized that the “sage of Monticello”
played hard in the rough-and-tumble fierce partisan politics of the 1790s and
early 1800s, but our vision of him was deeply rooted in loftier vocations and
avocations.
In his recent book, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (Random House, 2012), journalist
and biographer, Jon Meacham, challenges this traditional view of
Jefferson. Meacham’s Jefferson is
a statesman who was a pragmatist who knew how to wield political power behind
the scenes and cut deals to get things done. The author argues: “Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to
marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the
pragmatic. To realize his vision,
he compromised and improvised . . . . his creative flexibility made him a
transformative leader.” Meacham
continues to delineate his thesis, stating that, “Broadly put, philosophers
think; politicians maneuver.
Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often
simultaneously. Such is the art of
power.” Jefferson is still the
genius sitting atop his mountaintop, but he is also the consummate politician
bringing his vision to life.
With a smooth and inviting narrative, Meacham
gets much about Jefferson correct.
The early chapters narrate the early life in the rising Virginia gentry,
his classical education, and his study of the law under George Wythe and the
practice of it. Meacham then
weaves together the personal life of his subject and the introduction to
politics in the milieu of resistance to British tyranny as an eloquent writer
proclaiming the rights of man but also witnessing the performance of the great
orators who made persuasive speeches and the politicians won people over to
their points of view in the taverns of Williamsburg or Philadelphia.
Meacham buys into some fashionable
interpretations of the American Revolution, calling it a “rich man’s
revolution” and a “shrewd economic choice.” Yet Meacham cannot avoid the fact that, for Jefferson, it
was a revolution of ideas and natural rights as he penned some of the most eloquent
statements of rights in the American Revolution beginning with the Summary View of the Rights of British
America – which he states “moved [Jefferson] toward the front ranks of the
cause” – the Declaration of the Causes
and Necessity for Taking Up Arms in the Second Continental Congress, and
the penultimate statement of rights and self-government in the Declaration of
Independence. Whatever Meacham’s
strained attempts to paint the latter as a practical document, the three great
statements of rights and the purposes of government as well as his silence on
the floor of the Continental Congress reveals Jefferson in the traditional way:
a philosophical and eloquent writer and statesman rather than a political
operator.
The next stage of his life does perhaps even
less to prove Meacham’s main contention.
Jefferson helped to revise the legal code of Virginia, served as a weak
and ineffectual governor who controversially fled from the British, a congressman
who achieved little, and then the minister to France who had few concrete
achievements besides developing a profound loathing of monarchy and aristocracy
as well as contributing to the French declaration of rights once their
revolution began. Even his famous
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was an articulation of a free mind and
conscience. Moreover, Jefferson
was frustrated and settled for the idea of praying for Patrick Henry’s death
while his friend and political ally, James Madison, was responsible for clever maneuvering
to nullify Henry’s influence and securing passage of the bill in the
assembly. As for his time in
France, Meacham labels Jefferson an enlightened “Man of the World,” which
hardly supports the idea of a pragmatic politician. Moreover, his letters are filled with idealistic, radical
notions that debts, property, laws, and constitutions cannot be transferred to
future generations, while infamously praising the spilling of blood in
revolutions.
Increasingly, during the 1790s, as Secretary of
State in the Washington administration, Jefferson undoubtedly became fiercely
partisan as he battled his nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and helped to create
the first political parties despite the universal antipathy towards
factions. For Meacham, this period
is Jefferson’s most pragmatic by teaching Americans that “in his defense of
republicanism – then tactical flexibility can be a virtue.” Here is where Meacham is most wrong on
his subject. Jefferson was hardly
a pragmatic statesman who engaged in compromise and set aside partisanship as
he worked for the common good of the country. Jefferson constantly expressed an unalloyed fear that
monarchism was springing up all over the land, complaining to President
Washington on numerous occasions and leading to a presidential rebuke that
there weren’t more than a handful of monarchists in republican America. Additionally, at times Jefferson acted
as little more than a party hack, establishing an anti-administration, partisan
newspaper in his office and callously sought to discredit his political
opponents personally and politically.
Vice-President Thomas Jefferson was no better
as a pragmatic politician as he assiduously worked behind the scenes to oppose
President John Adams, most notably with the Kentucky Resolutions arguing for nullification
of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
His presidency was moreover ideologically democratic but marked with a
strong Hamiltonian strain of a powerful executive who acted according to a
broad construction of the Constitution, whether in the Louisiana Purchase or
the Embargo Act. One might well
argue that Jefferson was acting pragmatically but one might also chalk up
Jefferson’s exercise of presidential power as an example of his earlier naïveté
and idealism that he contradicted once he actually came to the nation’s highest
office.
Meacham has written an admirable biography on a
grand, enigmatic subject not easily explained. However, his thesis simply is not supported by the
evidence. As I read the book, I
kept thinking of the incredible statesmanship of James Madison who was indeed
the pragmatic, compromising politician of the deliberative Constitutional
Convention, Ratification debate, and First Congress that Thomas Jefferson was
decidedly not.
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