When I was a kid, we took a family vacation to Washington, D.C. I was about eight, maybe nine, and a friend of mine got to come along. It was mostly a camping vacation, though I think we stayed in some hotels. We were from Oklahoma, heading east to learn more about our nation’s history.
Along the way, we saw several other sights, including a trip to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s lasting estate. I adored Thomas Jefferson. Renaissance Man! Polymath! That was a word I hadn’t learned yet, but I had sentiment for all the same. He bought “Louisiana” and sent Lewis and Clark to check it out. A man of reason, of intellect; a natural scientist, inquisitive about the world. A man who was surely successful based on his home, then add the fact that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and was our third President. What’s not to like?
What I wasn’t thinking about was that much of Jefferson’s wealth was not only built by enslaved people, but was in the enslaved people themselves. I don’t remember if I knew then that Jefferson was a slaveholder, or could even comprehend how much of the nation’s history was built on slavery. I was eight, or maybe nine, and that sort of thing wasn’t emphasized in the history I’d learned to that date.
Of course, nowadays there is a strong voice, one that I agree with, to include that part of our history and not gloss over it. Most of our Antebellum Presidents were slave owners. They were landowners, and farming for most of them was at the supervisory level; it was slaves and the occasional hired hand who did the work of planting, nurturing, and harvesting the crops, as well as manufacturing and building.
Jefferson is therefore not in unusual territory in being a slave-owning politician, Founding Father, and President. So were George Washington, and James Madison, and James Monroe. However, Jefferson is a unique target in this discussion for a few reasons: He wrote the Declaration of Independence, which did not include enslaved people; his politics, in the context of the day, stressed the freedom of the individual; he was known to have had sexual relations with slaves, in particular, later in life with Sally Hemmings. That Sally was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife merely underscores how twisted racism and slavery are in the origins of the United States, the contradiction at the heart of America’s “original sin”.
For Jefferson, I read Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. It was one of the better-reviewed biographies of Jefferson, and more easily available than Dumas Malone’s six-volume set. It was also the first Presidential biography I read on a Kindle, because at the time, COVID-19 was ravaging New York City, and I didn’t feel right in ordering anything for myself that was not strictly necessary.
The title belies the tone; several passages in Meacham’s book extol the masterful politician playing politics like a violin, pushing debate to the brink but then compromising to preserve his political capital. I found this unnecessary. What I really wanted was, where would Jefferson fit into our national history?
I had a head start from prior reading of Jefferson’s fellow Founding Fathers, Washington and Adams. Jefferson served in the colonial government of his homeland in Virginia, and later in the Continental Congresses. He served as Governor of Virginia, his first taste of executive power; during the war he barely escaped with his life when a British squad was sent to arrest him, arriving just minutes after he fled on horseback. In addition to writing the Declaration, Jefferson’s got high credibility from his role in the Revolutionary War, and clearly had the respect of his peers when he was sent to Europe to serve as an envoy from the nascent American government.
After the war, Jefferson returned and served as Washington’s first Secretary of State, and later as Adams’ Vice President; this was a time when Vice Presidents were whoever got second place, and not someone selected to pick up swing votes. It is in this period that Jefferson’s politics began to distinguish themselves from more general Revolutionary sentiments, which were themselves not uniform.
Jefferson became the figurehead of the Anti-Federalist, or Democrat-Republican party. He supported publishers who derided the Federalists such as Washington and Adams. Put simply, Federalists believed in a strong central government, and Anti-Federalists were wary of that. At the extremes, Federalists believed in a strong central executive, and Anti-Federalists feared a return to monarchy in all but name. The debate continues to this day, with many more layers added in.
Jefferson was essentially at odds with the administrations he served in. When Washington was President, he was both overwhelmingly popular and the first President of the United States based on the Constitution. Political parties didn’t really exist at the start of his term, though they did by the end. Washington had to make decisions that were bound to displease some, and he tended to align with the Federalists.
As Secretary of State, Jefferson often offered counter-arguments, and possessed great enmity towards Alexander Hamilton, who was a very visible and active Federalist. As Vice President to John Adams, Jefferson was literally the man who ran against Adams (along with others) and was not sympathetic to Adams’ politics. Arguably one of Adams’ key failings was in not establishing his own cabinet, keeping on several of Washington’s men, some of whom had undermined Washington himself. Effectively, Adams’ own administration often worked against him. Jefferson was one such member.
Hand in hand with these ideological divides was the split between pro-British and pro-French sentiment. American history did not occur in a vacuum, and while the United States sought to establish and maintain its own independence, it was still affected by European politics. Generally, Americans in the north wanted to maintain trade relations with Britain, and Americans in the south favored making friends with the French.
While the French had been instrumental in assisting the Americans in the War of Independence, early in Washington’s term the French Revolution occurred, and by Adams’ term Napoleon was calling the shots. The United Kingdom, naturally, lined up against France, and joined in several coalition wars against France in this period. Both France and the United Kingdom treated the United States as a pawn in this war, variously applying embargoes and boarding ships to press sailors into service.
The result was that in American politics one was not only a Federalist or Anti-Federalist, but pro-Britain or pro-France. These tended to line up with each other, at least in slander: Federalists secretly wanted a return to British monarchy and Anti-Federalists supported France and its atheistic murder-spree.
Jefferson was supportive of France, as well as of the French Revolution. When the French Revolution started, he was close with the aristocrats who favored reform. These people were much like himself: landed gentry, educated and intelligent philosophes who recognized that the system was broken but believed it could be fixed. Jefferson wrote an outline of a new charter that might have preserved the monarchy with concessions to the people, but it came to naught.
Even after the storming of the Bastille – which did result in literal heads on pikes – Jefferson was alarmed but came around to the side of the mob. Even later, when aristocrats were being executed – including people he had personally known – he basically came down on the side of freedom. It was acceptable, if unfortunate, that some former acquaintances were murdered. Ultimately, Jefferson did draw a line at the Reign of Terror, but he remained in favor of the French Revolution.
Issues of the Day
Because Jefferson’s Presidency was decades after the American Revolution, he’s a bit unusual in that several contemporary issues were primordial in nature; they were present but not fully developed, and by the time he was President, Jefferson had new issues to contend with. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776; the war ended in 1783; the U.S. Constitution was signed in 1787 after the Confederation of States proved its shortcomings. Jefferson was elected President in 1800, and left office after serving two terms, 1808. Thus the span of his national political career was over thirty years, and a lot happened in that time. Independence, and what it meant, was a thread woven through Jefferson’s entire career.
During the Revolution, Jefferson was a bright, relatively young lawyer; his writing was well-regarded enough that, with the support of John Adams, he was selected to write the draft Declaration of Independence. While it was edited a bit in committee afterwards, it’s largely his, and the rhetorical flourishes are generally credited to Jefferson. It’s important to remember that independence from Britain was not universally desired; the thirteen colonies were fed up with how they were treated, and willing to fight for their rights, but for some, that road did not lead inevitably to independence. The Declaration was a firm step in the direction of independence from the United Kingdom.
The Declaration not only frames the philosophy upon which American ideals are founded, but also lays out the failings of the King in a lawyerly fashion. There were some Americans who viewed Parliament as having injured the colonies, that the King still cared for them and had either been misled by his advisors or simply been inattentive. The Declaration lays the fault squarely at the King, laying out in charge after charge his failings before finally denouncing him, and affirming that the thirteen colonies will no longer be subject to Great Britain.
It’s quite emotional in many ways. So many of the early European-Americans at the time of the Revolution were British – English, Scots, probably some Welsh. Britain was a global power, rivaled only by France and, less so, Spain. There were family back in the isles, not to mention other parts of the empire. Most Americans were probably not ardent readers of John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers. They just wanted to live their lives, raise their families, and not face a ridiculous system of mercantilist taxation, and have some self-government and better representation of their interests. It’s one thing to say, “treat me fairly”. It’s another to say, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m leaving.”
Jefferson came down on the side of independence meaning a relatively weak central government in favor of the primacy of the states in conducting their own affairs. While it’s true he favored reforms to strengthen the Federal government based on the failures of the Revolutionary government as well as the Articles of Confederation, he wanted that central government to be small. He favored states printing their own currency, not having a central bank, and having a small Federal judiciary.
Very likely, this was due in part to Jefferson being a Virginian. Virginia was a big and powerful state, encompassing modern-day West Virginia and Kentucky as well. Bigger states tended to favor a smaller Federal government while smaller states tended to favor a larger Federal government, as a counterbalance to the power of larger states.
Jefferson was also against what today we call the big-money interests; while he was a wealthy Virginia landowner, he was in direct opposition to big banking and the global financial system – first the banking center of London, and later the financial speculators in New York and Boston. The early part of American history was thus a contest between these two sides: a strong Federal government that favored banking and global commerce, and a devolution of that strength to the states in favor of local economies.
This is a debate that largely continues today. As I read through all of this, I was amused at how many of our modern stereotypes began at or before the founding of our nation.
Another issue that often goes unmentioned is that of slavery. There is the inherent irony in the Declaration of Independence not applying to slaves, that despite all this talk of freedom, it did not apply to enslaved people. Jefferson, like Washington, mused about the end of slavery, acknowledging both that the system was unsustainable and would also, eventually, tear the Union apart. Of course, there’s the personal aspect of Jefferson having had sexual relations with his slaves.
We know about Sally Hemmings, but he was remarking on master-slave liaisons positively as early as his young adulthood, as a way for a young man to get some satisfaction if he was sans girlfriend. Sexual relations between master and slave were common enough that often, slaves and the families who owned them were not too distantly related.
In Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, he makes some clearly racist statements, but he also argued in favor of abolishing slavery – mostly because otherwise it would all end in a race war. Jefferson, along with other Founding Fathers who were slaveholders, would say in private correspondence that slavery needed to end for variety of reasons: economic sustainability, human morality, or race war (which, don’t laugh too hard: the Haitian Revolution in the early 1800s was exactly what was feared, and Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 was just a taste of what slaveowners were afraid of).
The political elements were there from the beginning. There were anti-slavery factions in the Continental Congress, but they were in the minority, and it was an issue easily deferred by the Founding Fathers. There were proposals to eliminate or at lease reduce slavery in the Constitution, but Southern slave states threatened to leave. The Three-Fifths clause, which notoriously counted enslaved people as 3/5 of a person for purposes of determining how many Representatives a state had in the House, was itself a compromise, not so much on slavery, but on how much political power a slave-owning state had in the government.
Together, these two issues bring us to the third: the Bill of Rights, or more broadly, how individual rights are set as inviolable regardless of our political system. Freedom of Religion (aka conscience), probable cause, a fair trial, and that the enumeration of certain rights does not deny or disparage others retained by the people (Articles I, 4, 5 & 6, and 9, respectively). While there were requests from some quarters for many different amendments that would ultimately have diminished government power, the Bill of Rights as passed was meant to plug specific concerns about the tyranny of majority, not only at the Federal level, but at the State level as well. In particular, Amendment 10 stipulates that anything not specified in the Constitution as something Congress could do, and not prohibited by the states, was left to be decided.
It’s hard to comprehend in modern times how all of this talk of freedom and the protection thereof did not apply to slavery. The truth is there was much discussion, and a great amount of dissension. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison among others, even though they themselves were slaveholders, would admit that slavery was not sustainable, and in these early days of defining the republic would include language and proposals invariably freeing slaves. However, there were loud and powerful voices from the slaveholding states who were firmly against freeing slaves, and in some cases refusing to join the United States (and in later years, threaten to leave).
Slavery in the United States is a topic worthy of its own essay. That said, while on the one hand it is no defense to say slavery was an intractable issue, on the other hand there might have been no United States, or a very different United States, without the compromises that kept slavery at the nation’s founding and maintained it for decades after. Anyone who contemplated slavery ending in violence generally thought in terms of a slave uprising; the idea that a civil war fought by white men against white men, ending in emancipation, would have been seen as an unlikely plot twist.
Jefferson’s belief in small government, against big money interests, and his belief in personal liberty all fell under his pragmatism when it came to governance. He would compromise rather than go down in any given ship of ideology, even as he fought ideologically by supporting newspapers and publishers in favor of what became the Democrat-Republican party. Jefferson leaned on the deeper thinking of others (in particular, James Madison) for guidance.
The totality of Jefferson’s influence on these issues, then, was to support protection of the individual against the state. Even moreso, to limit the size of the government, lest the Federal government become as tyrannical as a king. Yet when it came to slavery, while Jefferson supported manumission and eventually abolishing slavery, he was not willing to sacrifice the founding of the United States in pushing for the freedom of enslaved people. He might have thought that was a battle for another day, perhaps at the State rather than Federal level.
One last category of contemporary issues Jefferson faced was foreign relations, in particular with France. Following the Revolution, the newborn nation needed to develop its own trade relations with powers great and small, these being the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, all three of which were still active in colonizing North America.
First, there was great debate in the United States over whether to favor trade with the United Kingdom or France. Generally, the northern states and the Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton favored re-establishing trade with the United Kingdom, while southern states and burgeoning anti-Federalists favored France. Some of this was practical – merchants in the north already had relationships from before the Revolution with traders and financiers in the United Kingdom – but this also played against the larger political backdrop, with Federalists being portrayed as closet monarchists who basically wanted to go back to the way things were.
Second was the French Revolution. The French Revolution was epic, and I highly recommend Mike Duncan’s months-long series in his Revolutions (typepad.com) podcast. For the United States, as with other countries, the French Revolution and all its chapters disrupted the US relationship with its Revolutionary War partner, and by the time Jefferson was President, the United States bought Louisiana from a France that was by then ruled by a military autocrat named Napolean Bonaparte.
Jefferson was a Francophile. He served as one of a triumvirate of trade ministers sent to France, was later the sole American minister in France, and witnessed the years leading up to and early parts of the Revolution. When he later became Secretary of State, he was against building trade relations with the United Kingdom, and clashed with other cabinet members on policies.
It was under Jefferson’s Presidency that the United States took its first international military action. Barbary coast pirates would routinely capture shipping, and most nations had settled into simply paying extortion money to the pirates’ supporters ahead of time, to make their flagged ships off-limits. Jefferson opposed this practice, and as President persuaded Congress to declare war on the Barbary states.
Could Jefferson be elected today? Probably, but possibly not; American politics are in such disarray that a legally-trained professional politician can win the highest office, as well as the polar opposite of that. Like all the Founding Fathers, it’s hard to contextualize Jefferson today because the period of history is so different from modern times. America’s first five Presidents were all Founding Fathers, and the country was barely the age of a legal adult.
That said, so many of the issues Jefferson faced, and the positions he took, resound today in our national politics. How large should the Federal government be? Should we have national policies on finance? Should we trade with dominant partners or eschew them? A more modern issue that falls under this rubric would be health care: should that be something guaranteed and provided by the Federal government?
Jefferson was very well-read and also quite eloquent, in writing and in person. He could probably get the hang of social media; generally, he could reduce complex arguments to simple statements. He would be able to campaign in the modern sense. His aversion to conflict would make him likely to rely on intermediaries; I imagine he would find others to post on social media, write blogs, and produce short, slick videos on the internet to influence the masses.
Thomas Jefferson looms large in America’s creation myth; the history of our nation, embellished by aging pride. More than the other Founding Fathers, he epitomizes both the ideals and the original sin of the United States: our battle cry of freedom, and the institution of slavery. Thomas Jefferson’s contradictions epitomize the judgment of America itself. We cannot praise or condemn one without doing so to the other. Thus, when we look to Jefferson, the United States of America are never far away, the nation is Jefferson writ large, for better and for worse.