Reflections on Jon Meacham's Biography of Thomas Jefferson

May 21, 2020

JON MEACHAM’S THOMAS JEFFERSON:  THE ART OF POWER

 This magnificent biography ranks among the three or four finest I’ve ever read.  Alongside it I would put Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, David McCullough’s biography of Truman and David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass.  

I’m going to break my reflections and excerpts from the book into two groups, the first being new insights and the second being personal beliefs strongly reinforced.  

New Insights

1. Jefferson and many of his peers saw a constant threat to the United States still newly acquired freedom from Britain and, to a lesser extent, from France.  This is the context in which we have to view his life starting in 1765 all the way through to 1815 and the Treaty of Ghent, which concluded the War of 1812.  

The controversies with Britain were many:  impressment of U.S. ships seeking British sailors, alliances which Britain made (or was felt to make) with Native Americans, possible encroachment from British-held Canada and more.  

For most of his political career, Jefferson was tightly aligned to France.  He was there as the country’s emissary in the 1880s.  He loved it.  

2. There was unending enmity between the two parties, the Federalists and Republicans, and their leaders, particularly Adams and Hamilton for the Federalists.  

Jefferson greatly feared the tendencies he saw in Adams to want to re-establish the vestiges of monarchy.  He felt Hamilton, quite correctly, was intent on forming a much stronger central government.  Witness the U.S National Bank.  Jefferson was strongly in favor of popular democracy and while at times pragmatically flexible on the point (e.g., his bold decision to carry out the Louisiana Purchase), he favored states’ rights.  His acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase was carried out through executive order, though it was eventually approved by the Senate.  He had considered calling for a constitutional amendment but correctly saw that this could delay the purchase and that Francie might have second thoughts. 

To amplify on the party and personal divisions.  When they were both members of the cabinet, Jefferson wrote that he and Hamilton were now “daily pitted in the Cabinet like two cocks.”  President Washington lamented this:  “How unfortunate and how much it is to be regretted that, whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends that internal dissentions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.”  

Jefferson’s view of the Federalists makes the point:  “their leaders are a hospital of incurables and, as such, entitled to be protected and taken care of as other insane persons are.”

Still, before becoming president, he expressed contemptuousness for politicians who held themselves above party.  “A few individuals of no fixed system at all, governed by the pack or the prowess of the moment, flap as the breeze blows against the Republican or the aristocratic bodies and give to the one or the other a preponderance entirely accidental.”   That changed when he entered the presidency.   He hoped he could achieve political unity.  “Nothing shall be spared on my part to obliterate the traces of party and consolidate the nation, if it can be done without abandonment of principle.”

But a few years later, he had to write:  “The attempted reconciliation was honorably pursued for us for a year or two and spurned by them.”  As Meacham writes, “As Jefferson well knew, in practice the best he could (hope for was a) truce between himself and his opponents, not a permanent peace.  Political divisions were intrinsic; what mattered most was how a president managed these divisions.”

3. The conflict between Jefferson’s notions and ideals of freedom and his continued willingness to live alongside slavery, in his own family and with his own bedmate, are vividly portrayed.  He firmly believed that whites could not live with blacks, not at least as far out as he could see.  He was willing to “kick the can down the road,” so to speak in finding a way, if there was to be found one, where blacks would be free and actually integrate with white society. Prior to his presidency, Jefferson would write:  “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.  Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

Jefferson’s cohabitating with Sally Hemmings was well known.  He coolly recorded the birth of Hemmings’ children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops.  “A multi-racial society was beyond Jefferson’s imagination,” Meacham writes, “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 Hemmings 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 view of “amalgamation” and his own paternity of such children Meacham asks.  He speculates that the human products of “amalgamation,” to use his term, were thought to be sources of chaos in the road behind his own mountain.  

Meacham correctly points out that rendering moral judgments in retrospect can be hazardous.  Yet also correctly he points out that it’s possible to assess a man’s view on a moral issue like slavery by what others in the same age and facing the same realities thought and did.  And there were at this time in the 1790s  some Virginians of Jefferson’s class who recognized that the blight of slavery had to go and they did what was within their power by emancipating their slaves.

4. Somewhat surprising to me was Jefferson’s desire to “avoid conflict at any cost.”  I can identify with this personally.  It has gotten me into trouble at times. 

It showed up in Jefferson’s case on a personal level by his unwillingness to intervene in a conflict between his two sons-in-law.  Meacham’s traces this tendency on Jefferson’s part back to his childhood.  So it is with mine as well.

5. As with so many historical figures, I was struck by how much death occurred in Jefferson’s family.  His wife, Martha, at an early age; four of his six children, three of them in early childhood.  I’m also struck by that Jefferson had that were either improper (for example, with the wife, Betsy Walker, of one of his best friends) or other loves which were not returned. 

6. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, because it’s so human, but I was surprised at how often and how deeply Jefferson felt sorry for himself.  

Early on as president, he wrote:  “I long to be in the midst of the children, and have more pleasure in their little follies than in the wisdom of the wise.”  (I can understand that.)  Here, too, he wrote his wife:  “There is such a mixture of the bad passions of the heart that one feels themselves in enemies’ territory.”  

Maybe that’s less “feeling sorry for yourself” than simple good introspection.  

In a latter part of his second term, he wrote a friend:  “I am tired of an office where I can do no more good than many others who would be glad to be employed in it.  To myself personally, it brings nothing but unceasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.”  (Well, we can have our down moments.  He’s just human.  That’s one of the things that makes this biography and his life so special.)  

Later, now retired from the presidency, but still only 68, he writes:  “I am already sensible of decay and the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be.  This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it”  (I sure can identify with that today at the age of 81).

7. Another element driving Jefferson’s fear of a return of monarchy was his deep knowledge of the history of the English civil war when a short-lived move to popular rule was turned back and the monarchy returned.

8. Striking and concerning to me was Jefferson’s abandoning his rule as Governor of Virginia in the midst of the British attack in 1881.  Jefferson later defended himself against charges of walking away but they were not persuasive to me.   

9. On religion, Jefferson believed in the existence of a creator God and an afterlife.  On the death of Abigail Adams, a good friend, he wrote to her husband, John Adams:  “Mingling sincerely my tears with yours.  Looking forward to ‘the time not very distant’ when we will ‘ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”  Jefferson expressed far more certainty in the prospect of an afterlife than I hold, but I won’t be particularly surprised if that’s what I find and I will be delighted to find it for the same reasons Jefferson enunciates.  Jefferson had no time for what he described as the “dogmas” of most established religion, including the divinity of Christ and his birth by the Virgin Mary.  But like me, above all, he defended the moral essence of the life and teachings of Jesus.  In fact, he wrote a 46-page worked entitled, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted from the Account of His Life and Doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

He carried a well-worn Book of Common Prayer, served as a vestryman and invoked the divine in his public statements.  He fought against the establishment of a religion but understood and appreciated the cultural role faith played in the United States.

10. Telling testimony from Jefferson writing to Edward Rutledge as he entered George Washington’s presidency as vice-president:  “You and I have formally seen warm debaters and high political passions.  But gentlemen of different politics used to speak to each other…it is not so now.  Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way lest they should be obliged to touch their hat.”  (What we are experiencing today is not as novel as we sometimes aver, but it is still very undesirable). 

Personal Beliefs Strongly Reinforced

1. Jefferson shares a commitment to service, to good values, to importance of good relations and treating all equally.  To wit:  “There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, a proportion (according to the) bounty which nature and fortune have measured to him.”

Writing to his grandson, Jefferson articulated this understanding of politics and the management of conflicting interests:  “A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence and good honor will go far towards securing  the estimation of the world.”  

And then going on in that letter:  “I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument.  I have seen many…getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another.”

Jefferson believed, Meacham writes, that “socialability was essential to Republicanism.  Men who like and respected and enjoyed one another were more likely to cultivate the virtuous habits that would enable the country’s citizens to engage in ‘the pursuit of happiness.’”

On treating all equally, Meacham writes:  “To Jefferson, each guest who came into his orbit was significant and he had little patience—no patience in fact—with the trappings of rank.”

2. On optimism.  “I’ve often been ‘accused’ of being too optimistic.  I plead guilty.  I have sometimes been too optimistic, not sufficiently attached to a sense of reality.  But far better that than a pessimistic view.”  Jefferson held an optimistic view of life’s possibilities, even as he recognized its imperfections and tragedies.  How could he not, with all the death in his family which surrounded him.  As Meacham writes: “To Jefferson, the imperfections of life and the limits of politics were realities.  So were the wonders and the possibilities of the human mind.”  “I am among those who think well of the human character generally,” Jefferson wrote 21 months before becoming president.  “It is impossible for a man who takes a survey in what is already known, not to see what an immensity in every branch of science yet remains to be discovered.”

I think of this as we contemplate how we will create a lifesaving vaccine for Covid-19.  And how we will create the method and science to be able to predict the next epidemic before it takes its onslaught on people.  

Later in his life, Jefferson struggled to be optimistic.  “I think, with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principled benevolence and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us,” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1816.  He took the broadest of views:  “I skewer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.  My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”

Future presidents often drew on Jefferson’s thinking.  Here is Truman invoking Jefferson:  “I have a profound faith in the people of this country.  I believe in their common sense.  They love freedom and that love for freedom and justice is not dead.  How 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 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.”

3. Like me, Jefferson saw civility as an important political virtue.  In the main, he practiced what he preached.  He understood, as Meacham writes, that “politics is a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting, and the morning’s flow may well be the afternoon’s friend.”  

On a key issue in dispute, Jefferson confided his faith in a middle course of Madison:  “I think we should leave the matter in such a (position) that we may not be committed absolutely to push the matter to extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render prudent.  A little patience and we shall see their spills dissolved and the people recovering their true sight.”

4. On the importance of taking decisive action, including reversing a prior point of view and taking a bold risk.  This was at play for me and others at P&G when we decided to introduce multiple categories in multiple countries at a time of economic and political uncertainty when Eastern and Central Europe opening up after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Probably the most luminous example for Jefferson was the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803.  He exercised executive power here, foregoing involvement of the states in a way that, under normal circumstances, he would not have countenanced.

As Meacham writes, “The vibrant, breathing, prevailing politics of the hour reflected the complicated character of the triumphant president.  The America of Jefferson was neither only Federal nor wholly Republican.  It was rather a marbled blend of the two, confected by a practical man of affairs.  The significance of the case of Louisiana in shaping the destinies of the country and in illuminating Jefferson’s political leadership cannot be overstated.  He believed, for instance, in a limited government, except when he thought the nation was best served by a more expansive one.”

This is what has characterized the most momentous decisions of any time, including right now, as Congress and every level of business of government has had to take unorthodox, even draconian, steps to minimize the impact of Covid-19.

At a time in 1805 when the Nation was under threat of war from either France or Spain, some advocated forming a provisional treaty with Britain.  Jefferson said “no.”  He insisted  that neutrality was still the country’s best course.  

A similar decisive action, though in history not highly regarded, was Jefferson’s decision to impose an embargo on all imports and exports in 1807.  “It was a breakthrough bill,” Meacham writes.  “A projection of governmental power that surpassed even the hated Alien and Sedition Acts.”

5. Jefferson’s life affirms what I’ve all believed of all of us, even the most famous, “No man is perfect.  We must judge a person by his whole life:  what he did, what he said, what he stood for, his values.”  As Jefferson wrote to his daughter, Patsy:  “Every human being, my dear, must be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections, this world would be a desert for our love.”

As Jefferson wrote later:  “All we can do is to make the best of our friends:  love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad; but no more think of rejecting them for it than in throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.”

Meacham writes with wisdom as he moves to sum up Jefferson’s life.  “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 of the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred (surely referring to the abolition of slavery and the treatment accorded to the Native Americans), he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.”

No one could ask anything more of a human being than that.  

Meacham continues:  “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.”

With due respect, I think Meacham oversimplifies what anchored the values and purpose of Jefferson’s life.  He writes that, “The closest thing to a constant in his life was his need for power and for control.  He tended to mask these drives effectively.  Henry Adams wrote:  “The leadership he sought was one of sympathy and love, not of command.”

But that was not quite the case, Meacham writes.  “For him, sympathy and love among the members of his political circle were means to an end—and the end was command.”

Yes, I agree.  Command was part of it.  But I think he had a nobler purpose, to make the nation a better place, a safer place, a larger and more vibrant space.  In other words, I believe comand was a means to a nobler end.

What has been the “constant” in my life?  I return to service.  Being all I can be and helping others do the same.  Succeeding.  Leaving people, above all my family, in a better place.  

In a way, Jefferson expressed what he viewed as the constant in his life in his later years, as he reflected on drafting the Declaration of Independence:  “Neither aiming in originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that occasion the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

In less grandiose terms, that thought was in my mind, in all of our minds, as we wrote the Purpose, Values and Principles of P&G in 1987, as we celebrated the 150^th anniversary of the company’s founding.

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