By Paul Carrier
The high points of Thomas Jefferson’s professional life are well-known: author of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia, congressman, diplomat, secretary of state, vice president. As president, Jefferson launched the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and purchased the Louisiana Territory. A Renaissance man whose wide-ranging interests included philosophy, agriculture, science, music and architecture, he was, more than any other individual, the founder of the University of Virginia.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham lays out the chronology of Jefferson’s life in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, but he does much more. Meacham gives us Jefferson in all his conflicted brilliance, a flesh-and-blood man who is far more interesting than a marble icon ever could be. This insightful biography, with its emphasis on what made Jefferson tick, explores his life in the context of his temperament and his contradictions.
Jefferson emerges as a highly skilled “political warrior” who loved the public arena, but an “easily wounded soul” who cringed in the face of criticism. He was a pillar of morality who sometimes tried to seduce married women. A Virginian troubled by slavery, he sought to weaken it, but did not fight to abolish it. This champion of liberty owned slaves, and almost certainly fathered children with one of them, Sally Hemings. Normally amiable and mild-mannered, he seethed with an almost blind hatred of Alexander Hamilton, whom Jefferson viewed as a ruthlessly manipulative autocrat.
The man’s very complexity lent itself to wildly divergent contemporary assessments of him, Meacham notes. His devoted friends viewed him as “among the greatest men who had ever lived.” To his enemies, he was an atheist, a demagogue and a “womanly Francophile who could not be trusted with the government of a great nation.”
Ever gracious in public, Jefferson loathed bombast, drama and direct confrontation, yet he turned to unscrupulous surrogates to wage stinging partisan attacks. The language Jefferson sometimes used in private could be sharply at odds with his gentlemanly public persona. A 1796 letter described England as a “harlot.” Federalist leaders, Jefferson wrote, “are a hospital of incurables, and as such entitled to be protected and taken care of as other insane persons are.”
Jefferson was “a breathing human being who was subject to the passion and prejudice and pride and love and ambition and hope and fear that drive most other breathing human beings,” Meacham writes in his prologue. “Recovering a sense of that mortal Jefferson - the Jefferson who sought office, defined human rights for a new age, explored expanding frontiers in science and philosophy, loved women, owned slaves, and helped forge a nation - is my object in the following pages.”
Rightly or wrongly, Jefferson feared that the American republic might fall if the Federalists achieved what he viewed as their goal of establishing an American monarchy, or restoring that of Britain. And rightly or wrongly, he saw his political foes as elitists who loathed democracy.
A former editor in chief at Newsweek, Meacham has a journalist’s eye for telling details and revealing anecdotes. He reports, for example, that on July 4, 1776, the day the Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson recorded purchasing seven pairs of ladies’ gloves and a thermometer. When Jefferson’s beloved wife Patty died at Monticello in 1782, Jefferson fainted. He did not regain consciousness for quite some time, after which he was “incoherent with grief.” As president, Jefferson sometimes greeted visitors while wearing old slippers.
Jefferson “liked quiet but could not stand silence,” Meacham explains. “He was usually humming or singing softly to himself and from the early 1770s forward Jefferson kept pet mockingbirds,” which he sometimes released indoors at Monticello and the President’s House. In the 1780s, he cooked up fanciful names for several future states, including Sylvania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia and Pelisipia.
Meacham doesn’t simply report the eventual rapprochement between Jefferson and John Adams after years of estrangement. He movingly explains how it came about. When two of Jefferson’s neighbors visited Adams after both presidents had left office, they listened to Adams bad-mouth Jefferson and then told Adams that Jefferson spoke well of him. Adams’ replied: “"I always loved Jefferson, and still love him." With that, a dormant friendship sprang to life.
Without openly making the comparison, Meacham reminds us that the overblown rhetoric, and venomous politics of our time are nothing new. He offers countless examples of the vitriol that Federalists and Jeffersonians hurled at one another, akin to the white-hot bombast of 21st-century Internet fare. Then, as now, blind partisanship ruled the day. John Quincy Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term as president that the country was so “totally given up to the spirit of party” that blind allegiance to one party or the other was the norm.
“The real Jefferson was like so many of us,” Meacham writes, “a bundle of contradictions, competing passions, flaws, sins, and virtues that can never be neatly smoothed out into a tidy whole.” Perhaps it is that lack of tidiness that makes Meacham’s multifaceted Jefferson so compelling.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham lays out the chronology of Jefferson’s life in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, but he does much more. Meacham gives us Jefferson in all his conflicted brilliance, a flesh-and-blood man who is far more interesting than a marble icon ever could be. This insightful biography, with its emphasis on what made Jefferson tick, explores his life in the context of his temperament and his contradictions.
Jefferson emerges as a highly skilled “political warrior” who loved the public arena, but an “easily wounded soul” who cringed in the face of criticism. He was a pillar of morality who sometimes tried to seduce married women. A Virginian troubled by slavery, he sought to weaken it, but did not fight to abolish it. This champion of liberty owned slaves, and almost certainly fathered children with one of them, Sally Hemings. Normally amiable and mild-mannered, he seethed with an almost blind hatred of Alexander Hamilton, whom Jefferson viewed as a ruthlessly manipulative autocrat.
The man’s very complexity lent itself to wildly divergent contemporary assessments of him, Meacham notes. His devoted friends viewed him as “among the greatest men who had ever lived.” To his enemies, he was an atheist, a demagogue and a “womanly Francophile who could not be trusted with the government of a great nation.”
Ever gracious in public, Jefferson loathed bombast, drama and direct confrontation, yet he turned to unscrupulous surrogates to wage stinging partisan attacks. The language Jefferson sometimes used in private could be sharply at odds with his gentlemanly public persona. A 1796 letter described England as a “harlot.” Federalist leaders, Jefferson wrote, “are a hospital of incurables, and as such entitled to be protected and taken care of as other insane persons are.”
Jefferson was “a breathing human being who was subject to the passion and prejudice and pride and love and ambition and hope and fear that drive most other breathing human beings,” Meacham writes in his prologue. “Recovering a sense of that mortal Jefferson - the Jefferson who sought office, defined human rights for a new age, explored expanding frontiers in science and philosophy, loved women, owned slaves, and helped forge a nation - is my object in the following pages.”
Rightly or wrongly, Jefferson feared that the American republic might fall if the Federalists achieved what he viewed as their goal of establishing an American monarchy, or restoring that of Britain. And rightly or wrongly, he saw his political foes as elitists who loathed democracy.
A former editor in chief at Newsweek, Meacham has a journalist’s eye for telling details and revealing anecdotes. He reports, for example, that on July 4, 1776, the day the Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson recorded purchasing seven pairs of ladies’ gloves and a thermometer. When Jefferson’s beloved wife Patty died at Monticello in 1782, Jefferson fainted. He did not regain consciousness for quite some time, after which he was “incoherent with grief.” As president, Jefferson sometimes greeted visitors while wearing old slippers.
Jefferson “liked quiet but could not stand silence,” Meacham explains. “He was usually humming or singing softly to himself and from the early 1770s forward Jefferson kept pet mockingbirds,” which he sometimes released indoors at Monticello and the President’s House. In the 1780s, he cooked up fanciful names for several future states, including Sylvania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia and Pelisipia.
Meacham doesn’t simply report the eventual rapprochement between Jefferson and John Adams after years of estrangement. He movingly explains how it came about. When two of Jefferson’s neighbors visited Adams after both presidents had left office, they listened to Adams bad-mouth Jefferson and then told Adams that Jefferson spoke well of him. Adams’ replied: “"I always loved Jefferson, and still love him." With that, a dormant friendship sprang to life.
Without openly making the comparison, Meacham reminds us that the overblown rhetoric, and venomous politics of our time are nothing new. He offers countless examples of the vitriol that Federalists and Jeffersonians hurled at one another, akin to the white-hot bombast of 21st-century Internet fare. Then, as now, blind partisanship ruled the day. John Quincy Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term as president that the country was so “totally given up to the spirit of party” that blind allegiance to one party or the other was the norm.
“The real Jefferson was like so many of us,” Meacham writes, “a bundle of contradictions, competing passions, flaws, sins, and virtues that can never be neatly smoothed out into a tidy whole.” Perhaps it is that lack of tidiness that makes Meacham’s multifaceted Jefferson so compelling.
