A Review of the New Jefferson Biography

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.Grand Bargainer‘Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,’ by Jon Meacham



By JILL ABRAMSON

Published: November 2, 2012

The political biographies most popular in the modern era often tell us less about their subjects than about the moment in which the books themselves are published. John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. But few remember its portraits of Senate lions like Thomas Hart Benton and George Norris. What lingers is its status as a kind of campaign document that set the table for Kennedy’s own rise from the Senate to the presidency. Similarly, “The Age of Jackson,” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s vivid book, published in 1945, the year Franklin D. Roose­velt died, recast the populist Andrew Jackson as the bold progenitor of the New Deal — and also won a Pulitzer. Schlesinger’s multivolume history of the New Deal was called “The Age of Roose­velt” — tightening the link between the two projects and the two presidents.

The Art of Power
By Jon Meacham
Illustrated. 759 pp. Random House. $35.

In our time, presidential historians have been reaching back even further, to the founders, either in search of lessons useful for current debates or to re-examine the characters and leadership of those colossal figures in ways that can help clarify our own preoccupations. Thus, Joseph Ellis (in 1993) and David McCullough (in 2001), reviving John Adams, who had fallen into disrepute (in part because of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts), depicted him as a farsighted statesman whose conservative instincts could be held up as a counterexample to the destructive passions of the Clinton and Bush years. Some recastings of the founders have been so original or counterintuitive as to alter their current reputations. This happened with “American Sphinx,” Ellis’s study of “the character of Thomas Jefferson,” which argued that the author of the Declaration of Independence and putative father of American democracy was also a scheming and even paranoid anti-monarchist, deficient in both wisdom and judgment, unlike his adversary, the stolid if unromantic Adams. This stinging revisionism was amplified in 2008, with the publication of “The Hemingses of Monticello,” Annette ­Gordon-Reed’s majestic study of Jefferson’s “other” family, his slave mistress and the children Jefferson had with her. The author’s exhaustive research resulted in both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and “gave fresh energy to the image of Jefferson-as-hypocrite,” as Jon Meacham observes in his new book, “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.”



Meacham is one of several journalists turned historians who belong to what might be called the Flawed Giant School. Other members include Walter Isaacson (on Benjamin Franklin), Evan Thomas (on Robert F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower) and Jonathan Alter (on Roosevelt and the New Deal). Books in this mode usually present their subjects as figures of heroic grandeur despite all-too-human shortcomings — and so, again, speak directly to the current moment, with its diminished faith in government and in the nation’s elected leaders.



Few are better suited to this uplifting task than Meacham. A former editor of Newsweek, he has spent his career in the bosom of the Washington political and New York media establishments. His highly readable biographies are well researched, drawing on new anecdotal material and up-to-date historiographical interpretations (thereby satisfying both journalistic and scholarly expectation). At the same time his rendering of people and events reflects and reifies Establishment values and ideals. His new book lacks the conceptual boldness of those by Ellis and Gordon-Reed but lies close to his own preoccupations — as gleaned from the many glittering names in his acknowledgments, from Robert Caro to Mika Brzezinski, that exhibit an impressively well-tuned appreciation for the social status quo.



And Meacham has been here before. His previous book, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” published just as a grass-roots tide swept Barack Obama into office, was a best seller and also won the Pulitzer. The quintessential Flawed Giant biography, it made the case that Jackson was a fresh voice of the people who protected individual liberty yet simultaneously “pressed the known limits of presidential power.” Meacham didn’t sugarcoat Jackson’s ruthless handling of slavery and American Indians, even as he made the case that Jackson’s presidency was among the greatest in history.



Meacham reaches the same conclusion about Jefferson, this time writing on the heels of a bruising presidential campaign in which voters have openly expressed their alienation from politicians as a class and have objected to the ever-growing partisan divide and the resulting near-­paralysis of the federal government. The time does seem right to highlight Jefferson’s skills as a practicing politician, unafraid to wield “the art of power” or to put it to uses often at odds with his small-government ideology. So insistently does Meacham stress Jefferson’s pragmatism, which at times made him appear hypocritical to his followers no less than to his opponents, that in places the book has a curiously focus-grouped quality, as though Meacham has carefully balanced the consensus view of Jefferson the visionary “framer” and “founder” against the dissenting claims of assorted critics and skeptics, apportioning equal time to each. But to be fair, he also suggests that Jefferson himself was attuned to the medley of voices and competing interests. And what could be more reassuring in 2012 than a biography that explains how in turbulent, divided times a great president actually managed to govern?



“Jefferson understood a timeless truth,” Meacham writes, “that politics is kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting, and the morning’s foe may well be the afternoon’s friend.” One hears the ice cubes clinking in President Reagan’s highball as he and House Speaker Tip O’Neill shared drinks and jokes in the White House and hammered together a deal on Social Security. Jefferson too “believed in the politics of the personal relationship,” Meacham observes, and “saw himself as a political creature,” not only the philosophe and dreamer others supposed. In moves that Meacham clearly admires — and that he implies are instructive today — Jefferson repeatedly reached out to his enemies and showed ideological flexibility. A momentous example came in 1790, when he was George Washington’s secretary of state. Jefferson’s archenemy Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury secretary, had laid out a plan for the federal assumption of states’ debts, anathema to Jefferson, since it “would create the need for federal taxes to pay down the debts,” Meacham explains, “and the power to tax was, as ever, the most fundamental and far-reaching of all the powers of government.” The issue bitterly divided the states, and Jefferson’s great friend and ideological soul mate, James Madison, had led the forces in Congress that voted down Hamilton’s proposal. Jefferson, for his part, had come “to see Hamilton as the embodiment of the deepest of republican fears: as a man who might be willing to sacrifice the American undertaking in liberty to the expediency of arbitrary authority,” Meacham writes. But then, one night in New York (then the nation’s capital), the two cabinet adversaries met near Washington’s door. Hamilton, looking “somber, haggard and dejected beyond description,” as Jefferson later remembered, pleaded for help. Realizing “matters were dire,” Jefferson pitched in. “The beginning of wisdom, Jefferson thought, might lie in a meeting of the principals out of the public eye,” Meacham writes. “So he convened a dinner,” on the grounds that, as Jefferson put it, “men of sound heads and honest views needed nothing more than explanation and mutual understanding to enable them to unite in some measures which might enable us to get along.” And in this case the stakes were high, for “if everyone retains inflexibly his present opinion, there will be no bill passed at all,” Jefferson warned, and “without funding there is an end of the government.” Needless to say, a compromise was reached. “Jefferson had struck the deal he could strike, and for the moment, America was the stronger for it.” President Obama and Speaker Boehner, are you listening?



But Meacham doesn’t simply dispense soothing history lessons. He argues persuasively that for Jefferson the ideal of liberty was not incompatible with a strong federal government, and also that Jefferson’s service in the Congress in 1776 left him thoroughly versed in the ways and means of politics. “He had defined an ideal in the Declaration, using words to transform principle into policy, and he had lived with the reality of managing both a war and a fledgling government,” Meacham writes. “A politician’s task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.”



Not that Jefferson was lavishly endowed with obvious political gifts. “Shy in manner, seeming cold; awkward in attitude, and with little in his bearing that suggested command” — so Henry Adams described him, in his great study of Jefferson’s two presidential terms. Though a peerless rhetorician, he did not always use this skill to best effect when in office. As the historian Eric McKitrick has pointed out, Jefferson gave no speeches during his entire presidency apart from reading, inaudibly, his two Inaugural Addresses.



One wishes Meacham offered more concrete details about Jefferson’s highest political achievements — including drafting, at age 33, the Declaration of Independence and, one year later, the seminal Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Both define the fundamental liberties that are the heart of democracy as well as Jefferson’s sweeping political vision for the new nation. Meacham does justice to other writings, especially the 158 letters Jefferson and Adams exchanged in the winter of their lives when, after decades of bitterness over perceived betrayals, they reconciled, two “aging revolutionaries” rekindling the shared intellectual and moral interests that had bound them together so many years before when both emerged as leaders in the Continental Congress, and renewing their longstanding debates about democracy and America.



“Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power” guides us through the entire life, but without much color or drama. When Meacham offers revealing details — for instance illustrating Jefferson’s lifelong love of horses by listing the funny names he gave his own (Polly Peachum, Peggy Waffington) — the book comes alive, and Jefferson does too. But other opportunities are missed. Sally Hemings has only a few walk-on scenes, leaving the reader hungry for more on this fascinating, and troubling, relationship. For Meacham, pronouncement trumps storytelling. Often he resorts to the formulaic summarizing sentence: “Though he had hardly left the arena, he was now unmistakably back in it,” Meacham writes of Jefferson during Washington’s second term. Jefferson then lost the presidency, barely, to Adams in the Electoral College. It was an ugly fight, but Meacham, characteristically, covers it with balm: “However different in form presidential contests were, one feature has been constant from the beginning,” he reminds us. “They have been rife with attacks and counterattacks.”



We have heard this before, of course. But then, Jefferson’s life and career have been subjected to exhaustive scrutiny since at least 1943, when Dumas Malone began work on the definitive six-volume biography, completed some 40 years later, that sealed Jefferson’s place as the most interesting and conceivably greatest president.



Meacham touches all the familiar bases, beginning with Jefferson’s birth in 1743. The son of distinguished parents — his father a successful planter and surveyor, his mother from one of Virginia’s best families — Jefferson “was raised to wield power,” Meacham writes, and to “grow comfortable with authority.”



His range of talents was almost limitless. He was 26 when he sketched the first designs for Monticello, his grand construction project, the 33-room mansion that was his home until his death, though never definitively completed. (Visitors reported having to step over beams or piles of soil from one of Jefferson’s constant renovations.) After studying with a tutor and attending the College of William and Mary, he served in the House of Burgesses and in the Continental Congress and was chosen to draft the Declaration over elders, including John Adams, who said, “You can write 10 times better than I can.”



But Jefferson’s first executive position, as governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, ended in near disgrace. When the British troops massed, Jefferson fled to Monticello and was accused of both dereliction of duty and cowardice. He was exonerated, but the episode haunted him for many years. Sent to the Continent after the war to help negotiate treaties with the great powers, he came to love European culture and food. He then returned to Washington’s cabinet, where he pursued his battles and compromises with Hamilton, the two elucidating the quarrel, over the size and role of the federal government, that still shapes our most profound political disagreements. When Jefferson became president, in 1801, it was the first time in our history that leadership transferred from one party to another.



The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition highlighted his first term, while his second bogged down in an unsuccessful effort to prevent further war with England and possibly France. When he left office, he returned to his beloved Monticello, where he resumed his many extrapolitical enthusiasms — horses, literature and the serious study of science, agronomy and architecture. He also undertook his last great project, founding the University of Virginia and designing many of its buildings, including the magnificent rotunda. He died, as did John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1826. He was 83.



It is easy to see why such a life, with its grand sweep and many events so central to American history, took up so many volumes by Henry Adams and then Dumas Malone. Meacham wisely has chosen to look at Jefferson through a political lens, assessing how he balanced his ideals with pragmatism while also bending others to his will. And just as he scolded Jackson, another slaveholder and champion of individual liberty, for being a hypocrite, so Meacham gives a tough-minded account of Jefferson’s slippery recalibrations on race, noting, “Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson’s sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform.” In 1814 Jefferson wrote, “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.” This wasn’t true. Jefferson “was not willing to sacrifice his own way of life, though he characteristically left himself a rhetorical escape by introducing the subjective standard of practicability,” Meacham observes. In fact, his slaves were his most valuable possessions. He also believed emancipation would precipitate a race war. The only solution was for free blacks to be exiled to another country. These were the reasons, or excuses, that underlay Jefferson’s justifications of slavery, though they were not his ideas alone. Lincoln, too, considered expatriation a viable solution to the slavery problem.



The art of power often involves brutality — and other offenses too. Jefferson was sometimes more sneaky than artful. Meacham lets him off fairly easily for having smeared John Adams, though it was Jefferson who secretly paid for a poisonous anti-Adams pamphlet prepared by the hack journalist James Thomson Callender. Joseph Ellis, referring to this bleak campaign, accuses Jefferson of “paying off hired character assassins.” Meacham, in extenuation, says first that Callender was someone “whom Jefferson had supported financially” and later that this support “had been based on opposition to the sedition laws and his agreement” with Callender’s politics, as if these reasons justified Jefferson’s collusion.



Elsewhere Meacham is more convincing. Where other historians have found hypocrisy in Jefferson’s use of executive power to complete the Louisiana Purchase, Meacham is nuanced and persuasive. His solid argument is that in order to transform the United States into a continental power, Jefferson sensibly drew on all of his political skills to secure the vast territory from France, but did so without abandoning his distrust of strong, centralized power.



Meacham, so determined to celebrate Jefferson and his use of power, departs from others as well in his relatively kind assessment of Jefferson’s second term, marked by a trade embargo that failed to prevent European wars and also exacted severe hardship at home. Going further, Jefferson, the enemy of federal power, assumed total control over American shipping. Meacham concedes that “history has not been kind to Jefferson’s embargo” but concludes it was a pragmatic power play that at least delayed war. If not a good idea, “it was the least bad.” Others disagree. Henry Adams, writing in the 1880s, judged Jefferson’s second term a failure “under which his old hopes and ambitions were crushed,” and added that the ensuing “loss of popularity was his bitterest trial.” Yet Meacham is right to note that Jefferson influenced almost all the presidents who came immediately after him, with the exception of John Quincy Adams, and right as well to reckon this as an immense political legacy. As an Establishment man, Meacham ultimately celebrates the art of political compromise in service of moving the nation forward. It is an argument unlikely to meet with disapproval.





Jill Abramson is the executive editor of The Times.