He says, "I renounce Louisiana. It's a wondrous, amazing thing. The country is to be doubled, for almost nothing, no bloodshed at all. But Jefferson, as we know, in theory is a strict constructionist. If the Constitution doesn't say he can do something as President, then you have to go to the country and get a constitutional amendment. So he immediately begins to draft a constitutional amendment to approve and ratify his purchase of Louisiana.
Five weeks pass. On the 21 st , 22 nd of August , he gets a letter saying that Napoleon is rethinking this deal, not surprisingly.
He is shocked that anyone would have thought we needed a constitutional amendment to buy Louisiana. He writes a letter saying, "I do not believe we should allow constitutional niceties to stand in the way of progress. But like a lot of Presidents, he was against executive power until he was the executive. He drove it through, made it happen.
Again, your folks up here were less than pleased. Timothy Pickering begins drafting articles of secession because he saw …. All politics is local. Because he thought that Louisiana meant that the South and the West were going to end up dominating New England politically. We have three children, my wife and I, not me and Mike. And my son, who was then seven, came to me, very serious, and he'd done the math, and he said, "Dada, we're going to be outnumbered and I don't like our chances.
And he was right. And by the way, my son was right, too. So it was a monumental thing. But that use of executive power was one that Lincoln looked at when he was trying to save the country during the Civil War, and that President Roosevelt explicitly pointed to when he was trying to send destroyers to Churchill to fight Hitler.
He doubled the size of the country for basically the price of a good designated hitter. What is the value of that? If you all don't know it, I ran across an essay last summer — because I'm a really exciting guy to hang out with — I ran across an essay by President Kennedy written in real time, written in '62, maybe early '63, as an introduction to Ted Sorensen's book on decision making in the White House.
It's the only piece I know of — it's about five, six paragraphs — of a President writing about what it's like to be President while he's President. And it got me thinking about President Kennedy and how he solved these sorts of things, because he was one of the more historically minded Presidents. He once said to David Herbert Donald, the great Lincoln biographer, when he was particularly upset about something that had been in the papers, Professor Donald came in the Oval Office and Kennedy pointed at the desk and said, "No one has a right to judge any President, even poor James Buchanan, who has not sat at that desk and seen his mail and been privy to the information the President has been privy to in real time.
I think that the value of this kind of Presidential history, at least what I hope I can do when I'm doing it, is to remind people that almost everything is a close-run thing. These are human beings who are riven by sin and guilt — some are good fathers, some are bad fathers; some are good husbands, some are bad husbands; some are good friends, some are lousy friends.
But they're human beings. The greatest among them are the ones who manage to transcend their appetites and ambitions, even for 15 minutes. That's almost all it takes sometimes. We're in a library dedicated to a man who I would put on Mount Rushmore, because without his negotiating skill and that of his brother in October of , we might not be sitting here at all. This is a man who averted Armageddon and we can follow it now on the tapes and the papers as he experienced it.
There's one very interesting interpretation our friend Evan Thomas has, which is if Bobby Kennedy had not disliked Dean Acheson so much, we might have had a nuclear war. Because Acheson comes in and starts lecturing them about how they have to be tough and send the military in. The other thing that I think is valuable is if you know that people who are seen as great in the past were human, then we should be more patient with the people who are in office now. The story of the civil rights movement is not of John Lewis and Josiah Williams and others turning Martin Luther King into a saint, an unapproachable saint, but their knowing him, knowing he was not perfect.
Because they weren't perfect, they thought they could effect the same amount of change. That's the moral utility of history, which is in fact inspirational.
Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson — have a bigger sense of history because of their appreciation for history while they are in the moment of history? I don't know how you can govern and think about public policy choices without appreciating what had come before and what had worked and what hadn't. Yes, and I think that guy — I'm just guessing who you might be alluding to — didn't have to look very far for a good example.
He didn't have to look outside the DNA gene pool. I don't think it's a radical thing to say that the administrations of George W. Bush could have benefited from a more careful study of the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush.
Meacham is tinkering with, working with, sorting through the idea of writing about the life of a truly great man, George Herbert Walker Bush. You just saw him last week. How's he doing? He's now home. To have been in the hospital for two months, that's how I want to look. He was very funny. I told him some Barnicle stories. He said, "How is that guy?
I am going to write about President Bush's life. The timing's a little tricky because he wants it to be posthumous. That's the fancy way of what he says, "I want to be paws up.
But yes, he absolutely understood history. And Mike is a friend of his. It's knowing history, but also — and this is not a long suit for most politicians — a certain kind of historical humility marks most great Presidents. President Kennedy had a tragic sensibility. Abraham Lincoln had a tragic sensibility. George H. Bush, I think, had one. I think Thomas Jefferson did. Gordon Wood, the great historian at Brown who is just amazing, the only thing on which I totally disagree with Professor Wood is he says that Thomas Jefferson had no tragic sense whatsoever.
I don't think that's true. I think that all the figures I just mentioned had an appreciation based on history and also based to some extent on their own lives. The loss of children, which links actually each of the figures I just mentioned — Lincoln, Kennedy, 41—. They all understand because of their appreciation of history and their own personal lives that the world was never going to fully conform to their wishes, and that politics, as Madison said, was the art of the possible.
Jefferson said, "It is best to give as well as take in a system such as ours. I think JFK had that same cool realism. It doesn't mean they didn't dream big, but the greatest Presidents are the ones — President Reagan I would include in this — are the ones who could project a vision of what the country should be, but was not now and had the tactical skill set to cut the deals, to move the country closer to that vision, to take that ideal and bring it closer to reality.
When you think about it, they're two very different skill sets. Projecting a vision can be done by preachers, philosophers, artists. Cutting deals, legislative mechanics, lawyers, all that. But think about it: here's a good game for the ride home: Is there a great American President who did not have both the capacity to negotiate and compromise well, as well as inspire us to believe that any present pain or sacrifice was not simply present pain or sacrifice, but was an investment in making the future better?
I don't think you'll think of one. I'll tell you one story about George Herbert Walker Bush. It was for a ball game. I'd go up and see him occasionally toward the end of his stay in October, spend a day, have lunch. This was a couple of years ago, and we're sitting out on the seawall at Walker Point, the Bush family home, and it's beautiful, obviously. I've told you this story. I ask him, "Mr. President, how many summers have you spent in this house?
There's not a lot there. She was, as best we can tell from the very sketchy records, mentally disabled in some way. She died in a bizarre moment where there was an earthquake in Virginia and the Rivanna River -- which ran next to Shadwell, the family plantation right below Monticello -- apparently drowned while trying to cross it in a skiff. Jefferson was also very protective of the women in his life in terms of destroying papers. He destroyed all the letters from his wife and to his wife -- which was something for which I shall not ever forgive him -- which happened with some regularity; part of the culture of that era was you would protect the women.
Otherwise, she died like his sister Jane, who was his eldest sister, who was very important to him. His siblings were sort of a mixed lot. One married his best friend, Dabney Carr. But it was a case where he was the one of that family who really sort of joined politics and the public life of the age. There are two answers in a way, ma'am. All genres, all people have the vices of their virtues. So the virtue of biographies of a President is you get an inherently dramatic narrative of the central player in the political system.
By the time you get to the Second World War, you have someone for whom the fate of the planet is in their hands by the time the atom is split under President Roosevelt. So it gives you and it gives the broad public a way of seeing the country through the eyes of that particular character. And character-driven narratives tend to work better than subject-driven narratives, in my view.
There are terrific narrative historians around. I'm not very good at it; I need a person. In my case, I don't mind talking to my dead biographical subjects; it's when they talk back that I know it's time to quit. I think there's important scholarship going on about exactly the issues you raise about the history of slavery. It's an exciting field that's unfolding. Another exciting development in that is this concept, less of American history or European history, but the Atlantic world. I don't know if that's a phrase that's totally familiar yet.
But there are a lot of Atlanticists now who are trying to look all the way down -- so from England, all the way down the coast of Africa; Canada, all the way down. And that's an exciting field, and I hope that that work would be integrated more and more into the life of biography. Q: Mr. Meacham, first of all an observation. First of all, I thought your book was very well written. Q: Well, my observation was that the research was the most intense and thorough that I think I've ever read.
I dare say it couldn't have been greater than if the subject had written an autobiography. Q: To my question: There's a period when Thomas Jefferson is Secretary of State and having a great brouhaha with Alexander Hamilton between a monarchy and a republic. You did report that Thomas Jefferson frequently spoke to George Washington at that time.
Can we have your comments, please? Actually, thanks, Dad. It's a terrific question. And believe it or not, this answer will end up with Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but in a coherent way, I hope. I think that as Charles de Gaulle once said, for some reason God loves drunks, little children and the United States of America. I think Washington needed to hear these two strongly held opposing beliefs argued as honestly as both men argued them.
Mike knows a lot of folks who have been in this Administration and recent ones. Presidents often don't hear the kind of rigorous debate that they should hear. Some Presidents don't invite it. Some Presidents who do invite it, the power of the Oval Office, the human instinct to please the most powerful person in the room, they're outside, they'll say, "I'm going to tell him this," and they get in and they say, "Oh, what a lovely tie, Mr.
That didn't happen with Jefferson and Hamilton in Washington. So Washington heard these debates. He heard them, he judged them well, I think, by and large. But I wouldn't have wanted a first cabinet with only Hamiltonian views, or one with only Jeffersonian views. And I think we were incredibly lucky that George Washington was where he was at that particular hour in the same way -- to move forward to a more recent example -- I think we were very lucky that Ronald Reagan and George H.
Bush were where they were in that year period. Bush could have made the rhetorical case that helped bring the Soviets to a place of more easy negotiation for us early on. And frankly, I don't think Ronald Reagan could have run the end of the Cold War with as much restraint and skill and dignity and humility as George H. Bush did. I think Reagan needed Bush and Bush needed Reagan, and the country needed them both. And I think that's providential, if you will.
Or fateful, if that's your view. So I think we've been lucky in these hours. What it requires is if you passionately hold views, having the courage in real time to express them so that they might have an effect. And that's what Jefferson and Hamilton did. And I admire both of them. Now, I wish there had been for narrative purposes, partly because it would have shown Jefferson to be a bigger guy. Then on the other hand, maybe it's a good thing he didn't do it because he didn't believe it necessarily.
And we don't like politicians who just make mouth noise. So Jefferson stuck to his principles. He thought Hamilton was bad for America, so he wasn't going to praise him when he was dead. He thought Washington was a tool in the hands of the Hamiltonians, so he wasn't going to be falsely mournful. I think that George Washington, the fact that he was there was incredibly important for us, as was having those two rigorous voices arguing it out.
Q: Jefferson led a life of entitlement: wealth, property, education. And yet he led a revolution in democracy. How do you reconcile those two? It was a revolution in democracy, but remember his democracy was not our democracy.
His democracy was one of largely propertied white men. The revolution was the product of a number of tributaries, some economic, some political, some cultural, some intellectual. The revolutionary fervor, particularly in the Middle Colonies, rose as the King began to limit the Virginians' ability to control, claim western lands.
And in that sense, there was an economic force. Virginians owed the English so much that they needed payday loans, basically, to get out of it. That was relevant.
I don't think Charles Beard is right, that the Constitution was entirely an economic document. But the Revolution was a rich man's revolution, and Thomas Jefferson was a rich man.
There were calls for the militia that went unanswered. One of the things that's difficult but important for us to acknowledge is, at least in the American South, in Virginia, the unifying electrifying event that brought all classes of whites together in favor of revolution was not the Declaration of Independence, but was something called Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, where the British lieutenant governor offered freedom to any slave who would take up arms against the Colonists.
It was that moment that congealed those forces. So motives were mixed. Blessedly, the end has worked out. The words of democracy and promise that Jefferson wrote set in motion a process which we are fulfilling even now. But it was not a clean beginning, any more so than our ensuing history has been clean.
Q: My question deals with Jefferson's Vice President Aaron Burr, who dispatched Alexander Hamilton, but then in Jefferson's second term was accused of treason essentially for trying to, some say, declare himself king of the Louisiana Purchase. Q: What was the relationship between Jefferson, given that he had gotten rid of his primary political enemy, and then turned on him just a few years later? What I like to say, when we talk about Hamilton and Jefferson, and David Brooks, our mutual friend, who's a great Hamiltonian, I point out that at least my guy wasn't shot in Jersey.
Very quickly. It's possible Thomas Jefferson would not have been President without Burr. Burr was a master political operator in New York Republican circles. He was fighting the Clinton and Livingston families and delivered New York for Jefferson, so much so and such to the surprise of Alexander Hamilton that Hamilton tried to get John Jay, who was the governor of New York, to throw out the electoral vote and throw it to Adams on a technicality.
Jay wrote on the back of the letter, "This is so unadvised, I did not reply. Burr blew it in January and February, ending on the 12 th of February when they had tied in the electoral college, Jefferson and Burr. Virginia sent Jefferson as its representative to the Confederation Congress in , where he worked to establish the decimal system as the nation's basis of measurement. More importantly, in , Jefferson drafted an ordinance providing for the temporary government of western territories under congressional control.
The national domain was to be divided into ten districts, and once the population of each district reached 20,, the residents could call a convention and establish a territorial constitution and government of their own choosing. When the territorial population then reached a size equal to the smallest of the original thirteen states, the residents could petition Congress for statehood.
Jefferson's original proposal included a provision prohibiting slavery in the new states, but Congress rejected this part by a vote of seven to six. In , Jefferson also helped draft an ordinance for surveying and selling congressional lands; though superseded by the Land Ordinance of , Jefferson's ordinance established the basic framework of federal land policy.
The Territorial Government Ordinance was replaced with the Northwest Ordinance of , which did prohibit slavery in those lands organized north of the Ohio River. The ordinance also replaced Jefferson's guarantee of initial self-government with congressionally appointed governors and judges.
For four years, beginning in , Jefferson served as America's minister to France, a position equivalent to today's ambassador. In this post, he negotiated commercial treaties and closely observed the disorderly events leading up to the French Revolution. As a widower, Jefferson enjoyed his years in France, living there with his two daughters, Martha, age twelve, and Mary, age seven.
He partook fully of French culture, intellectual salons, and the like. Upon his departure from France, he was convinced that French Enlightenment thought, as expressed by its philosophers and artists, would eventually prove the foundation for a new world order to the great benefit of all humanity. It was also during these years that Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings began. Hemings was the daughter of his wife's father and a slave woman in his household. Fourteen years old, Sally accompanied Jefferson's daughter Mary to Europe in While fulfilling his duties in France, Jefferson corresponded with members of the Constitutional Convention during and In particular, Jefferson communicated with James Madison about the events surrounding the creation of a new form of government.
Having kept abreast of the discussions and developments, Jefferson supported the ratification of the U. Constitution but also strongly emphasized the need for a bill of rights, amendments to the Constitution that would safeguard basic civil liberties, such as the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion, the right to bear arms, and the right to have a speedy trial by a jury of one's peers.
Jefferson reluctantly agreed to serve as Washington's secretary of state in the nation's first administration, beginning in He supported closer relations with France and viewed England with skepticism.
At that time, England and France were at war, and Hamilton won Washington's agreement to honor a pro-British policy of neutrality rather than the treaty providing for assistance to France, which Jefferson favored. Thus, Jefferson's effectiveness in foreign policy was blunted by Washington's insistence on a more neutral stance.
Although he enjoyed Washington's complete confidence, Jefferson found that the President was increasingly influenced by Alexander Hamilton, who had been his aide during the war and in the first administration served as his secretary of treasury.
As Jefferson's chief rival for the President's attention, Hamilton succeeded in swaying Washington in favor of a strong centralized government. Hamilton's successful policy agenda included federally funding state debts that were incurred during the war with England, creating a national bank, supporting commerce and manufacturing as the economic foundation of the new Republic, and using England as an economic model.
Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center. University of Virginia Miller Center. Thomas Jefferson: Life Before the Presidency. Breadcrumb U. Intellectual Beginnings At age nine, Jefferson began his formal studies, boarding with a minister-teacher nine months out of the year.
Law, Love, and Political Insurgency As a young country lawyer, Jefferson practiced law on a circuit, following the meetings of the colonial court as it traveled to various district seats throughout Virginia.
Although it was the second oldest college in America after Harvard , William and Mary was not at that time an especially rigorous academic institution. Jefferson was dismayed to discover that his classmates expended their energies betting on horse races, playing cards and courting women rather than studying.
Nevertheless, the serious and precocious Jefferson fell in with a circle of older scholars that included Professor William Small, Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier and lawyer George Wythe, and it was from them that he received his true education.
After three years at William and Mary, Jefferson decided to read law under Wythe, one of the preeminent lawyers of the American colonies. There were no law schools at this time; instead aspiring attorneys "read law" under the supervision of an established lawyer before being examined by the bar. Wythe guided Jefferson through an extraordinarily rigorous five-year course of study more than double the typical duration ; by the time Jefferson won admission to the Virginia bar in , he was already one of the most learned lawyers in America.
In , Jefferson began construction of what was perhaps his greatest labor of love: Monticello , his house atop a small rise in the Piedmont region of Virginia. The house was built on land his father had owned since More than just a residence, Monticello was also a working plantation, where Jefferson kept roughly African Americans in slavery.
Their duties included tending gardens and livestock, plowing fields and working at the on-site textile factory. From to , Jefferson practiced law in Virginia with great success, trying many cases and winning most of them. During these years, he also met and fell in love with Martha Wayles Skelton, a recent widow and one of the wealthiest women in Virginia.
The pair married on January 1, Thomas and Martha Jefferson had six children together, but only two survived into adulthood: Martha, their firstborn, and Mary, their fourth.
Only Martha survived her father. History scholars and a significant body of DNA evidence indicate that Jefferson had an affair — and at least one child — with one of his enslaved people, a woman named Sally Hemings, who was in fact Martha Jefferson's half-sister. Sally's mother, Betty Hemings, was an enslaved owned by Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, who was the father of Betty's daughter Sally.
It is overwhelmingly likely, if not absolutely certain, that Jefferson fathered all six of Sally Hemings' children. Most compelling is DNA evidence showing that some male member of the Jefferson family fathered Hemings' children, and that it was not Samuel or Peter Carr, the only two of Jefferson's male relatives in the vicinity at the relevant times. The beginning of Jefferson's professional life coincided with great changes in Great Britain's 13 colonies in America.
The conclusion of the French and Indian War in left Great Britain in dire financial straits; to raise revenue, the Crown levied a host of new taxes on its American colonies. In particular, the Stamp Act of , imposing a tax on printed and paper goods, outraged the colonists, giving rise to the American revolutionary slogan, "No taxation without representation.
Eight years later, on December 16, , colonists protesting a British tea tax dumped chests of tea into the Boston Harbor in what is known as the Boston Tea Party. In April , American militiamen clashed with British soldiers at the Battles of Lexington and Concord , the first battles in what developed into the Revolutionary War. Jefferson was one of the earliest and most fervent supporters of the cause of American independence from Great Britain.
In , Jefferson penned his first major political work, A Summary View of the Rights of British America , which established his reputation as one of the most eloquent advocates of the American cause. A year later, in , Jefferson attended the Second Continental Congress , which created the Continental Army and appointed Jefferson's fellow Virginian, George Washington, as its commander-in-chief. However, the Congress' most significant work fell to Jefferson himself. The committee then chose Jefferson to author the declaration's first draft, selecting him for what Adams called his "happy talent for composition and singular felicity of expression.
The document opened with a preamble stating the natural rights of all human beings and then continued on to enumerate specific grievances against King George III that absolved the American colonies of any allegiance to the British Crown.
Although the version of the Declaration of Independence adopted on July 4, , had undergone a series of revisions from Jefferson's original draft, its immortal words remain essentially his own: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
After authoring the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson returned to Virginia, where, from to , he served as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. There he sought to revise Virginia's laws to fit the American ideals he had outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson successfully abolished the doctrine of entail, which dictated that only a property owner's heirs could inherit his land, and the doctrine of primogeniture, which required that in the absence of a will a property owner's oldest son inherited his entire estate. In , Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which established freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. Although the document was not adopted as Virginia state law for another nine years, it was one of Jefferson's proudest life accomplishments.
On June 1, , the Virginia legislature elected Jefferson as the state's second governor. His two years as governor proved the low point of Jefferson's political career. Torn between the Continental Army's desperate pleas for more men and supplies and Virginians' strong desire to keep such resources for their own defense, Jefferson waffled and pleased no one.
As the Revolutionary War progressed into the South, Jefferson moved the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond, only to be forced to evacuate that city when it, rather than Williamsburg, turned out to be the target of British attack. On June 1, , the day before the end of his second term as governor, Jefferson was forced to flee his home at Monticello located near Charlottesville, Virginia , only narrowly escaping capture by the British cavalry. Although he had no choice but to flee, his political enemies later pointed to this inglorious incident as evidence of cowardice.
Jefferson declined to seek a third term as governor and stepped down on June 4, Claiming that he was giving up public life for good, he returned to Monticello, where he intended to live out the rest of his days as a gentleman farmer surrounded by the domestic pleasures of his family, his farm and his books.
To fill his time at home, in late , Jefferson began working on his only full-length book, the modestly titled Notes on the State of Virginia. While the book's ostensible purpose was to outline the history, culture and geography of Virginia, it also provides a window into Jefferson's political philosophy and worldview.
Contained in Notes on the State of Virginia is Jefferson's vision of the good society he hoped America would become: a virtuous agricultural republic, based on the values of liberty, honesty and simplicity and centered on the self-sufficient yeoman farmer.
Jefferson's writings also shed light on his contradictory, controversial and much-debated views on race and slavery. Jefferson owned enslaved people through his entire life, and his very existence as a gentleman farmer depended on the institution of slavery.
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