Jefferson was born to a
Virginia planter family, with important family ties – especially on the
side of his mother, Jane Randolph, a cousin of Peyton Randolph, who was
a leading political figure of Virginia during the 1760s and early
1770s. At an early age Jefferson was tutored along with the Randolph
children ... and as a youth, in classic aristocracy fashion, he was
taught Latin, Greek and French, along with history, science and the
classics. At age 16 he entered the College of William and Mary, where
he continued his study of these same disciplines. He graduated two
years later to begin his study of law under the prominent George
Wythe. And at age 21 he inherited 5,000 acres from his deceased
father’s estate ... including Monticello, where a few years later he
began the building of a mansion of his own design.
He
was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767, and as a practicing lawyer,
represented his county as a delegate to the House of Burgesses
(1769-1775). In 1772 he married a third-cousin, Martha, ... and
settled into a period that was perhaps the happiest of his life. In
the ten years of their marriage she bore him six children, only two of
which survived to adulthood. They also inherited from her father
another 11,000 acres ... and 135 slaves to work the land ... and a
heavy debt that accompanied the title.
Drafting the Declaration of Independence
When
he was sent to represent Virginia at the Second Continental Congress in
1775, he befriended John Adams, and thus was invited to join the
committee assigned the task (supposedly Adams's responsibility) of
drafting a Declaration of Independence ... the startup version which
was ultimately assigned to Jefferson. Some changes were subsequently
made to Jefferson’s draft by the committee, then by the full Congress
(about a fourth of the whole was cut out ... including a section
connecting King George and the slave trade!). At
the time, the Declaration seemed to be a much less significant matter
than all of the new State Constitutions being drafted by the thirteen
newly independent states!
Virginia governor
Shortly after this (September of 1776)
he was elected to the new Virginia House of Delegates, where he served
on the committee working on the new Virginia Constitution ... and
sponsored the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (forbidding state
support of religious institutions or doctrines ... which however failed
to pass). Two years later he was given the responsibility of reviewing
and editing Virginia’s system of laws, and the year after that (1789)
he was elected as the state’s governor ... undertaking at that point to
institute new laws in pursuit of his personal world view concerning
religion, education, property rights.
When in 1781 Benedict
Arnold, now serving the British, attacked the new Virginia capital at
Richmond, Jefferson and members of the Assembly were able to escape to
Monticello (Richmond was burned to the ground) ... then when Cornwallis
approached Monticello, from there to another of his plantations to the
West.1
Delegate to the post-war Confederation Congress
After the war (1783) he became a delegate to the
Confederation Congress where he chaired the committee that drafted the
1784 Land Ordinance, removing the Northwest Territories from the
on-going land title conflicts among the states by making them
territories eventually eligible to become states of their own. Also,
slavery was to be outlawed in these nine territories. (his anti-slavery
provision was not approved at the time ... though reintroduced and
subsequently approved when the nine territories were consolidated into
five territories and moved forward towards the original goal with the
passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787).
An American envoy to France
In
1784 he was sent to join Franklin and Adams in Europe in the effort to
negotiate trade agreements with England, France and Spain (Franklin
returned to the States the next year). Jefferson quickly made
himself at home among the French, befriending the Marquis de Lafayette
in his effort to work improved trade relations between the U.S. and
France. He also fell in love with the French lifestyle (including
its wine and books). Then soon after the French Revolution broke
out in July of 1789 he returned to the States, intending however to
return soon to Paris.
Serving on Washington's cabinet as Secretary of State
But
the request by Washington at that time to serve as his new Secretary of
State (charged with the primary responsibilities of supervising the
country’s diplomatic mission) cause him to remain in America.
His split with Hamilton ... and Washington
But
this would bring him into direct contact with Hamilton ... a man whose
views Jefferson by instinct opposed on virtually every front.
Hamilton was very supportive of a strong central government, able to
unify the functioning of the thirteen states, politically as well as
economically. This Jefferson opposed strongly, fearing that such
a strong central authority would compromise greatly the states’ rights
to conduct their own affairs as they chose. He was thus highly
opposed to the concept of a national authority (until he himself became
President of that nation!).
Furthermore, unlike the almost
spiritual rapport that existed between Washington and Hamilton,
Jefferson and Washington lived in very different universes when it came
to foreign policy and diplomacy. Even though Jefferson was
supposed to be in charge of the conduct of foreign policy, it was
usually to Hamilton that Washington turned rather than to Jefferson
when faced with a foreign policy issue needing to be resolved.
Jefferson grew increasingly bitter over this.
A big part of the
problem was that Jefferson was by nature an intellectual, who lived in
a world of perfect plans and grand schemes. He was also
personally smitten by French culture, had become deeply involved in the
Enlightenment dreams of the French intelligentsia (that eventually took
over the French Revolution ... and drove it to the slaughter known as
the 1793-1794 French Reign of Terror),
and even though horrified at the eventual excesses of French
Republicanism, still favored a working relationship with the French in
their ongoing conflict with the English.2
Hamilton
and Washington, on the other hand, despite the recent war with their
English cousins, still considered England as America’s best partner
when it came to issues involving European politics and economics (which
seemed always unavoidable ... especially to such a trading people as
the Yankees).
There really was no way to side-step the ongoing
French-English conflict ... and neither France nor England would let
America get away with being merely ‘neutral’ in the struggle. One
way or the other, America would constantly have to choose sides (not
usually happily, whatever the choice). And in choosing sides it
usually ended up pitting Hamilton and Washington against Jefferson (and
Madison).
Jefferson grew increasingly furious about how
Washington was lining up behind Hamilton and the pro-British
Federalists ... and in December of 1793 resigned his position on
Washington’s Cabinet. From then on he and his Republicans would
be active opponents of Washington and his Federalist Cabinet.
Jefferson as President (1801-1809)
With
Jefferson’s election to the presidency in late 1800, there would be a
dramatic shift in the character of the new Republic. The
Federalists were out; the Republicans were in. The Federalist
emphasis under Washington (inspired by his close advisor Hamilton) had
been to serve primarily the urban, commercial interests of the coastal
East. The Republican emphasis under Jefferson (and the fellow
Virginians who followed him to the presidency) would be the rural South
and West.
Reshaping the Republic’s finances
Hamilton
had used a growing (but responsible) national debt as a means of
locking the financial leaders of the new country into full support of
the new Republic. However, inspired by the American farmer’s
instinctive dislike of the banking world, Jefferson moved immediately
to undercut Hamilton’s strategy ... by reducing the size of the
debt. He had his new Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin abolish
domestic taxation (such as the hated excise tax on the farmers’
whiskey) and instead raise revenue through customs duties and the sale
of land in the Western territories. The former measure would put
much of the new tax burden on the commercial Northeast. The
latter measure, through actually rather inexpensive land sales, would
bring about greater American settlement in the Western territories ...
putting further burden on the Indian tribes living there.
Jefferson’s intention was clearly to strengthen the political voice in
the new Republic of the rural South and West ... at the cost of the
heavily urban Federalist Northeast.
Also in line with his
Republican dislike of a strong central authority (preferring ‘states’
rights’ instead) and as part of his strategy to reduce the Republic’s
debts, Jefferson moved to reduce the government budget by half ... and
thus also to reduce the federal bureaucracy by nearly the same
amount. A particular target was the collectors of the excise
tax. Also, as the bureaucracy had been previously staffed almost
entirely through Federalist appointments, Jefferson’s Republicans were
placed in half of the remaining positions.
The war with the Barbary pirates at "the shores of Tripoli"
Jefferson
was also adamantly opposed to maintaining, at the public expense, a
huge standing army. Using the logic that the Indian tribes to the
West had been pacified, Jefferson was eventually able to cut the size
of the army in half.
He also had a similar goal with
respect to the navy ... wanting to replace the navy’s six new fighting
ships (frigates) with smaller coastal vessels ... used primarily to
catch Northeastern shippers trying to avoid Jefferson’s new customs
duties.
However before he got going on his naval reduction
program he found himself facing a huge problem that had long infuriated
the Americans: the Barbary pirates of the North African Mediterranean
coast. Operating as ‘privateers’ out of the Muslim states of
Tripoli, Tunisia, Algiers and Morocco, these pirates had long raided
‘Christian’ shipping, seizing not just the ships and their cargo but
also the sailors who manned them ... holding them for ransom or even
selling them into slavery. America paid a huge ransom each year
to bring release for its captured sailors: approximately one million
dollars annually – roughly 10 percent of the government’s total
budget.
Jefferson had long protested the decision of
Washington and Adams to pay this ransom ... and now as President, was
determined that this policy was going to come to an end. When the
Bashaw of Tripoli declared war on the United States in 1801, Jefferson
responded by sendingCommodore Preble who linked up with the King of
Naples (Italy) to attack Tripoli’s pirates. Then Preble set
up a blockade against the Barbary states with an increase in the
American naval presence in the Mediterranean. But in late 1803
one of his frigates (the Philadelphia) ran aground in the Tripoli
harbor. However rather than let the ship fall into the hands of
the pirates, in early 1804 Americans boldly slipped into the harbor and
set the ship ablaze. Then in 1805 the American consul in Tunis
gathered a band of mercenaries and crossed the Libyan desert to seize
the coastal town of Derna ... just as also the American fleet arrived
to bombard the town from the sea. The Barbary pirates were ready
to sue for peace. And thus the Americans proved themselves quite
ably on the high seas.
The Louisiana Purchase (1803)
At
the same time that he was reducing the influence in the Republic of the
urban (and Federalist) Northeast, Jefferson busied himself looking to
the territory across to the West of the Appalachian Mountains.
The new American ‘Northwest’ beckoned thousands of agrarian (and thus
Republican) settlers. As nature would have things however, to
bring their produce to market these settlers would have to look to the
rivers which flowed west and south away from the mountains and toward
the mighty Mississippi River ... which however flowed through French
territory as it approached at New Orleans the Gulf of Mexico and thus
the high seas.
So it was that Jefferson asked his
ambassador to France, Robert Livingston (who was later joined by future
president James Monroe) to negotiate with Napoleon the purchase of this
French town. But America was in for a surprise when Napoleon
offered not just New Orleans, but the entire French territory
(“Louisiana”) to the west of the Mississippi River to America ...for a
mere $15 million dollars. The Americans were quick to accept the
offer. In effect this nearly doubled the size of the new American
nation. And it ended (for a while anyway) French ambitions in
America ... and put America on a new international footing.
Opening the West
Jefferson
was quick (1804) to send Army Captain Meriwether Lewis (accompanied by
William Clark) and a team of 50 men to explore this new territory.
He also sent out other teams to explore the new territory,
including that of Gen. Zebulon Pike who in 1806 ventured as far west as
the territory that would become Colorado.
In looking West,
Jefferson saw the need to connect that part of America with the home
base east of the Appalachian Mountains. Western land sales were
booming and the U.S. Treasury thus was well endowed to finance public
roads and canals. A Republican Congress in 1806 authorized
Jefferson to construct a national road reaching into the Ohio
territory. But this was just the beginning. Treasury
Secretary Gallatin began work on a proposal for massive development of
America’s agricultural hinterland, to help the farmer get his goods to
market, by road or by canal. In 1808 he proposed a
multi-million-dollar (16 to 20 million) plan to build a canal to
connect the Atlantic with the Great Lakes and to construct additional
national roads ... some of the plan financed directly by the
government, some of it through private contractors, financed by loans
from the government.
Thus it was that the ‘small government’
mentality of Jefferson was easily reversed when it came to the
role of the government in supporting the American farmer!
Jefferson’s
last years in the White House (he served two terms or eight years) were
tough on him, as tough as they had been for Washington in his last
years as U.S. President. The primary cause was the bitter
English-French feud stirred by Napoleon with his efforts to spread to
the rest of Europe – by military force if need be – French
‘Enlightenment’ ideals (that is, anti-monarchy ideals ... and to a
lesser extent anti-church ideals). Although Napoleon clearly was
a French dictator, there was something about French culture that
appealed to the Jeffersonian Republicans. They also still
harbored very strong anti-British sentiments. On the other hand,
the Federalists (who were quickly dropping in political importance)
looked to England rather than France as their natural allies. But
in any case, whatever the sentiments, there was no way America, whose
economy was built heavily on trade, could stay out of the
French-English conflict, even as ‘neutrals.’
During these
troubled times, the British had never ceased their impressment of
American sailors. But in 1807 a British warship attacked an
American warship just off the American coast when it refused to allow
the British to board them for a sailor hunt. Americans were
outraged and it was all Jefferson could do to keep his Republican
Congress from pressuring him to issue a declaration of war against
Britain.
What Jefferson did however was almost as ruinous as war
would have been at that time: he decided that somehow placing a block
or ‘embargo’ on American trade with England would bring the British to
their senses (he had the idea that this would stir up worker unrest in
England!). His rather naive analysis blinded him to the fact that
this would actually put America in alliance with France, which was
trying to bring the English economy to collapse by a similar embargo
against English goods traded on the European continent, a continent
that Napoleon now dominated. The economic stakes were so high in
the British mind that this American embargo would only inflame them
further against the Americans, not bring them to their knees! He
also failed to realize that this policy would force American traders
into bankruptcy ... or into smuggling. Hoping to placate the
opposition which exploded when he announced his embargo, he announced
that the same policy would hold true also with respect to trade with
France. But this pleased no one either.
To make bad
matters even worse, Jefferson chose to meet the European challenge by
not building more warships (frigates) ... the likes of which had
proven themselves so capably in the war with the Barbary states.
He figured that not having a fighting navy would help keep Americans
from making the mistake of wanting to go to war with either France or
Britain.
Instead he chose to build a number of much smaller
gunboats. These would not be terribly effective in defending
American shipping overseas ... but certainly could be used to help
prevent the American smuggling that his embargo encouraged.
Such
dangerous folly did not escape the notice of the American press ...
even bringing fellow Republicans to loud complaint. But Jefferson
stood firm ... and thus finished his second term in the midst of a
national uproar. However just before he left office in 1809 he
finally saw the logic in repealing the much-hated embargo.
1It
was later that year decided by the Assembly that Jefferson had acted
appropriately. But he had lost such stature that he was not
reelected governor.
2When
William Short, a Jeffersonian supporter, wrote Jefferson from Paris
that mobs had taken over the French Revolution and had even butchered
some of their French friends, Jefferson wrote back a sharp rebuke: “My
own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this
cause, but rather than it should have failed I would have seen half the
earth desolated; were there an Adam and an Eve left in every country,
and left free, it would be better than it now is.” |
Jefferson: His
Life and Works
His Legacy
Jefferson's Writings
Jefferson's
major works or writings:
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Miles
H. Hodges
