Chapter 14
The Republican President

THE CALCULATED MODESTY of Jefferson’s inaugural, the first ever held in Washington, underscored his will to make an opening statement about his “republican revolution.” The simple walk to the Capitol with a minimum escort (coupled with John Adams’s noiseless departure by public coach, of which Jefferson was presumbly unaware) made the day the overture to a new order of things in the national capital. True, there were splendid Republican rejoicings in other cities—in Philadelphia, for example, where an eye-popping procession included an “elegant” schooner, the Thomas Jefferson, on a flatbed carriage drawn by sixteen horses representing the sixteen states, each with a rider dressed in white.¹ But the new president, who did not even move from his boardinghouse to the executive mansion for two weeks, intended deliberately to signal that his administration would have no monarchical trappings. Twelve years earlier George Washington had counted on at least some display of pomp to show the dignity of the new government. Now, in changing times, Jefferson was using the power of symbolic behavior—especially by the chief executive—to underscore that a Republican regime would operate with “republican” simplicity. As the first “modern” president chosen in a hotly contested election between parties, he was emphasizing a clean break with the Federalist past.

That was exactly what worried his recent opponents. How sharp would that break be? More important, how much would it threaten them? Answering that question in a way that would calm the storms of recent weeks without giving up any essential principles was the project that kept Jefferson busy working over drafts of his inaugural speech, which he wrote absolutely and entirely on his own in the interim between February 18 and March 4. He got it finished in time to hand it over to S. H. Smith, the publisher of what would become the administration’s semiofficial newspaper, the Washington National Intelligencer. It was in print either on or soon after the day on which he read it to the Congress and the audience packed in the gallery, speaking from the well of the Senate, after Vice President Burr had shaken his hand in welcome and Chief Justice Marshall had sworn him in. It was just as well that the text was (or would soon be) available, since the testimony is that while the graying president, almost fifty-eight, was still a tall and commanding figure behind the reading desk, he spoke so softly that he could not be heard in the back rows.

But if the delivery was unimpressive, the content was sensational. The address was as extraordinary as the inauguration ritual itself was mundane by design. It remains one of the two or three best, bestknown, and most oft quoted inaugural speeches in American history thanks to its literary grace, its ripe expression of where Thomas Jefferson’s political thought had arrived nearly twenty-five years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and its summary of what he believed he had just achieved and what he was about to do. Most significant of all, it was reassuring—and it pointed the way to the American future.

JEFFERSON BEGAN by unfurling the red, white, and blue banner. He felt humbled, he said, by the responsibility that his administration would have for “the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country.” And what a country it was!

A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.

There the opening themes sounded. The United States was already a success story, with an even more brilliant “destiny” ahead—so promising that no living person could foresee its final glory. She was also special—a virtuous contrast with those nations that strutted in their power and forgot to do right, although she could trade with them without necessarily corrupting herself—a statement that was a friendly nod to the merchant class suspicious of Jefferson. And America’s people were hardworking. That was what he meant by their “industry,” though it could also be taken as still another friendly nod to manufacturers. Jefferson’s plain intention at that moment was to be inclusive, as his next and possibly most crucial point showed. All Americans were partners in the national enterprise and needed always to keep that in mind. “Let us... fellow citizens,” he implored (using the same term of address that Washington initiated), “restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.”

By implication Jefferson was admitting the divisive bitterness of the just-ended campaign. But he explained that the rancor was not the fault of good-hearted Americans—only the echo of the revolutionary turmoil in Europe. That was what had driven the wedge.

During the throes and convulsions... the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more... feared by some, and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety.

So it was taking sides in the wars of the “ancient world,” as he called Europe, that had led to all the trouble. But what a mistake it would be to continue a “political intolerance” that would be “as despotic, as wicked, and as capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions” as the ageold religious intolerance that America had gloriously “banished from our land.” Then came the most celebrated words of the speech, clearly addressed to the fears of the moment:

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists. If there be any among us who wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.

In the printed version, Federalist and Republican were capitalized, making it sound as if the president was giving his blessing to both parties, a healing if somewhat unrealistic interpretation. But in his handwritten version the labels were not in capitals, and the message was more general. Most Americans, Jefferson was insisting, were moderates. They were united in their commitment to preserving both the state and national governments in the “federal” system provided by the Constitution, and they were agreed that America should turn her back on monarchy forever and keep a “republican” character. There might be extremists on both sides—some who wanted to go back to pre-1787 undiluted state sovereignty; others to the days before 1776 when a king ruled. But it wasn’t necessary to stifle these minotities with Alien and Sedition Acts, or to punish them in any way. There would be no reprisals against losers. Reason would be left free to win its inevitable victory.

Jefferson was showing the Federalists who dreaded him as a dangerous revolutionary that he was not so dangerous. But he made no secret of supporting a “revolutionary” proposition as his well-crafted phrases rolled on. Conservatives throughout history had argued that only authority kept governments in business—only the strength of entrenched bureaucracies, police forces, standing armies, established religions, and privileged leadership classes kept states from crumbling into anarchy. According to Jefferson, they were wrong.

I know, indeed, that some honest men feel that a republican government cannot be strong, that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may... want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern,[emphasis added]

It was freedom that made a government strong, not the reverse. America’s future would be based on the radical idea that free people would, without coercion, preserve a government of their own choosing. That was something new in the human story, and it made the American “experiment” meaningful to peoples everywhere. That was what the election victory, the peacable “revolution of 1800,” meant. It carried a universal message to a globe still overwhelmingly run by crowned heads.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels, in the form of kings, to govern him? Let history answer this question.

It was a bold, shining declaration of democratic faith, though Jefferson’s word of choice at the time was “republican.” Having struck that note, Jefferson went back to the conciliatory tone. He sketched out bright prospects ahead for everyone, and even soothed any readers who were ruffled by his remarks against “religious intolerance.”

Let us, then, with courage and confidence, pursue... our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe... possessing a chosen country with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation, entertaining a due sense of our equal rights... to honor and confidence... resulting not from birth but from our actions... [and] enlightened by a benign religion, professed... and practised in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which, by all its dispensation proves that it delights in the happiness of man here, and his greater happiness hereafter— with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a prosperous people?

When he came to answering his own question, Jeffetson sounded somewhat less like the detached statesman and more like the old political enemy of Hamilton’s plans for an interventionist and expensive government. What more was necessary?

Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits... and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

There it was, an enduring American creed. It wasn’t entitely of Jefferson’s own invention, but neithet was the Declatation of Independence, and in both cases the cadences were so beautiful that they became an unconscious, unexamined, and rarely challenged part of the nation’s thinking, handed down through the generations long after the actual circumstances of 1800 had drastically changed. America was the darling of a divine providence that wished the human race well. Because America was sheltered from Europe’s strife and hatreds by the boundless ocean, het people were free to write a brand-new page in the annals of human progress, and the whole world would be watching. The hopes of liberty everywhere rode on the success of the American experiment.

On social specifics, Jefferson’s words suggested that opportunity was limitless “to the thousandth generation” because of America’s roominess. So individuals had an equal chance to show their inborn talents and would be judged, one by one, on their achievements and not their family pedigrees. As long as law and custom did not draw artificial class distinctions, there would always be an open door for merit. In their domestic politics, the American people would look first to their local and state governments to serve their local needs and protect their freedoms. In their relations with the world through the national government, the compass would always point to “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.” (Jefferson, even more than Washington, was the father of American isolationism.) And government at all levels should be held strictly to a few functions of defense and the protection of rights. Under those conditions it couldn’t become either oppressive or expensive, and tax collectors would need to take only the minimum bite from productive society.

Finally, the American consensus on these points was so complete that peacable dissent could be tolerated and even encouraged. Freedom of thought was the key to constant improvement.

Two hundred years later it’s easy to pick holes in this idealized design, find the weak spots where it expressed more hope than historical truth, jab at how serenely Jefferson dropped slaves, women, and Indians from his definition of “Americans,” or show how cranks of every sort have used his “glittering generalities” to advance their ends. But doing that overlooks the energizing power of such a generous estimate of human and national potential. America today may not be what Jefferson judged it would be, but it is almost certainly better than it might have been if Americans over two centuries had not intermittently tried to live up to the image that he painted of them. His words on that March day became one of the best legacies of the 1800 election.

JEFFERSON HIMSELF CLAIMED to have invented nothing. His own idea of the “revolution of 1800” was that by peaceful persuasion he had simply brought the country back to the original intentions of the Revolution of 1776. The High Federalists had steered the new ship of state off course, but as Jefferson wrote to another signer of the Declaration of Independence just two days after inauguration, “We shall put her back on her republican tack and she will show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.”² Nor would he have agreed with the historians who afterward decided that “revolution” consisted in putting the seal of approval on permanently organized competing parties. Jefferson still thought that once the people got a taste of true republicanism, all future quarrels would be differences of opinion, not principle, to be settled among republican brethren on a case-by-case basis. Federalist heresies would quietly vanish. Or, in his words a year and a half after the election, he would “by the establishment of republican principles sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection.”³

Luckily for peace and quiet, in March 1801 Federalist leaders were not aware that they were expected to disappear. That was, in fact, just what they had nervously anticipated from the man who had once said (though in private letters when not in power) that “a little rebellion now and then” was a good thing and that the tree of liberty needed occasional watering in the blood of patriots and tyrants.⁴ Instead they heard a promise of continuity. Hamilton took the words as “a pledge to the community that the new President will not lend himself to dangerous innovations, but in essential points will tread in the steps of his predecessors.”⁵ John Marshall, who had written to Charles Pinckney that very morning of March 4 that Republicans were “speculative theorists and absolute terrorists,” added a grumpy but relieved postscript in the afternoon that Jefferson’s speech was “in general well judged and conciliatory... giving the lie to the violent party declamation which... elected him.”⁶ One Federalist newspaper said: “His public assurances... have inspired us with a hope that he is not the man we thought him.”⁷

Republicans, of course, were ecstatic, and as the address made its way across the country in the press, gratifying hosannas tang in Jefferson’s ears. The typical impression was voiced by Benjamin Rush, always the enthusiastic optimist. Rush saw the Federalists already fading away. “You have opened a new era,” he wrote to his old friend the new president. “Never have I seen the public mind more generally or more agreeably affected by any publication. Old friends... separated by party names... for many years shook hands with each other.... It would require a page to contain the names of all the citizens (formerly called Federalists) who have spoken in the highest terms of your speech.”⁸

But the honeymoon with critics was inevitably short. No one yet knew the specifics Jefferson had in mind. The nearest thing to a concrete statement in the inaugural address was the pledge of peace with all nations—of neutrality, rather than a pro-French policy, as the Federalists had feared. But just exactly what did the man from Monticello (to which he headed for a vacation on April 1) mean by a “wise and frugal” government guaranteeing “equal and exact justice to all men of whatever persuasion?” What would be cut? What would be added? What Jefferson had said was wonderful. But what would this nonpolitical politician do?

Jefferson’s only other experience of executive responsibility had not been promising. He was wartime governor of Virginia from June 1779 to June 1781. The state had been invaded, Richmond had been captured, and a British raiding party had chased Jefferson out of Monticello for a day. Serious accusations of mismanagement and lack of preparation lingered around his reputation.

But given this second chance to lead—and on a larger scale Jefferson rose to the challenge and made another major contribution to the revolution of 1800. He took the presidency that George Washington had invented and gave it its modern form.

THIS TIME the fortunes of war were on his side. The fighting in Europe had been winding down, and in March 1802, the Peace of Amiens was signed, ending hostilities between France and England. The “peace” was actually a mere breathing spell, and at the end of 1803 it fell apart. But for most of his first term Jefferson was free of the problems of neutrality and harassment on the high seas that had tormented Washington and Adams for seven straight years. He could concentrate on his debt-reduction program without much concern for defense costs; and even better, the revival of trade with the West Indies and Europe, no longer hampered by blockades and seizures, boosted the economy and poured customs revenues into the Treasury.

Jefferson did have a small war to handle, however, with one of the maritime racketeers of North Africa. In May 1801 the pasha of Tripoli, dissatisfied with the timing and amount of American “tribute” payments, declared wat on the United States.⁹ Jefferson the antimilitarist candidate had condemned the costly naval buildup under Adams. But Jefferson the president did not hesitate to take some of the warships launched by Adams and send them to patrol and fight in the Mediterranean. The miniconflict lasted four years before the pasha gave in, and it made hero’s reputations for American commanders like Edward Preble and especially Stephen Decatur. In 1804 Decatur led a daring raid into the harbor of Tripoli and, right under the enemy’s noses and cannon, set ablaze and destroyed a powerful American frigate that they had captured and were busy converting to their own use. Jefferson’s action wasn’t necessarily inconsistent or hypocritical—he had always favoted resistance to the extortion of the Barbary States. But it showed, in the opening weeks of his presidency, that where the national interest was concerned, he would be pragmatic rather than ideological. He might condemn war and preach strict construction of the Constitution, but he promptly sent the atmed forces into overseas battle entirely on his presidential initiative. As an ironic footnote, Jefferson, always friendly to government-sponsoted free education, signed legislation in 1802 establishing an engineering school in New York State for worthy young men who hoped to become professional army officers. And so Jefferson, who always professed a “passion for peace,” was the first president to send Americans “to the shores of Tripoli” and the one who helped to found West Point.

Jefferson also was the first occupant of the executive residence to carry out a complete, conscious, and clearly defined program of “reform.” He hated Hamilton’s idea that a controlled national debt was a national “blessing” that gave the bankers who lent money to the United States a stake in its success. Jefferson saw that path as a sure road to corruption, speculation, high taxes, and bureaucracy, all of them burdens on “republican” freedom. What he wanted was for a “frugal” government to get rid of the debt, and, with the collaboration of Gallatin, who became his secretary of the Treasury, he went at it promptly. They devised a plan to pay down the $83 million worth of federal certificates of indebtedness, plus the accumulating interest, inside of sixteen years by earmarking $7.3 million a year for debt retirement. But they only estimated anticipated revenues at $10.5 million annually, especially since Jefferson insisted on cutting out “internal” taxes like the hated levy on whiskey. That would leave a mere $3.2 million for the government to spend per year, instead of the $10.8 million it had laid out in 1800 or the $9.7 million of 1799.

The only way to manage was to make deep cuts, especially in the diplomatic and military services. Embassies to Portugal, Prussia, and the Netherlands were closed. Naval ships not serving in North African waters were “laid up”—in twentieth-century terms, “mothballed.” And the army was slashed to three thousand men to defend the thousands of miles of America’s frontiers. Jefferson believed, as most Americans did for nearly a century and a half to follow, that in an emergency such as an invasion, militia could do the job. As it happened, even these reductions never shrank expenses below $7.8 million in Jefferson’s two terms. But tariff revenues were up, and a fresh surge of westward expansion (bringing Ohio into the Union in 1802) increased public land sales, so the nation’s yearly income from 1801 through 1804 was better than anticipated—between a low of $ 11 million and a high of nearly $ 15 million, generating hefty surpluses. The debt was down to $75.7 million by 1805 and got as low as $45.2 million before the War of 1812 shot it up again. Best of all, from Jefferson’s point of view, he could say in his second inaugural address in March 1805, “What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?”

Setting and enacting a presidential agenda required a novel degree of top-down management. Washington presented a public image of command, but he was willing to let his cabinet set the course of policy after open discussions like the councils of war. He listened attentively to conflicting positions, then made up his mind. By contrast Jefferson kept cabinet sessions to a minimum, preferring to have the department heads iron out disputes among themselves before meetings—he hated time-wasting arguments—and encouraging all of them to communicate any suggestions to one another through him. He operated not in Washington’s way but rather more like the master of Monticello, taking reports from his various supervisors and overseers to make sure that his guidelines were being followed.

Presidential initiatives also had to be turned into legislation on the floor of Congress. President Washington had never attempted to build a personal cadre of supporters in the House or Senate, although Hamilton had done so with some success. But President Jeffetson worked quietly through the network of friendly congressional Republicans that his endless letter-writing had woven during his days out of power. North Carolina’s Nathaniel Macon, speaker of the house in the new Congress, was an associate who knew what Jefferson wanted and saw to it that the committee chairmen he appointed knew, too. Both Madison, now secretary of state, and Gallatin freely kept up and used the collegial contacts they had made during their own past services as representatives. In the Senate a Virginia loyalist, Stevens T. Mason—the man who had ridden all the way from Virginia to Vermont with the money for Matthew Lyon’s Sedition Act fine—was a competent floor leader until his death in 1803. Jefferson did not need to bulldoze or plead to find party followers to steer legislation through parliamentary roadblocks. All the while, however, he denied that he was interfering with congressional prerogatives. The Federalist minority, powerless against the solid phalanx of Jeffersonians, strenuously disagreed. “The President has only to act and the majority will approve,” one of them grumbled: “In each house a majority of puppets move as he touches the wires.”¹⁰

One lever of presidential power that later became traditional was the use of patronage, the winning of a congtessman’s vote by appointing his nominees to office. Here, however, Jefferson was limited by his own self-imposed rules. He wanted to reduce, not enlarge, the number of federal offices to be awarded, and he was ambivalent about creating vacancies by firing incumbent Federalists. For one thing, he continued to feel that he was above partisanship and would fill posts only on the basis of merit. For another, as part of the conciliatory strategy suggested by the inaugural address, he expected to retain some deserving Federalist functionaries and convert them into good Republicans.

But in actual practice he made liberal exceptions. Adams’s lameduck appointments—those made after mid-December 1800, when the Federalist defeat was known—were fair game for removal, since they flouted the results of the election. So were Federalists impossibly rooted in their wickedness, those “whom I abandon as incurables,” as he told Monroe.”¹¹ And in some cases Jefferson, whether he liked it or not, had to consider the demands of loyal Republicans in the states for a clean sweep of Federalist customs, excise, and postal workers. Their views were summed up by a New York editor who asked: “If this should not be the case, for what, in the name of God, have we been contending?”¹² It was impossible to preside over the country’s first change in administrations from one party to another and be deaf to claims for the spoils. Like presidents after him, Jefferson found that satisfying office seekers was a major aggravation, since every choice that made a friend also made enemies among those passed over. Yet the job, he said, “like the office of hangman... must be executed by someone.”¹³ ’In all, he transferred about half of roughly 330 “significant civil offices,” according to one biographer,¹⁴ into new hands. He insisted privately that only a tiny fraction of the changes were for political reasons. But each award tightened the connections of the Jeffersonian party machinery whose existence its leader denied. One plum appointment—as the first Librarian of Congress—went to the faithful Republican factotum John Beckley, who was also reelected to his old job as clerk of the House of Representatives.

In a pretelephone era, the only way that even a president could keep up with his official and political business was to spend long hours with a pen in his hand. Jefferson got up with the sun and stuck to his desk until one in the afternoon, with a brief recess for breakfast. The n he rode horseback for an hour or two in Washington’s wooded or marshy lanes, often stopping to chat with townspeople high and low. Dinner was around 3:30 or 4:00 P.M., and he would often go back to writing for an hour or two after it was finished. But Jefferson’s renowned table had its managerial uses, too. The new president enjoyed informal dinner parties of eight to ten, to which members of Congress were often invited. He began by trying to mix Federalists and Republicans but had to give it up after a while when the chill became too great—even though there was an understood rule against talking politics and he himself often steered the conversation to science, history, and literature. Still, even a “nonpolitical” evening among congtessmen comfortably fdling their stomachs with dishes of soup, rice, eggs, turkey, mutton, ham, veal, and beef, followed by ice creams, custards, fruits, and tatts prepared in the best French style and accompanied by the very best of imported wines (Jefferson’s annual wine bill alone was about $2,400) could not fail to produce fond memories that would be helpful the next time a bill was introduced that carried a presidential recommendation. The diplomatic corps and the rest of Washington’s official establishment enjoyed Jeffersonian hospitality, too, although some of the stuffier royal ambassadors were ruffled by the practice of guests seating themselves “pell mell,” wherever was most convenient, rather than following a strict order of priority based on rank.

In all these ways, Thomas Jefferson was making his influence palpable in policymaking, even though he had always denounced the tendency to a strong executive. Unlike Washington, who had a different agenda, he worked hard at avoiding ceremony, and he was capable of startling visiting dignitaries by sometimes receiving them in slippers, vest, and corduroy breeches. He even made a point of not delivering his annual message to Congress in person because it struck him as too much like an “address from the throne” to Parliament. (He sent it up to Capitol Hill to be read by a clerk instead. The practice stuck until 1913. Nowadays, billed as the State of the Union address, it is a majot public relations event.) For all that scrupulousness, though, Jefferson was turning himself and his majority leaders in Congress into a working team. In doing so, he was blurring the lines between the branches and laying down the foundations for the active kind of presidential leadership that later giants in the office like Jackson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts would emulate.

He could not so easily influence the third of the federal governmerit’s “separated powers,” the judiciary, although he tried hard. He had never stopped fuming over the new judgeships created by the Judiciary Act of January 1801 and filled by Adams. To him it was a scheme by which his enemies had “retreated into the judiciary as a stronghold,” from which, protected by lifetime tenure, they would keep up the fight against him.¹⁵ The least he could do was to urge the repeal of the act, and no sooner had the Seventh Congress met in December than it took up the matter and, inside of two months, scrubbed it from the books. The “midnight judges” were not dismissed. Their jobs simply disappeared, and none took the risk of challenging the repeal in the Supreme Court. All the same, Jefferson could not throw out Federalist life-term judges already sitting before 1801, and above all he could not undo the appointment of John Marshall as chief justice.

Early in 1803 Marshall scored the first points in a careerlong battle with Jefferson by handing down the landmark decision of Marbury v. Madison. William Marbury was one of the midnight appointees, a justice of the peace named by Adams. Jefferson ordered Madison, as secretary of state, not to deliver Marbury his commission of office. Marbury petitioned the Supreme Court for a “writ of mandamus,” an order that would force Jefferson to carry out the lawful intention of the outgoing president. The issue was clear. Was the president subject to the chief justice’s orders like any other official? Could he be punished if he refused? Marshall’s opinion shrewdly ducked a direct confrontation. It denounced the president for denying Marbury what he was legally entitled to—but then went on to say that the Supreme Court could not do anything to help Marbury because the 1789 law authorizing it to issue writs of mandamus had no basis in the Constitution, which specificially limited the kinds of cases that could be initiated in, rather than appealed to, the nation’s highest court. And a statute that contradicted the Constitution, the highest law of the land, could not by definition be applied. Unlucky Marbury was without a remedy.

On the surface it looked like a surrender to Jefferson. Actually, however, Marshall was making the sweeping assertion that a law passed in good faith by congressmen and signed by a president, all of them also able to read and understand the Constitution, simply had no force and effect if judges on the bench concluded that it was inconsistent with the Constitution’s provisions. That could happen whenevet a plaintiff brought suit claiming that a national or, for that matter, a state law deprived him of some constitutional right. And therefore in practice, the final word on what the Constitution meant would rest with one of the three supposedly “equal” branches, the federal judiciary, the only one whose decision-making personnel could not be changed by elections. The doctrine of “judicial review” did not dovetail comfortably with the idea of popular government.

Confronted with this setback, Jefferson made an effort to counterattack by proposing the removal of Associate Justice Chase, famed for his intemperate outbursts in Sedition Act trials, on the grounds of his blatant partisanship. The House of Representatives duly impeached Chase in 1804. But in the Senate trial the following year, a two-thirds vote for conviction could not be mustered. Pro-Federalist harangues from the bench did not clearly qualify as a “high crime and misdemeanor,” and even some Republican senators worried about using impeachment as a tool to force a wholesale change of judges every time there was a new administration. “Old Bacon Face” remained where he was, and historians generally agree that it was a fortunate decision for Marshall: if Chase had been ousted, Jefferson might have gone after the chief justice next. As it was, Chase’s escape frustrated Jefferson’s only really “revolutionary” attack on the status quo and guaranteed that “republicanism” would have to learn to live in a permanent though often stormy relationship with a lifetime-tenuted judiciary and judicial review. The best Jefferson could do against the judges was to drop the prosecution of still-pending cases under the hated Sedition Act, which had automatically expired anyway in 1801.

The courts never had a chance, however, to deal with Thomas Jefferson’s most sweeping, unforeseen, transformative, and probably unconstitutional exercise of raw presidential power, the Louisiana Purchase.

THE STORY is well enough known to require little repetition in detail. By the spring of 1802 it was known for certain that Napoleon had forced Spain, under the Treaty of San Ildefonso, to cede to France New Orleans and all of the vaguely defined territory known as Louisiana. He had then dispatched twenty-five thousand troops to the West Indies to retake Santo Domingo—that is, modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic—from Toussaint-L’Ouverture, after which they would move on to occupy the emperor’s new New World possession. Instead of toothless Spain, the world’s greatest military power would have an army stationed on the western frontier and would control the vital outlet of the Mississippi River. The gateway to the unsettled empire of land where Americans would fulfill their future promise “to the thousandth generation” would be closed forever, and the commerce of the existing states and territories beyond the Alleghenies choked to death.

Jefferson could not hide his anxiety, and he wasted no time on channels. He wrote directly, and not through Secretary of State Madison, to the American minister in Paris, New York Republican Robert Livingston. Something would have to be done and done quickly to avoid a disaster. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy, “said Jefferson. Napoleon was stepping into that role, and from the moment the French flag was raised over New Orleans, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation,” an appalling prospect of dependence.¹⁶ Next, not trusting Livingston to handle the situation alone, the president dispatched his trusty longtime protege, James Monroe, to join Livingston in Paris, and there to offer Napoleon a sum of ten million dollars—not yet appropriated and certain to shatter the austerity budget—to buy New Orleans and as much of the territory surrounding it as they could.

Once more, luck was on Jefferson’s side. The French force in the Caribbean was decimated by yellow fever and black military resistance. It failed to subdue Toussaint-L’Ouverture’s troops (though Toussaint himself was tricked into capture) during the winter of 1802-3. Napoleon was also beginning to prepare for the inevitable resumption of war with England and decided that he would prefer ready cash to a faraway North American province from which he could easily be cut off. He offered to sell the United States the entire, uncertainly bounded territory known as Louisiana, for fifteen million dollars, almost exactly the government’s income for the previous year of 1802. The news reached Washington on July 4, 1803. The deal was consummated as fast as wind and wave could carry the president’s approval to Paris. France’s foreign minister was the great survivor, Talleyrand, who told Livingston and Monroe that they had “made a noble bargain” for themselves. They certainly had. The Louisiana Territory, after eventual agreement on its boundaries, turned out to stretch from the Mississippi to the Rockies and to include all or part of what would become fifteen states of the Union¹⁷ —some 830,000 resource-rich square miles, bought at an estimated cost of three cents an acre.

Jefferson had not even waited for Napoleon’s answer to the Livingston-Monroe proffer before authorizing Meriwether Lewis, his secretary, to prepare a “scientific” expedition through the region and on to the west coast of North America to see if a water route to the Pacific existed. He did that in April 1803, so anxious was he to find out more about that trans-Mississippi region that he once called “an empire for liberty.” Lewis and his partner, William Clark, set off from Washington to begin assembling their exploring party just as word arrived that they would officially be on American soil for most of the trip.

Once he had his prize in hand, Jefferson had to deal with his own uncomfortable awareness that there was absolutely nothing in the Constitution authorizing his action—he had dealt with Napoleon as one “boss” to another, though of course he intended to go to Congress for approval and funding. He thought at first of submitting a request for a constitutional amendment along with the legislation to acquire Louisiana, but then he became afraid that it would lead to wrangling and delay. So he told his attorney general that “the less that is said about my constitutional difficulty, the better.... [I]t will be desirable for Congress to do what is necessary in silence.”¹⁸ There was no problem. The Republican majority quickly approved the sale, in spite of Federalist objections best put by the versatile John Quincy Adams, who had come back from diplomatic service abroad to practice law, become a professor of literature at Harvard instead, and was then elected to the Senate from Massachusetts. In Senator Adams’s words, the purchase was “an assumption of implied powers greater... than all the assumptions of implied powers in the years of the Washington and Adams administrations put together.”¹⁹ Hamilton could hardly have stretched the Constitution further. When it was necessary to provide some temporary government for the area around New Orleans occupied mostly by French-speaking Creoles, Jefferson, the denouncer of unrepresentative government, had his Congress enact an ordinance that allowed him to appoint a governor who would rule with the help of an unelected council. He submitted his draft to a Kentucky senator to be introduced without admitting his own authorship, well knowing that the Federalists would be quick to attack his overnight conversion to rule by decree.

No serious public thinker, then or since, would disapprove the Louisiana Purchase. It doubled the size of the United States overnight, laid one foundation for her dazzling economic growth, and made the little republic an inland empire obviously earmarked for a great future among the powers of the earth. But it was achieved because Jefferson, believing he embodied the popular will, saw a personal chance to make a move that was beneficial to the American nation—and unhesitatingly made it. Because of his previous opposition to executive Caesarism, he was in a better position to get away with it than either of the presidents before him. In one sense, then, the wonders that flowed from the “noble bargain” also became part of the legacy of 1800.

THAT JEFFERSON WAS the people’s choice could hardly be doubted, even though there were no popularity polls, no “photo ops,” not even any photos. In fact, since the press lacked even the technique for good reproduction of drawings, most Americans did not even know what their president looked like. But the beginnings of a popular presidency were already visible in the somewhat primitive public relations events devised by Republican supporters—like the twelve-hundred-pound cheese, four feet in diameter and a foot and a quarter thick, presented to the president on New Year’s Day 1802 by the farmers of Cheshire, Massachusetts. Made from the milk of nine hundred “Republican” cows, it was carried to Washington by sloop and wagon and eventually served to White House guests after ripening in the unfinished East Room for over a year.

Travel conditions of the time precluded a heavy schedule of public demonstrations, however, which allowed Jefferson to continue his own personally preferred invisibility At the same time, he was freely quoted by a friendly press and his name featured in Republican celebrations, so that he could acquire the popularity that allowed him to lead. He had his private definition of what popularity meant. He would not pretend to be all things to all men or count noses (even if it were possible) to decide what was right. That was the demagoguery that Federalists insisted was part of his nature. But as he put it, “He who would do his country the most good... must go quietly with the prejudices of the majority until he can lead them into reason.”²⁰ To guide without seeming to be at the head of the column was the art of democratic administration. How well it worked and rubbed off on the party was shown by the 1802 off-year elections. Republicans increased their Senate lead to 25 seats out of the 34 now available, including Ohio’s, and their House margin to 102- 39.

By 1804 Thomas Jefferson had become a special kind of president. He was more than a unifying symbol, a republican monarch as Washington had been. He seemed to embody the collective self-image of Americans, to be the force to whom they looked to reflect and enact their wishes. It was a contradictory role for a shy thinker of aristocratic tastes, but it was only one of the intriguing contradictions of Thomas Jefferson. He was large enough, to use a phrase of Walt Whitman’s from many years later, to contain multitudes.

As the next election neared, Jefferson made up his mind, like almost every incumbent first- tem president, to run a second time. There was one piece of preliminary business to dispatch, which was to avoid the horror of another tie—especially a tie with Aaron Burr, whose relationship with Jefferson and with the party had steadily chilled. In the first session of the Eighth Congress congressional Republicans introduced the Twelfth Amendment. It provided that electors should vote distinctly in separate ballots for a president and a vice president. Sent to the states in December 1803, it had received the needed thirteen ratifications by the next June and was in effect by September 1804. Only the Federalists resisted, mainly because the old system offered a better chance of electoral success, but also because they said it would put a seal on the insignificance of the Vice Presidency, which no promising politician would accept if he could help it.

In the campaign the Republican caucus named New York’s canny veteran George Clinton, at that point a Burr enemy, to the vice presidential spot. The Federalists nominated Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for president and also chose a favorite son from electoral-vote-rich New York, Rufus King, for the vice presidency. There wasn’t much to campaign about. Low taxes, peace, prosperity, and Louisiana gave Jefferson an enormous advantage, and the best that the opposition could do was to sling mud, itself a sign of how important the personal image of the president had become. But no scandals would overcome the good Republican record. The Jefferson-Clinton ticket won in the first political landslide of the new century, the first election under the Twelfth Amendment, and the second to take place within a two-party system that was already, though unofficially, a part of the machinery of self-government. To call it a two-party system in 1804 almost seems like an exaggeration. The president carried every state but Delaware and Connecticut and had 162 electoral votes to 14 for the Federalists, two of those coming from Maryland. The congressional vote was even more lopsided. In the House, grown to 141 members after the new census, the Republicans would have a 116-25 majority, plus 27 of 34 senators.

With that gigantic mandate, so different from the crisis of four years earlier, the “revolution” was ratified and sealed. The Republicans had not only taken power peacefully, but they had managed to virtually wipe out the opposition, at least temporarily, without a single act of violence against any man, without a weapon raised or a detention order issued. After the terrible days of threats and protests and prophecies of doom—after the mobs, the liberty poles, the broken windows, the flaming effigies—after the whiskey rebels and the sedition jailings—after all that, Americans had kept the republic.

All that remains is to listen for the echoes that are still reverberating.