THOMAS JEFFERSON
3rd President, 1801–1809
Overall Rank: 7
Total Score: 727
Thomas Jefferson has held the 7th overall rank in all three of C-SPAN’s historian surveys. He scores highest in vision/setting an agenda (5th in 2017) and relations with Congress (5th). His lowest rank is in pursued equal justice for all, where he has seen a steady decline in each of the three surveys and currently ranks 17th.
Party: Democratic-Republican
b. April 13, 1743, Goochland County (now Albemarle County), Virginia
d. July 4, 1826, Monticello estate, Virginia
First Lady: Martha “Patsy” Randolph (daughter)
Age entering office: 57
Historian: Willard Sterne Randall
History professor and biographer of leaders from the Revolutionary War period, Willard Sterne Randall was interviewed on Booknotes for his book, Thomas Jefferson: A Life. The interview was recorded on October 29, 1993.
If you start from when he’s twenty-seven years old, [Thomas Jefferson’s government service began as a] member of the Virginia House of Burgesses from the farthest west, the frontier county of Albemarle, Virginia. He was also the youngest lawyer to practice before the General Court of Virginia, which was also the supreme court of that colony. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was in the Second Continental Congress, 1776, one year only, filling an unexpired term. He became a member of the first House of Delegates, was the Revolutionary governor of Virginia, and, in three years, literally rewrote the law of the largest state at the time, Virginia—126 new laws and a new criminal code. Then he went on to Congress again. He was the leading member of Congress for a few years then became the American minister plenipotentiary, or ambassador, to France, replacing Benjamin Franklin, his mentor. Washington wanted him in his first cabinet, so he was the first secretary of state. Jefferson found it hard to say no to George Washington, as I think just about everybody else did. Then he became vice president to Adams by three electoral votes in the first contested presidential election. Then he defeated the Federalists and became the third president of the United States. So, [on the federal level, he was] our first secretary of state; our second vice president; and our third president, for two terms.
Thomas Jefferson was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, the farthest settlement west, the last ridge basically before you got into the frontier. His father had settled Albemarle County, one of the two original settlers. He was a pioneer,… a great giant of a man, Peter Jefferson, of legendary strength, sort of the Paul Bunyan of the Virginia frontier. He helped draw the boundaries of Virginia. He rode out on expeditions with chains and surveyors. Jefferson worshipped him and learned surveying and a love for books from his father, whose entire library was only forty volumes, but compared to the libraries of most people on the frontier at the time, that was quite a lot. Jefferson emulated his father, but he’s very much like his mother, who was a Randolph, very refined, and he got his love of education from her.
There were so many [Jefferson children] that he basically had to move out and go away to school. Our picture of a plantation at the time is something more out of Gone with the Wind than was the reality. These were small farmhouses with eaves and dormers, and Jefferson was a tall boy. With… seven children at home with them by the time he was a teenage boy, there just wasn’t room for him, and he went off to school. He was the older of two boys with a half-dozen sisters, and when his father died, Thomas was only fourteen, and he became the man of the family.
I thought that his relationship with his father and with his mother was very important because there has been some spin put on his relationship with his mother since the 1960s and ’70s. Modern scholars have found that part of his early correspondence has been misdated, giving the impression that he was twenty-nine or thirty years old and hated women when he wrote certain things in his notebooks. It’s been found out recently that he was fourteen, and so when he wrote angry things about women in Greek and Latin, he was actually railing at his mother, like many an adolescent boy does. But [he was] doing it in Greek and Latin, which she couldn’t read, so he couldn’t get in trouble. If you don’t get that right, then you have a misogynist, because if you look at what he wrote, it’s very angry. He had been turned into a woman-hater [because of that misdating, and] I don’t find any evidence for that. In many ways, he was actually much more liberal than other men of his time. He saw that his daughter was wonderfully educated.… I think he gave women a higher place as life went on, although he was not ready to put one in his government, so he’s also been attacked for that. I don’t think he thought he had enough support from the public. There were some things that he remained confused about all of his life. One of those was exactly what to do with women. I think he was always awkward about that, but I don’t think he was a misogynist.
Jefferson’s father had slaves. They had been introduced into the family gradually. As the indentured white labor supply dried up, the Jeffersons, like others, bought more land and bought more slaves. When Peter Jefferson died, he left his family thirty-four slaves. Most of Jefferson’s slaves came by inheritance from his father. And, when Thomas married [Martha Wayles in 1772], almost immediately his father-in-law died right after buying a whole shipload of slaves that nobody wanted and nobody could afford. So, Jefferson instantly became the largest slave owner in Virginia.
Six feet two and a half inches is the best estimate [of Thomas Jefferson’s height that] I can come up with. He was thin, probably no more than 180 pounds.… A slave overseer who specialized in knowing the statistics about human beings said he was six two and a half, straight as a gun barrel, with a wonderful bearing. He didn’t walk with a cane until the last few months of his life. He exercised and rode a horse until the last few weeks of his life. He was virtually a vegetarian, although not slavishly so. He always had a glass of red wine [with his meals] for about forty years that I can tell, and it was always a good one. He preferred country ham and French cuisine equally, but he believed in being outdoors as much as possible. So, he took care of himself. He died with a full head of teeth, which was extremely rare in those days, and he had a shock of red hair.
Jefferson had migraine headaches.… They usually followed some serious loss. When his mother died, he had a migraine that lasted for six weeks. When his father died, there’s a hint of this in his correspondence. Mostly they called in someone who bled you and purged you, which I’m not sure helped a headache or anything else very much. He had one period in Paris for six weeks when he was absolutely flattened and called in a doctor, who I don’t think helped things very much.
[In researching this book, I learned that] Jefferson, the lawyer, was much more important than he’s been made out to be. Other biographers have touched on his career, but in tracking him through his life, I very quickly learned that his legal papers and his casebooks and his record books still existed. They were out in a private collection in California. I was able to go out there and sit, and hold them, and study them, and see that the man had almost one thousand law cases on the eve of the Revolution, many of them in areas that mattered a great deal to him. He would represent slaves without fee to try to win them freedom. He was one of the first to think about divorce reform; divorce was illegal [then].… Many of the areas that are considered quite modern, he had struggled with as a lawyer, and he had been shouted down by the slave-owning oligarchy and the British officials in Virginia. So, out of the law courts, we get Jefferson the revolutionary, on his feet, writing brilliant opinions, very articulate, a better speaker than most biographers have let on. That, to me, explained for the first time why such a good lawyer as John Adams would defer to him to write the Declaration of Independence and the key documents of the Continental Congress. That never made sense to me before. What I [previously] knew about Jefferson, basically, was at age thirty-three he dropped out of the sky in Philadelphia and wrote the Declaration of Independence; what I found out in this research is those early years [in law practice] were terribly important.
His closest friend was James Madison, roughly ten years his junior. He also had a number of young men [with whom] he ran the male equivalent of a salon. William Short was one; [David] Humphreys, and others who would be his aides for a while. Jonathan Trumbull was very close to him in Paris. He trusted Trumbull explicitly. Trumbull had been a soldier and was an artist, and he confided in him. He liked James Monroe. He picked him out when Monroe was a captain in the Revolutionary Army and brought him along. But these were always juniors; I don’t find close friends of his own age. For a while, he was very close to Adams, and he was very fond of Abigail Adams, admired her greatly, but it wasn’t until he was an old man and both Adams and Jefferson were out of power that they became close again. Jefferson could be very suspicious of people that he saw as potential rivals, and I think he trusted younger men more than most of the men of his own age.
He went to Paris when he was forty-one. His wife [Martha Wayles Jefferson, thirty-three,] had died not long before that. He was desolate. He thought his life was over. He went mostly because Franklin had asked him three times to come, and as long as his wife was alive and sick, he couldn’t see his way clear to leaving her behind. She wasn’t up to the voyage. But when she died, he went, at Franklin’s invitation, to help negotiate the peace with the British. That was all done by the time he got there, but he became the apostle of the new country, publishing Notes on the State of Virginia, over there, trying to show the French what this new country was about. He was there for five years, a vital five years. He was very close to [the Marquis de] Lafayette, and a lot of the early stages of the French Revolution took place at his dinner table in the American mission on the Champs-Élysées, so this period was fascinating to me.
He was in Paris from 1784 to 1789. He was there when the Bastille fell. The rioting was going on outside his windows. He went out in his carriage for months to investigate. The crowds recognized him, and they would stop hitting the guards long enough to let him pass and then would let fly again at the Swiss Guards. He stayed there about three months after the revolution began and then came home.
I thought it was a good idea [to tell the story of Jefferson falling in love in Paris] because I thought that one of the things that happens to Jefferson and other leaders, especially the early leaders of this country, is they are turned into marble busts instead of human beings. In looking at Jefferson in love in Paris, we have quite a different slant on the man. It’s not only Jefferson in love but Jefferson discovering the importance of women. In Paris, he learned to respect the intellects of the women of the salon who really ran the French government, not all that well sometimes, as Marie Antoinette could attest. Jefferson opened his mind in those years and had a wonderful time with Maria Cosway, an educated, brilliant painter, and it changed him into a much more sophisticated individual.
Maria Cosway was married to a British portrait painter, Richard Cosway, and he came to Paris with a commission to paint a duke. Jefferson was introduced to her by John Trumbull, the American artist who was living with Jefferson and painting Jefferson’s image in the… famous Trumbull portrait, The Declaration of Independence. He took Jefferson around and introduced him to these painters, and they hit it off. Many times, they would all go off as a foursome, many times not. Jefferson saw Maria Cosway for the better part of six weeks before she went back to England, and then they corresponded for the rest of his life, less and less frequently, but until he was a very old man. Very fondly, he was the patriarch writing to her. She later became a nun and the headmistress of a girls’ school in Italy. It was always this wonderful literary affair, if nothing more than that, between them. I don’t think they ever did see each other again. He had several opportunities [to stay in Europe], but he decided to come back to America and go back into political life. I think those years in Paris healed him from the terrible years in Virginia during the Revolution when he lost his home, his farms, and when his political career looked wrecked as well.
Between 1784 and 1789, [while Jefferson was in Europe] things were not going so well in the United States, depending on your point of view. There was Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, that so shocked Washington and Adams and Madison that they called a convention. And then, there was a new US Constitution. Jefferson was [away] for that. He was in France, and if he’d been here, I think he might have objected to a lot of the new Constitution because he thought revolution was a good thing. He wrote long letters to Madison trying to influence Madison during that convention, but it took six months before the letters went back and forth, and Jefferson had absolutely no effect whatsoever on that convention.
Jefferson’s daily expense records [for his travels in Europe] are in the Henry Huntington Library in California, [written] on the backs of envelopes and in foolscap. He kept meticulous day-by-day expense accounts. The man was obsessive about record keeping, so we can tell what he paid for a drink and what he paid the valet and how much to get the carriage fixed, et cetera, so you know his itinerary.… With those records we went off to France and tried to find the towns and the routes, many of which didn’t exist anymore or weren’t easily found. We were able to reconstruct his travels that way.… Jefferson actually went over the Alps in a mule train in the wintertime to try to find products in Italy that he could bring back to adapt to the United States to help its infant economy. Actually, he violated the laws of Italy and diplomatic immunity by stealing sacks full of unmilled rice because he thought the Carolinas needed not only a better grain of rice but one that didn’t use slave labor, one that would grow in the hills where so many slaves wouldn’t be killed from malarial insects. He risked his life going into Italy and smuggling out this rice. He also brought back ice cream, pasta, and several other things. He was always looking for new things to bring back to the United States.
… Jefferson was very good at operating behind the scenes. He appeared not to be running [for president in 1796], but as Adams and Hamilton and others found out, the appearance wasn’t the whole story. He was very good at lining up support, bringing around state committees, very good at working in secret, something he learned as a diplomat in Paris. As a president, I have a very mixed view of him. He could be absolutely ruthless. While he founded the oldest political party, the Democrats, he trashed the Federalists, almost destroyed the two-party system for forty years, and brought the spoils system into politics. When he believed in something, he believed in it so completely he couldn’t see the damage that he might do. I wouldn’t like to see some of the things he did then done again.
… Jefferson was vice president [during the Adams administration, 1797–1801], but it was already obvious that he was going to oppose Adams when Adams ran for a second term. In those days,… the process was that the number one in the Electoral College got to be president; number two got to be vice president [which meant people from opposing parties could both be in the same administration]. Jefferson had miscalculated in his 1796 campaign, so he came out three electoral votes short, or he would have been president instead of Adams the first time. As a result of that election, the [nominating system] was changed, [and parties nominated tickets, where you would]… choose your own running mate. That didn’t work very well either at first because both the president and vice president had the exact number of electoral votes. In 1800, Jefferson’s vice president happened to be Aaron Burr, who said, “That doesn’t mean I’m vice president; that means we’re tied.” So, there were thirty-six ballots in Congress to decide who the winner of that election was. It was a clumsy system at first before [the Constitution was changed in 1804, and] it came out the way it is now.… Jefferson served for two [terms as president]; the second time in 1804, he won very big.
The Alien and Sedition Acts [1798] were used, if not designed, [by President John Adams as a way] to stop Jefferson from forming an opposition party. It targeted newspapers in the Jefferson camp. Editors and writers were arrested; twenty-five editors and writers were indicted. They were imprisoned. The US Supreme Court justices rode around in carriages like hanging judges, reading their writings and rounding them up and having them imprisoned. When that law expired, Jefferson saw that it was not renewed. The Alien Act was intended to slow down the process of mostly French immigrants, exiles from the French Revolution, from becoming citizens. There were so many of them crowding into the country, and they were on the Jeffersonian side, or rather he was on theirs. The Alien Act passed in 1798, and immediately after that, the Sedition Act passed, which made it a federal crime to criticize the president, the presidency, the government, or the president’s party in any way, punishable by a fine and prison.
I don’t think Jefferson was in favor of the Sedition Act, but [as president] he shut down any criminal prosecutions that might have led to court testimony that was very unfavorable to him, so he did tamper with the courts. He didn’t go quite the step of a Sedition Act, but he went after key Federalist judges and replaced them with his own people, and where that didn’t work, cases all of a sudden dried up if they got too close to Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson managed to keep himself open to a great number of constituencies. He also believed in equality among the officers of government. [As president,] he abolished normal seating arrangements, for example. Every department had to have an oval table so no one sat at the head, no one at the foot. He received visitors of all kinds, people from the hustings or diplomats, with almost no fanfare. He was approachable. I know that’s very difficult today, but I think any president today would do well to try to keep himself open instead of just being surrounded by the old China hands, the palace guard. I hope there’s a message in my book about that. But also, the inquisitive mind of Jefferson never stopped; he was always looking for new approaches and was not afraid to contradict himself frequently. He did rapid about-faces. He was a pacifist going into the presidency, yet he founded West Point and made war in Algeria, just for an example.
He was against a strong central government and was a strict constructionist on the Constitution. And yet, he used a congressional slush fund—not that I’m advocating that—when he needed to buy land because he thought that was the wealth and the future of the country, the Louisiana Purchase. So, the flexibility of Jefferson is one of the most important things about him.
I guess I’m expected to say, since he founded the Democratic Party that he’d be a Democrat [today], but I’m not sure what camp he would be in because a lot of his ideas would make him much more conservative today. He was a decentralizer, and I’m sure that Reagan Republicans would be happy to claim him for that. Civil libertarians claim him; Unitarians claim him. All sorts of people have claimed him based on what he did then and what is happening now, but I’m not sure what Jefferson would do now.
I had to confront the question of was this man ruthless or not, and he could be quite ruthless in pursuit of something that really mattered to him, and his years as president are the most controversial. He did bring in the spoils system in this country that became one of the great political evils for almost one hundred years. He did it in [a] casuistic way. He kept very careful records that said he had given half of the political jobs to the Federalists and half to the Democrats—yes, the bottom half to his opponents, the top half to his own people. So, he really did set up a winner-take-all form of election, and sometimes he hounded people out of office or into prison, such as Aaron Burr. They’d been very close, and Jefferson couldn’t have gotten as far as he did without Burr’s support in New York. Once he turned on Burr, Jefferson was completely out of line as president in publicly indicting and convicting Burr before he’d even had a trial. Luckily, Chief Justice John Marshall shut that case down. John Marshall was Jefferson’s cousin, and he wasn’t at all intimidated by him. Marshall was very close to Washington, was his first biographer, a staunch believer in the Federalists and thought that Jefferson and what he represented were very bad for the country.
[In 1974]… Fawn Brodie brought out Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, which made the case that Jefferson had a slave concubine at Monticello, Sally Hemings.… What fascinated me… [was how this story] came about:… Jefferson had a hack writer, James Thomson Callender, working for him attacking Hamilton and Adams for years. When Jefferson didn’t give Callender a high political office when he became president and refused to have anything more to do with him, Callender switched sides and attacked Jefferson in print in a Richmond newspaper. I actually found the first paragraph [of Callender’s article while doing my research] about Jefferson, and there is Sally, although she’s not given a last name. Callender makes the charge that they had a son and that she had gone to France with Jefferson when he became the ambassador there, and that she named her son Tom.… Brodie’s interpretation was based on an interview with one of Sally Hemings’s sons when he was very old, after the Civil War, and had gone to Ohio to homestead.… There was also a Jefferson family story going back and forth in the private correspondence of biographers in the nineteenth century. The family’s version of this, privately, was that there were indeed mulatto children at Monticello but that they were not Thomas Jefferson’s, that they were the children of Jefferson’s nephews.
The public opinion after Brodie’s book was that Jefferson was a hypocrite: here was the man talking about freedom and that all men are created equal while he’s got a slave mistress at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson[’s reputation] was reduced to that, as far as what we should know about him. If we know one fact now, it wasn’t that he wrote the Declaration of Independence or founded a university; it was that he had a slave mistress.
[Editor’s note: In 1997, historian Annette Gordon-Reed published a Pulitzer Prize–winning book that changed the scholarship on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, using records to support the Hemings’s family claims. To help settle the long-standing controversy, a DNA test was done in 1998, scientifically linking the Hemings’s descendants to Jefferson. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns Monticello, announced that research suggested a “high probability” that Jefferson had fathered one of Hemings’s sons and it was “likely” he had fathered all six of her children. Exhibits at Monticello have been updated to tell Sally Hemings’s story to their visitors.]
I emphasize about six or seven different things in my book that [previous biographers hadn’t]: Jefferson’s legal career, his travels in Europe, his years in Paris, who his connections were there, and Jefferson the writer. I started out doing this [project being] fascinated that he was the writer of our Revolution, the closest thing [we had then] to a professional writer. [I learned] not only that he wrote the Declaration of Independence, but that writing is what he loved to do. The very last thing that he did when he lay dying was to sit up, and his hand moved in front of him as he tried to write one more letter. [Writing] was his favorite activity in life. As a writer myself, that fascinated me. He was a marvelous writer. He thought that the law should be in simple language so you didn’t need lawyers like him. When he rewrote the laws of Virginia, he put them in laymen’s language, got rid of the cobwebs. The Declaration of Independence is not only ringing rhetoric, but it’s beautifully done, beautifully crafted. It follows an argument. Jefferson knew exactly how to craft an argument. You can hear the beat get stronger and faster, the excitement of the writing, as it goes on. I think he was a brilliant writer, and I think [his contemporaries] thought so, too.