3 JON MEACHAM on Thomas Jefferson

“No one ever said it better and no one ever really fell so short, and I think in that tragic distance lies an extraordinary American life.”

BOOK DISCUSSED:

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (Random House, 2012)

The first of the Congressional Dialogues was the interview I had in 2013 with Jon Meacham about his new book on Thomas Jefferson. Had that not gone well, I guess the series might not have had a second interview.

But Meacham did an extraordinary job of describing his take on our third president: Jefferson, for all of his considerable intellect and intellectual interests, was actually a skilled acquirer and user of power, and was much more politically skilled than is commonly thought.

In focusing on Jefferson’s political instincts and capabilities, Meacham wrote about a subject that has not been heavily commented upon. And he brought to the task both a journalist’s easy-to-read style and a historian’s commitment to accuracy and detail. Meacham’s insights on Jefferson were so well respected by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello, Jefferson’s iconic home, that he was recently elected its president.

Given Meacham’s background, this should not have been a surprise. He had been a newspaper journalist in his native Tennessee as well as the editor in chief of Newsweek and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of a biography on Andrew Jackson. He also wrote award-winning biographies on Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, and on George H. W. Bush, and will soon complete his biography of James and Dolley Madison.

Meacham brought to this interview another helpful attribute: he is an engaging and witty conversationalist and storyteller. That is clear to anyone who watches him on the various television news shows (such as Morning Joe) on which he appears. I have interviewed Jon on a good many occasions, and he is always able to capture the audience’s attention with his rare combination of knowledge, enthusiasm, and humor, not to mention an appealing southern drawl.

I should note my own interest in and involvement with Jefferson. Perhaps this stemmed from my parents taking me as a young boy to Monticello and to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. In recent years, I have worked with the foundation to rehabilitate and restore Monticello, including a re-creation of Mulberry Row, the area where the enslaved people owned by Jefferson—including Sally Hemings—worked.

There has been considerable discussion about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings. The Jefferson Foundation has adopted the position that the relationship did occur and likely produced six children.

Sally Hemings was sixteen when the relationship with Jefferson apparently began in Paris. Jefferson’s wife had died several years earlier, and had asked him, on her deathbed, never to remarry.

Was this a consensual relationship? Can an enslaved person and a slave owner ever have a consensual relationship? What was Hemings’s special appeal to Jefferson? Does this relationship of several decades change the generally high regard that historians and Americans have for their third and perhaps most intellectual president? Should it? These are some of the questions Meacham addresses in the interview.

Also addressed is the other great Jefferson mystery: How could he write, in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, when he was a lifelong slave owner? In the interview, Meacham indicates that Jefferson was referring only to white men. According to Meacham, Jefferson had earlier spoken and written against slavery, but eventually realized such views would end his political career and sublimated them for the remainder of his public life.

That sentence about all men being equal forms part of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson wrote that sentence, with editing by Benjamin Franklin, it was not considered all that important. The significant part of the Declaration was considered to be the list of offenses committed by King George III against the colonies.

But as history has unfolded, that sentence has become perhaps the best-known sentence in the English language. It has served as the creed not only for the United States but also for so many other English-speaking and Western societies: “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.”

Jefferson did not realize, when he was writing the Declaration and in the years immediately following its dissemination, how significant that sentence—and the entire document—would become.

It was nine years before Jefferson first publicly admitted to being the Declaration’s author. He earlier felt that his initial version was much better than the “mutilated” version the Second Continental Congress actually adopted. Much later, toward the end of his life, it was “Author of the Declaration of Independence” that Jefferson wanted listed as the first accomplishment on his tombstone. And it was.