Jefferson's Secrets

Historians had so far disappointed him. The unanswered work of history that confounded Jefferson most was that which painted him as peevish, misguided, and disloyal. It was proudly authored by no less a personage than the sitting chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall. This was the only history, then completed, that was based upon the unimpeachable writings of George Washington. It credited the Federalist Party for wise, reasonable, and even-tempered leadership, rendering it the just inheritor of the American Revolution. It made Jefferson’s party grasping and unreasoning.

The thorn Jefferson needed to remove from the historical record, that which truly demeaned his “Revolution of 1800,” was Washington’s personal enmity. As the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth was about to open, the father of the country had died. He died hating Jefferson and all he stood for. Jefferson needed to reclaim Washington, without whom political legitimacy would be hard to argue. Over and over, as he professed the desire to absent himself from political controversy, he knew he could not pretend that nothing was wrong. He could not allow the Federalist view of history to predominate, as it had despite three successive two-term Republican administrations. How could he simply rely on posterity—on unnamed future biographers—to use his papers to his best advantage, and consign Federalism, like monarchism, to the dust heap?

As soon as he learned that John Marshall was compiling a history, Jefferson devised a strategy to contest him. Always wishing to avoid the appearance of involvement in a campaign of self-promotion, especially when he held national office, Jefferson attempted to find some persuasive pen, equal to his own, to contest the power of the Federalists in documenting America’s political history. In 1802, with James Madison’s concurrence, Jefferson turned to the politically friendly poet-diplomat Joel Barlow, then in Paris, for assistance.

Barlow (1754–1812) was a colorful, once widely known figure in the early years of the American republic who has unfortunately been marginalized in most modern narratives of the period. If he is known at all it is as one of the “Connecticut wits” who wrote a pretentious epic poem in 1807, “The Columbiad,” now quite hard to digest, which heralded America’s rise on the world stage. Born to yeoman farming life in southern New England, Barlow was modestly educated until he found his way to Yale on the eve of the Revolution. The college had the habit of graduating social conservatives, future Federalists, such as Barlow’s classmate Noah Webster; but the financially strapped Barlow, navigating the war as a hapless militiaman and later as a chaplain, turned to the law. He sailed off to Europe in 1786, where he imbibed a liberal spirit and befriended the Marquis de Lafayette and the American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson returned to America in 1789, just after the French Revolution began, but Barlow stayed on to witness the first years of hope, and then endured the subsequent years of the Terror. His wife, Ruth, safe in London, associated with the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft as her husband grew in stature as a political activist. He teamed up in Revolutionary Paris with the always-controversial Tom Paine, writing pamphlets, and he narrowly averted imprisonment after Lafayette, and then Paine, were taken away. Like Jefferson, Barlow mourned a republican movement gone awry, and he removed to Hamburg. There he advised the sympathetic Professor Ebeling on the character of American republicanism. As a friend to France, however, he alienated the Connecticut Federalists who had once touted his promise. Still, President Washington thought well enough of Barlow to appoint him to a diplomatic mission to Algiers, as the U.S. negotiator to the piratical Barbary states. He crossed the Mediterranean to northern Africa, and served his country nobly.

As partisan politics heated up in the United States, Joel Barlow anchored himself in France once again, though the country was now beset by capricious government, and eventually yielded to Bonaparte. He planned on writing a history of the French Revolution upon his return to America. But as relations between France and the Adams administration soured, Barlow thought his continued presence in Paris might serve the cause of peace. When John Marshall and a team of Federalists arrived, and misunderstandings enlarged, Barlow kept in touch with Jefferson, conveying his perspective on the exchange of diplomatic insults. After Federalist warmongers were replaced, communications improved, and war fever died down. When Jefferson became president, Barlow again contemplated a return to America. He finally sailed home in 1803, after seventeen years abroad.³

In 1802, then, when Jefferson wrote to Barlow concerning John Marshall’s forthcoming political history, his administration was ascendant. The “candid federalists,” he pronounced, were ready to acknowledge “that their party can never more raise it’s head.” It was Jefferson’s thinking, nonetheless, that there would always be “the division between whig and tory” in one form or another, because human nature dictated it. Elaborating on the imagery of “nervous persons” with “languid fibres” that he had found useful seven years before, he redefined the two parties as the “weakly and nerveless, the rich and the corrupt seeing more safety and accessibility in a strong executive; the healthy, firm and virtuous feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources.” The Federalist was perfectly comfortable with monarchical tendencies in government; the Republican, of sound minds and bodies, “willing to part with only so much power as is necessary for their good government.”⁴

From here, Jefferson got right to the point. He wanted Barlow to return to Washington, D.C., right away to undertake a crucial mission:

Mr. Madison and myself have cut out a piece of work for you, which is to write the history of the United States, from the close of the War downwards. We are rich ourselves in materials, and can open all the public archives to you; but your residence here is essential, because a great deal of the knoledge of things is not on paper, but only within ourselves for verbal communication.

Jefferson wanted to write his own political history, using Barlow’s pen and Barlow’s name. He and Madison would provide firsthand information, and lay out the full narrative they wanted printed. Utter confidentiality was required. Why the urgency of Jefferson’s appeal? In 1802, he already knew the meaning of Marshall’s having complete and sole access to the papers of George Washington, who was just two and a half years in his grave. Jefferson told Barlow directly:

John Marshall is writing the Life of Gen. Washington from his papers. It is intended to come out just in time to influence the next presidential election. It is written therefore, principally with the view to electioneering purposes.

Jefferson had his own, very clear-cut purpose. Barlow could be relied on to cast the post-Revolutionary story in Republican relief. If it was meant to be Barlow vs. Marshall, it was also, inevitably, on some level, going to be Jefferson vs. Washington. As Jefferson notably recorded in his Anas later on: “We are not to suppose that everything found among Gen. Washington’s papers is to be taken as gospel truth.”⁵

To Jefferson’s dismay, Barlow was not prepared to undertake this massive project, at least not right away; but neither did Marshall’s multivolume work appear in time to hurt Jefferson’s reelection prospects. Barlow now turned his creative attention to the “Columbiad,” which would prove, at length, a critical flop. He did, at least, accept several boxes of historical documents from the president, and he did come to Washington to champion the idea of founding a national university.

Jefferson was more afraid of Marshall than he was of other Federalists, because Marshall was a Virginian. He shared Jefferson’s modest appearance, his body language, his informal dress, his ability to identify with a variety of people beyond the well-heeled northern Federalist elite. Marshall was hard to equate with those of “languid nerves” whom Jefferson found so easy to dismiss. In closing his 1802 letter to Barlow with the forceful “Think of this, and agree to it,” he had squeezed a P.S. into the bottom left corner of the last page of the letter, promising the poet and would-be historian access to a hilltop residence with “a most extensive view of the Potomac.” The property featured fine gardens and thirty to forty acres of surrounding property, which he predicted Barlow could purchase for a song. Barlow did so finally, in 1807, the same year that Marshall’s formidable volume five appeared.

That same year, Barlow’s epic poem was published. In it, the Republican poet echoed Jefferson’s anxiety about the health of political liberty, with this caution: “Think not, my friends, the patriot’s task is done, / Or freedom safe, because the battle’s won.” When his second term as president came to an end in 1809, Jefferson once again sought to interest Barlow in countering the chief justice’s work. “I have taken up Marshall’s fifth volume,” the ex-president wrote to the poet, “and mean to read it carefully, to correct what is wrong in it, and commit to writing such facts and annotations as the reading of that work will bring into my recollection, and which has not yet been put on paper; in this I shall be much aided by my memorandums and letters, and will send you both the old and the new.”⁶ Appointed by President Madison to a diplomatic mission, Barlow died in Poland in 1812, without having written a history.

What was it in Marshall’s history that Jefferson could not leave alone, and that caused him so much concern throughout retirement? Most important, as a jurist, an intimate of Washington’s, and a veteran who was well acquainted with the main players of the Revolution, Marshall had enduring credibility. He also presented a plausible argument showing that Jefferson had attempted to steer the government away from the path that Washington had chosen. Writing about the moment in 1795, when Washington resolved not to run for a third term, Marshall observed: “The suspense produced in the public opinion ... seemed to redouble the efforts of those who laboured to rob him of the affections of the people, and to attach odium to the political system which he had pursued.” This low blow made the Jeffersonians seem vicious. Defending Washington’s foreign policy, Marshall charged the Republican opposition with an all too instinctive hatred for England and an equally unreasoning love for France. In Marshall’s script, the Federalists had devised a more rational approach to international relations. And the Republicans were passionate in their longing to “eradicate” Americans’ “love [of] Washington.”⁷

After 1815, when he shipped his private library in eleven wagonloads to the Library of Congress, Jefferson gradually replenished his stock at Monticello. But he could not wait even one month before ordering Marshall’s five volumes from his preferred Washington, D.C., bookseller, Joseph Milligan.⁸ Toward the end of that year, during one of his regular visits to Monticello, Jefferson’s nephew Dabney Carr brought up a factual error in the second volume that, for good reason, rankled him. The chief justice accorded Massachusetts full credit for having conceived committees of correspondence, which had aided communication among the colonial legislatures in 1773, and had doubtless brought the Revolution closer. But it was Jefferson’s clear recollection that Virginia and Massachusetts had each “acted about the same time” to form the committees, and moreover, that it was Dabney Carr (father of the present instigator) who had introduced the bold resolution in the Virginia Assembly.

The elder Carr, the husband of Jefferson’s younger sister, was also Jefferson’s best friend. His career had been cut short when he contracted a fever and died shortly after his debut in the legislature. He was the first to be interred in the Monticello cemetery, and the education of his three sons—Peter, Samuel, and Dabney—was carefully monitored by their soon-to-be-famous uncle. (Peter and Samuel, of course, would eventually assume roles in the modern Jefferson-Hemings controversy.)

The youngest of the Carr boys felt little hesitation about pursuing the matter of the committees of correspondence, because family honor was at stake, as much as getting history right. So Dabney wrote a letter to his uncle Jefferson in December 1815 to remind him of his promise to consult documents and draft a reliable corrective to Marshall’s statement. Unlike the ex-president, who had failed with Barlow, Dabney Carr knew precisely what vehicle to use to see Marshall’s history repaired, at least on this one point: His own best friend, the attorney William Wirt, another Jefferson protégé, was nearing completion of his much-awaited biography of Patrick Henry, who, along with Dabney Carr senior and Jefferson, was a member of the Virginia committee of correspondence. Carr would have Wirt insert in the text, above a long explanatory footnote, the reconstructed episode. To do so made perfect sense: In the nineteenth century, historical controversies were often fought out in footnotes.

Wirt complied. He accepted Jefferson’s revisions from Carr and faithfully called attention to the ingenuity of Carr’s father back in 1773, while pointing to the late Revolutionary’s estimable character—“spotless integrity, sound judgment, handsome imagination, enriched by education and reading”—words adapted from Jefferson’s tribute to him. “We ought not to suffer the Old Dominion to be robbed of her fame, & made to follow in the wake of Massachusetts,” wrote the son, aggressively. When Wirt’s Life of Patrick Henry went to press in 1817, a lively public argument between stalwart New Englanders and Virginia revisionists ensued, all because of the Jefferson-Carr retelling.⁹

But it was not Marshall’s volume two so much as volume five that pierced Jefferson’s thin political skin. With Barlow gone and no one else to take up his cause in a competitive format, Jefferson, in 1818, countered Marshall’s claim to Washington’s spirit in his own way when he fashioned his introduction to the Anas. He had collected and maintained notes on a series of combustible conversations within the Washington administration, and now he patched them all together in three notebooks. There can be no doubt that he expected someone to draw upon his raw history as religiously as he did.

But how to reclaim Washington, after the job Marshall had done? Jefferson’s explanation for the incontrovertible fact that Washington in the end had grown personally to despise him was that Washington was senile, or, as Jefferson put it, he had lost “the firm tone of mind for which he had been remarkable.” Jefferson used the word firm to praise Republicans for their fortitude, just as he associated Federalists with the qualitative opposite, “languid fibres.” Thus, when his mind “was beginning to relax,” President Washington allowed the High Federalists to manipulate him. As their tool, he abandoned his firm republicanism, but only half-consciously. His heart had remained uncorrupted. The last sentence of Jefferson’s introduction to the Anas mourns Washington’s “mortal decay.”

As a historian, Jefferson was himself a skillful manipulator. When he wanted to, he made his political enemies into brainwashing goons. In a remarkable letter of 1823, wishing for the day when someone other than “the high priests of Federalism” would be granted access to Washington’s papers, he complained that, under existing circumstances, “Caesar’s notes and memorandums [were] in the hands of Anthony.” He vowed that history would see a less selective use of texts and so reckon with the true Washington; indeed, posterity would know the first president as a “candid ... friend to truth” and, when it mattered most, a Republican.¹⁰ In reading Jefferson, we are meant to understand that Washington was stolen from the American people for at least the last four years of his life, when “a desire for tranquility [implying reduced mental energy] had crept up on him.”

To accept Jefferson’s reconstruction of the 1790s, from the perspective of 1818 or 1823, one would have to have agreed with five highly ideological statements: (1) that Hamilton was “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption”; (2) that Adams was a Republican who came to be fascinated with “the glare of royalty and nobility”; (3) that Washington lost his ability to resist the monarchists’ argument shortly after Jefferson resigned from the cabinet in early 1794; (4) that Marshall used Washington’s papers “for the suicide of the cause” of republicanism that Washington, in his prime, subscribed to; and (5) that Jefferson himself symbolized “the steady and rational character of the American people” and their just hopes for self-government. ¹¹

These were the battle lines of history, for as long as Jefferson survived. To him, Washington’s age (mid-sixties) and mental relaxedness had caused the father of the country to turn his back on his natural constituency, the Republican majority. In the mind of Chief Justice Marshall, meanwhile, Jefferson had used tricks of his own to usurp the federal government when he vilified Federalist efforts—Washington’s efforts—to achieve political stability and general economic strength.

In linguistic terms, Jefferson and Marshall had taken up incongruent definitions of the word firmness, and that made all the difference in their politics. In his volume five, Marshall described Washington as firm in his philosophy, indicating that his principles never changed, even at the end, when Marshall knew him best. “No man ever appeared upon the theatre of public action,” the chief justice wrote, “whose integrity was more incorruptible, or whose principles were more perfectly free from the contamination of those selfish or unworthy passions which find their nourishment in the conflicts of party. Having no views which required concealment, his real and avowed motives were the same.” To Marshall, Washington had governed with—to use a twenty-first-century term—transparency. It was Jefferson and his party operatives who had intruded upon the steady, solid planning of Washington, and who had sought change that was decidedly uncomfortable to Washington. It was the Jeffersonians whose motives were suspect. Washington’s means were “always pure,” but the Republicans’ were otherwise: “If Washington possessed ambition, that passion was, in his bosom, so regulated by principles ... that it was neither vicious nor turbulent.” What Jefferson had in mind for the nation was, by implication, turbulent.¹²

In his characterization of the Hamilton-Jefferson feud, Marshall feigned objectivity, equalizing the two men’s “irreconcilable hostility.” But he portrayed Hamilton as sharp, alert to dangers, a man who reasoned that government “should possess in itself sufficient powers and resources to maintain the character, and defend the integrity of the nation.” As Federalists, and fearing that local prejudices threatened the growth of a national identity, Hamilton and Marshall were “particularly apprehensive” about the Jeffersonians’ favorite topic of states’ rights.

The chief justice judged that Jefferson had been influenced by his years in a liberalizing France, just prior to its bloody revolution, and was keenly fixated on “the abuses of monarchy which were perpetually in his view, and he might be led to the opinion that liberty could sustain no danger but from the executive power.” Washington had sought to reconcile his two talented cabinet secretaries; but after “earnest endeavours to sooth the angry passions,” the president finally admitted that he could not succeed.¹³

This was not how Jefferson wished to see his personal style or political thinking handed to posterity. In binding his Anas, he insisted that its contents, these “scraps ... rugged, rubbed, and scribbled,” were genuine artifacts of history, told with “candor,” and utterly reliable. Jefferson explains that he had these notes joined together “by a binder ... doing it under my own eye, and without the opportunity of reading a single paper”—thus, in secrecy—but he does not perceive that his method suggests an obsession. Writing, at the end of the transcription of a conversation with Hamilton, “Th: Jefferson has committed [the foregoing] to writing in the moment of A. Hamilton’s leaving the room,” Jefferson times and dates his “truth” to let us know just how conscious he is of its historic import. He wants no doubt as to the authenticity of his transcription, no matter how much time passes. There is certainly more to the Anas than the “calm revisal” of the past that Jefferson claims.¹⁴

He wants posterity to believe that only Marshall’s effort to twist the truth is “artful.” He mocks the chief justice for trying to minimize the democratically inspired spirit behind the American Revolution and for propping up only the undeserving members of a rather exclusive political party, whose leaders, in fact, did far less in the Revolution than Marshall states. When it comes to the real heroes of the war, Marshall is stingy in his praise. Writes Jefferson: “The sufferings inflicted on endeavors to vindicate the rights of humanity are related with all the frigid insensibility with which a monk would have contemplated the victims of an Auto da fe!”¹⁵ The language, again, is revealing: In his momentous 1786 “Head and Heart” letter to Maria Cosway, the “frigid speculations” of a monk symbolized the failure to engage generously with “spasms of the heart”; here, Jefferson invokes the insensible monk (impervious to heartfelt sensation) to brand the chief justice as one who would stand by, devoid of feeling, as judgment of death is passed on a heretic. Insensibility to the Revolutionary republican spirit is as damning an indictment as exists in Jefferson’s vocabulary.

Carrying forward his argument, Jefferson asserts that Washington never looked favorably upon monarchy and even “frowned indignantly at the proposition.” Then, in the same language he would use until the end of his days, Jefferson straightforwardly identified “the real difference” between the parties as “their different degrees of inclination to monarchy or republicanism. The Federalists wished for every thing which would approach our new government to monarchy: the republicans to preserve it essentially republican. This was the true origin of the division, and remains still the essential principle of difference between the two parties.”¹⁶ Later in the Anas, exploiting every opportunity to call attention to the Federalists’ betrayal of the Revolution and their effort to sway President Washington, Jefferson jots down a conversation with Washington’s private secretary, Tobias Lear:

Conversation with Lear. He expressed the strongest confidence that republicanism was the universal creed of America, except of a very few ... said that he had seen with extreme regret that a number of gentlemen had for a long time been endeavoring to instil into the President, that the noise against the administration of the government was that of a little faction, which would soon be silent, and which was detested by the people, who were contented and prosperous.¹⁷

In Jefferson’s rendition, the witless king, separated from his people by the machinations of a few conspiring ministers, was being lied to, and led to believe that the thoughtful Republicans were actually the ones out of touch with the popular will. The Anas is a moral tale on the order of King Lear, replete with irony: Washington’s good and bad children clamor for attention, and the deserving child, Jefferson, is his Cordelia.

In Jefferson’s view of the 1790s, because Washington was duped, perversity reigned. The “Revolution of 1800” had reinvigorated the republic, yet Marshall’s version of events still prevailed. After the death of Joel Barlow in 1812, Jefferson began to drop hints when trustworthy Republicans wrote supportively, that is, when old allies held out the prospect of assisting in translating Jefferson’s memoranda into a volume that would supplant Marshall’s. John Adams, too, shook his head in disbelief at Marshall’s effort to confer sainthood on Washington, whom he knew to be a man with as many mediocre as impressive qualities. But for Jefferson, of course, recasting Marshall’s history meant far more.

In 1814, Jefferson thought he might have another chance to right wrongs. That year, a former congressman from Virginia, Walter Jones, asked him for material to help him complete a character sketch of George Washington. Professing a desire to have the history of their times put in “dispassionate” language, Jefferson sounded out Jones on the idea of writing the proper history that Barlow had declined. Jones’s Washington would be a Republican, just as Jefferson claimed. Intent on leading Jones to the larger project, Jefferson provided him with a character sketch of Washington; he later added one sentence to it, a sentence of little apparent consequence, but so important in Jefferson’s consideration that he wanted Jones to glue it in just where Jefferson indicated it belonged. But after all that effort, Jones made it clear that Jefferson had overinterpreted: He was hoping merely for Jefferson to write his own memoir, and had not meant to suggest that he was inclined to undertake the massive project Jefferson had in mind.¹⁸ And why could Jefferson not see this? Because he passionately believed that his essential truth, well told, would be irresistible to students of America’s political tradition; and so, he could scarcely stop himself from pressing on until he had found a willing penman. It had to be one of his political generation, whom he could entrust with his personal records and his well formed reflections and recollections. Barlow would have been perfect. Who of the appropriate stature could he now call upon? He would keep looking.

The entire episode of Jefferson and Marshall has a remarkable literary parallel, if one chooses to see it: In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the title character composes a long and winding narrative that explains and justifies his taking on the powerful Squire Falkland; he constructs his dark memoir because he knows it is the only countertext strong enough—morally sound enough—to bring about the surrender of his prominent accuser. “These papers shall preserve the truth,” Caleb avows. “They shall one day be published, and then the world shall do justice on us both.... This Falkland [read: Marshall] has invented against me every species of foul accusation.... In vain! With this engine, this little pen I defeat all his machinations.” At his emotional low point, Caleb seethes: “Didst thou imagine that I was altogether passive, a mere worm, organized to feel sensations of pain, but no emotion of resentment?” One literary critic who focuses on the main character’s resentments even sees Caleb from the view of eighteenth-century medical thinking: a man whose nerves have been damaged by his obsession with Falkland’s lies about him. As a story about sincerity, vulnerability, the uneasy mind—and obsession—Caleb Williams speaks to the personal politics of Thomas Jefferson. This is not to say that Jefferson expected Marshall to admit error, as Falkland did (and notably, in the courtroom). As always, Jefferson’s concern lay with the court of public opinion.¹⁹

The memoirs of Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee, the Revolutionary War general, were published in 1812, and they plainly sought to discredit Jefferson. Lee was a Virginian, educated, as was James Madison, at Princeton before the war, who served with distinction under General Nathanael Greene, and was a favorite of George Washington’s. After taking his turn as Virginia’s governor in the early 1790s, this Federalist went bankrupt owing to bad land investments and spendthrift ways. He wrote his history of the war largely from his cell, during 1809–1810, as Jefferson began his retirement.

Questions of accuracy aside, Harry Lee produced a very readable book. He had an energetic writing style. In the third person, he told of the battles and events in which he took part. According himself credit for having “completely baffled” Britain’s General Sir Henry Clinton in Charleston, in 1776, Lee narrated the March 1781 Battle of Guilford Courthouse to chivalrous effect: “The night succeeding this day of blood was rainy, dark, and cold; the dead unburied, the wounded unsheltered, the groans of the dying and the shrieks of the living, cast a deeper shade over the gloom of nature.” He professed humane concerns and wrote with a knowing confidence: “The campaign so far presents the undulation common to war.” He dispensed patriotic advice, and assured readers of the improvements brought by the Continental Army to the ravaged South. The victory of his force “bestowed the solace of inward satisfaction on our review of the past.” There was more than a little self-congratulation.²¹

Lee did not, however, confine himself to what he had seen with his own eyes. He embellished in similarly rich language a series of wartime occurrences from which he was hundreds of miles distant, only to exclaim: “What must posterity think of their ancestors, when they read these truths!” Lee’s patriotic zeal was magnificent, and so volatile (in print) as to seem nearly combustible. The problem with his memoir, as one might expect, is that Lee himself comes off as daring and decisive, ingenious and inventive, and larger than his commander.²²

Much as Jefferson was frustrated when Washington’s private papers were turned over to Marshall, he could not have been pleased by the acclaim Light-Horse Harry received in 1800, when he eulogized Washington in memorable words: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Moreover, Lee had already proved that he had an axe to grind with Jefferson: As a congressman, he had sought to stop Jefferson’s election in early 1801 by elevating Aaron Burr to the top station. He was no less severe in preparing his book, though Jefferson had just retired to Monticello, where he sought refuge from politics. Lee cunningly portrayed Benedict Arnold’s 1780–1781 invasion of Virginia in such a way as to demonstrate Governor Jefferson’s culpability and incapacity alike. Arnold had entered the state capital of Richmond with nine hundred men, “untouched,” and Jefferson was “driven out of its metropolis.” The enemy ranged across the heartland, as Jefferson ran. With Jefferson in charge, Lee infers, “What chance then could exist of stopping Cornwallis by any intermediate force from the country?”²³ Next, Lord Cornwallis’s most relied upon associate, the reputedly bloodthirsty Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, led an expedition into Charlottesville, and sent a detachment up Monticello’s mountain to bring back the governor in handcuffs. But Jefferson had made off, just in time.

Lee’s Federalist bias was evident as well in his celebration of Jefferson’s most noteworthy political foe. Early in the war, Lee had fought alongside Washington’s young aide Alexander Hamilton, whom he went out of his way to make heroic:

Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton took possession of a flat-bottomed boat for the purpose of transporting himself and his comrades across the river, should the sudden approach of the enemy render such a retreat necessary. In a little time this precaution manifested his sagacity. ... Hamilton was committed to the flood, struggling against a violent current, increased by the recent rains; while Lee put his safety on the speed and soundness of his horse.

In 1781, Hamilton’s pride temporarily estranged him from Washington’s “family,” but at the decisive Battle of Yorktown, “Hamilton, always true to the feelings of honor and independence,” stood up, even to “beloved” Washington, and earned himself a lead role in the attack. He rushed forward, “with impetuosity,” and helped oust the British. In the same season that the cowardly Jefferson was avoiding the action, his rival was conducting himself gallantly. So, in any event, says Lee’s news-making 1812 memoir.²⁴

This was how history was being presented—through a Federalist prism. Around the same time as Lee’s two-volume work appeared, the Frenchman Louis Girardin moved into Jefferson’s neighborhood and began teaching school. He wished to write the final volume of a history of Virginia whose author had died, and he found an eager ally in the squire of Monticello. Jefferson subtly directed Girardin to texts that countered Lee’s interpretation. Afterward, Jefferson read over Girardin’s manuscript and made suggestions.

Jefferson’s personal notes on his behavior as governor became an appendix to the volume. Girardin wrote: “It was Mr. Jefferson’s fortune to fill the office of Governor of Virginia, during the most perilous and disastrous period of the revolutionary war. ... the State was almost disarmed, by the troops it had furnished to the North and to the South.” Jefferson, under the circumstances, had done the best job anyone could, acting with dispatch and proper expedience. Yet, Virginia’s distressed situation caused passionate people to seek a more militant, dictatorial governor (unnamed by Girardin, but meaning Patrick Henry). Thus, for a time, “the misfortunes of the period were ascribed to” Governor Jefferson, who fell under an “absurd” censure in the Assembly. Later, when the Assembly reconvened and Jefferson was present, his name was completely cleared: “Not a word of censure was whispered,” wrote Girardin, “and the impeachment was no more heard of, until revived for the purpose of party and calumny.” After the book’s 1816 publication, Jefferson took little credit for its contents, but frequently directed his correspondents to Girardin as an infallible source on Virginia from the start of the war through Yorktown.²⁵

Also in the mid-1810s, the Philadelphia publisher Joseph Delaplaine embarked on his multivolume biography of the founders, Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans.²⁶ He wrote to Jefferson frequently over the next several years for information about him and others who had figured in the rising glory of the American republic. In an effort to resist the publicity that Delaplaine’s efforts would invariably produce, Jefferson maintained a retiring pose in his replies; but when Delaplaine pressed for reliable material on Jefferson’s role as governor during the Revolution, Jefferson eventually sent him copies of the documents Girardin had seen, papers clearly meant to prove his detractors wrong. These included a 1781 letter to General Washington documenting the British invasion and assailing “the parricide Arnold,” which revealed Jefferson’s committed effort to contend with the enemy. Extracts from Jefferson’s diary at the time showed that he closely followed military matters, assessed threats, and moved to and fro without undue concern for his own safety. He compared what he was doing with what the legislature was doing. And when members of the legislative body questioned his competence, Jefferson answered with irresistible explanations.

Finally, in his extended letter to Delaplaine, Jefferson turned the tables on Henry Lee: “And here it is but proper to notice the parody of these transactions which Genl Lee has given as their history. He was in a distant state at the time, and seems to have made up a random account from the rumors which were afloat where he then was. It is a tissue of errors from beginning to end.”

Did Jefferson run when Tarleton approached Monticello?

The nonsense which has been uttered ... is really so ridiculous, that it is almost ridiculous seriously to notice it.... I ordered a carriage to be used to carry off my family; we breakfasted at leisure with our guests.... when a neighbor rode up full speed to inform me that a troop of horse was then ascending the hill to the house, I instantly sent off my family, and, after a short delay for some pressing arrangements, I mounted my horse, and knowing that in the public road I should be liable to fall in with the enemy, I went thro’ the woods, and joined my family at the house of a friend where we dined. Would it be believed, were it not known, that this flight from a troop of horse ... has been the subject, with party [i.e., partisan] writers, of volumes of reproach on me, serious or sarcastic: that it has been sung in verse and said in humble prose that, forgetting the noble example of the hero of La Mancha, and his windmills, I declined a combat, singly against a troop, in which action would have been so glorious? ... These closet heroes forsooth would have disdained the shelter of a wood, even singly and unarmed, against a legion of armed enemies.

Jefferson’s prose is disarming as he cuts Lee to shreds. Providing further testimony of his lack of fear—an 1805 letter from one Virginian to another, asserting that throughout the invasion Jefferson did all he could, and fearlessly—Jefferson proved that he had no reason to flee the history of Henry Lee. Indeed, he faced it down, and decried it as “romance” rather than history. In his cover letter to Delaplaine, he assured the publisher: “I now enclose [the requested documentation], detailed with an exactness on which you may rely, with entire confidence.” Exactness, as well as certainty, marked Jefferson’s stern self-defense. When in 1817 Delaplaine sent out the volume containing Jefferson’s biographical sketch, the subject thanked the publisher—“I find the style and execution entirely good”—and then listed the seven substantive errors he nevertheless had discovered in the text.²⁷

Courage and cowardice are not fixed attributes. If he had been cowardly by nature, Jefferson would have exited politics early. It is true, however, that he relied heavily on political allies to dish out dirt, or to answer attacks. He was extremely uncomfortable with confrontational situations that exacerbated personal conflict, and he called dueling “barbaric.” If he wanted something done, he spoke quietly or wrote confidentially. When his temperamental son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, openly doubted Jefferson’s feelings toward him, Jefferson “adopted the wise plan of seeming ignorance,” as granddaughter and witness Ellen put it, maintaining “his unalterable calm,” to avoid unfriendly discussions. ²⁸ He adopted a similar tactic in face-to-face politics.

He did not take up arms. He was not a soldier. Jefferson in his mid-retirement years gave his credentials as a man of peace, an advocate of international “friendship and commerce” who believed that Americans were superior to Europeans because they lacked an impulse, centuries-old, to favor war. At the close of Napoleon’s time in power, he used wit as well as logic to analyze the human condition: “The world will remain after 25 years of war, and half as many millions of human beings destroyed, pretty much as it was, with only here & there a change of A. for B. as master.”²⁹

To pursue peace at the expense of being thought cowardly is something other than cowardice. Jefferson implicitly divided men into three essential categories: those like himself who were not fit to fight, those who imagined they were, and those who adapted to soldiering. Referring to the largely unproductive War of 1812, he said: “Our short war was, in it’s beginning, unpropitious, from the want of able & faithful officers. The 2d year however began to bring forward those characters which nature had moulded for military purposes, & the tide began with them to turn in our favor.” He well knew that he was not one of “those characters” molded for the military.³⁰

His temperamental opposite, Alexander Hamilton, who eventually rose to the rank of general, had suggested that Jefferson lacked something masculine when he refused to face the Federalists’ principled challenge directly and instead acted stealthily through intrigue and deception. Hamilton even referred to the unmartial pair of Jefferson and Madison as “womanish” in their foreign policy preferences.³¹ But Jefferson, at that time, was embittered enough to belittle Hamilton’s reputation for courage, telling Madison during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia that Hamilton was afraid: The New Yorker’s machismo did not impress him, and, indeed, Hamilton was not even a competent horseman—at that time a symbol of martial vigor. “A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phaenomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation in military occasions were genuine,” wrote Jefferson.³²

Finding a way around danger did not automatically make Jefferson a coward, nor did the methods he used in building a political consensus necessarily make him deceitful. Perhaps he was just a subtler strategist. “When capable, feign incapacity,” advised the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, with universal application. Relying on aides deflected some of the enemy’s barbs and freed Jefferson from wrangling in the newspapers.

When in the final two years of his presidency he acted to embargo all foreign trade, he was not being cowardly. It could be said, whether one approved or disapproved his method, that the embargo was an act of courage, for he invited economic discomfort, even scarcity, knowing he would be blamed for it. His act was meant to test Americans’ virtue, in the language of the time. If cowardice springs from fear, uncertainty, a sense of gloom, or anticipation of impending doom, Jefferson was certainly no coward. Indeed, he was a strongminded executive.

Panic was not in Jefferson’s nature, either, as far as we know. He deliberately built, researched, and wrote for public consumption. He was results-oriented. As the head of a party, he incurred a certain amount of risk in pursuing the moral collapse of his adversaries to realize his vision of how the world should be. His was not a rash kind of courage, such as that a charging trooper exhibited in battle. Perhaps it is best termed “craft.”

Society tends to define actions in bipolar terms, in this case hero versus coward. It suggests consistency, when in real life few people are entirely consistent. But to be labeled a “coward,” even on the strength of one episode over the course of a long life, is a highly threatening prospect. Jefferson felt he had been put in the position of having to explain himself. In the end, what we can know about Jefferson’s actions in 1781 is anecdotal and unreliable. Though it does appear in this instance that he behaved prudently, the interesting thing, once again, is not whether Jefferson’s version is wholly or partially correct, or wholly or partially wrong, but that Jefferson—without ever admitting it—was prepared to go to lengths to modify the historical record in his favor.³³

When Jefferson received his copy of the Greene biography, he read it “with the greatest satisfaction.” It lifted his spirits to encounter at long last “a fair history of the Southern war,” one that made it possible “to see the Romance of Lee removed from the shelf of History to that of Fable.” In Justice Johnson, Thomas Jefferson had found a man who embraced his pertinacious style of vengeance through historiography.³⁵

Johnson countered those who alleged that Greene was a man of “dangerous ambition”—the very charge that the Federalists leveled against the outwardly passive Jefferson. He characterized Greene’s pursuit of health and moderation: “Although General Greene never relinquished his early habits of temperance—never indulging himself in more than one full meal, he always retained his full muscular form, and that robust health which indicated a full compliance with the demands of nature.” Like Jefferson, Greene was “never known to be, for a moment, thrown off the most absolute equilibrium.... In his tent, or in private society, his intercourse with [friends and officers] was on the easiest footing.”³⁶

Johnson thus fashioned a hard-hitting exposé of recent history. He concluded his biography with a fetching appeal, likening Greene’s Quaker spirit to the “political religion of the United States.”³⁷ Though Greene had in fact abandoned the Society of Friends, it did not matter: This was the benevolence Jefferson claimed for his party, and he needed a pen other than his own that was capable of dashing off the emotional strokes he had earned fame for—but felt he could not employ directly, self-servingly, anymore.

And so he asked the jurist-biographer just where he stood: “What do you think of the state of parties at this time?” Tipping his hand, Jefferson prodded: “An opinion prevails that there is no longer any distinction, that the republicans & Federalists are compleatly amalgamated but it is not so. The amalgamation is of name only, not of principles.... [M]onarchy is a desperate wish in this country.” He predicted that “the old Federalists” would fail, no matter their disguise under the name “Republicans,” and that “the friends of the real constitution and union will prevail against consolidation, as they have done against monarchism.” He closed, “I have ... committed to you thoughts which I would do to few others.”³⁸

Jefferson was encouraged when the judge honored him with a twenty-one-page letter. William Johnson, it turned out, was just as indignant as he was about the Federalists’ resurgence. “The whole Remains of the Federal party is up in Arms against me,” Johnson railed. As for writing “the History of Parties,” though, he required convincing. “But what Inducement, my dear Sir, can I have to proceed with that undertaking?” The hostile reviews of his Greene biography and unpleasant dealings with publishers and booksellers combined to make him skittish about trying a political subject again. Besides, he noted, word had it that the retired James Madison was to attempt such a work—the only person other than Jefferson whom Johnson considered worthy of the task.

But Madison was not going to write the antidote to Marshall. And so Justice Johnson (like William Short, like Walter Jones) pressed Jefferson to fill the gap: “I regret exceedingly that it has not occupied your Hours of Retirement hitherto, for believe me, we have been all looking up to you for the Vindication of the Purity of our Intentions & Patriotism of our Efforts.... We have hoped for a rich Legacy of History from your Pen.” He had heard that Jefferson kept a “Journal from the earliest Time of your public Service,” as of course Jefferson had. “If so, pray bequeath it to some Friend who will fearlessly do Justice to the Part you have acted, and vindicate us along with you, from the foul Imputations which have already passed into History against us.” Johnson had perfectly mimicked the plea inside Jefferson’s own head. The problem was, simply put, that Jefferson could find no one to perform this critical task. And who better suited than Justice Johnson to go after Chief Justice Marshall?

He must have read Johnson’s aggravated harangue with repeated nods of concurrence. How can it be, the justice brooded, that “we have never turned our Thoughts to the Opinions of Posterity.” As his letter raced on, he perceived a larger threat to America’s union in the weakening of southern republicanism, and for this he recommended a judicial solution: that the Supreme Court be equally constituted of representatives from the various sections. In the end, it appeared to him that Jefferson’s nation-expanding Louisiana Purchase had prevented the powerful Northeast from “establishing a general Monarchy.” Justice Johnson made it perfectly plain that he was afraid of the Federalists, for, like Jefferson, he reckoned that they had merely abandoned their name—not their consolidationist agenda.

Jefferson read and absorbed the letter, and wrote to Justice Johnson again a few months later with renewed purpose. “Do not fear therefore these insects,” Jefferson wrote, censuring the book reviewers who had frightened Johnson away from undertaking another political work. He was softening up the justice for another attempt at convincing him to weigh in against Marshall’s five volumes: “What you write will be far above their grovelling sphere.” Jefferson went on to remind the South Carolina Republican of the larger object, and what was at stake: “Let me then implore you, dear Sir, to finish your history of parties.... We have been too careless of our future reputation; while our tories will omit nothing to place us in the wrong.” Building his argument, Jefferson clarified that former President Madison would leave behind “only particular passages of our history.” Hinting at his own record keeping, he added: “My letters (all preserved) will furnish the daily occurrences and views from my return from Europe in 1790. till I retired finally from office.”

From this point, Jefferson held back nothing. He made clear that he thought a chronicle of his letters and other papers would not only display his convictions, but also tell historical truth and do the country good. It could not wait for future biographers—it had to be begun right away. Here is how he finally made his case: “No day has passed without a letter to somebody. Written in the moment, and in the warmth and freshness of fact and feeling they will carry internal evidence that what they breathe is genuine. Selections from these after my death, may come out successively as the maturity of circumstances may render their appearance seasonable. But multiplied testimony, multiplied views will be necessary to give solid establishment to truth.”

He had prepared the means for posterity to receive, in “seasonable” installments, the story of his political life—that is, in such a way as his family and the executors of his will decided on, so as to protect his reputation. Anything deemed shocking, or too radical, would wait until the country was ready for it. But that did not obviate the need for a book from Justice Johnson; it was crucial for there to be “multiplied testimony” on Jefferson’s behalf, if his legacy was to be secured.³⁹

Furthermore, it had come to Jefferson’s attention in early 1823 that a new, hagiographic Hamilton biography was in the hands of one who represented both “the bitterness of the priest” and “the rancour of the fiercest federalism.” Marshall’s “five volumed libel” would then have this reinforcement.⁴⁰ Time was of the essence. And yet, when in 1824 a Philadelphia newspaper editor, Stephen Simpson, proposed collaboration on a political biography, Jefferson cut the conversation short: “I have uniformly declined any participation in the history of my self,” he wrote definitively. This was because he did not really know Simpson, and could not entrust so critical a project to him. Only someone of Johnson’s rank and record would do.⁴¹

In 1824, after years of disregard, Jefferson buried the hatchet with Livingston, after the latter, via President Monroe, made an effort to restore communication. Once the overture was made, Jefferson wrote to Monroe and spoke of Livingston with complete magnanimity:

He may be assured I have not a spark of unfriendly feeling towards him. In all the earlier scenes of life we thought and acted together. We differed in opinion afterwards on a single point. Each maintained his opinion, as he had a right, and acted on it as he ought. But why brood over a single difference, and forget all our previous harmonies? Difference of opinion was never, with me, a motive of separation from a friend. In the trying times of federalism, I never left a friend. Many left me, have since returned, and been recieved [sic] with open arms. Mr. Livingston would now be recieved at Monticello with as hearty a welcome as he would have been in 1800.⁴³

The style is virtually identical to Jefferson’s explanation for his readiness to repair his long-fractured friendship with John Adams. This was because the decisive spirit of 1776 represented an indissoluble memory, easy for him to latch onto, a defining moment of common resolve. When Adams (again, not Jefferson) made the first move, in January 1812, Jefferson responded to his predecessor as president by declaring that their shared trials, the Revolutionary experience, was all the incentive he needed to act to reconstitute personal harmony:

A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, ... we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port. Still we did not expect to be without rubs and difficulties; and we have had them.⁴⁴

Political conflict understandably created fissures, but one’s most critical memories—“our first sympathies,” in Jefferson’s words to Monroe—could effectively serve, in later years, to restore the historic bond. “The case with Mr. Adams was much stronger,” he wrote, comparing the Livingston and Adams ruptures. “Fortune had disjointed our first affections, and placed us in opposition in every point.” He concluded the sentiment: “I bear ill will to no human being.” It was a corollary of his 1816 quip, “I wish to avoid all collisions of opinion with all mankind.”

With Livingston, the historic bond—the formative tie—was not 1776 but the “Revolution of 1800.” For Jefferson, the meaning weighed the same: a “revolutionary” political struggle, endured together, was a memory powerful enough to help him to overcome one bitter argument and recover a lost friendship. That is why, when he wrote Livingston in 1824, quick to congratulate him upon election to Congress, Jefferson was just as quick to re-establish their political genealogy. He did so by issuing his familiar warning with regard to the grand subterfuge of their common enemy, former Federalists who in the 1820s called themselves Republicans without really subscribing to the party’s principles.

Then came an implicit apology, so infrequent in Jefferson’s preserved papers: “I have learnt to be less confident in the conclusions of human reason, and give more credit to the honesty of contrary opinion.” Perhaps he was no longer so certain that Livingston’s motive in the Batture case was one of vulgar self-interest. In any event, it was a meaningful statement from him. Praising a Livingston speech, Jefferson added: “You have many years yet to come of vigorous activity, and I confidently trust they will be employed in cherishing every measure which may foster our brotherly union.”⁴⁵

The next year, Livingston asked Jefferson to read and evaluate a code of laws he had drafted, doubtless aware that Jefferson had undertaken a similar effort in Virginia during the months immediately following his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson declined to venture a legal-constitutional opinion owing to his advanced age (“five and twenty chilling winters” having “rolled over my head and whitened every hair” since they had last seen one another), but he lavishly praised his former adversary nonetheless: “your work ... will certainly arrange your name with the sages of antiquity.” In welcoming Livingston back into the fold, Jefferson was delighted that the congressman was working to restore “original principles,” to stymie the consolidationists and protect the states from “usurpation.” Moreover, he wrote the Princeton-educated constitutional scholar, “I am pleased with the style and diction of your laws, plain and intelligible as the ordinary workings of common sense.”

Nothing could be so Jeffersonian—to Jefferson—as the facility to promote republicanism in language of elegant simplicity. He was now convinced that Edward Livingston embodied that special and necessary talent. The determined Virginian had found compromise and reconciliation possible. As in his estrangement from John Adams, he was ultimately able to set aside differences and appreciate an honest intellect.

The Livingston episode showed how Jefferson could modulate the inner authority of his reactive political memory. He discovered there was no dishonor and no political liability in doing so. He signed off his last letter to Edward Livingston with “unabated friendship and respect,” the same expression he often used in writing to his most cherished allies, Madison and Monroe.⁴⁶

The Chief Justice Pierces Jefferson’s Skin

Henry Lee’s Tissue of Errors

Urging Justice Johnson

“first sympathies”