At Monticello, Jefferson seemed more interested in grandchildren than politics. Martha left her first two children, Anne Cary Randolph and Thomas Jefferson Randolph, with their grandfather and spent several weeks visiting another Randolph plantation. Jefferson enjoyed the toddlers immensely. Writing to Martha, he assured her that the two youngsters “have never had even a fingerache since you left us. Jefferson is very robust. His hands are constantly like lumps of ice, yet he will not warm them. He has not worn his shoes an hour this winter. If put on him, he takes them off immediately and uses one to carry his nuts, etc. in. Within these two days we have put both him and Anne into mockaseens, which being made of soft leather, fitting well and lacing up, they have never been able to take them off.”

Back in Philadelphia the political caldron continued to bubble with more than a few of Jefferson’s ideas. Before leaving the capital, he had submitted to Congress a report on America’s commercial relations with England, France, and other foreign nations. Armed with a wealth of devastating statistics, it clarified England’s continuing attempts to keep the United States in a colonial position by imposing all sorts of humiliating restrictions on American shipping. Madison used the report to call for a series of resolutions to retaliate against England. The controversy inflamed anti-British sentiment among Americans, and with incredible stupidity, England’s ministers stoked the flame by attacking and harassing American ships on the high seas.

At Monticello, while managing 2,000 acres of farmland, Jefferson tried to find more productive work for the slaves he owned. He had many more African-American men than he needed to run his farms, but, because he detested slavery, he refused to sell any of them or their children. So he started a nailery at Monticello, using persuasion, praise and cash bonuses to boost his monthly production so that a dozen young slaves under his personal supervision were producing a ton and a half of nails a month.

As elsewhere at Monticello, he never permitted an overseer to whip someone. In fact, he soon made one of his best workers - a rugged, commanding black man named Isaac - the nailery boss.

When a nailery worker stole several hundred pounds of nails, hoping to sell them at an opportune moment, he was caught and brought to Jefferson for punishment. Weeping, he begged to be forgiven. Jefferson turned to the overseer and said: “Ah, sir, we can’t punish him. He has suffered enough already.” Jefferson told the fellow how disappointed he was, but he hoped the man had learned his lesson. Then he sent him back to the shop.

The chastened thief told Isaac, “Well, I’s been a seeking religion a long time, but I never heard anything before that sounded so, or made me feel so as I did when Master said, ‘Go and don’t do so anymore,’ and now I’s determined to seek religion till I find it.” A few days later, he asked to be baptized.

Most of the time, Jefferson was his nailery’s best customer. He devoted a large share of his own and his workmen’s energies to rebuilding Monticello. Jefferson undertook a complete restructuring of the house, enlarging it to almost three times its original size. His library, which occupied much of the second floor, was brought to the first floor and housed in a new south wing. The entire roof was ripped off, and a dome of Jefferson’s own design was to rise above a reorganized second floor, to be used exclusively for bedrooms.

Jefferson’s artistic instincts inclined him to make his commodious Virginia mansion look like a one-story house. He wanted the building to fit snugly on its hilltop and resemble the elegant, one-story townhouses he visited in Europe. He especially liked the way those houses eliminated “great staircases . . . which are expensive and occupy a space which would make a good room in every story.” Monticello’s staircases, Jefferson decided, would be small and hidden from the visitor’s eye.

He was equally interested in Monticello’s landscaping, and during his first year at home, he put in 2,400 cuttings of weeping willow to border the lower paths of the mountain and sketched plans for terraces of fig and other fruit trees, strawberry beds, and a vineyard.

Meanwhile, the world of Philadelphia politics continued to knock on Jefferson’s door. James Madison sent as many as three letters a week from Philadelphia, and Senator James Monroe of Virginia and other Republican leaders wrote frequently, giving Jefferson an insider’s view of what was happening in the nation’s capital.

He watched with indignation and alarm the Hamiltonian reaction to the so-called Whisky Rebellion. The citizens of western Pennsylvania had never looked with favor upon the secretary of the treasury’s tax on whisky; the brew was their economic staff of life. They challenged the tax by not paying it, by assaulting federal collectors, and finally arming themselves and sending federal officials fleeing for their lives while threatening to destroy Pittsburgh. There was even bold talk of joining the western counties of Virginia in a new, independent nation.

When a presidential proclamation failed to restore peace, Washington reluctantly yielded to Hamilton’s urging and assembled a militia of 15,000 men. The sight of such firepower turned the extremist leaders’ backbones to jelly. Most of them fled to Spanish territory. Elsewhere in the area, moderate Republicans led by Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant who had risen high in the councils of Jefferson’s party, persuaded many of the would-be rebels to submit without violence. To Jefferson, the entire episode reeked of Hamilton’s power grabbing, especially when the secretary of the treasury took it upon himself to accompany the troops.

Scarcely had the whisky crisis died down when another political hurricane blew across the new nation. In a desperate attempt to avert war with England, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay abroad as a special envoy charged with resolving the tensions and settling the outstanding differences. Jay returned with a treaty woefully deficient in British concessions. Except for the evacuation of the western forts and some minor relaxation of British barriers against American ships in the West Indies, Jay’s trip was a failure. Jefferson and Madison saw the treaty as the final sellout, the inevitable outcome of Hamilton’s policy of appeasing Great Britain.

Madison blasted the treaty in Congress, and Jefferson hurtled scorching opinions of it from his mountaintop. To a fellow Virginian, Jefferson reverted to his favorite metaphor of the ship. He described his neighbors “in considerable fermentation,” because “while all hands were below-decks mending sails, splicing ropes, and everyone at his own business, and the captain in his cabin attending to his log book and chart, a rogue of a pilot has run them into an enemy’s port.”

When Hamilton took to the newspapers to defend the treaty as the only alternative to war, Jefferson again urged Madison to do battle with him. “Hamilton is really a colossus to the anti-Republican party,” Jefferson admitted. “Without numbers, he is a host within himself . . . in truth when he comes forward, there is nobody but yourself can meet him.”

The fight over Jay’s treaty made it grimly clear to Jefferson that the success of the Republican cause was by no means guaranteed. James Madison, in the thick of the fight, had known this all along. Now he told Jefferson, “You ought to be preparing yourself . . . to hear truths which no inflexibility will be able to withstand. This was Madison’s diplomatic way of telling Jefferson that he was the only man capable of leading the Republican Party to victory in the presidential election of 1796.

Claiming that he was reluctant to run, Jefferson made no objections when Madison and his other friends nominated him for the presidency. Hamilton and his friends chose Vice President John Adams as their candidate. The two men who had worked so closely together to create America’s independence became political opponents.

Neither Jefferson nor Adams made a single speech outlining their policies throughout the campaign, nor did they make even a single comment on each other’s respective merits. But their supporters in the newspapers were not so gentle. Republicans, as Jefferson’s followers were called, industriously pictured Adams as “the Duke of Braintree” and called him a “monocrat” - a lover of one-man rule. The Federalists called Jefferson an atheistic worshipper of France, who yearned to introduce the guillotine into American politics.

Some struck even lower blows, blaming Jefferson for Virginia’s helplessness during Cornwallis’ invasion and sneering that he showed a lack of “fortitude” when he fled Monticello before Tarleton’s cavalry. Others said Jefferson showed a “weak, wavering, indecisive character” that might suit a professor in a college, president of a philosophical society, or even a secretary of state, but not the chief executive of the nation. The Republicans matched these absurdities by ominously pointing out that while Jefferson had daughters, John Adams had sons, who might try to succeed him to the presidential “throne.”

In the rush to slander came a tale of miscegenation that Jefferson would deny, although he knew it to be true.

In the election year of 1802, Scottish-born newspaperman James Thomas Callender put out the first public report concerning Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, a housemaid and half-sister of Martha Wayles Jefferson. Callender was known for his character assassinations, and the Founding Fathers were among his prized subjects. Though his report spawned popular songs and rhymes about Sally and Mr. Jefferson, the exposé didn’t keep Jefferson from the White House.

Behind the Federalist scene, Alexander Hamilton was playing a game of his own. Forced to acquiesce in John Adams’ candidacy, he secretly hoped to throw the election to the Federalist vice-presidential candidate, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. Under the system laid down by the Constitution, each state elector had two votes, as the rise of political parties had not been envisioned. It was simply assumed that the electors would choose the two best men available, and the man who received the most electoral votes would be president, the runner-up vice president.

Hamilton connived with Federalists in South Carolina to vote for Pinckney and throw away their second vote, which should have gone to Adams. Assuming that other Federalists would vote the party line for its two candidates, Pinckney would come out eight votes ahead of Adams and be the legally elected president – and Alexander Hamilton’s puppet.

Unfortunately for Hamilton, news of the plot leaked out, thanks largely to the political shrewdness of Jefferson’s vice-presidential candidate, Aaron Burr. The suave New Yorker had recently distinguished himself as a U.S. senator and as a politician who combined practicality with enormous ambition. He boldly put himself forward as a vice-presidential candidate in 1792, before John Adams decided to run again, and proved himself a potent vote getter in New York, thanks to his organization of the less well-born Sons of St. Tammany. The Republicans rewarded him with the nomination for vice president, but Burr liked to dabble with both parties. He warned New England electors of Hamilton’s scheme, and they made sure they threw away enough second votes to guarantee that John Adams would run well ahead of Pinckney.

The race between Adams and Jefferson was a seesaw affair, with Jefferson sweeping the south and Adams New England, dividing the middle states, and finally coming down to Pennsylvania, the last state to vote. If Jefferson carried the Quaker State, he could, on a strict party vote, hope to tie Adams in the Electoral College.

Jefferson won Pennsylvania by one-half of 1 percent, thanks largely to the “whisky boys” of the western counties. But to everyone’s amazement, one Republican elector, remembering Adams’ revolutionary service, threw one of his two votes to him. The same thing happened in Virginia and North Carolina, states the Republicans also carried. The final vote was Adams seventy-one, Jefferson sixty-eight, Pinckney fifty-nine, and Burr, a relative stranger to southerners, a poor fourth with thirty. John Adams won the presidency by three votes in what Alexander Hamilton grumpily called “a sort of miracle.”

On the job in Philadelphia, Madison foresaw the result before the final returns trickled in. He warned Jefferson: “You must reconcile yourself to the secondary as well as the primary station if that should be your lot.”

Jefferson’s reply was proof of his ever-present concern for the stability of his country. The talk of electors north and south throwing away second votes had already made him wonder if he and John Adams might finish in a tie. In such a case, the final choice of a president would depend on the House of Representatives.

There, he noted, “it seems also possible that the Representatives may be divided. This is a difficulty from which the Constitution has provided no issue. It is both my duty and inclination, therefore, to relieve the embarrassment should it happen; and in that case, I pray you and authorize you fully to solicit on my behalf that Mr. Adams may be preferred. He has always been my senior, from the commencement of our public life and the expression of the public will being equal this circumstance ought to give him the preference.”

When the Adams miracle was confirmed, Jefferson reiterated his satisfaction with the final decision. “I have no ambition to govern men,” he told Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, “no passion which would lead me to delight to ride in a storm.

Jefferson almost declined to appear for his inauguration as vice president. The journey in the month of February, he told Madison, would be “a tremendous undertaking.” He toyed with the idea of taking the oath at Monticello, “or wherever else I could meet with a senator.” Finally, “respect to the public” forced him to brave the icy rivers and muddy roads of winter. But he added, “I hope I shall be made a part of no ceremony whatever. I shall escape into the city as covertly as possible.” That is precisely what he did. He drove his carriage to Alexandria and took the public mail coach the rest of the way to Philadelphia, arriving on March 2.

An interesting contrast between Jefferson and the Federalists can be glimpsed in the comment Jefferson made to the French philosopher Constantin Volney, explaining why he preferred to take public stagecoaches. It gave him “an opportunity of plunging into the mixed characters of my country, the most useful school we can enter into, and one which nothing else can supply the want of.” Around the same time, Joseph Cotton Smith, a Federalist lawmaker from Sharon, Connecticut, told how he and four fellow Federalists hired a private carriage in New York so they could “enjoy each other’s company without democratick annoyance.” In the public stagecoach, Smith explained, they would “have to endure the presence of social inferiors,” the passengers often including “squalling children and Republicans smoking cigars.”

As vice president, Jefferson presided over the Senate. He found it a congenial job, but soon noticed that there was a great deal of confusion and argument about the rules of order in the day-to-day proceedings. Senators argued with each other constantly about who had the floor and the right to speak next. Jefferson quietly went to work on a manual of procedure, which is still largely followed by the U.S. Senate today. He also accepted the presidency of the American Philosophical Society, an organization founded by Benjamin Franklin to facilitate the exchange of information among U.S. scientists. Jefferson brought with him to Washington the bones of a huge animal found in Virginia’s Greenbrier County. He named it Megalonyx, or “Great Claw,” and compared it to a more complete skeleton discovered in Paraguay, which had been identified as an early ancestor of the sloth. Though he did not realize it at the time, Jefferson was involved in a new American science: paleontology.

Much to his dismay, Jefferson soon found himself involved in another violent political controversy. Before he was elected vice president, he wrote a letter to a former Monticello neighbor, Philip Mazzei, who had returned to his native Italy. Angry about the Jay Treaty, Jefferson used severely critical language in describing Hamilton’s party. He called it “monarchical and aristocratical” and said its aim was to transform America “in all things to the rotten as well as the sound part of the British” government.

His next statement was even more emotional: “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomon in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors & perils.”

Mazzei unwisely translated this personal communication into Italian and published it in a local paper. An alert reader forwarded it to Paris, where it was translated into French. From there, it bounded across the Atlantic, was retranslated into English, and published in arch-Federalist Noah Webster’s American-Minerva in New York. In the course of these complicated travels, several mistranslations gave the distinct impression that Jefferson considered the Constitution itself a tool of the British interests.

Webster denounced the letter as treasonable, and he and other Federalist editors took up the cry that Jefferson, in his reference to Samsons in the field, had slandered Washington. This was partisan politics at its worst. Although privately Jefferson had become increasingly critical of Washington around the time of the Jay Treaty - believing him to be the captive of the Hamiltonians –his admiration for Washington’s fundamental integrity had never wavered. The Samsons to whom he referred were the numerous ex-soldiers who followed Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton into the Federalist camp.

In a Senate dominated by the Federalists, Jefferson had to sit mute while senators rose to denounce him and accuse him and other Republicans of treason. No wonder Jefferson was soon writing to his daughter Martha, “I become more and more disgusted with the jealousies, the hatred, the rancorous and malignant passions of this scene, and lament my having ever again been drawn into public view.”

The Federalists were on the offensive. The French Revolution had degenerated into the Reign of Terror, Lafayette had to flee the country to save his life, and scores of other Frenchmen, republicans as well as nobles, went to the guillotine. A Director took control of the country and ordered French men-of-war to seize all ships carrying merchandise produced in England or her colonies. This action made American ships returning from Britain or the West Indies fair game, and the two former allies drifted closer and closer to war. President Adams sent a belligerent message to Congress denouncing France in such extreme terms that Jefferson, in a private letter to Madison, called it “insane.”

Against Jefferson’s advice, the Republicans in Congress demanded public hearings on the results of a special peacekeeping mission that President Adams sent to France. Soon they were wishing they had never asked the question.

The papers the president sent to Congress revealed a tale of French arrogance and corruption. Charles Maurice Talleyrand, the French minister of foreign affairs, had informed the envoys that his government considered President Adams’ speech an insult of such magnitude that it could only be erased by an immense American loan - $12.8 million was suggested - plus a personal bribe of $250,000, which Talleyrand and the Directors were presumably to share. One of the three envoys, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, stood firm when Talleyrand’s agents - discreetly designated by President Adams as X, Y, and Z - suggested the bribe. “No, not a sixpence,” he snapped.

The XYZ papers struck Jefferson and his fellow Republicans with hurricane force. “Trimmers dropt off from the Party like windfalls from an apple tree in September,” gloated Federalist leader Fisher Ames. Jefferson ruefully admitted to Madison that the XYZ revelations and their “artful misrepresentations” had “produced such a shock on the Republican mind as has never been seen since our independence.”

Spurred by gleeful Federalist editors, the nation plunged into a frenzy of anti-French emotion. Patriotic testimonials poured into the capital. Young men sporting black cockades, a Federalist symbol, paraded in military formation on Philadelphia’s streets and assaulted any and all Republicans they could find. President Adams addressed them with a matching black cockade in his hat and a sword on his hip. Fifers and drummers played the “Rogue’s March” under Jefferson’s windows.

Jefferson and the Republicans could only watch helplessly while Congress rammed through some twenty acts, abrogating the Revolutionary War treaty of alliance with France, raising an army, equipping a navy, and putting the nation on a war footing. George Washington was summoned from retirement to head the army, and to Jefferson’s dismay and John Adams’ mortification, the aging general insisted on Alexander Hamilton as his second-in-command and chief of staff. Since Washington made it clear he had no intention of leading in the field, Hamilton would be the army’s real commander if war was declared. Jefferson, knowing Hamilton’s fondness for military power, found this appointment alarming.

Meanwhile in Congress, the Federalists did not stop with defensive measures. Riding a wave of immense popularity, they moved to crush Jefferson and his Republicans for good. They gleefully passed a series of laws that came to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. On the theory that most of the support for France came from immigrants, the acts extended the waiting period for citizenship from five to fourteen years and gave the president the power to deport any alien he considered dangerous. Most ominous, however, was the section that made it a crime “to publish false, scandalous or malicious writings against” the government, either house of Congress, or the president. The Federalists now had the power to muzzle the Republican press.

Jefferson remained calm. Instead of denouncing the Federalists, he did his utmost to restrain those in his party who sought extreme solutions. When John Taylor, one of Virginia’s leading thinkers, wrote to Jefferson strongly intimating that it was time for Virginia to secede from the Union, adding that North Carolina would join her, Jefferson answered with a profound philosophical and psychological analysis of the nature of political man.

True, he admitted, Massachusetts and Connecticut, the heartland of Federalist strength, were riding the South hard. But “in every free and deliberating society,” he said, “there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these, for the most part must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time . . . but if to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusetts and Connecticut we break the union, will the evil stop there?”

“No,” Jefferson said. Even North Carolina and Virginia alone would fall to quarreling, and when they split up, the Virginians would soon fall to quarreling among themselves.

“Seeing, therefore, that an association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations, down to a town meeting or a vestry; seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that purpose, than to see our bickerings transferred to others.”

“A little patience,” he assured Taylor, “and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved and the people recovering their true sight.”

But as always, Jefferson geared his optimism to action. With James Madison’s help, he drew up a series of resolutions that were secretly handed to the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures. They warned the Federalists that the states never intended to permit themselves to be subjected to “undelegated and consequently unlimited powers. The inevitable result would necessarily be revolution and blood.” The resolutions were vivid proof of Jefferson’s devotion to freedom and his genuine fear that it was about to be destroyed by the reckless Federalists. At the same time, he remained a political realist. He made it clear that only “repeated and enormous violations” would justify revolution or secession, and he emphasized peaceful protests for the present. “Firmness on our part, but a passive firmness,” he told Madison, “is the true course.” Anything rash or threatening might check “the favorable dispositions” that he saw rising among the people on his return to Philadelphia.

Jefferson foresaw the erosion of the popularity of the Federalists and that had seized them during the XYZ furor. Congress had passed a direct tax on houses and land to pay for an enlarged army and navy. Every time a voter paid this tax and a French invading army failed to appear, he stopped to ask himself what, exactly, was he getting for it? Then he saw the army put to the use the Republicans had long predicted. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, an auctioneer named Fries organized a group of 700 farmers to resist the tax, and they chased the federal collectors out of the neighborhood. The government responded with massive force; squadrons of cavalry thundered up and down the countryside, pursuing a nonexistent revolutionary army, finally hauling Fries off to a federal court, where he was condemned to death. President Adams pardoned him, practically admitting that the affair was an absurdity.

Meanwhile, the popular outcry against the Sedition Acts’ prosecutions created a host of Republican martyrs. Samuel Adams, the man who began the American Revolution, strode into a Boston jail and publicly announced his sympathy through the bars to the imprisoned Republican editor, Thomas Adams (no relation).

When the newsman died three weeks after his release from prison, Republicans bitterly claimed it was the result of his suffering in a dank, damp cell. Congressman Matthew Lyon, another imprisoned editor, had his $1,000 fine paid by popular subscription and was re-elected to Congress while behind bars. His journey to Philadelphia from his native Vermont was nothing less than a triumphant progress, with thousands of Republicans turning out to greet him in towns and cities along the way. At one point, his partisans vowed the crowd following him was twelve miles long.

Thus, the nation roared into the presidential election of 1800, a conflict that even then was recognized as a crucial turning point in the history of America.