Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (15 page)

Patty engaged with the war effort. Replying to a request from Martha Washington to sew clothes and supply the army, Patty enlisted James Madison's mother, Eleanor Conway Madison, to help as well. “Mrs. Washington has done me the honor of communicating the enclosed proposition of our sisters of Pennsylvania and of informing me that the same grateful sentiments are displaying themselves in Maryland,” Patty wrote. “Justified by the sanction of her letter in handing forward the scheme I undertake with cheerfulness the duty of furnishing to my countrywomen an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth to it.”

T
he soldiers needed what they could get, for the Revolutionary War was about to come south with ferocity. In Baltimore, Thomas Nelson unsuccessfully tried to take a cheerier view. “Could we but get a good regular army we should soon clear the continent of these damned invaders,” Nelson had written Jefferson in January 1777. “They play the very Devil with the girls and even old women to satisfy their libidinous appetites. There is scarcely a virgin to be found in the part of the country that they have passed through.”

The sense of threat was constant. “We have pretty certain intelligence that a considerable reinforcement (the N. York papers of the 1st of May say 8000 men) will be sent over immediately,” a correspondent wrote Jefferson in May 1779, “and if so there will, no doubt, be an active campaign, which it is generally supposed will be chiefly confined to the southern states, where we are the most vulnerable—and from thence the enemy can more easily withdraw their troops to the West Indies, if occasion should require it.”

Amid rising concerns over British designs to invade and subjugate Virginia as a critical element in London's bid to defeat the American rebellion and restore order in the empire, Thomas Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia, succeeding Patrick Henry as chief executive.

In accepting the post Jefferson was explicit about the significance he saw in the good opinion of the public. “In a virtuous and free state, no rewards can be so pleasing to sensible minds, as those which include the approbation of our fellow citizens,” Jefferson wrote. His “great pain,” he said, was the fear that “my poor endeavors should fall short of the kind expectations of my country.”

The balloting had pitted John Page against Jefferson. In the first round, Jefferson led 55–38, and Thomas Nelson had 32. In a runoff between Jefferson and Page, Jefferson won 67–61.

After two decades of friendship, Jefferson and John Page were compelled to explain themselves to each other, pledging that neither harbored any of what Page called “low dirty feelings” over the gubernatorial election. Page had been unable to see Jefferson since the balloting and, scheduled to be away from Williamsburg for a brief time, he wanted the new governor to understand he was not avoiding such a meeting. “I can assure you … that were it not for the world who may put a wrong construction on my conduct I should scarcely trouble you with this apology,” Page told Jefferson on Wednesday, June 2, 1779.

Jefferson replied that “it had given me much pain that the zeal of our respective friends should ever have placed you and me in the situation of competitors. I was comforted however with the reflection that it was their competition, not ours, and that the difference of the numbers which decided between us, was too insignificant to give you a pain or me a pleasure [had] our dispositions towards each other been such as to have admitted those sensations.”

By pointing out the narrowness of the margin between the two, Jefferson was trying to soothe his friend's feelings, but he knew that no one likes to come up short in any contest. Picking up on Page's allusion to the opinion of others, Jefferson sought to create a sense of unbreakable camaraderie with his friend: “I know you too well to need an apology for anything you do, and hope you will be forever assured of this; and as to the constructions of the world, they would only have added one to [the many sig]ns for which they [are] to go to the devil.”

However kind the two men were to each other, though, the contest had still been a contest, with one winner and one loser. Jefferson, who knew how he would have felt had the results been reversed and who hated such tensions, moved to assuage Page. “As this is the first, so I hope it will be the last instance of ceremony between us,” he wrote, adding that Mrs. Page's company in Williamsburg would be one of the only consolations for Patty when she came to the capital.

Jefferson wanted familiar faces around him, people he could trust, as he assumed his post. Isaac Granger Jefferson recalled riding down to Williamsburg in a wagon; James Hemings, Robert Hemings, and Martin Hemings came, too.

Governor Jefferson was to serve for two years, from June 1779 until June 1781. He was to preside over the destiny of his beloved Virginia at a time when the future of everything he cared about was anything but certain.

TWELVE

A TROUBLESOME OFFICE

They certainly mean another campaign, a last effort; as Georgia and South Carolina, with the frontiers and sea coasts appear to be their objects at present.

—R
ICHARD
H
ENRY
L
EE
, on British military plans, 1779

I am thoroughly satisfied that the attachment of the people to the cause in which we are engaged and their hatred to Great Britain remain unshaken.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
, amid rising military pressures from the British

They formed in line and marched up to the palace with drums beating; it was an awful sight—seemed like the Day of Judgment was come.

—I
SAAC
G
RANGER
J
EFFERSON
, describing the British attack on Richmond, January 1781

I
N
W
ILLIAMSBURG
, the royal Governor's Palace of Thomas Jefferson's youth—that enormous residence on the green, with its elaborate gardens—was to be his. Hardly twenty years had passed since Jefferson had been a fortunate guest of Francis Fauquier's, dining and talking and listening and playing music, a student in the presence of greater, more learned, and more powerful men. Now Jefferson was thirty-six, a husband, a father, the governor of Virginia, and a statesman of the United States of America.

Jefferson's two-year tenure as governor would be consumed with the threat and then the reality of British invasion. Up until this point, military concerns in Virginia had centered on threats by proxy (Indians, slaves), not direct danger from the full force of British troops. The war in Virginia had been real but still somehow abstract—more theoretical than tangible—from the time of Dunmore to 1779–81.

That had changed not long before Jefferson took office. Georgia had collapsed after the British attacked Savannah. South Carolina was next for the British troops.

For a man who loved control and appreciated order and harmony, Jefferson found himself facing the most disorderly and chaotic of crises: a two-front war. The regular British were a force to the east; to the west Jefferson had to contend with British soldiers and their Indian allies based in Detroit.

As he walked the halls and surveyed the grounds of the palace, listening to the conversation of his wife and the voices of his children, he could not have helped but hear the echoes of his education in these rooms and at these tables. By any standard, Jefferson's rise had been rapid, and the man who took over the governorship of Virginia in the early summer of 1779 was ambitious but not blindly so. Power meant much to him, but he cloaked his driven nature with a mien of intellectual curiosity and aristocratic confidence.

Like many legislators, Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power—until he bore executive responsibility. He emerged from his wartime governorship with a different view of authority than the one he had held on first accepting the office, and with a deeper appreciation of the perils and possibilities of command. His sense of the price of public service was also to become keener than it had been. Jefferson foresaw years of “intense labor and great private loss” ahead, and by “loss” he meant more than money. The approval and esteem that led to election rarely endured, and Jefferson knew that few men left office with the standing they enjoyed on entering it.

From Philadelphia, a correspondent sent qualified salutations. “I will not congratulate you, but my country on their choice of a chief magistrate,” the writer told Jefferson. “It will break in on your domestic plan and you'll find it a troublesome office during the war.” Jefferson would indeed.

F
rom captives to defense to frontier security to suppressing Tory dissent, Governor Jefferson proved himself capable of making difficult, even harsh, decisions.

The capture of Henry Hamilton, the Irish-born British commander of Fort Detroit, offered one such case. Reputed to have given bounties to Indians for white scalps—hence his nickname “the Hair Buyer General”—Hamilton was kept in irons at Jefferson's direction and over British objections.

Jefferson's willingness to do whatever it took for the sake of security was already on record. In May 1778 he had drafted a bill of attainder—an automatic conviction of an individual by legislative fiat—for a man named Josiah Philips for “committing murders, burning houses, wasting farms and doing other acts of hostility.” Philips was given a certain amount of time to surrender himself for trial; if he failed to turn himself in, he would be declared guilty.

Jefferson's bill was an extraordinary expression of power and the work of a pragmatic politician. Essentially it denied Philips the rights the Americans said they were fighting for. For Jefferson, the practical need to end the Philips insurrection outweighed the ideal application of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Noting the failure to recruit sufficient infantry volunteers in June 1778, he suggested that the Congress “commute a good part of the infantry required from us for an equivalent force in horse. This service opens to us a new fund of young men, who have not yet stepped forth; I mean those whose indolence or education has unfitted them for foot-service.” As governor he also lamented the state of Virginia's navy, noting that a shipbuilding effort had been “unsuccessful beyond all my fears. But it is my opinion we should still persevere in spite of disappointment, for this plain reason that we can never be otherwise defended.” He had made a point of touring Virginia's gunnery east of Fredericksburg.

And he insisted on attempting to secure the West. He and George Rogers Clark planned an expedition against Britain's Fort Detroit. A decade younger than Jefferson, Clark was a tall, adventurous Virginian who had studied surveying in his youth. Clark was a pioneering figure in Kentucky and played a critical role in defending the western lands from British-supported Indian attack. He captured Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River and Vincennes (a point roughly halfway between St. Louis and Louisville) under pressure from “Hair Buyer” Hamilton. His exploits in the Northwest in the icy winter of 1778–79 secured American influence over the Illinois country. He was a tough man. Years later, after severely burning his leg in an accident, Clark watched a parade of Kentucky militia out the window of the doctor's office where he was undergoing an amputation. Listening to the martial music, he is said to have endured the brutal operation, turning to the doctor only afterward, asking, “Well, is it off?” Clark was the kind of man Jefferson needed: a bold commander who could execute the vision Jefferson formulated and fought for in the political world.

Ultimately, though, the George Rogers Clark expedition to Detroit was deemed too dangerous. Jefferson told Washington that “the want of men, want of money, and difficulty of procuring provisions” made the mission impossible for now. He reported the decision with regret. (Nearly a quarter of a century later, Jefferson was to entrust a journey to the Pacific to George Rogers Clark's brother William Clark and Meriwether Lewis.)

Jefferson soon needed Clark for another project: putting down Loyalists. “There is reason to apprehend insurrection among some discontented inhabitants (Tories) on our South-Western frontier,” he wrote Clark in March 1780. “I would have you give assistance on the shortest warning to that quarter.… Nothing can produce so dangerous a diversion of our force, as a circumstance of that kind if not crushed in its infancy.” Jefferson was in no humor to be merciful.

As with Josiah Philips and with Henry Hamilton, Jefferson took the fight straight to the enemy. Diplomacy, grace, and mercy had their place. So did steel, vengeance, and strength. Thomas Jefferson was quite capable of deploying whatever weapon he thought best to defend those entrusted to his care.

I
t had been the coldest winter anyone could remember. The rivers were frozen so solid as 1779 became 1780 that horses and wagons could cross the James and the Potomac rivers.

In the thaw of spring, Jefferson and his colleagues made a historic move, shifting the capital of Virginia from Williamsburg to Richmond. They believed they would be safer farther inland.

As Jefferson settled his family in a house on Richmond's Shockoe Hill, borrowed from an uncle by marriage, he had every reason to believe he was acting in a climate of extreme emergency.

Charleston fell to the British on Wednesday, May 10, 1780. Jefferson was surrounded, and he knew it. “While we are threatened with a formidable attack from the northward on our Ohio settlements and from the southern Indians on our frontiers convenient to them,” Jefferson said in June 1780, “our eastern country is exposed to invasion from the British army in Carolina.”

There was another Tory uprising on the New River in Montgomery County in southwestern Virginia over the summer as well as more Indian violence. Elected to a second yearlong term as governor on Friday, June 2, 1780, Jefferson had no relief from bad news.

In the closing weeks of August, Lord Cornwallis routed the American general Horatio Gates and the Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina militias at Camden, South Carolina.

Jefferson was despondent. Citing the “disaster which has lately befallen our Army,” he summoned the council to help him formulate “an immediate and great exertion to stop the progress of the enemy.” He knew his options were limited: “The measures most likely to effect this are difficult both in choice and execution.”

A
t last, the most serious blow came. Beginning on Friday, December 29, 1780, Benedict Arnold, the American general who had become a traitor, selling himself to the British, led an invasion of Virginia. Word of the British attack off the Virginia capes reached Richmond on New Year's morning, 1781.

Living as long as he had in an era of exaggeration and of flawed reports, Jefferson was slow to credit the intelligence. A series of invasion rumors since 1777 had led to popular discontent and ambivalence about a summons to arms. To call out the militia, Jefferson said in December 1779, created “disgust” when the militiamen “find no enemy in place.”

For two days in 1781, then, he declined to summon the militia. A messenger found him at the house on the hill in Richmond, calm and collected—too calm and collected.

As the days passed, it became clear that the invading forces were quite real. By then Jefferson had issued the proper orders, but it was too late to field a serious opposition.

With the British troops moving toward Richmond on Friday, January 5, 1781, Robert Hemings and James Hemings drove Patty and the rest of the Jefferson family to safety at a piece of property Jefferson owned on Fine Creek, west of the capital.

At about one o'clock on the afternoon of January 5, the British arrived at Richmond, formed a line, and launched cannon fire into the city. One shot took off the top of a butcher's house near Jefferson's Shockoe Hill quarters. According to Isaac Granger Jefferson, “In ten minutes not a white man was to be seen in Richmond; they ran hard as they could” to a camp of American soldiers on Bacon's Quarter Branch in northern Richmond.

It was chaos. “The British was dressed in red,” Isaac Granger Jefferson recalled; he “saw them marching.” Thomas Jefferson had left the governor's residence to avoid capture and spent the hours of the invasion circling Richmond in efforts to secure supplies and to rendezvous with American officers.

He was right to leave the center of the action. The British had brought along handcuffs in expectation of arresting the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Reaching the house on Shuckoe Hill, a British officer asked where Jefferson was. “He's gone to the mountains,” said George Granger, Isaac's father, protecting the master.

“Where is the keys to the house?” the officer asked, in Isaac's recollection. Isaac's father handed over the keys.

“Where is the silver?” the officer asked.

“It was all sent up to the mountains,” George Granger said. It was a lie: As Isaac recalled it, his father had “put all the silver about the house in a bed tick and hid it under a bed in the kitchen and saved it too.”

Benedict Arnold soon removed himself back to the coast. The British, meanwhile, seized a large number of Jefferson's slaves, including Isaac Granger Jefferson. As they were marched out of Richmond, they heard the sounds of war—one blast, Isaac Granger Jefferson recalled, was “like an earthquake.”

W
ould it have made a difference to the defense of Richmond if the call for militia had gone out earlier? Writing from Richmond a month after the invasion, Jefferson himself believed that “men of enterprise and firmness” would have been able to capture Arnold “on his march to and from this place.” Presumably, then, an activated militia would have been of military value. Jefferson had plenty of strength in his soul, but on this occasion he misjudged the moment.

By waiting, Jefferson had made a common political mistake. He had followed the people rather than led them. Many of the Virginians who did the actual fighting in militias were unhappy and skeptical about the elite that Jefferson embodied and represented. The culture of Virginia was not conducive to rapid military deployment in the best of times; now, in wartime, militias were even more difficult to muster. “Mild laws, a people not used to war and prompt obedience, a want of the provisions of war and means of procuring them render our orders often ineffectual, oblige us to temporize and when we cannot accomplish an object in one way to attempt it in another,” Jefferson told a French newcomer in March 1781—the Marquis de Lafayette, who had reached Virginia to take command of Continental troops.

It may not have been fear of the British that kept Jefferson in check for those two days. It is possible that he feared mobilizing a public when he could not be sure the threat was real, thus risking the wrath of the people. By hesitating, he failed to bring his constituents along to the place they needed to be.