Titans of History

JEFFERSON

1743–1826

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

J.F. Kennedy, welcoming forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962

Thomas Jefferson was a radical polymath who put into words the principles of the American Revolution and then put those words into practice as a statesman. Private, intense and simultaneously possessed of matchless generosity of spirit, grace and sensitivity, Jefferson was a man almost without compare who advanced the cause of liberty across the world.

Jefferson’s intellect was second to none. The son of a wealthy Virginian planter, he could, at college and while studying law, as a close friend recalled, “tear himself away from his dearest friends, to fly to his studies.” Gracious and charming in manner, he nonetheless had an intense dislike of oral debate and rarely spoke in public. But the intricate brilliance of the young politician was quickly noted in Virginia’s colonial legislature.

Jefferson’s power was in his pen. It is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. As a delegate at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, Jefferson became the chief author of the document repudiating British sovereignty. In his exposition he championed universal liberty and equality. It was the first charter of civil rights, the founding document of freedom. The stamp of Jefferson’s peerless mind, his determination to secure liberty and his immense generosity toward his fellow men are apparent in the declaration’s every word.

Elected to the new Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson was determined to translate his ideals into practice in Virginia’s new constitution. He secured the abolition of primogeniture and entail. He tried in vain to introduce a scheme of universal education but later succeeded in founding the University of Virginia, which he considered among his greatest achievements. A deist himself, Jefferson pushed through a statute for religious freedom that established the complete separation of church and state, a division that lies at the very core of American democracy.

Jefferson’s passionate belief in freedom at times made his liberalism somewhat anarchic. “Was ever such a prize won with so little blood?” he asked during the early years of the French Revolution. He earned a reputation as a demagogic radical, but as the third president of the United States from 1801 Jefferson showed restraint and sensitivity in preventing the ideological schism that threatened to fracture the infant nation. He was an extraordinarily intense man, but was almost incapable of animosity. “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists,” he declared at his inauguration.

The Republican Jefferson believed government’s paramount duty was to protect the individual’s right to “life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He deplored the Federalists’ readiness to curtail civil rights in the supposed interests of the nation. But he concealed his extraordinary passions. His even-tempered approach quelled fears. Americans embraced republican principles, realizing that Jefferson’s protection of liberty would protect them too.

In one of the first acts of his presidency in 1801, Thomas Jefferson refused to pay the pirate state of Tripoli the extortionate tribute it demanded in return for safe passage of American ships on the high seas. In so doing, he sent America for the first time into combat against an Islamic power in the Middle East.

Nominally vassals of the Ottoman empire, but in reality independent states run by corsair dynasties, the regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were known, along with the sultanate of Morocco, as the Barbary States. Unashamedly piratical, they existed very profitably on the revenue garnered from slave trading, looting, tribute and ransom.

The ships of the newly independent United States, now lacking British naval protection, were prime targets. Only substantial tributes could secure them some relief. By 1801 America was paying out 20 percent of her annual federal revenue to the pirate states. When Jefferson assumed the presidency, he was determined to prove that war was preferable to tribute and ransom.

The Karamanli dynasty of Tripoli ruled what is now Libya. Pasha Yusuf Karamanli defied American power: “I do not fear war, it is my trade.” Prospects initially looked bleak. In October 1803 the USS Philadelphia was shipwrecked and its crew taken captive by Tripoli. Infiltrating Tripoli harbor in February 1804, a daring young officer named Stephen Decatur set fire to the Philadelphia and thwarted the corsairs’ hopes of turning the pride of the US fleet into a pirate ship. But his attempts to blow up Tripoli’s fleet backfired, killing eleven US servicemen.

The erstwhile US consul to Tunis, William Eaton, managed almost single-handedly to reverse the fortunes of war. A maverick, educated at the elite Dartmouth College, fluent in Greek and Latin, a veteran of the Indian wars who could throw a knife with deadly precision from eighty feet, Eaton fulminated at the prospect of “bartering our national glory for the forbearance of a Barbary pirate.” He proposed conquering Tunis with a force of 1000 marines. Then he suggested ways of enforcing regime change in Libya. The US secretary of state rejected both proposals.

Eaton acted unilaterally instead. He recruited a Karamanli prince, Hamet, in Egypt, and with nine marines and a mercenary force of 400 he led his motley troop of Arabs and Christians on a 500-mile desert march to launch a surprise attack on Tripoli’s second-largest city, Derna (modern Darnah). In the fierce pitched battle that ensued, Eaton and Hamet emerged triumphant. But Eaton’s plans to make good his coup and march on Tripoli were thwarted. The pasha hastily offered the USA a treaty, which US naval officials immediately negotiated. Hamet was sent back to Egypt. Deeply disappointed, Eaton returned to America—a renegade hero whose role in American history has never been fully acknowledged.

Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States. This bold move, seizing on Napoleon’s unexpected offer to sell French territory, was a decision taken (as Jefferson freely admitted) without constitutional authority. It was an act that secured America’s stability and created what Jefferson called an “empire for liberty.” It also earned him a landslide election to a second term as president.

The man who declared that “all men are created equal” has been censured for his racial attitudes. Jefferson was a staunch opponent of slavery, yet he owned large numbers of slaves on his Virginian plantation. His only book, Notes on Virginia, revealed in its discussion of slavery a deep opposition to racial mixing and at times a surprising degree of racism.

Jefferson recognized his fundamental hypocrisy, based on an irreconcilable opposition between justice and self-preservation. “We have the wolf by the ears,” he remarked of slavery to a friend, “and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” Jefferson was no less anxious to shield his private life from posterity than from his contemporaries, but what we know of it shows the confusion of his attitudes. It has only recently been revealed that while ambassador to France (1785–9) Jefferson began a long relationship with his slave Sally Hemings (who was the half-sister of his beloved deceased wife Martha).

Jefferson’s energy and creativity were phenomenal. He knew French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon. At seventy-one he read Plato in the original (he thought it overrated). He collated Native American dialects. He was a keen archaeologist who pioneered new methods of excavation on the Indian burial mounds on his estate, and an oenophile who promoted the establishment of American vineyards. He smuggled back plants and seeds from his travels to enrich his new country. He invented a swivel chair and an early form of automatic door. He was a magnificent architect: his own constructions—the University of Virginia and his Virginian estate of Monticello—are now World Heritage Sites. His library, which he left to the American nation, became the Library of Congress.

At the White House President Jefferson greeted guests in his slippers. The “sage of Monticello” welcomed visitors, only occasionally escaping to his retreat at Poplar Forest for the solitude he craved. All America wanted to sit at the feet of the republican radical who had proved himself America’s greatest architect. He died, like his old friend John Adams, on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the day their Declaration of Independence promulgated freedom across the world.