Cultivating Control in a Nation’s Crucible

“Self-evident” is one of the most meaningful words in the Declaration of Independence, a document drafted by Thomas Jefferson but edited by some of his fellow founding fathers. According to Walter Isaacson, author of a biography of Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson’s original version used the phrase “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable.” It was Franklin who deemed those same truths “self-evident,” to convey that they were rooted in rationality, not religion.

The word “self-evident” has different relevance to Jon Meacham’s new biography, “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.” Much of what Mr. Meacham has to say about Jefferson is too self-evident to be very illuminating. His strongest point, repeated frequently, is that Jefferson was both philosopher and politician but could be pragmatic when theory and reality were at odds.
“The Art of Power” takes less note of how self-evidently Jefferson’s personal life as a slaveholder violated his principled talk of liberty. But that is another recurring theme in this temperate, only modestly ambitious biography.
Mr. Meacham’s thesis — that presidents are also politicians — burned brighter in “American Lion,” his Andrew Jackson biography, which juxtaposed the bellicose and strategic sides of the outsize Jackson personality. But Jefferson was a far more polished figure, at least in his later years. (“Take things always by their smooth handle,” he wrote, as one of 10 maxims intended for a young namesake.) And a far more revered one. In its dutiful inventory of the contents of Jefferson’s Monticello, “The Art of Power” notes that the Library of Congress has preserved scraps of paper used by Jefferson in his privy.
The biography begins less compellingly than it ends, perhaps because the young Jefferson’s entitlement precedes his accomplishments. Mr. Meacham’s admiration is at its most expansive here. He cites the observation that Jefferson was descended from “a very gentle, well-dressed people.” And he says “the first half of the 18th century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy and Virginian.” Jefferson was born in 1743, and “he was raised to wield power.” What’s more: “He was born for command. He never knew anything else.”
When a fact becomes inconvenient, as does the detail that Jefferson lived as part of a large, combined family for seven years, before he turned 10, Mr. Meacham does not amend his flattery. He simply looks on the bright side of adversity, saying that perhaps this situation “set him on a path toward favoring comity over controversy in face-to-face relations.”
At 17, Jefferson would find himself in Williamsburg, Va., attending the College of William & Mary, living amid “a social swirl that included Virginia’s most charming women and most prominent men.”
Although this book is so lavishly fact-checked that its endnotes and bibliography run more than 200 pages, Mr. Meacham oddly glosses over unbecoming details. About an unsuccessful courtship that Jefferson conducted in the early 1760s, Mr. Meacham describes contents of his letters but does not quote from them. “His attempts at humor and self-mockery,” the book says, “fall largely flat, and the episode is chiefly interesting for the light it sheds on Jefferson’s sensitivity to rejection, disorder and criticism.”
But this book does not address its principal concern, power, until Jefferson has accrued some. When it comes to the force that he wielded as a slaveholder, Mr. Meacham finds ways to suggest that thoughts of abolition would have been premature; that it was not uncommon for white heads of households to be waited on by slaves who bore family resemblances to their masters; and that since Jefferson treated slavery as a blind spot, the book can too.
Far more attention is devoted to Jefferson’s perception of the burgeoning and then brand-new republic as being engaged in a decades-long, partly undeclared war with Britain, and to his fears that American independence could easily fall apart. Jefferson’s worries about creeping American monarchy, even during his own eight-year presidency, guide many of the policies and strategies that the book describes.
By coming to the presidency as a former governor of Virginia and vice president, Jefferson had grown wise and wary. He was full of perceptions that seem both familiar and self-evident now. “I can say with truth that I would rather be thought worthy of it than to be appointed to it,” he wrote about the presidency, adding, “Well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.”
Mr. Meacham’s thoughts about this part of Jefferson’s life are truisms too. “However different in form presidential contests were, one feature has been constant from the beginning,” he observes. “They have been rife with attacks and counterattacks.” Any individual aspiring to the office still wishes, at least, to fit Mr. Meacham’s description: “a lifelong student of control and power bringing all of his virtues and vices to the largest possible stage.”
“The Art of Power” does not fully come into its own until Jefferson does: after the Louisiana Purchase, after the Lewis and Clark expedition, after Washington and back at Monticello, cultivating the intellectual, artistic and scientific pursuits that make him so exemplary and rare among American presidents.
This is the most affecting part of Mr. Meacham’s portrait — the man is finally freed from his carapace, able to cultivate his life and legacy. This biography ascribes less complexity and malice to Jefferson than other recent books have. But it captures less of his brilliance too.
Mr. Meacham intends “The Art of Power” as a portrait that “neither lionizes nor indicts Jefferson, but instead restores him to his full and rich role as an American statesman who resists easy categorization.” That sounds bolder than it proves to be. It’s a polite way of staking out middle ground.