Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

Tier 3

Now would probably be a good time to let you know that I’m a bit of a masochist when it comes to biographies. I don’t want some nice, cursory reflection on an individual. I want an exhaustive tome. I want to look down at my audiobook app and see that I have days left to listen. My favorite presidential biographies on this list are multivolume ones. My favorite of all of them – Robert Caro’s still unfinished series on Lyndon Johnson – currently clocks in at around 150 hours.

And I want more.

I want to have a biography full of mini-biographies. I want to hear about their childhood and failures in excruciating (though well-written) detail. It’s part of what I loved about this project. To watch these biographies overlap to meet future and former presidents. I love for a biography to show the person and the time, and to do that, you need scope. And, in my experience, a short biography often lacks that scope.

I think it’s important to mention this as we continue through these biographies because it’s not Jon Meacham’s fault that he wrote a digestible book. For comparison Chernow’s book on Washington is about 42 hours long, McCullough’s on Adams about 30 hours, and Meacham’s book on Thomas Jefferson is just under 19 hours.

I know that he could’ve written a longer book. I do not doubt his ability as a researcher or his knowledge of his subject. He’s the only biographer in this series to appear three times and has won a Pulitzer Prize (two honors that I assume he considers equal). He writes in a beautiful style that often feels novelistic. My middling grade for his biography of Jefferson says far more about me than it does about him.

But this is my list, and everyone can’t be in tier one.

My problem with this book is its length. Or maybe not its length exactly, but the speed through which certain events are dealt with. I know this was intentional. Meacham and his publisher surely discussed the length, and making a more reasonably sized biography is, in many ways, better. More people will read this book than Caro’s Master of the Senate. And they should because, despite my criticism, this is still a very good book.

I simply wanted more. For such a mammoth figure in our nation’s history, I wanted to dive deeper. But, again, that’s my fault. And I will find a more exhaustive biography of Jefferson in the future, but for now, we have this.

Now onto Jefferson. Where to begin? Sally Hemming? His seemingly cowardly retreat from Richmond during the Revolutionary War? The Declaration of Independence? The Louisiana Purchase? His time in France?

There’s too much. Too varied a career to spend much time on individual moments.

Instead, what I wish to discuss is the idea of specialization. We live in an era of hyper-specialization. We’ve been trained that it’s better to excel at one thing than dabble in many. There’s more money in specific expertise. More prestige. We’ve come to believe that specialization makes for a better person and professional.

And I hate that.

Maybe it’s better. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I find this over-specialization dull.

Thomas Jefferson was, for his many faults, a man who dabbled. Some may argue he did more than merely dabble. That his exploits in various fields, from architecture to agriculture to politics to philosophy, were more expert than amateurish. But I would attest that’s only because he spent time working in so many varied pursuits. It teaches you to think differently and see problems and the world through a mixed prism. It builds curiosity and teaches humility by showing that someone else knows more than you in a given field.

And most importantly, it emphasizes improvement. If you always have a new challenge to tackle or a new hobby to investigate, you’re never a finished product. And we should constantly be improving. We should never see ourselves as finished.

Jefferson is remembered a bit differently due to his status as a renaissance man. People loved him for it, and they sought to emulate and glorify him for his varied skills. Later, those same people would violently protect his reputation and shape the image of him that we have today.

He’s remembered as someone who was above petty politics when he essentially started them in this country by forming one of the first political parties and smearing his opponents. He’s remembered as aloof, a philosopher prince attempting to shape the United States in the mold of enlightenment France, and yet, he could be as vicious and calculating as anyone. He’s remembered for the brilliant Louisiana Purchase, showing him as a seeming virtuoso in international diplomacy, but we aren’t taught about the 1807 Embargo, which was an unmitigated disaster.

In short, he contained multitudes. He wasn’t one thing. It’s tempting to boil these people down to their finest particle and to paint someone like Jefferson as either a god or a devil. But the truth is he was neither.

His treatment of Sally Hemming was horrific. It was then, and it is now. I won’t hear about him being a product of his time. His time was full of discourse on the inhumanity of slavery. His willingness to balance the perceived notions of human freedom and equality while simultaneously being a master over dozens of enslaved people is abhorrent and contradictory on the highest level. That isn’t to mention the litany of errors he made as president.

But he wrote the Declaration of Independence, fought for religious freedom, and founded the University of Virginia. He inspired generations of politicians to follow. Meacham saliently argues that more than any other founding father, he shaped the nation through those who followed him. Few individuals in our nation’s history can truly be said to have molded it, and he’s one of them.

In the end, Meacham chooses to lionize Jefferson. As I mentioned in a previous post, biographers often do this. You want to believe the person you’re writing about was a good person, and biographies tend to skew toward idolization. That’s not a knock on Meacham, and he’s not alone in this. There’s no such thing as an unbiased biography. Every writer leaves fingerprints on their book.

And as for Jefferson, in many ways, he is the perfect embodiment of this nation, the living contradiction that we can never escape. A country founded on the premise of freedom and equality that enslaved countless souls and ignored the rights of women. He encompasses our loftiest visions and our dirtiest truths. He’s been molded to fit the time more than any other president. A hero of slave-owning states' rights traitors during and after the Civil War. He was an enemy of the conservative establishment in the late 19th century due to his populist views. He was a hero of New Deal democrats, only to be later (correctly) demonized for his slaveholding. He is, much like the United States herself, whatever you want him to be. He’s shaped in your image, he changes with the time, but his influence remains.

Fun fact(s): He loved pasta and ice cream; he was constantly in debt, including dying with between one and two million (in today’s dollars) owed; and he wrote his own gravestone, which mentions writing The Declaration of Independence and the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom, as well as being the father of The University of Virginia, but doesn’t mention being president.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!