Flashback, June 1781: “Other Midnight Ride” Saves Jefferson

In her cockamamie way, Sarah Palin’s recent visit to Boston has reminded Americans again about how Paul Revere’s ride serves as our eternal symbol of patriotic vigilance. The Beantown jack-of-all-trades got lucky in the afterlife in being lionized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (though I imagine he’s turning over in his grave, angry and thoroughly confused, at the thought that a contemporary politician believed he “warned the British” about their own plans).

To my knowledge, no versifier of similar renown has performed such magic for Jack Jouett Jr. But without the all-night ride, completed June 4, 1781, of this Virginian, not only might Thomas Jefferson have been executed, but the American Revolution as a whole might have been snuffed out with Britain’s capture of members of the government of the large, strategically important state of Virginia.

For the rest of Jefferson’s life, opponents would charge that Jouett’s arduous and brave ride would not have been necessary at all if the Sage of Monticello had adequately performed his duties as governor of Virginia. As with so many politically inspired charges down to this very day, this aspersion on Jefferson’s record blended manifest unfairness with at least some amount of truth.

In my American Presidency seminar in college, our professor tossed out the possibility of one theme for the semester: the performance of those Presidents who served as governors before they reached the White House. Their triumphs and disasters in state capitals, he thought, often foreshadowed how they performed as President.

That observation was especially true of Jefferson’s two years as governor of Virginia. The best way to gauge what he thought of it can be glimpsed by observing the three achievements mentioned on his tombstone at Monticello: “author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia."

Those three items are primarily intellectual, not political, achievements. Nowhere does Jefferson mention that he had gained the highest office in both his state and nation. No wonder: In both cases, he left office profoundly depressed, with his achievements called into question by near-disasters that were at least partly of his own making.

Jefferson had just finished his second one-year term as governor the day before Jouett, a resident of Charlottesville, took off to warn him that the British were on their way to capture him. Jefferson couldn’t have been happier to relinquish his post: Virginia, suspicious of executive power, had not only vested its governor with no independent veto power, no appointive power, no power to call out the militia, but had left him bound by the decisions of an eight-man Council of State elected by the Assembly.

At key moments in the developing military crisis of early 1781, the Council of State hamstrung Jefferson, being unable several times to meet a quorum and, in one instance, rejecting his plea to create a standing Virginia army. However, in several ways, Jefferson made critical errors of his own in dealing with British invaders into Virginia’s heartland:

* he had ignored intelligence, in September and December 1780, from both Generals Horatio Gates and George Washington, that the British were planning assaults southward from New York or, more specifically, directly at Portsmouth;
* he had dispatched as many troops from the state as he could to assist George Rogers Clark on his military mission into present-day Ohio, Indiana and Illinois—giving later American negotiators in Paris an invaluable assist in claiming this as American territory, but in the meantime leaving Viriginia's coastal defenses badly undermanned;
* he had waited two days after learning that unknown ships had landed in the Chesapeake before calling out the militia or requesting an emergency meeting of the Council of State.

One element in particular made Jefferson’s two terms as governor an unfortunate dress rehearsal for his two terms as President: a ghastly underestimation of the value of naval power. After six weeks in office, he had concluded that “we should be gainers were we to burn our whole navy.” Thirty years later, as the War of 1812 was just about to ensue, the ex-President advised one confidante that seizing Canada would be “a mere matter of marching,” and his belief that small coastal gunboats instead of frigates would be sufficient to defend the country proved a dismal failure when the British came ashore and burned Washington.

It’s hard to know how Jefferson, who implemented so many ingenious schemes around Monticello, could be so impractical about defense matters. Perhaps it was a byproduct of a visionary nature that could see so much in the distance but so little in front of his own nose. (Of the three Virginian Democratic-Republicans, it was James Monroe, the one judged blessed with the smallest amount of intellect, who had the best grasp of military matters—but that might have resulted from his three years he spent in the Continental Army—three years more than Jefferson and Madison spent combined.)

The result, in the first half of 1781, was a pair of near-catastrophes at the hands of two of the British army’s most despised officers. In early January, Jefferson and the legislature had to flee Richmond (a site chosen as state capital because, ironically, it would be easier to defend that Williamsburg, located closer to the coast) to avoid capture at the hands of Benedict Arnold. Then in early June, Col. Banastre Tarleton made a dash toward Charlottesville to capture the assembly, which were planning to reconvene there following Arnold’s raid on Richmond.

Several prominent patriots—including Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee in town and Jefferson in Monticello—were within the reach of the man that the patriots had taken to calling “Bloody Ban” for what they saw as his war crimes. In his characteristic vigorous fashion, Tarleton had covered tremendous ground in bringing his troops to this point.

Tarleton had stopped his men to rest on June 3 at a tavern when Jouett overheard their plans. As inconspicuously as he could, the 26-year-old Charlottesville resident—a bear of a man—dashed out of the Cuckoo Tavern and made his extraordinary ride to Charlottesville.

Though Jouett’s adventures over the next 24 hours are unsung nowadays, his ride was more astounding than Revere’s:

* Revere’s ride to Concord was only 15 miles; Jouett’s was more than 40;
* Revere had the help of two other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, the last of whom actually completed the ride to Concord; Jouett made the trip entirely by himself.
* Jouett, to escape British detection, rode virtually the entire way on backroads, through vines, brambles, and potholes.

Jouett reached Jefferson by 4:30 in the morning. The latter is said to have coolly offered the rider some of his choice Madeira to fortify him for the last leg of his trip to Charlottesville to warn members of the assembly gathered there to leave.

You can only imagine how Jefferson must have felt when he heard this latest bit of news from Jouett: anxiety for his household, relief that he’d be able to make his getaway just in time, but also a feeling something like that great line from Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this?” His wife Martha had just experienced another difficult pregnancy, and she was showing less resiliency than before. (She would, in fact, die a year later, leaving her husband so disconsolate that he refused to leave his room for three weeks.)

Now Jefferson had to deal with a government that he technically no longer headed but whose successor was weeks away from taking office, as well as a household on the brink of danger. (Some historians have argued that, contrary to his reputation as “Bloody Ban,” Tarleton had given strict orders that private property would not be harmed. But even if that were true, the British would still be practicing a kind of predecessor of the neutron bomb: i.e., minimizing property damage while maximizing the pain felt by people. Thus, having put his signature to the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson would be on the short list of politicians measured by the British for the noose if captured.)

After sending his wife and family to safety at a friend’s home, Jefferson rode off, leaving the estate in the care of two slaves, Martin Hemings and Caesar. From the stories passed down over the years, the slaves suffered more at the hands of the British than their master did. When the first British horseman rode up to Monticello, Hemings slammed down the floorboard of the east portico on poor Caesar, who was hiding the silver plates there. For the next three days, Caesar was trapped under the porch until the redcoats departed. Martin, if the family legend is true, had an even closer call, refusing to divulge Jefferson’ s whereabouts to the redcoats despite a gun pressed against his chest.

What Jefferson faced next was not musket fire from redcoats, but potshots from his countrymen. His conduct during the defense of Richmond had disgusted the Continental Army’s General von Steuben, and now his conduct during Tarleton’s raid led to charges of cowardice. A few days after the enemy had departed, the legislature took up the issue. An impassioned defense by Jefferson led the legislators not only to withdraw the charges, but to thank him for his “impartial, upright, and attentive administration, whilst in office.”

Nevertheless, Jefferson could not embrace private life readily enough after that. That same attitude would be repeated in March 1809, after the Embargo Act--passed by his administration to punish Britain for its impressment of their former sailors on American ships—only ended up devastating American shipping, and plunging his own popularity to its great depth during his eight years as President. Now on the brink of retiring, he couldn’t wait once again to stop sailing on “the boisterous ocean of political passions.”

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of James Monroe, "National Security President")

April 28, 1758—James Monroe—fifth President of the United States and, according to former Presidential candidate and Monroe biographer Gary Hart, our "first national-security President" —was born the second of five children of a small planter in Westmoreland County, in what was then the colony of Virginia.

Two and a half years ago, on the same trip to the piedmont section of the state in which I visited the mansions of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Monticello and Montpelier, I also stopped at what their protégé, Monroe, called his "cabin castle": Ash Lawn-Highland. I have to admit that, having just come from Jefferson's iconic hilltop home-turned temple of democracy, I was surprised, even let down, by the Monroe's comparatively simple farmhouse.

Yet, as my eyes swept over Monroe's rolling 535 acres in the mountains of western Virginia, I was reminded that he was, after all, a plantation owner requiring many resources to sustain the lifestyle he desired as a man and required as a politician. Moreover, a longer look afforded some surprises.

Instead of one story high, which was how it looked from the north side, the house was, I soon noticed, tucked into a hillside that concealed a basement. Once past the modest exterior, I saw evidence of a man with a taste for sophisticated, even costly foreign furniture, usually French. Clearly, there was more to Monroe than a first glance suggested.

An Underestimated Chief Executive

For all the inevitable comparisons with Monticello and Montpelier, then, Ash Lawn-Highland should not be overlooked, anymore than Monroe's political legacy should be. The last of the "Virginia Dynasty" that dominated the Presidency at the start of the American Republic, Monroe was, like other Presidents down to the present day, used to being "misunderestimated."

Nobody—but nobody —thought he was smarter than his fellow Democratic-Republicans, Jefferson and Madison. Even his Cabinet doubted him. His Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, regarded him as "slow." His Secretary of the Treasury, William Crawford, thought Monroe was so indecisive that he threatened his chief with a cane.

Yet Monroe, though still not placed among the great Presidents, has achieved greater stature among historians, even making the top 10 on occasion. The doctrine named for him has dominated American policy in the Western Hemisphere for nearly two centuries. He won two terms, the second in such near-unanimous fashion that his administration was dubbed, somewhat misleadingly, the "Era of Good Feelings."

Just as Monroe rebuilt the White House after its burning by the British in the War of 1812, so he led the United States to a new era of peace and prosperity. After two wars involving its mother country in its first 40 years, the United States would never experience a British invasion again — not unless you count a quartet of moptops singing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964.

Early in his career, Monroe would have been voted one of the least likely to be called a consensus-builder. His advocacy of the French Revolution while serving as America's envoy to the country led George Washington to recall him, and Monroe's self-justifying pamphlet upon his return further annoyed the President (who, incidentally, had been his commanding officer at the Battle of Trenton, where 18-year-old Monroe had been wounded). In December 1799, Monroe's election as Virginia's governor so enraged his old boss that Washington discussed it for an hour without taking off his snow-covered cloak – triggering the pneumonia that killed him a few days later.

Nor was Washington the only Federalist that Monroe angered during his time in Washington. Thoroughly convinced that Monroe was behind the exposure of his affair with Maria Reynolds, Alexander Hamilton challenged the Democratic-Republican to a duel. Only cooler heads prevented a Weehawken-style duel that, like Hamilton's a few years later with Aaron Burr, might have resulted in loss of a political career or a life. (As I noted earlier this year, the most likely culprit in the leak was an associate of the Virginia Dynasty, John James Beckley, who went on to become the first librarian of Congress.)

The Tales This House Could Tell

Like its longtime master, Ash Lawn-Highland has passed in and out and back into fashion. Dire financial straits forced Monroe to put the house up for sale only a year after he left the White House, and even to sue the government he once headed for reimbursement of expenses from a lifetime of public service.

In 1974, the home was bequeathed by its then-owner to Monroe's alma mater, the College of William and Mary. Income from admissions, shop sales, grants, and tax-deductible contributions go not only toward maintenance of the house, but also to merit scholarship recipients at William and Mary.

Guides at Ash Lawn-Highland were quick to point out to me and the other visitors on this golden autumn afternoon that Monroe had more executive experience than any prior American President – U.S. senator, four-term Governor of Virginia, Minister to Great Britain, Spain, and France, Secretary of State and Secretary of War.

How could a man with such accomplishments be overlooked? This property is a good place to start for an answer.

Like so much else in Monroe's life, it was influenced by Jefferson – from the location (only two and a half miles from Jefferson's estate in Charlottesville, personally selected by the great man himself), to the gardeners who started the orchards, even to the placement of the kitchen underneath the house.

Having taught the young Monroe the law and taken him under his wing as the new republic formed, Jefferson could be forgiven for offering a little architectural advice, too.

Some of his other counsel was not as benign. Upon inspecting Monroe's slave quarters, Jefferson told his protégé that they were too good for their occupants: even white guests, he noted, barely enjoyed better accommodations than the "servants" (the preferred euphemism for the "peculiar institution"). Perhaps he wasn't blessed with Jefferson's often stunning farsightedness, but Monroe was also not plagued by the stunning moral blindness that made the Sage of Monticello so maddening to posterity.

A Beloved But Aloof Beauty

The house interior also reflects another difference between the two: the presence of a wife. There is virtually no trace at Monticello of Martha Jefferson, who died when her husband was only halfway through his life. The sensibility of Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, on the other hand, comes through as strongly as that of her husband in virtually every room at Ash Lawn-Highland.

In the parlor, I scrutinized the portrait of Elizabeth as a young woman. You could see why Monroe was devoted to her throughout their married life, and why her death hastened his own a year later.

She retained much of her youthful beauty all the way into her fifties in the White House, with some observers even comparing her to a goddess. But that description also hints at unapproachability – a distinct disadvantage for a plantation owner and politician expected to lavish hospitality on an epic scale. Elizabeth was utterly without the genius for small talk that distinguished Dolley Madison, and she used her mounting illnesses to evade social engagements she dreaded.

“The Last of the Cocked Hats”

The "last of the cocked hats" (i.e., the last President to have fought in the American Revolution), James Monroe favored knee-buckled breeches and three-cornered Revolutionary hats, even during his Presidency. This identification with the republic's beginnings had become so complete that people figured it was natural that he would even die on July 4, 1831, just like Adams and Jefferson had done five years before.

Both old-fashioned and cosmopolitan, Monroe knew enough about the Old World's corruptions and convulsions that he would not allow it to regain lost traction in the New World. The doctrine that Secretary of State (and future President) John Quincy Adams formulated for him has served as the bedrock of American foreign policy ever since then. The little "cabin-castle" in Virginia reminded Monroe every day of everything valuable in his country.

This Day in American History (Birth of Thomas Jefferson, Bibliophile)

April 13, 1743—Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong bibliophile who sparked one revolution in America and countless others the world over by declaring that "all men are created equal," began a life of fundamental paradox when he was born in Shadwell, Va., on a plantation owned by his slaveholder father, Peter Jefferson.

"The only birthday I ever commemorate is that of our Independence, the Fourth of July," the author of the Declaration of Independence said while serving in the White House. In one of the great ironies of American history, both Jefferson and his longtime friend and former political rival, John Adams, died on that second "birthday" in 1826, each unaware that the other was about to pass away.

A further irony: Jefferson was not only unable to rid his nation of an institution he had castigated in his youth, but incapable of ending his own fatal dependence on it in operating the estate he had built, Monticello.

Jefferson's personality was so multidimensional, his achievements so multitudinous, his times so tumultuous, and his legacy so ambivalent that I'll undoubtedly return, time and time again, with your indulgence, faithful reader, to his life. But as a professional librarian and literary aficionado, I'd like to focus today on one aspect of his existence: Books.

I have visited Monticello several times, most recently two and a half years ago, when I was struck in a new way by how fundamental Jefferson's library was to him. It offers a particularly vivid way of illustrating John F. Kennedy's famous quip, when greeting an assemblage of 49 Nobel Prize winners in April 1962, that it was “probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for those times when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

The research of Jack McLaughlin, in Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder, highlights just how staggering an achievement his library was for his time. In fact, there were three substantial libraries created by the Virginian in his lifetime: the first, inherited from his father, which was destroyed in the fire that consumed his birthplace Shadwell in 1770; a large general collection that he compiled over the next 45 years at Monticello; and a more specialized one, eventually numbering some 1,000 volumes, that he accumulated in his last decade.

The Monticello library comprises, along with Jefferson's bedroom, the "Greenhouse," and the "Cabinet," one of his favorite architectural forms, the octagon. Freely confessing to the "malady of bibliomania," Jefferson admitted, "I cannot live without books."

Most titles here are not, but his detailed lists made it easy for preservationists to reconstruct this. The books not only are in English, but also in French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Old English.

Jefferson classified Massachusetts law books in the "foreign law" section of the library – a graphic illustration of his view of the original states and their place in the new republic. A high-backed red chair is a remnant from his term as Vice-President under Adams.

One reason why Jefferson could not free his slaves at his death was that he was entangled in $100,000 in debt—a fortune at the time—accumulated because he was as much a slave to his appetites—for the best furniture, best paintings and sculptures, and best food and wines (680 of the latter)—as his slaves were to him. Only one aspect of his collecting mania seems forgivable (or, at least, understandable) to me: his books. Even in this instance, however, as with so much else with Jefferson, certain aspects of their creation and dissemination are problematic.

Let’s start with how the books were shelved. McLaughlin notes that, breaking with the traditional practice of the time, Jefferson had them classified not by their size but by subject, because he didn’t want to waste any time locating them. The classification scheme he used, based on Francis Bacon’s system of knowledge, was eventually the same one adopted for the Library of Congress.

But how were those shelves created? You guessed it: through slave labor—more specifically, under the supervision of John Hemings, the half-brother of Sally (need we say more about her?), a talented artisan.

During Jefferson’s first term in office, the first Librarian of Congress, John James Beckley, was appointed at his behest – though, as I pointed out in an earlier post, the President did neither the office nor his country any favors by appointing to the job a political hack who had endeared himself to his Virginia patrons Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe by leaking the news of Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds.

Even the far more lasting service to the institution that Jefferson rendered – the bargain-basement sale of 6,000 volumes from his own Monticello collection to Congress, after British troops burned its library during the War of 1812—was not without its nettlesome aspects: He did so at a point in his life when he was already financially hard pressed.

As a Virginia grandee, Jefferson was too mired in the mores of his own planter class to understand that libraries could be the province of anyone else besides white males. But eventually, the desires to inform oneself and improve one's life that lie at the heart of libraries would lead African-Americans on a long and tortuous road to freedom. In many ways, access to books still represents the most powerful weapon they—or any of us—possess as we seek the full American promise of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."