Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809

This is the fifth out of a six volume, massive biography of Thomas Jefferson. In these hundreds of pages, just his second term as president is covered. As with the other volumes, Malone goes into incredible detail, practically going week by week in Jefferson's life, it seems, for these four years.

I've said this before, and I will say it again: I have read multiple biographies on a bunch of the key individuals of that founding generation of the country, and in all of them, Thomas Jefferson was the villain. Even in Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton's biography, Jefferson comes off as the most ominous and terrible presence in that man's life, and not Aaron Burr.

So many of the people that knew Jefferson best described him as calculating, duplicitous, hypocritical, and arrogant. And yet, for the first four volumes in this current series, Malone has reflexively praised and defended Jefferson in spite of his wrongs. In reference to those, he consistently finds some sort of excuse, reason, or explanation; or shrugs off as not that big of a deal; or chalks it up to regular human foibles.

This has frustrated me, and I have been really looking forward to this fifth volume because to me, this second term of Jefferson's presidency, was the most clearly and self-evidently corrupt and terrible of this man's entire life. I was really curious how Malone was going to approach it.

So how does he fare? As poorly as I had feared.

All of those defense mechanisms I mentioned before, are doubled and tripled down on. Granted, some of Jefferson's worst acts may have only been discovered more recently since this biography was written, but still, it is bewildering to me the pretzels this author will twist himself into just to justify Jefferson or redirect the blame away from him.

Jefferson sics his attorney general and the entire legal apparatus of the federal government against his former vice president for trying to do something that was not even illegal at the time and charging him with treason–and retrying him a couple of times for similar charges trying to get one thing to stick. He does relentless attacks on the Judiciary, defying court orders towards him, claiming immunity simply as President, and was the first president to try to make the argument that he was above the law because he had better things to do than follow court orders about his presidential conduct and business. He takes the country into economic collapse because he makes terrible decisions in diplomacy and ends up cutting off trade from all outside countries, and the next president (his BFF Madison) has to be the one to admit defeat and roll back this failed economic warfare, eventually resulting in the War of 1812. After being swept into the office on his opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson then turns around and enacts similar legislation when people in the media are criticizing this embargo.

And all along, through this book, Malone has justifications and reasons that he gives for all of it. I understand that the real human subjects of biographies do not fall simply into the flattened caricatures of villains in novels. But you can still say that somebody acted selfishly, or badly, or unwisely.

In this book, Malone's most frequent defense is to blame other people and to say that Jefferson surely could not have known about such and such thing; or to say that Jefferson did not seem to comment on or say anything about a particular matter and so we have to assume the best of him.

Malone says this even though there are a lot of insight about Jefferson we have because of occasional recipients of Jefferson's letters did not follow his instructions to burn the letter so their contents don't get out (which is his “usual custom”). He also tells people in several letters not to write down a certain thing so they can discuss something in person and there not be a written record of it. Malone quotes from all these letters, without pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that there clearly seems to be a huge body of Jefferson's thought and writings we don't know about precisely because of Jefferson's design and him not wanting us to know about it. Therefore, Jefferson himself is not an absolutely trustworthy narrator of his own story. We have to view many of his actions through the eyes of others. And when you do that, you get a much more negative picture of the man than Malone gives.

And yet, just as with the other volumes, I am really torn. When it comes to a portrait of Jefferson, Malone is clearly biased to the point of distortion. I am thousands of pages into Jefferson's life, and I still don't know who the man is, and the picture I have is dramatically different than the one that this author is trying to promote.

And yet, the granular detail in these books is so fascinating and interesting. As pure historical account of how politics, foreign policy, and governance played out, this book is invaluable. Most other biographies of Jefferson devote a 30-page chapter to the Aaron Burr trial, and a 30-page chapter to the embargo–and that's it. And even then, they kind of float above everything and give a bird's-eye view of all that happened.

This book, however, goes day by day into the events surrounding the decisions that caused these events. Malone admirably jumps between diplomatic efforts in other countries and what was going on there, and the discussions that the administration was having amongst themselves here in America while awaiting word from overseas. It shows just how difficult it was to do foreign policy with an ocean between you and the rest of the world, and no electronic communication. We intuitively know that in a sense, but this book really hammers home how that affected things here.

The one exception to this, however, is the single most complicated and convoluted situation Jefferson was ever involved in: the events surrounding Aaron Burr which led to his treason trial. In his attempt to explain all that was happening, Malone gets lost in the trees and loses the forest. I do not think that he prepares the reader with a good overall framework within which to fit these day-by-day (and sometimes hour-by-hour) accounts of what was going on simultaneously with multiple people in multiple places and countries in order to understand this. Other more recent books have done this better, like Nancy Isenberg's Aaron Burr biography, “Fallen Founder”, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

And so, as an analysis of Jefferson, this volume once again fails in my view. And yet as a history and an account of the story of his life and those around him, it is invaluable. It is well written and clear and at times almost thrilling. The pacing is well done and Incredibly complicated events are explained comprehensively yet deftly. And so, as long as you go into this volume with a clear view towards Malone's biases, I do think this book is fantastic and a worthy read.