Jefferson's Art of Power

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, a magnificent biography by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston, brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. The book presents Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era.

Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power. Though Jefferson hated confrontation, his understanding of power and of human nature enabled him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his mistakes, and to prevail.

Passionate about many things—women, his family, books, science, architecture, gardens, friends, Monticello, and Paris—Jefferson loved America most, and he strove over and over again, despite fierce opposition, to realize his vision: the creation, survival, and success of popular government in America. Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Jon Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all of American history.

The father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and of the settling of the West, Jefferson recognized that the genius of humanity—and the genius of the new nation—lay in the possibility of progress, of discovering the undiscovered and seeking the unknown. From the writing of the Declaration of Independence to elegant dinners in Paris and in the President's House; from political maneuverings in the boardinghouses and legislative halls of Philadelphia and New York to the infant capital on the Potomac; from his complicated life at Monticello, his breathtaking house and plantation in Virginia, to the creation of the University of Virginia, Jefferson was central to the age.

The Jefferson story resonates today not least because he led his nation through ferocious partisanship and cultural warfare amid economic change and external threats, and also because he embodies an eternal drama, the struggle of the leadership of a nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding world. This terrific book allows us to see the political genius of Thomas Jefferson better than we have ever seen it before, as Jefferson emerges with such vitality that it seems as if he might still be alive today.

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