OK, first the claim that Jefferson is dishonest and conniving (all content between " " is directly from historical documents)–
During the public controversy surrounding the founding of Freneau’s National Gazette, Jefferson was once again less than honest in explaining his role in the matter to George Washington. Julian Boyd, editor of the Jefferson Papers, was forced to conclude that Jefferson was thoroughly disingenuous in explaining to the President the role that he had played in founding and sponsoring a newspaper that was hostile to the administration. See Julian Boyd, “Editor’s Note,”… Jefferson’s use of the press to further his political aims is ably discussed in Frank Mott, Jefferson and the Press (Baton Rouge, La., 1943).
JA to Thomas Jefferson, 29 July 1791, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 20: 305-7. In a thinly veiled reference to Adams [And Washington – ed.], Jefferson told Philip Mazzei in 1796 that it “would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies [monarchy and aristocracy], men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.” Right up until he end of his life, Jefferson insisted on repeating his indictment. In 1825, he asked William Short if it was possible to “read Mr. Adams’s defense of the American Constitutions without seeing that he was a monarchist?”
[Jefferson felt] the urge to assure Washington that, contrary to the gossip circulating in the corridors and byways of Philadelphia, he was not responsible for the various rumors describing the president as a quasi-senile front man for the Federalist conspiracy against the vast majority of the American people. The historical record makes it perfectly clear, to be sure, that Jefferson was orchestrating the campaign of vilification, which had its chief base of operations in Virginia and its headquarters at Monticello. But Jefferson was the kind of man who could have passed a lie-detector test confirming his integrity, believing as he did that the supreme significance of his larger cause rendered conventional distinctions between truth and falsehood superfluous.
Washington’s response was designed to let Jefferson know that his professed innocence itself sounded like the defense comments of a guilty man, and that Washington already knew a good deal more than Jefferson realized about who was whispering what behind his back. “If I had entertained any suspicious before,” wrote Washington, “the assurances you have given me of the contrary would have removed them; but the truth is, I harboured none.” (Translation: Your protests confirm my suspicions.) Then Washington parted the curtain covering his soul just enough to show Jefferson a glimpse of what he truly felt: “As you have mentioned the subject yourself, it would not be frank, candid or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as derogatory from the opinion I had conceived you entertained to me.” (Translation: I am onto your game.) “That to your particular friends and connexions you have described, and they have described me, as a person under a dangerous influence.” (Translation: My sources are impeccable.) “My answer has invariable been that I had never discovered any thing in the conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions in my mind of his insincerity.” (Translation: I have not done unto others what they have been doing unto me.)
Washington concluded with an impassioned defense of his support for Jay’s Treaty: “I was using my utmost exertions to establish a national character of our own, independent, as far as our obligations and justice would permit, of every nation of the earth.” But somehow he had “been accused of being the enemy of one Nation [France], and subject to the influence of another [England]; and to prove it, that every act of my administration should be tortured, and the most insidious misrepresentations of them be made (by giving on side only of a subject, and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket.) But enough of this; I have already gone farther in the expression of my feelings that I intended.” (Translation: Even this mere glimpse into my soul is more than you deserve, my former friend.)
For the next year, Jefferson attempted to sustain at least the veneer of a friendship with Washington by writing him letters in the Virginia gentleman mode, avoiding politics and foreign policy altogether… Then all communication from Mount Vernon to Monticello ceased forever.
In a letter exchange between Abigail Adams and Jefferson (in 1804) prompted by the death of his daughter after a long spell of no communication between the two families, Jefferson took the opportunity, uninvited, to review the long political partnership he had enjoyed with her husband, getting in some digs against JA. Mrs. Adams was not going to have any of it.
Abigail launched a frontal attack on Jeffersons’ character. Throughout Adams’s presidency, she claimed, Jefferson had used his position as vice president to undermine the policies of the very man he had been elected to support. This was bad enough. But the worst offenses occurred during the election of 1800. Jefferson was guilty of “the blackest calumny and foulest falsehoods” during that bitter campaign. While affecting disinterest and detachment, he was secretly hiring scandalmongers like James Callander to libel Adams with outrageous charges: Adams was mentally deranged; Adams intended to have himself crowned as an American monarch; Adams planned to appoint John Quincy his successor to the presidency. “This, Sir, I considered as a personal injury,” Abigail observed, “the Sword that cut the Gordion knot.” It was richly ironic and wholly deserving that the infamous Callender had then turned on Jefferson and accused him of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings, his household slave. “The serpent you cherished and warmed,” she noted with satisfaction, “bit the hand that nourished him.”
..His first instinct was to claim that both sides, Republicans and Federalists alike, had engaged in lies and distortions during the election of 1800, and that he had suffered equivalent “calumnies and falshoods” along with Adams. (This was completely true.) He then went on to disclaim that “any person who knew either of us could possibly believe that either meddled in that dirty work.” In effect, he had no role whatsoever in promoting Callender’s libels against Adams. (This was a lie.)
..Abigail was having none of it. As she saw it, Jefferson’s denials only offered further evidence of his duplicity. His complicity in behind-the-scenes political plotting was common knowledge. … there was no denying that Jefferson had mortgaged his honor to win an election. His Federalist critics had always accused him of being a man of party rather than principle. “Pardon me, Sir, if I say,” Abigail concluded, “that I fear you are.”
So there you have it, Jefferson romantics, dishonest, coniving, and betrayal. How can anyone place this man on the same moral pedestal as the other Founders?
