Free America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation by Joshua Kendall Page A

institution that he now headed. He declared his intention to keep it as lean as possible, promising “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another.” And before moving on to his peroration, in which he humbly accepted his demanding new post, Jefferson rallied his fellow citizens around a list of “essential principles,” headed by “equal and exact justice to all men” and “the honest payment of our debts.”
    Attacking the national debt, which had ballooned under the Federalists, became the chief focus of his Republican administration. With the help of his able secretary of the treasury, the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, the compulsive accountant worked tirelessly to clean up America’s finances. Fully aware of the mathematical prowess of the chief executive, Gallatin asked him in a memo dated November 15, 1801, to “calculate what will be the annual sum wanted to pay the interest on, and pay off within eight years, a debt of $21,955,900, bearing an interest of $1,310,401.50.” Since different chunks of the total were lent out at different interest rates, the problem was far from straightforward; nevertheless, an unfazed Jefferson provided the precise answer the next day: $3,277,516. He remains the only president ever to use complex logarithmic equations to crunch the national debt as well as census data. In his first State of the Union Address, which was submitted to, rather than spoken before, Congress that December, Jefferson explained that America’s population was growing geometrically—as per his calculations, it was expected to double in twenty-two years—and that the “multiplications of men…educated in the love of order” meant that he could both pay down the debt and dispense with all internal taxes. And he fulfilled his promises; though to balance the nation’s books, he would reduce the size of the army by half and that of the navy by nearly two-thirds.
    But the president, like the farmer, did not always live within his means. In the spring of 1802, Jefferson became alarmed by the impending transfer of the Louisiana Territory from Spain to France, which had bought back the land from its European neighbor in 1800. “This little event, of France’s possessing herself of Louisiana,” he wrote in April 1802, “is the embryo of a tornado.” And his fears were warranted; six months after the transfer, Napoleon closed the port of New Orleans to American ships. Instead of waging war, as the Federalists advocated, Jefferson opened up America’s checkbook. Though the Louisiana Purchase, which instantly doubled the size of the country, ran counter to his principles—in addition to adding $15 million to the debt, the deal implicitly chipped away at states’ rights by giving the president authority not specified in the Constitution—he felt that he had no choice but “to get out of the scrape as I can.” And even before the treaty was ratified by the Senate in the fall of 1803, Jefferson asked Congress to fund a trip to the Pacific that became known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His detailed instructions to Clark, embedded in a three-thousand-word missive dated June 20, 1803, whose numerous drafts he kept revising, included several lists of desiderata; besides weather data, his outgoing personal secretary was to gather vast amounts of information on all the Native Americans, animals, vegetables, and minerals that he came across in his travels. This investment would also pay enormous dividends. On account of this string of accomplishments, historian Joseph Ellis has lauded Jefferson’s first term as “one of the two or three most uniformly successful in American presidential history.”
    The American people voiced a similar sentiment in 1804 when they reelected Jefferson in a landslide. He captured a staggering 73 percent of the popular vote—far more than any other presidential candidate since—which translated into 162 electoral votes; his Federalist