Confidential Letters in Partisan Crossfire

"After the vote, Jefferson worked harder than ever. He wrote a flurry of letters—at least eight in seven days, each one marked confidential. He returned to the other diplomats, using the same script he’d tried on Irujo. This time, it worked. “He is ambitious in his character of a man of letters,” the British official wrote. But he assumed the Americans were more interested in the Gulf Coast than the Pacific Northwest, and he issued a passport. The French diplomat asked if Irujo had signed off. Jefferson considered this and then said he “ought to.” That was good enough for the Frenchman, who simply copied the passport from his British counterpart."

"That changed with a surprising job offer. In the election of 1800—an ugly and polarizing affair, with Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans facing off against John Adams and the Federalists—Jefferson won the presidency. Before his inauguration, he wrote to Lewis and asked him to be his private secretary. Jefferson admired Lewis’s “knowledge of the western country, of the army and of all its interests.” Mostly, though, he needed someone he could trust. America remained angry and divided. When a Federalist senator learned that a sympathetic Supreme Court justice was sick, he responded with partisan calculation: “God grant him a life as long as Jefferson.” Outrage and ideological fracture cropped up everywhere. Politics was almost certainly the cause of the argument that led to Lewis’s court-martial."