American Sphinx (11 page)

Each of these interpretations offers valuable insights into the intellectual sources of Jefferson’s thinking as he sat down to write the Declaration. Clearly, he knew his Locke, though his favorite Lockean treatise was not the one on government but the
Essay on Human Understanding.
That said, the fundamental claim that revolution is justified if the existent rulers demonstrate systematic disregard for the rights of their subjects certainly originated with Locke. Jefferson may have gotten his specific language from George Mason, but both men knew whom they were paraphrasing. Just as clearly, Jefferson believed that the distinguishing feature that made human beings fully human, and in that sense equal, was the moral sense. Whether he developed that belief by reading Hutcheson or any of the other members of the Scottish school or from his own personal observation of human behavior is ultimately unknowable and not terribly important.

The claim that Jefferson meant the Declaration to be read aloud is more difficult to swallow. A simpler explanation of his unusual punctuation marks would be that he was worried that he might be required to read the document aloud when the committee presented it to the Congress on June 28, so he inserted oratorical guides for his delivery, not trusting his own famously inadequate speaking ability. (We really don’t know whether he himself read it or whether it was read by the secretary of the Congress.) But the recognition that the Declaration plays on the sentiments of readers and listeners, that its underlying tones and rhythms operate in mysterious ways to win assent despite logical contradictions and disjunctions, is a key insight very much worth pondering.

The central problem with all these explanations, however, is that they make Jefferson’s thinking an exclusive function of books. True, he read voraciously as a young man, took notes on his reading and left a comprehensive list of the books in his library. Since we know so much about his reading habits, and so little about other aspects of his early life (the Shadwell fire, again), the temptation to make an implicit connection between his ideas and his books is irresistible. Then once the connection is made with, say, Locke or Hutcheson, one can conveniently talk about particular texts as if one were talking about Jefferson’s mind. This is a long-standing scholarly tradition—one might call it the scholarly version of poetic license—that depends on the unspoken assumption that what one thinks is largely or entirely a product of what one reads.
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In Jefferson’s case, it is a very questionable assumption. In the specific case of the natural rights section of the Declaration, it sends us baying down literary trails after false scents of English or Scottish authors, while the object of the hunt sits squarely before us. In all his previous publications the young Thomas Jefferson had demonstrated a strong affinity for and deep attachment to visions of the ideal society. He found it in various locations “back there” in the past: the forests of Saxony; England before the Norman Conquest; the American colonies before the French and Indian War. (Here his previous reading clearly
did
have a discernible influence, though the relevant books were the Whig histories and the Real Whig writings, but they had been so thoroughly digested that their themes and categories blended imperceptibly into Jefferson’s cast of mind.) His several arguments for American independence all were shaped around a central motif, in which the imperfect and inadequate present was contrasted with a perfect and pure future, achievable once the sources of corruption were eliminated. His mind instinctively created dichotomies and derived its moral energy from juxtaposing the privileged side of any case or cause with the contaminated side. While his language was often colorful, the underlying message was nearly always painted in black and white.

The vision he projected in the natural rights section of the Declaration, then, represented yet another formulation of the Jeffersonian imagination. The specific form of the vision undoubtedly drew upon language Locke had used to describe the putative conditions of society before governments were established. But the urge to embrace such an ideal society came from deep inside Jefferson himself. It was the vision of a young man projecting his personal cravings for a world in which all behavior was voluntary and therefore all coercion unnecessary, where independence and equality never collided, where the sources of all authority were invisible because they had already been internalized. Efforts on the part of scholars to determine whether Jefferson’s prescriptive society was fundamentally individualistic or communal can never reach closure, because within the Jeffersonian utopia such choices do not need to be made. They reconcile themselves naturally.

Though indebted to Locke, Jefferson’s political vision was more radical than liberal, driven as it was by a youthful romanticism unwilling to negotiate its high standards with an imperfect world. One of the reasons why European commentators on American politics have found American expectations so excessive and American political thinking in general so beguilingly innocent is that Jefferson provided a sanction for youthful hopes and illusions, planted squarely in what turned out to be the founding document of the American republic. The American dream, then, is just that, the Jeffersonian dream writ large.

ESCAPE

S
OON AFTER HE HAD
finished drafting the Declaration, but before the debate on it began in the Continental Congress, Jefferson expressed the strong desire to escape from Philadelphia. “I am sorry,” he wrote Edmund Pendleton, that “the situation of my domestic affairs renders it indispensably necessary that I should sollicit the substitution of some other person here,” explaining in his indirect way that the “delicacy of the house will not require me to enter minutely into the private causes which render this necessary.” The “private causes” were unquestionably related to Martha’s health; she was pregnant for the third time in six years and miscarried that summer. “For god’s sake, for your country’s sake, and for my sake,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, “I am under a sacred obligation to go home.” It would have been perfectly in keeping with his character to draft the Declaration, then absent himself from the debate over its content, especially when the center of his private world at Monticello was in danger.
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But he was needed in Philadelphia to preserve a quorum for the Virginia delegation, which was filled with men who preferred to attend the constitutional debates in Williamsburg. So Jefferson did his duty, remaining at his post throughout the summer. He made no contribution to the debates in the Congress over prospective foreign alliances or the shape of the national government under the Articles of Confederation, but he took extensive notes on what others said that became the fullest historical record of those exchanges. Within the context of the moment these issues loomed larger than the passage of the Declaration, which was signed on parchment by all members present on August 2. One of the many ironies of the signing is that Jefferson was available to affix his name to the document that became the basis for his fame only because he had been forced, against his will, to sustain Virginia’s official presence in the Congress.

For his part, Jefferson went out of his way to disavow responsibility for the version of the Declaration passed by the Congress. His own version, he explained to friends back in Virginia, had been badly treated (the operative word was “mangled”); he devoted considerable energy to copying out his own draft, with the revisions made by the Congress inserted in the margins and the deleted sections restored. He needed to differentiate between his language and the published version being circulated throughout the country, claiming that the Congress had watered down the purity of his message in order to appease the faint of heart, who still hoped for reconciliation with England. Although this was hardly the case—the revisions of his draft were driven less by any desire to compromise than to clarify—Jefferson maintained a wounded sense of betrayal by the Congress throughout the remainder of his life.
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His friends in Virginia, perhaps recognizing he needed reassurance, wrote back to him in a commiserative tone. “I am also obliged by your Original Declaration of Independence,” explained Edmund Pendleton, “which I find your brethren have treated as they did your Manifesto last summer [i.e.,
Causes and Necessities
], altered it much for the worse; their hopes of a Reconciliation might restrain them from plain truths then, but what could cramp them now?” Richard Henry Lee also tried to soothe his young friend’s wounded pride by agreeing that the Jeffersonian draft was much better but concluded that “the
Thing
is in its nature so good, that no Cookery can spoil the Dish for the palates of Freemen.” Jefferson’s hypersensitivity to criticism precluded the possibility of a more detached perspective like Lee’s. He contented himself with the preservation, for the historical record, of the difference between his own words and the official version.
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His sensitivity extended to matters beyond drafts of the Declaration. Word reached him in July about rumors circulating in Williamsburg that his support for independence was only lukewarm, a misguided charge that was probably a function of his seclusion at Monticello in the spring when other Virginian leaders were taking the field against Dunmore. “It is a painful situation to be 300 miles from one’s country,” he complained to his old friend William Fleming, “and thereby open to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defence.” Then, later in the month, he heard that reports were circulating within the Virginia leadership that he harbored dangerously radical ideas about the inherent wisdom of the people-at-large, reports that were possibly based on second thoughts within the planter class of his language in the natural rights section of the Declaration. He tried to quash such rumors by writing Edmund Pendleton, who had succeeded the recently deceased Peyton Randolph as the presiding presence of the Tidewater elite, assuring him that “the fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security of the state . . . , which you have heard insisted upon by some, I assure you was never mine.” He reminded Pendleton that none of his drafts of the Virginia constitution called for direct election of the upper house or senate: “I have ever observed that a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom” and that the “first secretion from them is usually crude and heterogeneous.”
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Then there was the charge that he had no stomach for war and had gone soft on the question of military action against the Indians allied with the British. He wrote home to assure friends this too was slander. He favored an all-out campaign against the Indians pursued without mercy: “Nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side the Mississippi.”
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These were emphatic overstatements of his own considerably less belligerent and more trusting convictions. He felt forced into making them in order to answer his critics. His statements are less a measure of what he really thought than a symptom of how vulnerable he felt. He saw himself as an honorable young man who had grudgingly but voluntarily agreed to do his duty by remaining in Philadelphia despite compelling personal reasons to return home. Listening to the delegates in the Continental Congress while they questioned and revised and deleted his wording of the Declaration was bad enough. But then to be whipsawed by rumormongering enemies back in Virginia, accused of being either a tepid or excessive supporter of the revolutionary cause, this was unbearable.

Later in his career Jefferson learned to suffer in silence and to present a placid, impenetrable facade to his critics. John Adams commented admiringly on the mature Jefferson’s capacity to remain silent and unperturbed whenever he was the target of innuendo or of the inevitable jealousies generated by ambitious men playing politics. (Adams lamented his own failure to perfect the technique, which he called “the wisdom of taciturnity,” admitting that his own inveterate tendency was to erupt like a volcano and fondly hope to eliminate his critics in a lava flow.) But young Jefferson had not yet perfected the technique either. The enigmatic masks he eventually learned to wear were essential additions to his public personality precisely because he was by nature thin-skinned and took all criticism personally. Fate had selected him to play a prominent role in what posterity came to regard as the most propitious moment in American history. But for a young man of his tender and vulnerable disposition, making history came at an unacceptable personal cost.
⁶⁸

In September 1776 Jefferson’s prayers were answered when Richard Henry Lee came up from Virginia to replace him in Philadelphia. His exit was less grand but more speedy than his entrance more than a year earlier. Only Jupiter accompanied him this time, and if Jefferson followed his customary habit whenever in a hurry, he drove the horses of his phaeton himself. He could not wait to get back to Martha and Monticello. A month later, when John Hancock wrote in behalf of the Continental Congress asking him to join Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane as a member of the American commission to France, Jefferson sent his regrets, explaining that personal considerations “compel me to ask leave to decline a service so honorable and at the same time so important to the American cause.” He was played out. Both his pride and his vulnerable core of personal feelings had been wounded. He needed time to heal.
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2

PARIS: 1784–89

I am much pleased with the people of this country. The roughness of the human mind are so thoroughly rubbed off with them that it seems as one might glide thro’ a whole life among them without a justle.

—JEFFERSON TO ELIZA HOUSE TRIST
PARIS, AUGUST 18, 1785

I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasure of this gay capital.

—JEFFERSON TO BARON GEISMAR
PARIS, SEPTEMBER 6, 1785

T
HE MAN ENTERING
Paris in August 1784 was older and more complicated than the young Virginian who had ridden into history nine years earlier at Philadelphia. He was traveling in a phaeton again, but this one was a larger, sturdier carriage, handcrafted by his slaves at Monticello, with glass on four sides to protect the passengers. He was accompanied by his twelve-year-old daughter Martha, named after her mother but best known as Patsy, an uncommonly tall and long-limbed girl with her father’s bright eyes and angular bone structure. His other companion was James Hemings, a nineteen-year-old mulatto slave who had replaced Jupiter as a favorite servant. Hemings was also along to learn the fine art of French cooking.
¹

The party required a full week to make the trip from Le Havre to Paris, following the Seine River through Rouen, where centuries ago Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake. “I understand the French so imperfectly as to be uncertain whether those to whom I speak and myself mean the same thing,” Jefferson confessed. The language problem meant that he was “roundly cheated” by porters at several stops. But nothing could spoil the wonder of the French countryside at the start of the harvest season. When they crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly—Jefferson proclaimed it “the most beautiful bridge in the world”—then rolled onto the Champs-Élysées, he was clearly starting a new chapter in his career as America’s minister plenipotentiary to France.
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We have a much clearer sense of how he looked because his ascending fame made him the subject of several portraits, engravings and busts during his five years in France. The skin on his face was now taut and tight, with a permanently reddish hue that made him always appear as if he had just finished exercising. His hair was now more sandy than red, but just as thick and full as ever, cut so that it covered his ears, then tied in the back so as to fall just below his collar. His frame remained angular but was now more muscled and less gangly, the product of daily four-mile walks and a vigorous regimen that included soaking his feet in cold water each morning.

In general, he had grown more handsome with age, like one of those gawky and slightly awkward young men who eventually inhabit their features more comfortably with the years. Time had also allowed him to occupy his height in more proper proportions and carry it with more natural grace. He remained a very tall man for his time. We know that when he made his first official appearance with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin at the French court at Versailles, the physical contrast struck several observers as almost comical, like watching a cannonball, a teapot and a candlestick announce themselves as the American trinity.
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If aging had served him well physically—perhaps here was an underlying reason why Jefferson always thought that the future was on his side—it had also seasoned him psychologically. Many American lives had been caught up in the turmoil of the war for independence, then deposited on the other side of the historic conflict with scars and wounds that never went away. Though Jefferson never commanded troops or fired a shot in anger, his personal experience during and immediately following the war included two traumatic episodes that toughened him on the inside even more than his marathon walks and cold-water baths toughened his body.

The first incident occurred during his two-year term as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781. It was the worst possible time for a man who preferred the rarefied atmosphere of scholarship and the study to assume the duties of governor, since wartime exigencies generated massive economic, logistical and political problems that even the most adroit executive would have found daunting. Despite his best efforts, Virginia’s economy became a shambles and the state failed to meet its quota of men for the Continental Army. Then Jefferson approved an expedition that carried off Virginia’s best troops to a futile campaign against Detroit, just before a British invasion force under the command of Benedict Arnold swept in from the Chesapeake Bay and burned the capital at Richmond to the ground. To make matters worse, cavalry detachments from General Cornwallis’s army moved against Charlottesville and nearly captured Jefferson himself at Monticello.
⁴

Stories spread throughout the state of Jefferson’s ignominious last-minute escape on horseback, implying rather unfairly that he had behaved in a cowardly fashion or that he was derelict in his duty by allowing the state to become so vulnerable to British military occupation. The Virginia Assembly even passed a resolution calling for an investigation into his conduct. This was eventually dropped; a final resolution officially absolved him of any wrongdoing. But even though the wartime mishaps were probably beyond his or anybody’s control, they had happened on his watch. The stain of failure as an executive never wholly disappeared—all the stories resurfaced when he ran for the presidency in 1796 and again in 1800—and Jefferson himself learned that his refined sensibility was ill suited for the rigors of leadership during times of crisis. As for the emotional effects, Jefferson confided to a friend that the experience had “inflicted a wound on my spirit that will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”
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The second incident came straight on the heels of the first and unquestionably constituted the most traumatic experience of his entire life. In May 1782 his wife Martha gave birth for the seventh time in their ten-year marriage. The daughter, named Lucy Elizabeth, was only the third child to survive, and Martha herself fell desperately ill after the delivery. Her delicate disposition had obviously been destroyed by the never-ending pregnancies. She lingered on through the summer, with Jefferson at her bedside nearly around the clock. Family lore, reinforced by reminiscences within the slave community at Monticello, described a melodramatic deathbed scene in which Martha extracted a promise from Jefferson that he would never marry again, allegedly because she did not want her surviving children raised by a stepmother. He never did. She died on September 6, 1782.
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Jefferson was inconsolable for six weeks, sobbing throughout the nights, breaking down whenever he tried to talk. Word of his extended grieving leaked out from Monticello and caused some friends to worry that he was losing his mind. “I ever thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief good,” wrote Edmund Randolph, “but scarcely supposed that his grief would be so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.” When he eventually emerged from seclusion to take long rides through the local woods, Patsy became his constant companion in what she later called “those melancholy rambles.”
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He agreed to accept the diplomatic post in Paris as part of the effort to move past this tragedy and to escape from his memories of Martha at Monticello. But he was scarred in a place that never completely healed. God had seen fit to reach down into the domestic utopia that he had constructed so carefully and snatch away its centerpiece. (Jefferson did not seem to possess any sense of complicity in causing her pregnancies or any sense of warning as her health deteriorated after each new miscarriage or birth.) We cannot know for sure whether, as family tradition tells the story, he promised his dying wife that he would never remarry. The promise he made to himself undoubtedly had the same effect: He would never expose his soul to such pain again; he would rather be lonely than vulnerable.

If this, then, was how he looked and—as much as we can ever know—how he felt upon his arrival in Paris in the late summer of 1784, there remains the question of what he thought. His reputation as a political thinker, which did not yet benefit from his authorship of the Declaration of Independence since that achievement was not yet widely known, was based primarily on his legislative work in the Virginia Assembly and the federal Congress. From 1776 to 1779 he had almost single-handedly attempted the root-and-branch reform of the Virginia legal code, calling for the abolition of primogeniture and entail as the last vestiges of English feudalism, the reform of the criminal law so as to limit the use of the death penalty, the expansion of the suffrage to include more of the independent yeomen from the western counties, the expansion of the public school system of the state and, most important, the elimination of the Anglican establishment in favor of a complete separation of church and state.

This phenomenal effort at legislative reform proved too visionary for his colleagues in the Virginia Assembly, who defeated all his proposals save the abolition of primogeniture and entail, which was on the verge of dying a natural death anyway. But the thrust of his political thinking was clear: to remove all legal and political barriers to individual initiative and thereby create what he called “an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent.” It was in effect an attempt to implement the ideals articulated in the natural rights section of the Declaration. Just as clearly, his favorite ideas were several steps ahead of public opinion. He was more a prophet than a politician.
⁸

The same pattern held true in the federal Congress at Philadelphia. Throughout the winter and spring of 1784 he threw himself into the reform of the coinage system, successfully urging the dollar and decimal units in lieu of the English pound and shilling. He also tried but failed to replace the English system of weights and measures with metric standards. He wrote the Ordinance of 1784, which established the principles on which all new states would be admitted to the Union on an equal basis with existing states. The final provision required the end of slavery in all newly created states by 1800. But it lost by one vote, prompting Jefferson to remark later that “the fate of millions unborn [was] hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!” It was the most far-reaching proposal to end slavery that Jefferson ever wrote but also the high-water mark of his antislavery efforts, which receded afterward to lower levels of caution and procrastination.
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Throughout the spring of 1784 he expressed frustration with the paralyzing combination of indolence and garrulousness that afflicted the Congress. (It was barely possible to muster a quorum to approve the peace treaty ending the war with England.) Given his subsequent hostility to consolidated federal power in virtually every form, his impatience at this time with what he called “the petty justlings of states” stands out as an indication of his temporary willingness to accept federal power as a corrective to local and regional bickering. He confided to friends his conviction that the Articles of Confederation, in giving the federal government power over foreign affairs, had implicitly given it power over all trade and commerce. (This endorsement of the doctrine of implied powers came back to haunt him a decade later.) He wanted to see treaties of amity and commerce negotiated with European nations, in part for the economic benefits they would generate but mostly because, as he put it, “the moment these treaties are concluded the jurisdiction of Congress over the commerce of the states springs into existence, and that of the particular states is superseded. . . .”
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To sum up, then, the man riding into Paris as America’s minister plenipotentiary was not the same young Virginian who had drafted the Declaration of Independence. He was more famous, more physically impressive, a more confident carrier of his natural assets and abilities. He was more seasoned as a legislator, though still and always an idealist with greater talent at envisioning what ought to be than skill at leading others toward the future he imagined. He was also more seasoned as a man, less vulnerable and sensitive because more adroit at protecting his interior regions from intruders by layering his internal defenses in ways that denied access at all check points. (This psychological dexterity was to serve him well as a diplomat.) Finally, he had managed to combine his utopian vision of an American society of liberated individuals, freely pursuing happiness once the burden of English corruption and European feudalism had been removed, with a more practical recognition that an independent America required some kind of federal government to coordinate its burgeoning energies and excesses. Without surrendering his youthful radicalism, he had also become a dedicated nationalist.

FRIENDS AND PIRATES

S
ETTLING HIMSELF
and his entourage took much longer than he had expected. First there was the problem of his health, which, except for his recurrent migraine headaches, had always been excellent. But within a few weeks he came down with a severe cold that he could not shake for six months. “I have had a very bad winter,” he explained to his friend James Monroe back in Virginia, “having been confined the greatest part of it. A seasoning as they call it is the lot of most strangers: and none I believe have experienced a more severe one than myself. The air is extremely damp, and the waters very unwholesome. We have had for three weeks past a warm visit from the Sun (my almighty physician) and I find myself almost reestablished.” Though he eventually fell in love with the people, the wine and the architecture of France, the weather was another matter, causing him to speculate that there was a nearly permanent cloud bank over this section of western Europe that produced pale and anemic human constitutions.
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Then there was the problem of the language. Jefferson was justifiably renowned for his facility with foreign languages, which included Latin, Greek, French and Italian. He even claimed that he had taught himself Spanish on the voyage to France by reading
Don Quixote
with the aid of a grammar book. (Years later, when he was president, Jefferson recalled the incident over dinner. John Quincy Adams, who was present at the dinner party with the president, recorded the claim in his memoirs, then added: “But Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.”) The truth seems to be that Jefferson was adept at learning how to read foreign languages but not to speak or write them. Even after five years in France his spoken French never reached a sufficient level of fluency to permit comfortable conversation, and he never trusted his written French sufficiently to dispense with a translator for his formal correspondence.
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