American Sphinx (51 page)

His other enduring legacies are less specific and must be sought at more rarefied regions where the thinner intellectual atmosphere makes it much easier to mistake platitudes for ideas. Two examples of the dangers entailed in working at such altitudes might serve as object lessons that improve our prospects of avoiding the same vacuous fate. First, a host of otherwise intelligent commentators, following the lead of Gunnar Myrdal in
An American Dilemma
(1943), have claimed that the core ideas of what he called the American Creed, as first articulated by Jefferson in the natural rights section of the Declaration of Independence, constitute the intellectual common ground on which America’s many different racial and ethnic groups can congregate. Jefferson’s most eloquent words, and the ideas of freedom and equality they proclaim, thereby become the intellectual cement or glue holding multiracial America together.
¹²

Not only is it rather preposterous to believe than an abstract idea can perform such a massive social function, but it also flies in the face of all that we know about the historical Jefferson to make him an advocate of racial equality or the modern-day multiracial ideal. He was a staunch believer in white Anglo-Saxon supremacy, as were several other leading figures in the revolutionary generation. Moreover, he went out of his way to identify the differences between the races as products of nature rather than nurture. Martin Luther King, Jr., was right to deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, for it was Lincoln’s expansive revision of the original Jeffersonian version of the natural rights philosophy that broadened the message to include blacks. While it is plausible to cite Jefferson as an enemy of slavery, though even here the evidence of his life contradicts the logical imperatives of his thought, it is a wholesale distortion of both his life and his thought to describe him as a friend to racial integration.

Second, Jefferson has become the preeminent historical source for presidents and public officials eager to sound an optimistic note about the superiority of American political institutions and ideas and the foreordained character of their eventual triumph. A host of Jefferson quotations can in fact be gathered to support this most optimistic form of patriotism. The Cold War, for example, was waged within the intensely moralistic and dualistic Jeffersonian categories of thought. And it is neither implausible nor ahistorical to imagine Jefferson describing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as the culmination of the global struggle launched with the American and French revolutions, the long-term war of ideas fated to replace despotic regimes dependent upon coercion with representative governments and market economies based on popular consent and personal voluntarism.

On the other hand, it is misleading and in the end dead wrong to equate Jefferson’s optimism about the outcome of the international struggle, often depicted in cosmic terms with providential guarantees, and his more specific vision of the United States as the eternal City on the Hill. Jefferson did not believe, as Ronald Reagan put it, that “it is always morning in America.” Toward the end of his life especially, he was extremely pessimistic about the long-term viability of the American nation he had helped create. Although it is true that he was distinctive within the revolutionary generation for his way of describing America’s limitless horizons, even Jefferson shared with his fellow founders the realistic realization that all nations, including the United States, had limited life spans.

Madison, writing in 1829, predicted that the American republic would last for another hundred years, a prediction that must have looked eerily prescient at the start of the Great Depression. Adams oscillated between apocalyptic warnings that the end was close and more sanguine projections ranging up to another century and a half. Even though one of the most seductive features of Jeffersonian thought was its capacity to levitate out of its specific historical context, Jefferson shared with other members of the revolutionary generation the belief that all rising nations must eventually fall, that America’s political success depended on a favorable set of social, economic and demographic conditions, chiefly the existence of vast tracts of western land, that would eventually run out. As Drew McCoy has so succinctly put it, Jefferson hoped to delay the inevitable ravages of time by extending the American experiment through space. (John Kennedy’s New Frontier represented the same Jeffersonian impulse projected into space itself.) As we have seen, those favorable conditions disappeared between 1890 and 1920, so that the entire political landscape of twentieth-century America would have struck Jefferson as alien, indeed symptomatic of American degeneration along what he regarded as the corrupt path of the British Empire. If, in other words, we wished to conjure up Jefferson standing atop the Berlin Wall and leading the cheers for its demolition, we must also realize that the victorious version of democratic politics and capitalistic economics triumphant at the end of the twentieth century was not at all what he had in mind.
¹³

Virtually all commentators who ascend into the rarefied regions in pursuit of Jefferson’s enduring legacy eventually end up discovering its essence in the natural rights section of the Declaration of Independence and the ideal of individual freedom it so eloquently celebrates. At the beginning of the twentieth century Woodrow Wilson, questing after what he called “The Spirit of Jefferson,” found it in “the right of the individual to a free opportunity. . . .” At the end of the century Joyce Appleby, engaging in the same quest, also concluded that Jefferson’s “most enduring legacy, entailed on us in the name of nature, has been a particular understanding of human freedom.” In between these interpreters countless orators, statesmen and scholars have sounded a similar note, usually as part of a patriotic hymn in which Jefferson has proved a serviceable source for campaigns against foreign foes, such as Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union, or in domestic battles against such contradictory targets as labor unions and corporate power, welfare legislation and entrenched poverty, the death penalty and the right to die. Jeffersonian rhetoric lends itself naturally to this kind of benign dilution and functional promiscuity. Where the real Jeffersonian idea ends and the platitudinous cant begins has become an unanswerable question.
¹⁴

Clearly, Jefferson’s own conception of individual freedom was more restricted than modern-day notions. His vision was essentially negative: freedom from encroachments by either church or state. It was all a piece with his antigovernment ethos and therefore incompatible with our contemporary conviction about personal entitlements, whether it be for a decent standard of living, a comfortable retirement or adequate health care, all of which depend on precisely the kind of government sponsorship he would have found intrusive. His was the freedom to be left alone, which has more in common with twentieth-century claims to privacy rights than more aggressive claims to political or economic power. He really had little to say about the positive ways that Americans should use their individual freedom, though the nineteenth-century scramble for wealth, then the twentieth-century pursuit of unprecedented levels of consumption, would surely have left him disappointed in his fellowman.

For all those reasons modern-day invocations of Jefferson as “the apostle of freedom” are invariably misleading and problematic. Nevertheless, even though the content of the idea has changed in several expensive ways since Jefferson’s time, what has not changed, and what remains a truly powerful Jeffersonian legacy, is the format within which all considerations of personal freedom are framed. Alone among the influential political thinkers of the revolutionary generation, Jefferson began with the assumption of individual sovereignty, then attempted to develop prescriptions for government that at best protected individual rights and at worst minimized the impact of government or the powers of the state on individual lives. Both Adams and Madison and, to an even greater extent, Hamilton, began with the assumption of society as a collective unit, which was embodied in the government, which itself should then be designed to maximize individual freedom within the larger context of public order. Jefferson did not worry about public order, believing as he did that individuals liberated from the last remnants of feudal oppression would interact freely to create a natural harmony of interests that was guided, like Adam Smith’s marketplace, by invisible or veiled forms of discipline. This belief, as Adams tried to tell him in the correspondence of their twilight years, was always an illusion, but it was an extraordinarily attractive illusion that proved extremely efficacious during the rowdy “takeoff” years of the American economy in the nineteenth century, when geographic and economic growth generated its own topsy-turvy version of dynamic order. Not until the late nineteenth century, with the end of the frontier and the emergence of the massive economic inequalities of the Gilded Age, was it fully exposed as an illusion.

But by then the Jeffersonian formulation of individual freedom as the bedrock conviction and the privileged starting point in all political debates was firmly entrenched. Just as Jefferson himself was prepared to abandon the principle temporarily when great opportunities (i.e., the Louisiana Purchase) or great crises (the Embargo Act of 1807) required it, twentieth-century Americans have only been willing to adopt a more collectivistic mentality when threatened by the Great Depression or by foreign foes during World War II and then the Cold War. But individual sovereignty remains the seminal conviction and the ideological home-base for all mainstream political thinking after the threats recede. It continues to frame political conversations in ways that put all communal schemes and proposals for group rights, like affirmative action, on the defensive. At the end of his panoramic review of American democratic culture, Robert Wiebe has concluded that the Jeffersonian ideal of “self-government,” though a contradiction in terms, remains the abiding belief of most Americans: “The substantial body of contemporary criticism that singles out individualism as the special curse of American democracy simply flies in the face of its history. Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind. There never has been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.”
¹⁵
For better and for worse, American political discourse is phrased in Jeffersonian terms as a conversation about sovereign individuals who only grudgingly and in special circumstances are prepared to compromise that sovereignty for larger social purposes.

Finally, Jefferson created a particular style of leadership adapted to the special requirements of American political culture that remains relevant two centuries later. It is a style based on the capacity to rest comfortably with contradictions. If you begin with the conviction that government is at best a necessary evil, then effective political leadership must be indirect and unthreatening. It must cloak the exercise of power from public view, appear to be a tamer and more innocuous activity than it really is. If there is also an inherent disjunction between the ideals on which the nation is founded (i.e., individual freedom, equality of opportunity and popular sovereignty) and the imperatives of effective government, imperatives which require the capacity to coerce and discipline the undecided and faint of heart, then effective leadership, especially at the executive level, must be capable of benign deception. And if the political culture claims to derive its authority from popular opinion, which is by definition divided over the contested questions of the day, then leadership must at least appear to be followship, and the knack of political survival requires the skill to use language in ways that permit different constituencies to hear what they are listening for.

Within the corporate world and the military profession, late-twentieth-century America does permit more direct, more conspicuous, less elusive styles of leadership. But in the political realm, authority remains severely circumscribed and must achieve its ends more covertly. Television has only intensified the manipulative milieu; instant, more accurate polling techniques have only amplified the influence of popular opinion. The exponential growth in the size of government over the course of the century, at the same time as the Jeffersonian hostility to government flourishes in the deepest corners of the culture, places an even greater premium on paradox by enhancing the attractiveness of political candidates who, like Jefferson in 1800, claim to despise the federal government they are campaigning to head.

Jefferson did not come to this style self-consciously, did not hone his personality to fit the requirements of popular leadership in a political culture inherently suspicious of government. The style came to him naturally. His protestations about public life were completely sincere. If he were reincarnated and invited to run for political office in our time, he would almost certainly decline in favor of the tranquillity of Monticello. But by temperament and disposition he possessed the internal agility to generate multiple versions of the truth, the rhetorical skills to propose policies that different audiences could hear favorably, the deep deviousness only possible in a dedicated idealist, the honest aversion to the very power he pursued so effectively. These remain invaluable political talents. And the bedrock moralistic simplicity of the Jeffersonian vision has only increased its political potency as the size of the American electorate has grown larger and more unwieldy. If we could ever persuade him to run, he would remain a formidable candidate for national office.

APPENDIX

A NOTE ON THE SALLY HEMINGS SCANDAL

Modern-day journalists and social commentators have frequently claimed that candidates for national office during the last third of the twentieth century have been exposed to unprecedented scrutiny into their personal, especially their sexual, lives. While the proliferation of talk shows and tabloids has certainly intensified the appetite for scandal by making such stories readily available to a mass market, the primal urge to know about the sexual secrets of the rich or famous is apparently as timeless as the primal urge itself. Long before we learned about the sexual escapades of Presidents Kennedy or Clinton or, before them, Harding and Franklin Roosevelt, there was the story of Jefferson and Sally. Indeed the alleged liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings may be described as the longest-running miniseries in American history.

The history of the story itself falls naturally, if not neatly, into three discernible phases. The first was the early nineteenth century, when James Callender published the initial accusations and the Federalist press spread them across the country. Callender’s motives, all historians agree, were scurrilous and vengeful. He probably heard the rumors about miscegenation at Monticello while imprisoned in Richmond—it was a story that had been making the rounds in Virginia for several years—and felt no compunction about reporting the gossip as fact. His charges, while obviously motivated by the basest personal and political motives, derived a measure of credibility from three different factors. First, Callender had accurately reported on the adulterous affair between Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds in 1797; while wildly irresponsible and blatantly smut-seeking, he tended to exaggerate rather than tell outright lies. Second, Sally Hemings did have several children who were obviously fathered by a white man and some of whom had features that resembled those of Jefferson. Third, Callender had correctly accused Jefferson of making unsolicited advances toward Elizabeth Walker, a married woman, when he was a young bachelor in 1768. Jefferson acknowledged the truth of this youthful indiscretion in 1805, made a public apology to her husband, John Walker, but claimed it was the only charge “founded on truth among all their allegations against me.” Nevertheless, the accuracy of the Walker accusation lent a measure of credibility to the Sally story.

The next chapter in the story, which occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, produced two new pieces of evidence, each important in its own right, but together contradicting each other. In 1873 Madison Hemings, Sally’s next to last child (born in 1805), gave an interview to the
Pike County
(Ohio)
Republican
claiming that his mother had identified Thomas Jefferson as his father and, in fact, the father of all her children. This claim was verified by Israel Jefferson, another ex-slave from Monticello, also living in Ohio at the time and a longtime friend of Madison Hemings’s. The following year, in 1874, James Parton published his
Life of Thomas Jefferson
and reported another story that had been circulating within the Jefferson and Randolph families for many years—to wit, that Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr had been the father of all or most of Sally’s children and that he had admitted as much to Martha Jefferson when she had confronted him with the charge. Sally’s children looked like Jefferson, then, because they were related, but through Carr rather than Jefferson himself. This version of miscegenation on the mountaintop received partial corroboration from Edmund Bacon, the former manager of Monticello, who claimed in his interview of 1862 that he had seen another man leaving Sally’s quarters “many a morning.” There were now two different versions of the Sally story placed before the public, one rooted in the oral tradition of the Hemings family and the other in the oral tradition of the white descendants of the Jefferson-Randolph family.

The third chapter of the story dates from the 1950s, when the scholarship on Jefferson, especially the massive publication project led by Julian Boyd and the authoritative six-volume biography by Dumas Malone, generated fresh evidence and a new and spirited debate about its meaning. Although the most dramatic episode occurred in 1974, with the publication of Fawn Brodie’s
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History,
a national best-seller that argued in favor of the liaison and even claimed that Jefferson and Sally Hemings loved each other, the new evidence in fact came from Malone. Despite his own forcefully argued conclusion that the Sally story was a fictional creation of Callender and nothing more, Malone’s research revealed that Jefferson was present at Monticello nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally’s children. Since he was often away at Philadelphia or Washington, and since Sally never conceived in his absence, the timing of her pregnancies was compatible with his paternity. In 1993 the researchers at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation discovered a “missing” daughter, born in 1799, who had died soon thereafter. That birth was also compatible with Jefferson’s residence at Monticello. Although Brodie’s book ignited a raging debate within the scholarly world and then a proliferation of biographies, novels, films and popular magazine stories, it was in truth Malone’s findings about the chronology of Sally’s pregnancies that constituted the most tangible piece of new evidence to support the charge of a sexual liaison.

Where does that leave the matter? Well, unless the trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation decide to exhume the remains and do DNA testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny, it leaves the matter a mystery about which advocates on either side can freely speculate, and surely will. Within the scholarly world, especially within the community of Jefferson specialists, there seems to be a clear consensus that the story is almost certainly not true. Within the much murkier world of popular opinion, especially within the black community, the story appears to have achieved the status of a self-evident truth. If either side of this debate were to file for damages in a civil suit requiring a preponderance of evidence as the standard, it is difficult to imagine an impartial jury finding for either plaintiff. Jefferson’s most ardent defenders still live under the influence of what might be called the Virginia gentleman ethos (i.e., this is not something that a Virginia gentleman would do), which increasingly has the quaint and charmingly naive sound of an honorable anachronism. Meanwhile those who wholeheartedly endorse the truth of the story, either in Callender’s original version as a tale of lust and rape, or in Brodie’s later rendering as a tragic romance between America’s premier biracial couple, have also allowed their own racial, political or sexual agenda to take precedence over the evidence. On the basis of what we know now, we can never know.

That was then. In the original edition I went on to speculate that the likelihood of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison was remote, offering several plausible readings of the indirect evidence (i.e., Jefferson’s voice in his letters to women; the reasons his enemies doubted the charges) to support my conjecture. No matter how plausible my interpretation, it turns out to have been dead wrong.

In the November 5, 1998, issue of
Nature
, the results of a DNA comparison between Jefferson’s Y chromosome and the Y chromosome of several Hemings descendants demonstrated a match between Jefferson and Eston Hemings. Comparisons between the Y chromosome from the Carr line yielded negative results, as did comparisons between Jefferson and the first of Sally’s children, Thomas Woodson. In effect, the interpretation offered by the white Jefferson descendants was discredited; the interpretation offered by the Hemings descendants was partially supported.

But the Eston match is the crucial new evidence and really all that matters, since it is virtually impossible to believe that a sixty-four-year-old Jefferson fathered a child by Sally Hemings six years after the Callender accusations surfaced in a Monticello version of the one-night stand. Sally gave birth to seven children between 1790 and 1808. Whether Jefferson fathered all of them will probably never be known. But the match with Eston shifts the burden of proof toward the presumption that Jefferson was the father of each. The likelihood of a long-standing sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings can never be proven absolutely, but it is now proven beyond a reasonable doubt.