America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (5 page)

That summer, America’s declaration of independence, rather than Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, was what made headlines. All that anyone seemed to care about was that the colonists had finally broken all ties with the mother country. In cities and towns across the nation, the text was read aloud to cheering throngs rather than studied. Few Americans knew who had written the document or paid attention to its particular words and phrases. That Jefferson had been the primary author was not mentioned in any newspaper until 1784. And only in the 1790s, when he sought to replace Washington as president, did Jefferson start to claim ownership. With the birth of partisan politics, his Republican party saw itself as the defender of the founding principles against its opponents, the Federalists, which it dubbed “monarchists.” In 1797, a Republican paper celebrated the Declaration as a “rational discussion and definition of the rights of man and the end of civil government.” After his presidency, as he started to focus on his legacy, Jefferson was visibly moved whenever he recalled the bold assertions on behalf of human dignity that he had made in his youth. He also kept close track of the relevant numbers. “Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” he reported to John Adams in 1812, “I see now living not more than half a dozen on your side of the Potomac and on this side, myself alone.”

After completing his work on the Declaration, Jefferson would have little to do with national affairs until the war ended. In October 1776, accompanied by his wife, he headed to Williamsburg, where he took up his seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates. With the new Commonwealth then rebuilding itself from the ground up, Jefferson relished the chance to strike out against “every fiber…of ancient or feudal aristocracy” in order to lay a foundation for “government truly republican.” This “political architect,” as Dumas Malone has called him, wished to bring order and rationality to his home state by creating an “aristocracy of talent and virtue.” Within a month, he notched his first victory by getting his fellow delegates to abolish primogeniture. That fall, he was also appointed to head a committee of five, which was charged with the responsibility of revising all of Virginia’s laws. Two men soon dropped out, and Jefferson ended up doing the bulk of the work himself. The astute legal historian took on the monumental task of revising English common law and statutes until the reign of James I. In June 1779, shortly after he became governor, Jefferson submitted to the General Assembly a ninety-page report of his committee of revisers, which featured 126 carefully wrought bills. As in his own account and fee books, Jefferson stuck an index in the front, which listed the contents of each numbered bill. In the revisions of the outdated laws, precise prose reigned. As Jefferson later noted in his memoir, he thought it useful to eliminate “endless tautologies…involutions of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis, and…multiplied efforts at certainty by
saids
and
aforesaids
, by
ors
and
ands
.” The bills addressed everything from property rights and education to the penal code and religion.

His pride and joy was Bill Number 82, “For Establishing Religious Freedom,” which he first introduced in 1779. This cause célèbre, too, had its source in childhood hurts. The adolescent railing against authority had also felt alienated from his Anglican instructors, Douglas and Maury; in his memoir, he insulted the former as “a superficial Latinist, less instructed in Greek.” (Jefferson’s assessment of Douglas was much harsher than the similar one rendered by the poet Ben Jonson of Shakespeare—“small Latin and less Greek”—because classical languages were supposed to be this clergyman’s bailiwick.) Baptized into the Church of England like everyone else in his family, Jefferson did not hate religion per se; but as a deist, who saw God solely as the omnipotent creator of the universe, he hated the dogma spread by organized religions. To come up with the text for his famous bill, Jefferson once again mined his reading notes. Paraphrasing Locke’s
A Letter Concerning Toleration
, he stressed the connection between true religious belief and rationality, noting that “the opinions and belief of men…follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.” Decried by critics as “diabolical,” his bill didn’t pass until several years later when it was revived by his protégé, James Madison, then a key member of the Virginia legislature. By the end of 1786, Madison would help transform nearly half of Jefferson’s 126 bills, which he called a “mine of legislative wealth,” into law. Virginia’s Act for Religious Freedom, which created “a wall of separation between church and state,” as Jefferson would later put it, was soon reworked into the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Thanks to Jefferson, all Americans would enjoy both the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. No longer could the government, as states such as Virginia had done before the Revolution, use tax dollars to support any officially sanctioned church or churches. The socially awkward Jefferson, who experienced most human connections as an annoyance, had gotten another group of intruders—the clergy—to leave him alone. Jefferson’s political philosophy, often summed up as “that government is best which governs least” (even though these words were penned not by him, but by Henry David Thoreau), was inseparable from his personal predilection for solitude.

Jefferson’s two one-year terms as Virginia’s governor proved to be the low point of his political career. Elected by the legislature on June 1, 1779, to replace Patrick Henry, who was prohibited by law from serving a fourth consecutive term, he accepted the post reluctantly. “[E]specially in times like these,” Jefferson wrote to Richard Henry Lee a couple of weeks later, “public offices are burthens to those appointed to them.” Inflation in Virginia, as in the rest of the struggling nation, was spiraling out of control; the price of a duck, just a few shillings in 1779, would skyrocket to fifty pounds by 1781. And British forces, having recently taken Savannah, Georgia, were starting to attack the Virginia coast. Despite—or perhaps because of—all the stress, Jefferson’s minutiae mania was as fervent as ever. When presented by his assistants with a list of all the furniture in the Governor’s Palace after a few weeks in office, he personally checked off each of the roughly fifty items, including the pair of blue and white butter boats. And after completing his inventory, Jefferson wrote the following note: “things omitted. 2 delft [a town in Holland known for its ceramic products] wash basons. 4 blankets.” A year later, in response to a request from the Marquis de Marbois, secretary of the French legation to the United States, who was asking all thirteen governors for information about their states, Jefferson got cracking on a thorough inventory of Virginia. “I take every occasion which presents itself of procuring answers,” he wrote to another French friend in November 1780. This was the beginning of his only full-length book,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, which he kept expanding and revising over the next several years. Besides climate, Jefferson covered a variety of topics, including boundaries, landscape, and population; the chapter on Virginia’s natural history, its minerals, vegetables, and animals, was the longest, comprising about one-fourth of the text. Marbois, who didn’t get much of a response from any other governor, was bowled over by what Jefferson sent to him. “I cannot express to you,” the Frenchman wrote to Jefferson in March 1782, “how grateful I am for the trouble you have taken to draft detailed responses to the questions I had taken the liberty of addressing to you.” For Jefferson, of course, gathering this material and doing the concomitant number crunching—according to his statistical analysis, Virginia’s 1781 population of 567,614 was projected to reach 4,540,912 by 1862¾—was anything but trouble. Though containing many a trivial factoid, his treatise also presented important scientific findings. As the editor of an annotated edition, published a half century ago, has put it, Jefferson crafted “one of America’s first permanent literary and intellectual landmarks.”

Facing crisis after crisis, Governor Jefferson succeeded in doing little but moving the seat of government out of Williamsburg, first to Richmond and then to Charlottesville. On June 2, 1781, with the Brits coming directly after both him and the members of the legislature, he fled Monticello on horseback. He would soon join the rest of his family at his other plantation at Poplar Forest, ninety miles away. While Jefferson had already announced his retirement, his successor wouldn’t be chosen until the legislature reconvened in Staunton a few days later. Since he had still technically been governor at the time of his escape, his political enemies, led by the poorly read Patrick Henry, who were bent on giving the state’s new chief executive dictatorial powers, immediately seized on the appearance of impropriety. On June 12, the House ordered an investigation into Jefferson’s conduct during the whole last year of his administration. Six months later, the humiliated ex-governor had to defend himself in a public hearing against a series of charges, including whether he had abandoned his post and the citizens of Virginia. Even after he was cleared of all wrongdoing and had received a public apology from the Assembly, Jefferson remained furious. The following spring, when the freeholders of Albemarle County elected him once again to the House of Delegates, he declined to serve. On May 20, 1782, he wrote to James Monroe, then a freshman member of the state legislature, that the inquiry “had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.…Reason and inclination unite in justifying my retirement.”

Jefferson had another compelling reason for avoiding public service. His wife, Martha, who on May 8 had given birth to the couple’s sixth child, Lucy Elizabeth—of the other five, only two were still alive, Martha (Patsy), born in 1772, and Mary (Polly), born in 1778—was gravely ill. Childbirth had never been easy for the frail Martha, and this time, as Jefferson quickly realized, she would not recover. For the next four months, he sat either at her bedside or at his writing desk, which had been transplanted into a small room that opened at the head of her bed. “My dear wife,” he noted in his account book on September 6, 1782, “died this day at 11:45 am.” His devastation was palpable. For the next three weeks, he shut himself in his bedroom. Though Patsy was still a month shy of her tenth birthday, Jefferson did not hesitate to lean on her for emotional support. Late in life, he would describe his eldest daughter as “the cherished companion of my early life and the nurse of my age.” But the nursing actually began decades earlier. “I was never a moment from his side,” Patsy later recalled of her whereabouts in the weeks following her mother’s death. Once the distraught Jefferson summoned up the energy to leave the house, all he wanted to do was go on horseback rides with Patsy. “In those melancholy rambles,” she added, “I was…a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.” His frequent emotional outbursts must have frightened her and made
her
loss all the more excruciating. But Jefferson was too self-absorbed to be at all attentive to what the nine-year-old was experiencing.

The characterologically challenged father could not recognize his favorite daughter’s emotional needs or even her separateness. For him, parental love meant teaching her how to be a good obsessive. In his first letter to Patsy, written at the end of 1783 while she was living with a family friend in Philadelphia, he recommended that the eleven-year-old adhere to the following schedule:

As part of the program, he also insisted on perfection in her appearance. “Nothing is so disgusting,” ran his startling injunction, “to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.…Your first work will be to dress yourself in such style, as that you may be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss, or any other circumstance of neatness wanting.” A few years later, the meticulous keeper of account books stressed to her the importance of “never buying anything which you have not money in your pocket to pay for.” “Learn yourself,” the meta-rule man added, “the habit of adhering rigorously to the rules you lay down for yourself.” In Patsy, who would forever idealize him, Jefferson created the dutiful and industrious daughter whom he needed.

Jefferson would never get over the death of his wife. In November 1782, he wrote a friend that he was “a little emerging from the stupor of mind which has rendered me as dead to the world as she whose loss occasioned it.” In an attempt to short-circuit his mourning, he jumped back into politics. In June 1783, Jefferson was one of five delegates selected by the Virginia General Assembly to serve in the new Continental Congress. On May 7, 1784, Congress appointed him a minister plenipotentiary; his assignment was to travel to Paris to assist Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in negotiating commercial treaties with European nations. To prepare himself for his new job, the data collector went into overdrive. Over the next two months, as he made the trek from Annapolis, where Congress was meeting, to Boston, from where his ship was to leave, he gathered massive amounts of economic information on each state that he passed through. His twelve-part questionnaire, which he filled out by meeting with leading merchants and public figures, covered everything from the wages of carpenters to the size of fishing vessels.

On July 5, 1784, Jefferson, accompanied by Patsy, boarded the
Ceres
, which was bound for Cowes. He entrusted his younger daughters, Polly and Lucy—the two-year-old would die of whooping cough just a few months later—to the care of an aunt back in Virginia. Traversing the Atlantic did not stop him from piling up factoids. Every day at noon, he recorded in his account book numerous measurements, including latitude and longitude, the mileage since the previous day, the temperature, and wind direction. (Two decades later, President Jefferson would know whereof he spoke when he instructed his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to take “observations of latitude and longitude at all remarkable points on the [Missouri] river…with great pains and accuracy.”) And during the three-week journey to England, he also interviewed the owner of the ship, the Newburyport merchant Nathaniel Tracy, to complete his Massachusetts questionnaire. As he learned from Tracy, carpenters in the Bay State were now making about $7 a day, up from $3–$6 before the war.