Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 1799, as quoted in Jon Mecham, Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power (Random House 2012) pp. 319-320.
Reconstructing Jefferson.
Having in recent years read three sympathetic biographies of men who became, to lesser or greater degrees, political adversaries of Thomas Jefferson, I had come to develop a rather dim view of the man. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, and Ron Chernow’s biographies of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, each, in praising their own Federalist subjects, can’t help but paint the Republican Jefferson in less-than-charitable terms. In these biographies, Jefferson comes across as he did to the men those books were written about: He could be hypocritical. He originated that unfortunate American habit of ascribing to his political enemies the worst of all possible motives, accusing them of being closet monarchists, instead of simply having a different point of view. He was capable of unscrupulous behind-the-scenes political conniving -- seeking to undermine two administrations in a row from within their own ranks, and using scandal-mongers to surreptitiously stab former friends in the back. He was blind to the violent excesses of the French Revolution, and was so self-righteous about his own political opinions that he could accuse the Revolution’s greatest stalwarts, even Washington, of political heresy for the simple crime of disagreeing with Jefferson’s views. Not a very flattering picture.
But I have always wanted to like Jefferson. He is, after all, the author of some of the best sentences ever written in the English language: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these needs, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Aaaahh. That should be put to music. Thousands of pages of Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment distilled to their most important essence in a few memorable sentences that continue to affect history. What a different country we would have today if schoolchildren recited those sentences every morning instead of the Pledge of Allegiance. Or maybe they could alternate between the two: Jeffersonian Republicans reciting the Declaration one day and Hamiltonian Federalists reciting the Pledge the next.
So I’ve been looking for a biography of Jefferson that would portray him in a more positive light, as he saw himself; highlight his virtues, and help me develop a more appreciative view of the man.
Jon Meachman’s recently published biography couldn’t have been more perfectly suited to this purpose. Indeed, that this book was written for readers like me, whose views on Jefferson have been negatively influenced by recent popular history on the nation’s Federalist triumvirate, is explicitly confirmed in Meacham’s Author’s Note, at the end of the text, in which he explains:
“This book, I hope, neither lionizes nor indicts Jefferson, but instead restores him to his full and rich role as an American statesman who resists easy categorization.” And why is this “restor[ing]” necessary? Meacham goes on: “Jefferson has not had an easy time of it in recent years. The 1998 DNA findings and subsequent scholarly reevaluation that established the high likelihood of his sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings –a liaison long denied by mainstream white historians– gave fresh energy to the image of Jefferson-as-hypocrite. Then came nearly two decades of highly acclaimed biographies of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington that understandably emphasized the virtues of their protagonists, often at Jefferson’s expense.”
So there you have it. I was looking for a book that would give me a counterpoint to the Federalist hagiographies I have recently so thoroughly enjoyed, and, little did I know it, one was being written for me.
Meacham’s biography does much more lionizing than indicting. His central thesis is that to understand Jefferson, we must understand that he lived his life in a 50 year period of American conflict with Britain (sometimes cold, sometimes hot), which was as central to his political philosophy as the conflict with Soviet Russia was to Ronald Reagan’s. Jefferson’s fears about the possible restoration of monarchy in the United States may appear to us (as they did to Washington) to be overheated fanciful paranoia. And his willingness to accuse his federalist enemies of being closet “Monarchists” may sound to our ears like absurd and unfair ad hominem political attack. But just because these perceived threats never rose above perception doesn’t mean the fears were not legitimate, or at least very real to Jefferson. In the decades before the American Revolution, monarchy had been deposed and come back to power in Britain, and in the decades after, the same would occur in France. More importantly, this was not rhetoric which Jefferson stoked for mere political advantage. It was the way he legitimately saw the world. Progress from the chains of history meant providing more and more power to the people. And the threat of reasserted monarchical power and hereditary aristocracy was, in his mind, always imminent.
So, did Meacham succeed with this particular reader? Do I like Jefferson better now? Hmmm. That remains hard to say. I like him better than I used to, but not as much as Mecham likes him.
Jefferson, Pro and Con.
I certainly have a deeper appreciation of Jefferson’s political gifts and achievements. It may be true, as Chernow argued, that Hamilton better foresaw our modern American condition, and laid its groundwork, than Jefferson, such that we are now living in a Hamiltonian, not a Jeffersonian, America. Nevertheless, Jefferson triumphed politically in his own time, with his election spelling the doom of the Federalists and inaugurating a 50 year era of successful Presidential candidates who ran and governed as “Jeffersonian" politicians. Imagine Ronald Reagan succeeding in not only transforming the Republican party, but a majority of the whole voting nation, into majority conservative voters from 1980 to 2030, and one might begin to understand the depth and extent of Jefferson’s political victory. Meacham’s book explains the political skill which set those events in motion.
There were faults and missteps in his presidency (Jefferson’s hatred for anything that smelled like British influence in our society ironically made him weaken our Navy, which, in the years before the War of 1812, left us more vulnerable to . . . Britain). But, overall, Jefferson’s political accomplishments were undoubtedly good for America. A President lacking Jefferson’s light touch might have bungled the greatest and most important opportunity any American President has ever received: the chance to buy half a continent in the Louisiana Purchase.
Presidents as politically diverse as FDR and Ronald Reagan have looked to Jefferson’s language and rhetoric to support their own visions of America. Here’s a little bit of trivia that might help us understand just how triumphantly Jefferson’s influence bestrides American politics: He was living in France when the First Amendment was enacted and had absolutely nothing to do with its wording or meaning. But almost 200 years after its enactment, when the U.S. Supreme Court began wrestling with 1960s and 1970s school prayer cases, requiring it to interpret the “establishment clause,” the Justices determined that the clause’s meaning must be determined on the basis of the understanding of the founders. And to what source did they look to determine this understanding? The writings of Madison, who drafted its text? The floor debates of the men who voted to approve its final language? No: they enlisted support from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists, 14 years after the Amendment was passed, in which Jefferson described the clause as erecting a “wall of separation” between Church and State. More than 150 years after his death, Jefferson was still being given the final say on how we should understand constitutional language which he had nothing to do with drafting. For better or worse, Jefferson matters. The Art of Power indeed.
After reading this book, I also have a better understanding of and appreciation for Jefferson’s intellectual gifts and wide-ranging curiosity. (JFK once lauded a group of Nobel Prize recipients being honored at a White House reception as perhaps the most extraordinary collection of talent and human knowledge ever gathered at the edifice, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.) He was a brilliant human being, and he got that way by spending his time reading, thinking, and writing about serious subjects. We’d be better off if more American Presidents (especially the ones who have ruled during my lifetime) had done the same. His concerns over undue Federal governmental power may have been premature in an era when the greatest dangers to the nation were weakness and disunion, but they can also be seen as ahead of their time, as his words, with remarkable foresight, predicted many of the problems the nation faces today from an overly large, powerful, and intrusive Federal government.
Politically, Jefferson remains enigmatic. Modern political conservatives like myself can’t help but admire his rhetoric in support of a Federal Government of limited and enumerated powers, his belief in State’s rights, individual liberties, and his fear of the mischief which could be done by an unrestrained judiciary. (Although, this must be said, his alternative to judicial review, State nullification theory, provided the ideological underpinnings for secession and the Civil War.) He can be praised for reducing the Nation’s debt and for preaching against a government which takes from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned. His advocacy of a free press and freedom of religion and conscience should be universally admired by both sides of the political spectrum. His decision to step down after two terms solidified Washington’s example and turned it into a tradition so sacrosanct that it would be centuries before a President came along with the audacity to violate it (causing the nation to wisely thereafter formally insert it into the Constitution). His fear of monarchy and his advocacy in favor of the rights of individual conscience were prophetic warnings against overweening 20th Century totalitarian governments.
But therein lies a rub: For those totalitarian systems did not take the form of monarchy, as Jefferson feared. Rather, they took their inspiration from many ideals which Jefferson’s writings favor: they were, or claimed to be, progressive and secular movements, allegedly based on science and reason and therefore free to jettison the outmoded thinking of prior eras. In this there were dangers which Jefferson failed to see. Those who put greater trust in the future than in the past would come, after Jefferson's time, to eagerly overthrow organically developed institutions which had stabilized society for centuries, in order to murderously require society to re-start itself from scratch on supposedly more enlightened and more future-looking ideals. If Jefferson had lived to see our day, would he have recognized the odious 20th Century totalitarianisms of our time as yet another version of the monarchy he had spent his life warring against? Would he have discovered that secular ideologies can be just as subversive to human freedom as what he termed “monkish ignorance”? Or would he have been, like so many modern leftists, swept up by their progressive rhetoric and proven himself to be the radical Jacobin his political enemies always accused him of?
It is, of course, impossible to say. Jefferson’s politics were of his own time, and what he feared and loved politically was based on the recent history his own generation would have grown up studying and the contemporary history they then lived through. He did not have the benefit of our hindsight into how the French Revolution, and other similar 20th Century versions of Jacobinism, would turn out. But his apologetic attitude towards the excesses of the French Revolution remain troubling, and do seem like an emblematic precursor of the kind of moral blindness that 20th century Marxists would engage in. For example, his statement that the ideals of the French Revolution would be worth shedding so much blood over that only an Adam and Eve for every nation remained to repopulate the earth is more than just unsettling: it's one of the worst things any founder ever thought, wrote, or said. Ultimately, if Jefferson embraced certain philosophies that cause me disquiet instead of admiration, it is because I tend towards the conservative worldview that there is much in any given society which has been proven over time to work and ought to be preserved, whereas Jefferson was much more prone to the liberal outlook that there is much in any given society which is outmoded unexamined tradition, and ought to be replaced, damn the unintended consequences. Of course, both points of view are necessary in roughly equal proportions for a society to avoid either stagnation or anarchy, and there are times and places when one philosophy is more suitable than the other. Jefferson's outlook made him the perfect man to write the Declaration of Independence, breaking our nation free from its British past. But it's probably just as well that he was in France when the Constitution was being created, allowing us to create a stable society of law and not of men, to replace what Jefferson had helped to overthrow.
There is much in Jefferson’s personal life that also prevents me from admiring him as much as I do some of the other founders. Even when comparing their faults, Jefferson seems to come out worse. Hamilton’s adultery (with a woman whose con-man husband had pimped her out to the cause in order to set Hamilton up for blackmail payments) looks like unfortunate weakness on Hamilton’s part. Young Jefferson’s years-long attempt to unsuccessfully seduce the wife of a close friend comes across as far more venal. Washington and Jefferson both shared in the bounty of the sin of slavery. But Washington at least freed his slaves in his will. Jefferson’s written critiques of slavery are among some of the sharpest ever written, such that he does not appear to have shared Washington’s intellectual blind spot over the issue. But Jefferson’s intellectual awareness of the lack of moral justification for slavery makes his own refusal to free his own slaves that much more dispiriting. (Jefferson did arrange for Sally Hemings to be treated as, de facto, free, upon his death, and arranged for her children to gain their freedom on their 21st birthday, to honor promises he had made to Sally while in France, in exchange for her agreement to stay by his side and return home with him, even though France’s laws would have allowed her to abandoned him to her acquire her own freedom.)
Then again, but yet, but yet, . . . . Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, whose ideals of equality we continue to lurch toward in our day, wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and spent his lifetime as an advocate for freedom of speech and conscience and thought, founded the University of Virginia and made a love for art, architecture, and science deeply American ideals. He was undoubtedly a key figure in mankind’s great leap away from hereditary monarchy, freeing us from the idea that some men are born, booted and spurred by divine right, to ride others. Hereditary monarchy is a ridiculous idea. Aristocracy and a House of Lords are absurdities. Jefferson was a key figure in helping humankind get to the point where these truths could be fully recognized, and even the English now use their monarchy primarily as a tourist draw. He deserves credit for that, even if later radical revolutionaries would take those ideas too far, and subvert them for gruesome totalitarian ends. In the end, Mecham has certainly proven this much: Jefferson "resists easy categorization.” Was he our first forward-looking future-oriented liberal, wary of tradition, but insufficiently wary of the law of unintended consequences? Our first small government conservative? Our first libertarian? Who knows. He was Jefferson.
Federalists and Republicans.
Had I lived in the 18th Century, would I have been a Federalist or a Republican? The Federalists were right about some of the big questions: the need for a more powerful centralizing government after the disaster of the articles of confederation, to avoid disunion and balkanization; the need for a unified monetary system to allow nationwide commerce; the utility of a Navy and Military; the propriety of entering into the Jay Treaty to keep the young nation out of a war it could not yet afford, despite the treaty’s obnoxiousness; and, most of all, the need to work for the abolition of slavery. The Republicans were right about some big issues too: the unconstitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts under the First Amendment, and the need to restore freedom of the press and of conscience by overturning the same; the importance of promoting a government of republican simplicity rather than aping European monarchies.
The Republicans and the Federalists seem to have fought as much over America’s relationship with France vs. its relationship with Britain as they did about anything. It’s hard for modern Americans to understand why this debate was so important and rancorous. Like a 20th Century Central-American Banana Republic trying to decide which side to join in the cold war, the fledgling (and, at the time, relatively insignificant) republic of the United States apparently saw its future as inexplicably tied to which sphere of influence (that of Britain or France) it would volunteer to belong to. For all the rhetorical heat this issue created though, we were lucky that we didn’t get too drawn towards either direction.
Here’s the thing. The Federalists and the Republicans were both wrong on this issue, and instead of arguing endlessly about whether we should ally ourselves with France or Britain, we would have done well to let our political arguments follow what we actually did in the event: steer a neutral course.
It’s true, as the Federalists argued, that we shared a common culture, language, religion, law, and outlook, as the British. But it would be many decades before the British would be able to treat us with anything but contempt, and the years immediately after the Revolution were no time to try to re-establish our ties with that monarchy and potentially be sucked back into its imperial ambitions. Our “special relationship” with Britain, and the union of English speaking peoples that saved the world in the 20th century, was still a long way off.
The Republicans had some valid points about France. We owed that nation a great debt for its assistance in the war of independence. And it was only natural that the French Revolution would be seen as a sequel to our own: the ongoing march of history to elevate democracy over tyranny. Except that the French Revolution wasn’t really a sequel to America’s revolution. The American Revolution was about restoring pre-existing legal rights of citizenship which the colonists felt had been denied them, and ultimately determined could only be restored through independence from what they finally came to realize was a foreign power ruling on American shores. It was about independence and establishing our own sovereignty, not a remaking of society. While some of the rhetoric of the early French Revolution mirrored American ideals, it was ultimately to prove a much darker affair, fueled by far different motives, which would not lead to a constitutional republic for another 80 years. In hindsight, the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon look a lot more like a prequel to 20th Century communist revolutions and the rise of Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, et al., then a sequel to the American Revolution and the rise of an American Republic.
Fortunately for the Country, both factions often governed by taking a far more centrist course than their rhetoric suggested, and were not as far apart as the partisan newspapers of the day would lead the country’s citizens to suppose. For all the supposed pro-British anti-French sentiments of the Federalists, John Adams' most significant achievement as President was keeping the country out of a war with France. For all his pontificating about the evils of an overly powerful executive, Jefferson quickly took a more pragmatic view when he was the one holding the reigns of office, and when opportunities arose, such as the Louisiana Purchase, which could only be taken advantage of through a more expansive view of constitutional power than he himself subscribed to, Jefferson didn’t let ideological purity stand in the way of doing what was right for the country.
In the end, the United States was probably greatly blessed to have men who leaned towards a Federalist point of view in charge for the first 12 years. The last thing the country needed after enacting a constitution which remedied the defects of the articles of confederation, would have been a President who didn’t understand the nature of those defects. When Republicans came to power, they probably ended up ratifying (by not dismantling) as much of what the Federalists had wrought as they modified. At the end of that dialectical process, the country was, for the most part (with the exception of the continuing sin of and coming crises over slavery) on a firm footing. Jefferson deserves as much credit for that as anyone. However his historical reputation may wax and wane, he played a major positive role in establishing a great modern nation: sovereign, independent, and full of people who are, thanks to his guiding hand, still free to think for themselves and vociferously argue with each other about many of the same issues that were relevant in his own time. For that he will always have my gratitude.
Ranking: 4 stars out of 5.
Completed January 16, 2013.
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