The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  Everything in the world was going on. They were trying to make a whole new world. Jefferson was on something like six committees, he was in charge of creating a plan for Canadian defense, every kind of legislative question was coming up.

  John Adams believed, being a lawyer, that the resolution to reorganize state governments that had passed a few days before had been the real break with Britain that would be celebrated. Only a lawyer could think that way. The Declaration of Independence was kind of an afterthought. It was something they wanted to do, they thought they should do it, so one of the world’s great subcommittees was formed.

  DR: With John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert R. Livingston from New York.

  JM: And Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

  DR: Five people. But as I understand it, what they said to John Adams was, “We really would prefer Jefferson to write it,” because Jefferson was from Virginia and the Massachusetts people were seen as being in favor of breaking away, so having this man from Virginia write this declaration might bring the southerners into the fold.

  Jefferson sits down, he writes for four days, he brings the draft back to Congress, it’s edited mildly by the committee. Benjamin Franklin made a couple of changes. They decide on July 2, 1776, that we’re going to break away from England. What does the Congress do with the Declaration on July 3 and July 4?

  JM: They applied the wisdom of a great legislative body. That was their view. In Thomas Jefferson’s view, they mutilated it.

  Those of you who are writers will know that being edited is a great and important and wonderful thing to go through, akin to colonoscopies and other things like that. Jefferson hated it so much, he was sitting next to Franklin on the floor there in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, and his leg started doing this jiggling. Franklin had to reach over and put his hand on his leg to calm him down, because Jefferson thought the document was being torn apart.

  The one great edit, I think, which came in the subcommittee process, was made by Franklin, who was suffering from gout at that point—the wages of a well-lived life. He changed the word sacred to self-evident—“that these truths are self-evident”—in order to ground the notion of human rights more in the ethos of reason than in the ethos of religion. He thought that would work better over time. It was a critical change that Jefferson enjoyed.

  Adams and Jefferson, we remember them now in this great autumnal correspondence—they’re the great rivals who came back together and exchanged almost two hundred letters in their retirement. But Adams never really got over how, as he put it, the Declaration of Independence was a theatrical show and Jefferson ran away with all the glory of it, and so that was part of the rivalry that really never went away.

  Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence from June 1776 includes edits made by John Adams and Ben Franklin, among others.

  The Declaration of Independence has three parts to it. First is the preamble, which I gave a little bit of before: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Nobody paid attention to that. That was not important then because it was just a preamble.

  The part that was most important was the section that listed the faults of King George III. That was what most of the document dealt with. The mutilation that occurred was the Congress’s taking out Jefferson’s view that King George should be blamed for the slave trade. He blamed King George for forcing slaves into the United States. It was taken out because many of the people in the Congress were slave owners, and they didn’t really like to criticize King George for it.

  Then the third part of the Declaration stated that we’re going to become independent. Those were the three parts.

  Thomas Jefferson, not being unlike many of us, perhaps—at least, not unlike me—he would send his friends a copy of his draft and say, “Don’t you think my draft is better than what these guys did?” So he wasn’t above all that.

  Let me describe what you’re actually seeing when you see a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The language of the Declaration was agreed to on the Fourth of July. In those days, they didn’t have typewriters and things like that, so once they mutilated the language—I should say that Jefferson was so upset that for nine years he didn’t admit that he wrote the Declaration of Independence. He wouldn’t tell anybody, he was so upset about it. Later he said it was the most important thing he did, and he put it on his tombstone.

  But, okay—the language has been agreed to. They went next door to a man named Mr. Dunlap and said, “Print up a hundred copies of this” as a broadside—a Dunlap Broadside, as they are now known—and they took these hundred copies and distributed them around—one to King George, one to George Washington to read to the troops at Valley Forge, and then they were sent around to the states.

  There were two hundred of them. There are twenty-seven known copies. They probably are worth about $25 million apiece now.

  The broadside version doesn’t have any signatures. It just was the text. They had to inscribe it, so what happened?

  Well, they told all the members who agreed to the final document on July 4, “Go home, because one of the states hasn’t agreed to it.” New York State had been invaded by the British, so the legislators were hiding, and they hadn’t agreed to the independence. So the Congress ultimately said, “Let’s get all thirteen states together. We’ll come back at another time when New York can be in favor of it and everybody can sign it.”

  They came back, more or less around August 4. There are debates on whether it was signed then or not, but let’s just assume for a moment it was signed on August 4.

  That document was kept as part of the United States government. It was moved to New York and back to Philadelphia; it was wrapped up for a time, hidden in a box. When the British invaded in 1814, it was wrapped up and taken in a cloth bag down to Leesburg and hidden there. At one point it was displayed for thirty years in a building in Washington—the Claims Building.

  The original is now in the Archives. If you go to the Archives, what you see is a very faded document. One of the reasons it’s so faded is because it was exposed to sunlight—nobody preserved it—but another thing also happened.

  In 1820 John Quincy Adams, the secretary of state, said, “We’re not going to have a copy that everybody can see, because it’s getting faded.” He hired a man named William Stone and said, “Figure out how to make a perfect copy of the Declaration of Independence.”

  So Mr. Stone, in a three-year process, came up with a process that essentially involved taking a wet cloth and putting it on the original. That took half the ink off, and that was then made into a copper plate. That copper plate was then used to make two hundred perfect copies—two hundred—two were given to each living signer of the Declaration, and two or more to each state or governor.

  There are fifty or so of them left. When you see the New York Times, on the Fourth of July, printing a copy of the Declaration of Independence, what you’re seeing is a Stone copy. It’s a perfect replica, but it’s a Stone copy because the original one is so faded. So today, when people talk about the Declaration, there’s the original in the Archives, there is the Stone copy, and then there are the Dunlap copies that were printed the day after, which don’t have signatures.

  And the signatures had no binding effect. The Declaration was a propaganda document, but everybody wanted to make sure that, in effect, the signers were really standing behind it. They all knew when they signed it they might be signing their death warrant, because it was treason. So that’s more than you might want to know about the Declaration.

  Now, how many Stone copies do you have?

  DR: I own four of them [now seven], and I’ve given one on permanent loan to the State Department.

  JM: That’s one more than me.

  DR: One is in the permanent display at the State Department. If you go to the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, it’s there. One is at the Archives, one is at Mount Vernon, and one is now at the new Constitution Center in Philadel
phia. I put them on display so people will see them.

  JM: Can I give you one treason story?

  DR: Go ahead.

  JM: When the signing of the Declaration was going on—I have this vision in my mind that it was on a table in the corner and you would come in for a roll call and they would say, “Have you signed this?”—it was like a birthday card—“Have you signed it yet?” and they would go over and do it.

  There was a great fat Virginian named Benjamin Harrison and a little, little guy from Massachusetts named Elbridge Gerry, of gerrymandering fame, a wispy fellow. And as they were taking their turns, Harrison turned to Gerry and said, “You know, when the British catch us and hang us, it’ll all be over with me. You’re going to dangle for days.” So there was the sense that if they didn’t hang together, they would hang separately.

  DR: Thomas Jefferson, when his document was being mutilated, never said a word because he didn’t like to talk. As president of the United States, he gave one speech in public. He hated to talk in public. Why was that?

  JM: He wasn’t very good at it. Honestly, he did not have a voice that carried.

  As keen an observer of Jefferson as John Adams—and as we all know, our frenemies are often our best critics and the most precise ones—believed that Jefferson’s political power was enhanced by his failure to be a great speechmaker. Remember, in those days, the largest group he would have addressed—outside of the presidential inauguration, which would have been a big crowd—would have been the House, the Continental Congress, or the Confederation Congress. It would have been a group of people fewer in number than are in this room.

  Adams—and Franklin also agreed with this—said that because Jefferson was such a good committeeman, he was a good draftsman, he would exercise a certain amount of power in being the fellow who wrote the report. It enhanced his power, because no legislator had ever changed his mind.

  Adams spent most of his time getting up and giving speeches saying the other guy was wrong, and it never changed anyone’s mind. And so both Franklin and Adams, on reflection, believed that Jefferson had been wise not to pursue the art of rhetoric.

  DR: In those days, you ran against each other for president, and whoever came in second became vice president. In this case, when Adams ran against Jefferson in the election of 1800, Adams got the highest number of votes, and he became president. How was it to be serving as vice president for somebody you ran against?

  JM: It didn’t work out very well, surprisingly. This was the first great contested election in U.S. history, because Washington had not faced any opposition and yet was so sensitive to criticism that he almost left after one term because he didn’t like being criticized at all. I certainly never have that reaction to criticism.

  Adams came to call on Jefferson when he arrived after the 1800 election and said, “I very much want you to be part of the councils of the administration.” They talked about several issues, and then Adams went off to have dinner with a bunch of Federalists and, as Jefferson put it, “We never again had a substantive discussion about any measure of the administration.”

  The Federalists are holdovers. John Adams kept Washington’s cabinet, and later said it was one of his greatest mistakes because they were more loyal to older policies than to Adams’s.

  DR: So when Adams ran for a second term, he was defeated by—

  JM: Thomas Jefferson.

  DR: And Jefferson’s vice president was?

  JM: Aaron Burr.

  DR: And Aaron Burr shot Hamilton while he was vice president?

  JM: In 1805.

  DR: When Aaron Burr was vice president, was he preparing an insurrection against the president because of the Louisiana Purchase?

  JM: There were several insurrections. In 1801, beginning in February, there were thirty-two ballots cast in the House of Representatives for the presidency of the United States. There had been a mistake. It took the Twelfth Amendment to correct it, but in 1800 the number of electoral votes for Jefferson and Burr turned out to be the same.

  In the past, they would figure out a way to throw away a vote, vote for someone else, just symbolically. It hadn’t happened this time.

  There’s a great debate about this, but Burr was not as eager to stand down as a possible president as Jefferson had hoped, and so you had this entire intrigue in February. There was a snowstorm in Washington. Jefferson was in a quiet agony over at Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse at C Street and New Jersey Avenue, a fancy new boardinghouse, just trying to figure out how to survive this great political intrigue. Burr let it be known that perhaps he would accept the presidency.

  In one of the moments that helped feed an existing rivalry between John Marshall, a cousin of Jefferson’s, and Jefferson, there was talk that Marshall might become president for a year while they settled this. You can imagine how that made Jefferson feel about Marshall.

  As someone once said, for some reason God loves drunks, little children, and the United States of America. This was the fourth election we’d ever had. Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania and James Monroe of Virginia were governors who prepared to send militia to Washington if, in fact, Thomas Jefferson was not made president. It was a remarkably conditional moment.

  DR: Jefferson lived in the White House for eight years—two terms—and his hostess was Dolley Madison because he didn’t have a wife, is that right?

  JM: That’s right.

  DR: He didn’t give speeches, so members of Congress would come to the White House for salons, and he would greet them in his slippers. What was that all about?

  JM: He very much wanted to establish a republican—lowercase—ethos. A lot of debates in the first four, five, six years, even the first decade of the Republic, were about these questions of style and etiquette.

  Washington was much more monarchical than a lot of Republicans believed he should be, understandably. General Washington wore a sword when he took the oath of office both times; John Adams also wore a sword. I always have visions of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance in my mind with that.

  Jefferson refused to do that. Jefferson walked from Conrad and McMunn’s to the Capitol to take the oath of office and then returned after his inaugural address and sat down at the common boardinghouse table to have lunch, a very conscious way of signaling that this was a republic, not a proto-monarchy.

  The way in which he entertained at the White House was very much like this, and also classically contradictory in a Jeffersonian way. There had never been better food, there had never been better wine—he went broke buying wine for the White House to keep members of Congress happy—but he would show up in these sort of Virginia plantation-house clothes, showing that any farmer could become president.

  DR: Jefferson almost went broke all the time. He would die bankrupt, more or less. Why was he always borrowing money, and how come he was so bankrupt if he was so smart about so many other things?

  JM: You’re a private-equity guy. You know farmers.

  He was a plantation owner, and he was not very good at it. He spent a lot of time creating new things. He created new species of apples, he loved grapes, he was always trying to bring Italian musicians to Albemarle County, Virginia. It was all very charming, but he didn’t actually get a crop to market very often.

  DR: You spent five years studying him. If Thomas Jefferson were sitting right here now and you had a chance to ask him one question, what would that question be?

  JM: “Why, given your clear moral sense that slavery was the fire bell in the night that was going to lead to a civil war someday, did you not use any political capital in the twenty years of your political dominance to try to ameliorate the situation?”

  He just gave up. Again, no one was more eloquent, even in retirement. If you go to the Jefferson Memorial, all those quotations, almost all of them, are about slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people shall be
free.”

  These are all about slavery, but these were always in letters in which he then said, “But I can’t do anything about it. It’ll be the work of another generation.”

  Thomas Jefferson was the dominant political figure of the first half of the American Republic. I absolutely believe he was the most important president—Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln.

  From 1801 through 1840, for those forty years, either Thomas Jefferson himself or a self-described Jeffersonian was president of the United States, except for four years during the administration of John Quincy Adams. For thirty-six years there was a de facto Jeffersonian dynasty. No other president has done that. Lincoln didn’t do it, Roosevelt didn’t do it, Reagan didn’t do it. It’s an unmatched achievement.

  If I’m right about that, then you have to take unpopular positions at times to move the country forward in places they don’t want to go, and Jefferson just never tried. So “Why, Mr. President, did you never try?”

  DR: I wish I knew the answer. One last question. Jefferson lived to be eighty-three years old—a very old age in those times, when the average life span was forty-five or forty-seven. He would attribute that to riding horses and walking, but he also did something with water every day with his feet. If you want to live to eighty-three or longer, what is the secret that he used?

  James Hemings, a relative of Sally Hemings, was trained as a French chef. He prepared this inventory of kitchen utensils in 1796, two weeks after he was emancipated by Jefferson.