When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  His library also grew by buying up other people’s libraries, including those of Benjamin Franklin and fellow Virginians Richard Bland and Peyton Randolph, who shared his interest in the early history of their state. Purchasing libraries is a common practice among bibliophiles. Comprehensive collections are frequently assembled by harvesting the fruits of other collectors’ zeal. But buying books wholesale from existing collectors was particularly notable among monarchs and statesmen of start-up countries. The emperors and empresses of Russia, for example, eager to catch up with centuries of European intellectual achievement, were famous buyers of libraries, from Peter the Great’s purchase of Archibald Pitcairne’s library on the art of physic (medicine) to Catherine the Great’s acquisition of philosophe Denis Diderot’s library.

  With a double-mindedness characteristic of Jefferson as a man—and typical of collectors and other addicts—he found in the larger ambitions of his collecting a justification for spending more money than he had in the pursuit of his quarry. That larger ambition was to create a bank of knowledge full of the accumulated riches of human thought and memory that the young nation could draw on for generations to come. His acquisitions, then, were driven by two overlapping but sometimes conflicting ambitions. He wanted a collection for his private purposes, shaped by his own personal bibliographic tastes, to be housed at Monticello and enjoyed in domestic intimacy. And he was seeking to build a library that would enshrine his political and intellectual ideals and in good time be put in service to the nation. As he was leaving public office behind for good in 1809, he wrote to Madison that he contemplated giving his collection to a university—either to Virginia, or to the national university that might be built in the capital.

  But war intervened, and so, too, did a personal financial crisis. While officials in Washington had ample warning of the British invasion of 1814, there were only desultory evacuations of the books and papers housed in the Capitol, with priority given to government records over books from the congressional library. The clerk of the House (who also held the position of librarian of Congress) was absent from his post, away at a spa in Virginia taking the waters to fortify his constitution. The staff he left on duty did the best they could to find conveyances to move the books out of harm’s way. But most horses and carriages had already been commandeered by the combatants. As a result of the Capitol fire, countless books, maps, records, and vital documents (including Revolutionary War pension claims) were lost. It is not clear how much of the three-thousand-volume congressional library remained when the fighting was over. The reports of widespread depredation suffered by the Capitol were later judged to be exaggerated. What flames there were, were used by propagandists to fuel the anti-imperial patriotic fervor of the young Republic’s citizens. Contemporaries gave eager ear to the rumors that British troops deliberately pulled books, manuscripts, and maps from the library in order to stoke the fires.

  Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson had his own reasons to believe the worst. Living in retirement at Monticello, he was a man with many books, many expensive habits, and many debts. Chief among those expensive habits was Monticello, an ambitious building project that was ongoing for most of his life. “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and taking down, one of my favorite amusements,” he confessed. And he kept himself very well amused. Within a few weeks of the fire, Thomas Jefferson approached Congress about purchasing his library to replace what was lost. Through an intermediary, he presented a formal tender to the Library Committee of Congress. But his offer was driven as much by his ambitions for the young Republic as by pecuniary interests.

  Jefferson had always cared deeply about the congressional library: As president (1801–1809) he formalized the office of librarian of Congress, ensured a dedicated acquisitions budget, and took active interest in the growth of the library. In his tender, he enclosed a catalog of his books and invited Congress to name their price. Congress offered him $23,950, a price based solely on the size and number of the books—$1 for a duodecimal, $3 for an octavo, $10 for a folio, and so on. The Senate, with typical liberality (the House appropriates funds, not the Senate), quickly passed a bill approving the purchase. But not the House. They had a far more partisan view of the former president, and they had the power of the purse. A contemporary report states:

  Those who opposed the bill, did so on account of the scarcity of money, and the necessity of appropriating it to purposes more indispensable than the purchase of a library; the probable insecurity of such a library placed here; the high price to be given for this collection; its miscellaneous and almost exclusively literary (instead of legal and historical) character, &c.

  To those arguments, enforced with zeal and vehemence, the friends of the bill replied with fact, wit, and argument, to show that the purchase, to be made on terms of long credit, could not affect the present resources of the United States; that the price was moderate, the library more valuable from the scarcity of many of its books, and altogether a most admirable substratum for a National Library.

  There were some, such as Cyrus King of Massachusetts, who tried to exclude “all books of atheistical, irreligious, and immoral tendency,” of which there were quite a few, given Jefferson’s broad interests and special fondness for philosophes. But careful selection demands the luxury of time, which the members of Congress did not have. In the end, the measure was approved along strict party lines.

  So the first chapter in this bibliographical genesis ended happily for all: Congress had acquired a library, and Jefferson paid off his major creditors. In the end, he even pocketed $8,580—a sum it turns out could buy a lot of books and wine.

  JEFFERSON THE STATESMAN

  What exactly had Congress bought? Some members were clearly already thinking about “a National Library,” and they saw this purchase as a good foundation. Jefferson himself was less ingenuous. In pitching the sale to Congress, he insisted that the books were each and every one of them necessary for Congress.

  I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer … [The collection], while it includes what is chiefly valuable in science and literature generally, extends more particularly to whatever belongs to the American statesman.

  And there were indeed a lot of useful books for the making of good laws—the great English jurists Blackstone, Bolingbroke, and Coke in particular—in addition to dozens of volumes on foreign and domestic laws, treaties, books on weights and measures, trade and customs, and so forth. And because the congressional library was also the only library accessible to members and government officials in the cultural backwater that Washington was, who would deny that the majority of books, while not precisely important for the purposes of legislating, would not be welcome as companions to the soul? Gentlemen of the capital could settle down with the wisdom of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Locke, and Hume. Members could choose to pass a few hours in the company of the great poets and historians of the past—Homer and Virgil, Ovid and Xenophon, Thucydides and Herodotus, Tacitus and Cicero, Dante and Shakespeare, Milton and Ossian (whom Jefferson deemed “the greatest poet who ever existed,” though we now know he did not actually exist). And for those lighter moments, between writing legislation and the weighty deliberations over treaties, members could tuck into delights of literature by the likes of Sterne, Defoe, Cervantes, and Rabelais.

  But the idea that each volume in the library was somehow germane to governing was a flagrant exaggeration, a high-minded sales pitch that only Jefferson could have made with a straight face. What was true was that Jefferson believed his library contained what it took for Americans to educate themselves, to advance science and philosophy, and to form their identity as Americans distinct from all other nations.

  Jefferson was a futurist. That was why he was obsessed with the past. “It is the duty of every good citizen,” he wrote, “to use all the opportunities, which occur to h
im, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.” He was not an antiquarian, reveling in the discreet charms of the simple and obsolete modes of life lived by generations long gone from the face of the Earth. The purpose of saving the historical record was to discover in it the ways in which America differs from Europe—is as good as Europe, in fact probably better, but certainly not inferior. What it is to make an American citizen out of a British subject, Jefferson argued, is the moral, physical, aesthetic, and political environment in which the republican citizen is raised. The clean air, unpolluted waters, rich soils, and vast expanses of the continent allow humanity the greatest range for the development of its higher self, inspired and instructed by the accumulated examples of the past.

  He was first and foremost interested in items that documented the nation: everything written by Americans and everything written about America. Jefferson collected in all the publishing formats available in his time, ranging from books, newspapers, and broadsides to maps, charts, manuscripts, engravings, statistical tables, and musical scores. His interests went far beyond politics, public policy, and political economy. There were works by American scientists and poets (including the first black poet, the ex-slave Phillis Wheatley), works about the natural history of the continent and the languages spoken by the indigenous populations. In a letter thanking James Madison for sending him a pamphlet on the Mohican language, he wrote, “I endeavor to collect all the vocabularies I can of the American Indians, as those of Asia, persuaded that if they ever had a common parentage it will appear in their languages.”

  But in Jefferson’s day, the world of learning lay elsewhere, so the majority of his books came from Europe and a good portion of them were in European languages—Greek and Latin, German, French, and Spanish. He collected histories of the classical world, European history, and everything that would provide information about the republican predecessors of the United States. As he wrote in the preamble to the education bill he drafted for the Virginia legislature, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, Jefferson especially believed a future secure from tyranny and corruption demands that leaders “illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” Montaigne, too, advocated the study of history: It brings us into the company of “the worthiest minds, who lived in the best ages.”

  The record of the past is direct evidence of man’s potential, both good and bad. Jefferson owned numerous books he deemed exemplars of bad ideas and pernicious influence. For example, he admired Hume’s essays but roundly condemned his history of England, blaming this book and those of Blackstone for the spread of “universal toryism over the land.” And yet, though he blamed these books for spreading bad ideas, he did not purge them from his library. A universal library must include all books of significance, whether their influence be for good or ill. Having access to recorded knowledge and a reliable record of the past—feats and follies, virtues and vices alike—became a lynchpin of self-rule. An enlightened people will and must judge for themselves where truth lies.

  So how much can this library tell us about the mind of Jefferson? Access to the originals used by an individual can be revealing, especially if the books bear annotations. They can be like magnifying glasses held up to the mind, because reading the marginalia—the comments, quarrels, notes, and doodles we find in the margins or fervidly squeezed in between the lines of a page—is like hearing the owner whispering in your ear. But Jefferson, as a rule, did not write in his books. He tended mainly to make owner’s marks—revealing in itself, but not necessarily about his intellectual concerns. We cannot see or hear him arguing with a writer, as we see Ben Franklin doing in furious annotations in his books. One book that Jefferson had acquired from Franklin’s library had annotations covering the page and into the gutters, memorializing Dr. Franklin’s passionate indignation at the stupidity and mendacity of the views therein expressed (“An impudent falsity,” “Another misrepresentation,” “This is a most extravagant assertion,” and so on).

  Jefferson was more an acquisitor than an annotator. He dedicated himself to assembling a universe of learning, neither commenting on it nor quarreling with it. To read his mind, we do better to study his correspondence than look inside the volumes on his shelves. In his epistolary writing he carried on lively debates with others—and with himself—as his letters are rich with references to writers, thinkers, and historical actors. Even lightly browsing his bookshelves will yield more knowledge about the man than would the same time spent carefully studying each volume. There were no doubt items in his library that he did not, in fact, read—the three-volume book on statistics in Russian stands out as one example—but the fact is of little consequence. That he thought it important to collect such an item reflects his view of the world of knowledge and casts light on his dreams of the future of the United States. It is this notion—that of a comprehensive and coherent collection of knowledge about and useful to America, not merely catering to personal interests or executed in imitation of aristocratic models of collecting—that makes people describe his collecting practices as universal and stand as a model for the Internet today. But this vision also reflects the essential character of Jefferson’s spirit—omnivorous, insatiable, and quixotic.

  JEFFERSON’S LAST ACT

  The paradox for a man like Thomas Jefferson, both a diligent student of history and one who self-consciously made history, is that no matter how much we have to learn from the past, in making history we inevitably obliterate much of what came before us. “The earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,” Jefferson wrote to Madison from Paris in the early months of the French Revolution. Revolutionaries—and Jefferson was nothing if not a committed revolutionary to his dying day—engage in acts of destruction that they hope are creative. They set out to destroy what is old and create what is new. But in any successful social or political revolution, the originators inevitably lose control of both processes. Jefferson was no different. And yet he believed the national library would endure.

  Jefferson’s rationalism and native idealism waxed and waned as he lived longer than he had expected. By the time he died in 1826—exactly fifty years to the day since the signing of the Declaration of Independence he drafted—he witnessed developments in the United States that were completely counter to what he had hoped and indeed planned for. Where he had envisioned a largely agricultural nation spread evenly across the capacious land, he saw instead the steady influx of migrants, the growth of manufacturing, and the burgeoning of cities. As he fought off the pain of disillusionment, he withdrew from the present and gave himself over to his utopian longings for a future that would be all peace and harmony among men. Like his fellow survivor John Adams, Jefferson was very concerned that history should remember him for the role he played in the founding of what he expected to be a great nation. By the time Jefferson and Adams lived into their eighties, they were afraid that they would not be remembered for the things that they had accomplished and worse—that they would not be remembered at all. It was as if they had a bitter foretaste of America’s inane tension between nostalgia and utopian futurism, ignoring altogether the unadorned facts of history and the lessons these men so hoped to leave behind to instruct their descendants.

  This is where Jefferson’s library could perform its final act of redemption. Just weeks after his books left Monticello for the capital in 1815 and the shelves of his library stood bare, Jefferson wrote to Adams that “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.” He had discharged his duty as a public servant and desired nothing more than to enjoy the privileges of being a private citizen. And so, bereft of books and debts retired, he entered in the third chapter of his b
ibliomania, the creation of his last library.

  He started assembling it right after the sale of his library to Congress, and this one he designed to be a library for a retired man, not a working library. For while Jefferson confided to his fellow revolutionary and comrade-in-arms that he was more comfortable with his dreams of the future, to another friend he wrote that “I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing.” So his third library was stocked, like Montaigne’s, primarily with the classics, particularly Greek and Latin histories. We have the testimony of his family that these volumes were his constant companions in his retirement. At the same time, he was occupied with planning to translate his library to the university that he was creating in Charlottesville. Again succumbing to the passion of collecting and dreaming of the future, he thought about building a comprehensive collection with a coherence that could structure a curriculum for the citizens of the newborn republic. He reportedly drew up a list of the books that should be housed under the great dome of the rotunda he designed for the campus. It numbered 6,680 volumes, he reckoned, and would cost $24,076.

  At the time of his death in 1826, Thomas Jefferson had over two thousand books in his library. These books were to go to his university in nearby Charlottesville. But he was improvident to the end, and his heirs were forced to sell his books to pay his debts. The University of Virginia, rather than receiving this bequest, was instead the recipient of an embarrassed letter from his grandson and executor explaining that the books would go, along with other movable property (including slaves), to his creditors.