America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  Printed in early 1801, just as Jefferson was exchanging the vice presidency for the presidency, his manual on the legislative process was immediately put into use by the Senate, the House of Representatives, and state legislatures across the country. “It is much more material,” Jefferson wrote in the first section, entitled “Importance of Rules,” “that there should be a rule to go by, than what that rule is.”

  By this meta-rule also lived the man. Jefferson was addicted to his routines. He would rise at dawn and read before breakfast. For sixty years, he gave himself a cold foot bath every morning. At one o’clock, he would go riding—an activity he continued as president. On his return, about two or two and a half hours later, he would have his daily glass of water; dinner would then be served, during which he drank wine, but never more than three glasses. He typically retired to his chambers at nine and went to bed between ten and eleven.

  Monticello, which he kept fine-tuning for decades after first moving there in 1770, celebrated the regularity and order that he loved. To construct his home, Jefferson relied on another rule-laden treatise, The Four Books on Architecture by the sixteenth-century architect Andrea Palladio, which he once referred to as his “Bible.” During his lifetime, Jefferson owned seven editions of this masterpiece that inspired the revival of the classical style in the eighteenth century—he could not resist snapping up a couple of French translations. For each part of a villa—say, the walls or ceilings—Palladio insisted on precise proportions, based on the dimensions of ancient Roman buildings, which he himself had measured “with the utmost diligence.” (This Renaissance man of numbers also encouraged architects to make “an exact calculation” of their costs before building in order to avoid leaving their creations unfinished.) Jefferson was, a French visitor noted in 1782, “the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” One factor contributing to his decade of “unchequered happiness” with his wife, Martha, who died at the age of thirty-three in 1782, was her skillful administration of Monticello. “Nothing,” Dumas Malone, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning six volume Jefferson and His Time, completed in 1981, “he ever did was more characteristic of him as a person or as a mind.” Jefferson himself calculated the mathematical measurements and did the drawings for the three-story, twenty-one-room mansion, which he didn’t finish until 1809. He also selected all the furnishings and accoutrements, down to the drapery and upholstery.

  Jefferson liked mathematical precision everywhere, even in poetry. In the mid-1780s, in his daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne, America’s minister to France began formulating how to put English literature in order. Jefferson’s essay “Thoughts on English Prosody,” completed in the fall of 1786, sought to explain “the rules” that should govern poetic composition. Mining passages from his literary commonplace book, which he began keeping as an adolescent, he presented numerous examples of different types of meter and rhyme interspersed with his commentary. The inveterate classicist came down hard on lyric poems such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) for intermingling different line lengths in the same verse and thus departing from “that simplicity and regularity of which the ear is most sensible.” Though he didn’t quite recommend kicking such poems out of the canon, he came close, concluding that “these pieces are seldom read twice.”

  Despite the overwhelming evidence of Jefferson’s obsessionality, most biographers have looked the other way. Dumas Malone, whose work still remains definitive, characterized his subject as “thoughtful and observant” as he whipped out his thermometer in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. The preeminent Jefferson scholar said nothing else about this curious incident. (Perhaps it takes one not to know one; Malone, who spent nearly forty years combing through Jeffersoniana, once described himself as “properly fastidious.”) But such has not always been the case. The first writer to get his hands on the bulk of Jefferson’s papers, Henry Stephens Randall, could not help but fixate on this central characterological tic. Like a giddy teenager, Randall, the author of a three-volume, two-thousand-page life published in 1858, used italics and exclamation points to express his initial surprise:

  All the manuscripts of Thomas Jefferson present a striking and persistent coincidence in one particular—and it is one of the first ones which the examiner notices, partly from its own prominence, and partly because few out of the circle of his immediate friends are prepared for the fact it discloses. It is his remarkable precision down to minute details—his apparent fondness for details. Never was there a more methodical man from great matters down to the merest seeming trifles—never so diligent a recorder of them!…The pocket account books include the minutest items of his daily expenditure, down to two or three pennies paid for a shoe string, or tossed into a beggar’s hat in Paris—and we think we remember one or two entries of a single penny, to make the inexorable cash book balance exactly!

  As Randall aptly notes, to point out Jefferson’s immersion in the trivial is not to diminish his greatness. “The master mind, that comes but once in a century,” the biographer adds, “is stamped with universality.… It has vigor to collect all, without becoming over-wearied or frittered away in the pursuit.”

  The more distressed Jefferson was, the more avidly he threw himself into his collecting, organizing, and list making. The loss of his wife would produce a veritable frenzy of classification. While his grief initially resulted in emotional paralysis, within a few months, he sought comfort by cranking out a host of new lists. In early 1783, the master collector created an Epistolary Record to track all his correspondence. Over the next forty-three years, he cataloged 19,000 letters of his own—he used a polygraph, not the modern day lie-detector but a primitive copy machine, as he wrote—and 25,000 from colleagues in a 656-page index. Not long after Martha’s death, he also recorded a second inventory of his slaves—the total came to 204—in his Farm Book. And around the same time, he completed the first catalog of his books. Following the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon, Jefferson classified his 2,640 volumes into the categories of Memory (history), Reason (mathematics and philosophy), and Imagination (art and literature). To console himself, the aging Jefferson repeatedly responded to his own query of “whether my country is the better for my having lived at all” by compiling lists of his achievements. Shortly before his death in 1826, he came up with a final “short list.” As he instructed his heirs, he wanted “the following inscription, and not a word more” placed on his tombstone:

  Here was buried

  Thomas Jefferson

  Author of the Declaration of American Independence

  of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom

  and Father of the University of Virginia.

  So attached to lists was he that he wished to be remembered by one; and this summary of his career stressed his main obsessions and compulsions—advocating for freedom and organizing knowledge—rather than the prominent offices he held—governor, secretary of state, and president.

  For comfort, Jefferson often turned to data sets rather than to other people. A man who had difficulty connecting, he was convinced that “the most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.” A loner with few close friends, he felt uncomfortable in most social settings. In fact, in a recent paper published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, a team of Duke University psychiatrists, based on the evidence contained in the major biographies, concluded that Jefferson met the diagnostic criteria for social phobia. A common symptom of this anxiety disorder is an intense fear of public speaking, the very problem that derailed Jefferson’s law career in the early 1770s. “His voice, if raised much above the loudness of ordinary conversation,” Randall notes, “began, after a few moments’ effort, to ‘sink in his throat’—in other words, to become husky and inarticulate.”

  Jefferson never said a word in the debates held during the Second Continental Con
gress. As president, he gave just two speeches—his first and second Inaugural Addresses. In sharp contrast with his predecessors, George Washington and John Adams, President Jefferson hardly ever appeared in public, except at his dinner parties, where he set strict rules (he invited members of one party— either Federalists or Republicans—in groups of twelve to twenty, and any political discussion was verboten). While Jefferson could be a lively conversationalist, he related more easily to others on the page than in person. His was an epistolary presidency. In his White House study, with his pet hummingbird, Dick, often perched upon his shoulder—the president kept the cage open when no one else was around—he spent ten to thirteen hours a day at his writing desk. As per his own calculations, in the first year of his administration, Jefferson received 1,881 letters and sent out 677.

  Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, in Shadwell, Virginia. He was the third child and firstborn son of Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph; he had nine brothers and sisters, seven of whom would survive until adulthood. A modest country squire who owned about 1,500 acres of farmland along with two slaves at the time of his marriage, Peter Jefferson was an imposing physical specimen; it was said he could lift a thousand pounds of tobacco from the ground to an upright position with each hand simultaneously. The laconic advocate of self-reliance often reminded his children, “Never ask another to do for you what you can do for yourself.” The Virginia native didn’t attend college, but he was an avid reader of Shakespeare who made sure that his eldest son received the best education that money could buy. At nine, Tom boarded at the house of a local clergyman, William Douglas, where he began studying the classics. No slouch with numbers, Peter Jefferson kept his own detailed account books—his payments to Douglas came to sixteen pounds per annum—and was a talented surveyor who coauthored a widely used map of the southern United States. According to Randall, “the lessons of system, punctuality, energy and perseverance” were passed down from the father, who also served his community as a justice of the peace, a colonel in the militia, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.

  While Thomas Jefferson later spoke affectionately about his father, he almost never mentioned his mother, even though her family stood at the center of Virginia’s aristocracy. “By his own reckoning,” one biographer has written, “she was a zero quantity in his life.” His desire to erase his mother from his history suggests, most Jefferson scholars agree, that the relationship was marked by tension. One common hypothesis is that she had a habit of barking out injunctions to him, just as he would later do with his daughters. Whatever the source of the friction, its effects may well have been considerable; after all, Jane Randolph constantly hovered over him. Except for his student years in Williamsburg, he continued to live with her at Shadwell until he moved to Monticello at the age of twenty-seven. And the boy who felt alienated from his mother would evolve into a loner who had difficulty forging intimate bonds with other human beings, particularly women.

  Details about Tom’s early years are scant. Shadwell burned down in 1770, destroying many of his papers. Eager to protect his privacy, Jefferson would later burn his entire correspondence with both his mother and his wife. And his unfinished memoir, written in 1821, like his various accounts books, focuses mostly on the data. “At the age of 77,” he wrote in the introduction to this hundred-page autobiographical fragment, which describes political events rather than personal experiences, “I begin to make some memoranda and state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself, for my own ready reference and for the information of my family.” The septuagenarian had little interest in remembering for himself, much less in revealing to others, his life as he had actually lived it. “I am already,” Jefferson noted about a third of the way through, “tired of talking about myself.”

  Tom would be forced to grow up much too fast. In August 1757, when he was fourteen, his beloved father died. In his will, Peter Jefferson left his eldest son a “body servant,” his library of forty-two books—then a not insignificant number—and his mathematical instruments. But Tom would not inherit any property until he reached twenty-one. In the meantime, he would have to cater to those who wielded authority over the family—namely, his mother and the five executors of his father’s estate, whose approval he would need for his expenses. According to one biographer, this was the primary reason why Jefferson began counting every penny and became “obsessed by accountability.” Sadly, even though the adolescent had little control over his own quotidian life, he was saddled with enormous responsibility. Thrust into the role of the man of the house, he was supposed to oversee the education and welfare of his six sisters and brother, whose ages then ranged from seventeen to two. “When I recollect that at 14 years of age,” Jefferson confided to his grandson a half century later, “the whole care and direction of my self was thrown on my self entirely, without a relation or friend qualified to advise or guide me…I am astonished I did not…become…worthless to society.” These feelings of anger and alienation would last well into adulthood.

  In early 1758, the fourteen-year-old began attending a boarding school in nearby Fredericksville, led by a cleric named William Maury. While he enjoyed immersing himself in his studies and learning the violin, he could not escape entirely from the stressful family situation that he encountered upon his return to Shadwell every weekend. As the literary critic Kenneth Lockridge has noted, of the roughly eighty entries that Jefferson made in his literary commonplace book in the years surrounding his father’s death, about half contain passages expressing rage against authority. This correlation, argues Lockridge, suggests that the teenager had an “obsession with conflict.” As he read John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Jefferson apparently sympathized with Satan, the epic poem’s protagonist, who, as the schoolboy recorded in his notebook, vowed “ever to do Ill” and preferred to “reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” Long before writing the Declaration, Jefferson was already thinking about revolution.

  After two years at Reverend Maury’s, he petitioned John Harvie, a family friend who served as the chief executor of his father’s estate, to approve his plan to begin college at William and Mary. “I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here,” he explained to Harvie in his earliest surviving letter, dated January 14, 1760, “and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.” The sixteen-year-old’s hunch proved prescient. Soon after his arrival in Williamsburg that March, he came under the wing of William Small, a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy (physics), who, as he later wrote, “fixed the destinies of my life.” From Small, who taught Jefferson through lectures as well as informal daily chats, he learned to appreciate the scientific method and systematic thinking of all kinds. But it was mathematics about which Jefferson became downright passionate. The perfectionist could hardly resist the lure of entering a world filled only with numbers. “We have no theories there,” he wrote a half century later, “no uncertainties remain on the mind; all is demonstration and satisfaction.” For the same reason, this voracious intellectual would later express a reverence for all branches of knowledge except ethics and metaphysics; he had little but contempt for philosophers such as Plato. “Recondite speculation,” concludes Randall, “having no connection with practical questions…could not long interest his attention.” Though much more widely read than the other obsessives covered in this book (and just about anyone else), Jefferson too was a problem solver, not a reflective thinker. The Virginia plantation owner would return again and again to William Emerson’s Doctrine of Fluxions, his beloved calculus text from college, but each time, he was motivated by a specific task. “I have imagined and executed,” he wrote to John Taylor, a fellow Virginia politico and farmer, in 1794, “a mould-board [the wooden part of a plow that picks up the sod cut by the iron blade] which may be mathematically demonstrated to be perfect, as far as perfection depends on mathematical principles.” While Jefferson didn’t patent his famous “Moldboard of Least Resistance,” which great
ly facilitated plowing, most scholars consider his invention a significant contribution to agriculture.

  Reading fifteen hours a day, Jefferson completed William and Mary in two years. Over the next five years, as he studied law under George Wythe, a leader of the Virginia bar to whom he had been introduced by Dr. Small, he kept up the pace. Except for his hour a day of violin practice, he would rarely have time for anything else. Wythe, whom Jefferson would later praise for “regularity in all his habits” and call a “second father,” endeared himself to the future defender of individual rights by his enlightened approach to legal training. Instead of requiring Jefferson to do clerical work in his law office, the bibliophile with the perfect Greek encouraged him to learn for himself. Judging by the advice that Jefferson gave to a prospective law student in 1769, he followed a grueling reading schedule; he would begin with Agriculture at dawn, move to Law, Politics, and History during the day, and conclude with Belles-Lettres at bedtime. In the missive in which he showcased his rigorous curriculum, Jefferson mentioned all the essential books in each area (the key legal text was the Institutes of the Lawes of England by Sir Edward Coke, the legendary Jacobean jurist), insisting that they be “read in the order in which they are named.” He also recommended summarizing “every case of value,” which was exactly what he did in his own legal commonplace book. For most of the 1760s, Jefferson’s deepest ties were to his texts; canonical authors such as Coke, whom he once referred to as an “old…scoundrel,” were as real to him as his colleagues and family members. When a slave informed him in early 1770 that Shadwell had burned down, his thoughts didn’t immediately turn to the welfare of his mother or siblings who lived there with him. “But were none of my books saved?” was instead the first question that emerged from his lips. For Jefferson, books were imaginary friends that could help insulate him from feelings of isolation.