One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  The “very nature” of this war, Osgood concluded, “is violence against the lives and properties of our fellow-beings, our brethren, the children of our common progenitor on earth and common Father in heaven.” In a stinging rebuke of the pro-war preachers with whom he was competing for the hearts and minds of the faithful, he asked, “What Christian, under the influence of Christian principles, can dare pray for success?”

  As distinct as such religious principles were, they all in fact were trying to answer some basic questions inevitable in the second generation of a new republic: What ideals should the nation embody? What were the contents of its soul?

  One answer came from an unexpected source—the Olympian hilltop of Monticello—while General Ross was still floating away in his barrel of Jamaican spirits.

  In early September 1814, the aging statesman Thomas Jefferson read in a Richmond newspaper of the destruction recently wrought by the British in Washington. Just a hundred miles to the north, a city reduced to ash and blackened with soot could not have seemed farther away from his busy and bucolic retreat outside of Charlottesville. A lifelong bibliophile, the former president—now five years out of office—was particularly struck by the loss of the Congressional Library. Fully aware that the contents of the nation’s soul might be judged by the holdings of its bookshelves, he had in fact been the instigator of the original library, outlining its purpose twelve years earlier in a letter to Georgia senator Abraham Baldwin. Attaching a catalogue of every book he thought appropriate for legislative use, he had stressed the need for volumes on “the laws of nature and nations… because this is a branch of science often under discussion in Congress.”

  At the time, he had favored the idea of a library limited to reference works, for he imagined that any gentleman who might find himself in Congress would already possess the classics of literature and philosophy in his own personal library. Yet in the aftermath of the congressional collection’s destruction, and perhaps with a sense that the cultural assumptions of his generation might not be those of the next, he now envisioned something grander. The Library of Congress, rather than the limited collection it had been, should instead be universal, filled with a world’s worth of ideas, as his own personal library was—indeed, as his own life had been. And so from his redoubt untouched by the flames of Washington, surrounded by the greatest private collection of literature on this side of the Atlantic, Jefferson resolved to undo at least one part of the destruction wrought by General Ross.

  Wasting no time once his decision had been made, Jefferson sent a three-part missive to an acquaintance in the capital city: Samuel Smith, a newspaperman likely to know who was in charge of the Library Committee in Congress. The first part of this correspondence was a casual cover sheet, a warm appeal to the friendship the two men shared and an apology in advance for any trouble he might cause him through his unusual request. The second part was a book catalogue, and the third was a longer letter he hoped Smith would share with Congress.

  “I learn from the newspapers that the Vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington over science as well as the arts by the destruction of the public library with the noble edifice in which it was deposited,” Jefferson wrote. “I presume it will be among the early objects of Congress to recommence their collection. This will be difficult while the war continues, and intercourse with Europe is attended with so much risk.”

  The bulk of the original collection, Jefferson knew, had been purchased from the very people who had just reduced it to ashes. As busy as American printers were, they still could not match the output or the backlists of publishers in England or on the European mainland. Jefferson, too, had acquired most of his own collection while abroad, and was justifiably proud of the result.

  “You know my collection, its condition and extent,” he wrote. “I have been fifty years making it, and have spared no pains, opportunity, or expense, to make it what it is. While residing in Paris, I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal book-stores, turning over every book with my own hand, and putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science.”

  Allowing himself a boast because it happened to be true, he added, “Such a collection was made as probably can never again be effected, because it is hardly probable that the same opportunities, the same time, industry, perseverance and expense, with some knowledge of the bibliography of the subject, would again happen to be in concurrence.” Jefferson’s library was unique, he knew, because throughout his life he had been the right man in the right place at the right time—and most importantly, he had always had the cash on hand to make the most of happenstance.

  And like anyone who haunts used bookshops, he also knew a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when he saw one. Now that the Capitol and its three thousand volumes were lost, Jefferson proposed starting the Library of Congress anew with his own collection. It had been his intention to do so upon his death, he explained to Smith, but now the need seemed immediate. This would not be a gift, however. Jefferson made it clear he would take whatever payment the Congress authorized to give, and left it to the scruples of his former fellow legislators, and no doubt to their feelings of indebtedness to the great man, to come up with a suitable price. Jefferson’s Republican party, not incidentally, held the majority over the Federalists, so if it came to a vote over cost (a reasonable expectation, given that the nation was already approaching twenty million dollars in debt), he could have expected some debate over the legitimacy of the expense.

  What he might not have expected was a fight over the library’s contents. Beginning not long after Jefferson’s offer in September, a months-long controversy over the nature of his library and its appropriateness as a resource for lawmakers roiled Washington, with ripples felt all over the country. The central question in the dispute—which ideas were appropriate for recognition by the government?—was an extension of the questions at the heart of the war. As controversy over the library festered and congressmen on both sides entered the fray, this disagreement showed that the “wall of separation” between church and state, which Jefferson himself had famously described twelve years before in a letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, was not without cracks.

  Indeed, if any such wall existed as the War of 1812 ended, it seemed likely to crumble under the weight of Jefferson’s books—for so dangerous were the volumes he proposed to place in service to the nation that the Congress of the United States would soon discuss the merits of book burning, in a city that had only recently been engulfed in flames.

  Of the more than six thousand volumes Jefferson planned to deliver to Congress (eighteen or twenty wagonloads, as he reckoned the collection to be), only about three hundred dealt with subjects we might today consider under the rubric of religion. This was a small percentage of the library, but given the uproar many of the religious opinions offered in those books would soon cause, they may be seen as the controversial core of the collection: a window into their collector’s views not only of faith but of progress and human history. They are a key, ultimately, to understanding a man whose idiosyncratic thoughts on religious difference have so influenced both today’s laws and our enduring national assumptions.

  Jefferson was at heart a cataloguer of human experiences. An inveterate classifier and a list-maker, he famously first enumerated humankind’s unalienable rights to include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property” in his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, before altering the final subcategory to prefer the more abstract “happiness” over “property.” In his home, too, he meticulously classified and reclassified everything from seeds to living spaces to books. His library in particular was a marvel of organization, collected and arranged in an attempt to make a map of all branches of knowledge. Using a system that was “something analytical, something chronological, and sometimes a combination of both,” he sought not merely to make desired books easy to find on
crowded shelves but to demonstrate the relationship between them, and to suggest the connection of one set of ideas to another.

  Toward this end, he divided his library into three parts, following a schema inspired by Sir Francis Bacon yet making it his own. Bacon’s system had been to separate fields of inquiry into the categories of Memory, Reason, and Imagination. “From these three fountains,” he wrote, “flow these three emanations, History, Poesy, and Philosophy; and there can be no others.”

  Perhaps finding “imagination” too fanciful, and being hardwired to recognize “reason” as the governor of all, Jefferson reworked Bacon’s model into a system based on the divisions of History, Philosophy, and Fine Arts, including more than a dozen subcategories in each. To the modern reader it may be odd to see that the subcategories within History include not only Ancient, Modern, and Ecclesiastical sections but also Chemistry, Zoology, and Mineralogy. Philosophy, likewise, includes the expected—Ethics comes first—but also more than a dozen other subgroups, including Mathematics, Politics, Astronomy, and Religion. In Fine Arts, a reader would find sections on Painting, Sculpture, and Gardening, as well as Comedy, Tragedy, and Architecture. As Jefferson saw it, History was objective knowledge, and Philosophy human reflection upon it, while Fine Arts reflected the application of the second upon the first. In the words of the scholar of presidential books, Arthur Bestor, it was not just through the library but the catalogue, the organization of ideas, that Jefferson has left us “a blueprint of his own mind.”

  And more than that, he seems to have left us a blueprint for our national approach to conflicting and competing spiritual ideas, traditions, and beliefs. The Religion section of his library provides a good example of this.

  The general category of “religion” at the time was synonymous with Protestant Christianity—most non-Christians were said to adhere to “heathen religion,” Jews to the “Jewish religion,” and Roman Catholics to the “Romish religion”; but “religion” on its own, or “true religion,” could generally mean only one thing. Yet in his classification system, Jefferson took a more expansive view. In the catalogue he created to apprise Congress of his holdings in advance of the sale, the first few books in his collection move from the Sibylline Oracles, to a tome on “heathen gods,” to the Quran, to the Old and New Testaments. Reflective of human experience in its wide variety, as he understood it, Jefferson’s religion collection includes works in five languages.

  Somewhat poignantly, this great thinker avoided arranging books alphabetically by title or author as he reached his elder years, “because of the medley it presents to the mind, the difficulty sometimes of recalling an author’s name.” There was also the difficulty, when the title was used for classification, of remembering which part of the title, in which language, had been used to “determine its alphabetical place.” And so Jefferson organized his books on faith in a rough system that sought to replicate his understanding of how religious ideas developed over time. His thinking here was not chronological—he ordered the titles neither by composition date nor by publication—but rather genealogical. The titles with which the catalogue begins are those upon which, in Jefferson’s estimation, all the others depend—a bibliographic family tree of belief.

  Each of these earliest titles in the section also provides a view of the way he saw religions at work in the world. To begin with the first title: The Sibylline Oracles—a collection of poems supposedly uttered by ancient prophetesses—are at once a symbol of the classical cultures the Revolutionary generation held in such high esteem, and a reminder of the religious diversity that existed even at the time of their composition. The fragments gathered throughout are not limited to standard mythological tropes but also draw on Jewish and early Christian legends. They are reflective of a time not unlike Jefferson’s own, which, despite recognizing one religion as “religion” and others merely as pale imitations, was also shaped by religious diversity, often as hidden as the Christian and Jewish themes are within the Sibyls’ utterances.

  The second and third books in his religion collection are also instructive. An Historical Account of the Heathen Gods and Heroes, by William King, was a popular book of classical mythology in Jefferson’s day, primarily for the reason indicated by its subtitle: “Necessary for the Understanding of the Ancient Poets.” Jefferson and other men of learning of his day read widely in certain areas of religion in part to comprehend arts and cultures of the past, but Jefferson’s interest did not end with literary allusions. Following King on the shelf was Samuel Boyse’s A New Pantheon, Or Fabulous History of the Heathen Gods, Heroes and Goddesses. Boyse acknowledged the reason many might turn to such a work was that “some acquaintance with the Heathen Gods and ancient Fables is a necessary Branch of polite Learning” and “generally esteemed necessary for the Improvement of Youth,” yet he then goes further to consider the well-known figures of classical mythology as the living religious system of its day. Tracing the trajectory of “Pagan Theology,” Boyse sought—as did Jefferson, apparently—to understand how the “Rise of Idolatry, and its Connection with the ancient Symbols, which gave Names to the Planets” could have led to “Sentiments of the Pagans with regard to the Unity of the Deity.”

  There is, then, in just the first few books in Jefferson’s classification of religion, a clear sense that religious ideas change over time. There is also an awareness that every age has had to square unavoidable diversity of opinion on religious matters with the shared assumptions upon which any culture relies. This same awareness can be seen in the book Jefferson chose as the next in his collection, a copy of the Quran that he had purchased as a law student almost fifty years before. It is somewhat remarkable that he still had it in his possession, for his own early library, like Congress’s original collection of books, had been mostly lost, in 1770, in a fire.

  Like the three earlier books in the religion section, Jefferson’s Quran was read not merely as primary source but as commentary. The translator of the edition (The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed), the Englishman George Sale, was not very sympathetic to Islam. In his opinion, “Providence has reserved the glory of its [Islam’s] overthrow” to Protestant Christians. Sale presented the book not to encourage readers to accept its original author as a prophet but rather as an act of cultural and political literacy. “To be acquainted with the various laws and constitutions of civilized nations, especially of those who flourish in our own time, is, perhaps, the most useful part of knowledge,” he wrote. “If the religious and civil institutions of foreign nations are worth our knowledge, those of Mohammed, the lawgiver of the Arabians, and founder of an empire which, in less than a century, spread itself over a greater part of the world than the Romans were ever masters of, must needs be so.”

  To put the establishment of that empire in context, Sale paints a picture of Arabs before the coming of Muhammad as a people not unlike the Greeks and Romans, who worshipped according to the mythologies listed in books on “heathen” religions in Jefferson’s collection. “The idolatry of the Arabs… chiefly consisted in worshiping the fixed stars and planets, and the angels and their images, which they honoured as inferior deities, and whose intercession they begged,” he writes. “It was from this gross idolatry, or the worship of inferior deities… that Mohammed reclaimed his countrymen, establishing the sole worship of the true God among them.”

  Though the Quran would seem a very different book from the works of classical myths or oracular utterances, Sale’s translation similarly conveys the ways in which a range of religious notions can be united through human effort and understanding.

  Only after these primary texts does Jefferson turn his collection to religious tomes more commonly owned in early America, not least of which are multiple versions of the Christian scriptures. Even these, however, Jefferson would eventually turn to as fodder for his own attempt at crafting a unified, if unorthodox, religious message. No conventional Bible reader, Jefferson used his various editions of the New Testament as s
ource material for a book so heretical he would not allow it to be published in his lifetime. Pieced together from editions of the Gospels to which Jefferson put an editor’s blade, his Life and Morals of Jesus Christ consisted of quotations literally cut and pasted from various translations. In the same spirit of spiritual progress with which he read the first volumes of his library, Jefferson sought to excise all mention of the miracles or the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth from the foundational text of Christendom. Though not included in the library Jefferson planned to send to Congress, the so-called Jefferson Bible was in a sense a distillation of the ideas present there. It is the best evidence we have of the tenets of Jefferson’s idiosyncratic faith: that religion is a work in progress, that scripture was mortal rather than divine handiwork, and that one could count religion a benefit to society without necessarily adhering to a single creed.

  This was, for Jefferson, the only reasonable approach to religion. Elsewhere in the catalogue’s religion list, and within other subcategories of the Philosophy section, we see the logical end of Jefferson’s reasonable approach to religion: a progression from many gods, to a single God known by one name, to a sense of the divine unlimited by particular revelation—the god of deism, which to many of his countrymen, he knew, seemed like no god at all.

  Within this continuum of religious beliefs and practices, it was the task of humanity to organize and classify. As a naturalist might approach flora and fauna, an observer of religion ought to organize the rites and divinities across time and among the world’s peoples. Jefferson’s library, in other words, presented religion as one subject among many. Receiving no special treatment, it was safe from neither Jefferson’s reason nor his blade.

  Religious works accounted for barely a twentieth of Jefferson’s collection, but this part came to stand for the whole in the public imagination. Faced with the challenge and opportunity to rebuild the nation’s first city and to restock the contents of Congress’s intellectual resources, opponents of heterodoxy were horrified by the notion that Jefferson’s famously eclectic opinions would soon form the core of the national storehouse of knowledge. As news spread of Jefferson’s proposal, the handwringing began almost immediately. Jefferson had written his letter in late September; by early October, a sarcastic editorial appeared in the Federal Republican: