Joseph J. Ellis

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  Beyond the question of immediate influences on Jefferson’s choice of words and his way of framing the case for independence, however, lies the more murky question of the long-term influences on his political thinking. Granted that his own earlier writings and drafts of the Virginia constitution almost certainly lay strewn across his lap and writing desk, where did the ideas contained in those documents come from? Granted that we know beyond a reasonable doubt what Jefferson was looking at, that he and the other delegates in the Congress were under enormous pressure to manage the ongoing war as military disaster loomed in Canada and New York, so he had little time to do more than recycle his previous writings, what core of ideas was already fixed in his head?

  The available answers fall into two primary headings, each argued persuasively by prominent scholars and each finding the seminal source of Jefferson’s political thought in particular books. The older and still more venerable interpretation locates the intellectual wellspring in John Locke. Even during Jefferson’s lifetime several commentators, usually intending to question his originality, noted that the doctrine of natural rights and the corollary endorsement of rightful revolution came straight out of Locke’s Second Treatise. Richard Henry Lee, for example, claimed that Jefferson had merely “copied from Locke’s treatise on government.” Several conclusions followed naturally from the Lockean premise, the chief ones being that Jeffersonian thought was inherently liberal and individualistic and, despite the substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for “property,” fundamentally compatible with America’s emerging capitalistic mentality.59

  The second and more recent interpretive tradition locates the source of Jefferson’s thinking in the Scottish Enlightenment, especially the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson. The key insight here is that Jefferson’s belief in the natural equality of man derived primarily from Hutcheson’s doctrine of the “moral sense,” a faculty inherent in all human beings that no mere government could violate. Moreover, the Scottish school of thought linked Jefferson to a more communal or collectivistic tradition that was at odds with Lockean liberalism and therefore incompatible with unbridled individualism, especially the sort of individualism associated with predatory behavior in the marketplace.60

  There is, in fact, a third most recent and most novel interpretation, at once brilliant and bizarre, that operates from the premise that Jefferson intended the Declaration to be read aloud or performed. This claim is based on the discovery that his final draft was punctuated by a series of quotation marks designed to guide the reading of the document in order to enhance its dramatic effect. This discovery has led to the conclusion that Jefferson was influenced by the new books on rhetoric by such English authors as James Burgh and Thomas Sheridan, in which spoken language was thought to derive its power by playing on the unconscious emotions of the audience. The secret power of the Declaration, so this argument goes, derives from Jefferson’s self-conscious orchestration of language, informed by the new rhetoric, which overrides all contradictions (i.e., slavery and human equality; individualism and community) in a kind of verbal symphony that still plays on within American political culture.61

  Each of these interpretations offers valuable insights into the intellectual sources of Jefferson’s thinking as he sat down to write the Declaration. Clearly, he knew his Locke, though his favorite Lockean treatise was not the one on government but the Essay on Human Understanding. That said, the fundamental claim that revolution is justified if the existent rulers demonstrate systematic disregard for the rights of their subjects certainly originated with Locke. Jefferson may have gotten his specific language from George Mason, but both men knew whom they were paraphrasing. Just as clearly, Jefferson believed that the distinguishing feature that made human beings fully human, and in that sense equal, was the moral sense. Whether he developed that belief by reading Hutcheson or any of the other members of the Scottish school or from his own personal observation of human behavior is ultimately unknowable and not terribly important.

  The claim that Jefferson meant the Declaration to be read aloud is more difficult to swallow. A simpler explanation of his unusual punctuation marks would be that he was worried that he might be required to read the document aloud when the committee presented it to the Congress on June 28, so he inserted oratorical guides for his delivery, not trusting his own famously inadequate speaking ability. (We really don’t know whether he himself read it or whether it was read by the secretary of the Congress.) But the recognition that the Declaration plays on the sentiments of readers and listeners, that its underlying tones and rhythms operate in mysterious ways to win assent despite logical contradictions and disjunctions, is a key insight very much worth pondering.

  The central problem with all these explanations, however, is that they make Jefferson’s thinking an exclusive function of books. True, he read voraciously as a young man, took notes on his reading and left a comprehensive list of the books in his library. Since we know so much about his reading habits, and so little about other aspects of his early life (the Shadwell fire, again), the temptation to make an implicit connection between his ideas and his books is irresistible. Then once the connection is made with, say, Locke or Hutcheson, one can conveniently talk about particular texts as if one were talking about Jefferson’s mind. This is a long-standing scholarly tradition—one might call it the scholarly version of poetic license—that depends on the unspoken assumption that what one thinks is largely or entirely a product of what one reads.62

  In Jefferson’s case, it is a very questionable assumption. In the specific case of the natural rights section of the Declaration, it sends us baying down literary trails after false scents of English or Scottish authors, while the object of the hunt sits squarely before us. In all his previous publications the young Thomas Jefferson had demonstrated a strong affinity for and deep attachment to visions of the ideal society. He found it in various locations “back there” in the past: the forests of Saxony; England before the Norman Conquest; the American colonies before the French and Indian War. (Here his previous reading clearly did have a discernible influence, though the relevant books were the Whig histories and the Real Whig writings, but they had been so thoroughly digested that their themes and categories blended imperceptibly into Jefferson’s cast of mind.) His several arguments for American independence all were shaped around a central motif, in which the imperfect and inadequate present was contrasted with a perfect and pure future, achievable once the sources of corruption were eliminated. His mind instinctively created dichotomies and derived its moral energy from juxtaposing the privileged side of any case or cause with the contaminated side. While his language was often colorful, the underlying message was nearly always painted in black and white.

  The vision he projected in the natural rights section of the Declaration, then, represented yet another formulation of the Jeffersonian imagination. The specific form of the vision undoubtedly drew upon language Locke had used to describe the putative conditions of society before governments were established. But the urge to embrace such an ideal society came from deep inside Jefferson himself. It was the vision of a young man projecting his personal cravings for a world in which all behavior was voluntary and therefore all coercion unnecessary, where independence and equality never collided, where the sources of all authority were invisible because they had already been internalized. Efforts on the part of scholars to determine whether Jefferson’s prescriptive society was fundamentally individualistic or communal can never reach closure, because within the Jeffersonian utopia such choices do not need to be made. They reconcile themselves naturally.

  Though indebted to Locke, Jefferson’s political vision was more radical than liberal, driven as it was by a youthful romanticism unwilling to negotiate its high standards with an imperfect world. One of the reasons why European commentators on American politics have found American expectations so excessive and American political thinking in general so beguilingly innocent is that Jefferson provided a san
ction for youthful hopes and illusions, planted squarely in what turned out to be the founding document of the American republic. The American dream, then, is just that, the Jeffersonian dream writ large.

  ESCAPE

  SOON AFTER HE HAD finished drafting the Declaration, but before the debate on it began in the Continental Congress, Jefferson expressed the strong desire to escape from Philadelphia. “I am sorry,” he wrote Edmund Pendleton, that “the situation of my domestic affairs renders it indispensably necessary that I should sollicit the substitution of some other person here,” explaining in his indirect way that the “delicacy of the house will not require me to enter minutely into the private causes which render this necessary.” The “private causes” were unquestionably related to Martha’s health; she was pregnant for the third time in six years and miscarried that summer. “For god’s sake, for your country’s sake, and for my sake,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, “I am under a sacred obligation to go home.” It would have been perfectly in keeping with his character to draft the Declaration, then absent himself from the debate over its content, especially when the center of his private world at Monticello was in danger.63

  But he was needed in Philadelphia to preserve a quorum for the Virginia delegation, which was filled with men who preferred to attend the constitutional debates in Williamsburg. So Jefferson did his duty, remaining at his post throughout the summer. He made no contribution to the debates in the Congress over prospective foreign alliances or the shape of the national government under the Articles of Confederation, but he took extensive notes on what others said that became the fullest historical record of those exchanges. Within the context of the moment these issues loomed larger than the passage of the Declaration, which was signed on parchment by all members present on August 2. One of the many ironies of the signing is that Jefferson was available to affix his name to the document that became the basis for his fame only because he had been forced, against his will, to sustain Virginia’s official presence in the Congress.

  For his part, Jefferson went out of his way to disavow responsibility for the version of the Declaration passed by the Congress. His own version, he explained to friends back in Virginia, had been badly treated (the operative word was “mangled”); he devoted considerable energy to copying out his own draft, with the revisions made by the Congress inserted in the margins and the deleted sections restored. He needed to differentiate between his language and the published version being circulated throughout the country, claiming that the Congress had watered down the purity of his message in order to appease the faint of heart, who still hoped for reconciliation with England. Although this was hardly the case—the revisions of his draft were driven less by any desire to compromise than to clarify—Jefferson maintained a wounded sense of betrayal by the Congress throughout the remainder of his life.64

  His friends in Virginia, perhaps recognizing he needed reassurance, wrote back to him in a commiserative tone. “I am also obliged by your Original Declaration of Independence,” explained Edmund Pendleton, “which I find your brethren have treated as they did your Manifesto last summer [i.e., Causes and Necessities], altered it much for the worse; their hopes of a Reconciliation might restrain them from plain truths then, but what could cramp them now?” Richard Henry Lee also tried to soothe his young friend’s wounded pride by agreeing that the Jeffersonian draft was much better but concluded that “the Thing is in its nature so good, that no Cookery can spoil the Dish for the palates of Freemen.” Jefferson’s hypersensitivity to criticism precluded the possibility of a more detached perspective like Lee’s. He contented himself with the preservation, for the historical record, of the difference between his own words and the official version.65

  His sensitivity extended to matters beyond drafts of the Declaration. Word reached him in July about rumors circulating in Williamsburg that his support for independence was only lukewarm, a misguided charge that was probably a function of his seclusion at Monticello in the spring when other Virginian leaders were taking the field against Dunmore. “It is a painful situation to be 300 miles from one’s country,” he complained to his old friend William Fleming, “and thereby open to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defence.” Then, later in the month, he heard that reports were circulating within the Virginia leadership that he harbored dangerously radical ideas about the inherent wisdom of the people-at-large, reports that were possibly based on second thoughts within the planter class of his language in the natural rights section of the Declaration. He tried to quash such rumors by writing Edmund Pendleton, who had succeeded the recently deceased Peyton Randolph as the presiding presence of the Tidewater elite, assuring him that “the fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security of the state… , which you have heard insisted upon by some, I assure you was never mine.” He reminded Pendleton that none of his drafts of the Virginia constitution called for direct election of the upper house or senate: “I have ever observed that a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom” and that the “first secretion from them is usually crude and heterogeneous.”66

  Then there was the charge that he had no stomach for war and had gone soft on the question of military action against the Indians allied with the British. He wrote home to assure friends this too was slander. He favored an all-out campaign against the Indians pursued without mercy: “Nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side the Mississippi.”67

  These were emphatic overstatements of his own considerably less belligerent and more trusting convictions. He felt forced into making them in order to answer his critics. His statements are less a measure of what he really thought than a symptom of how vulnerable he felt. He saw himself as an honorable young man who had grudgingly but voluntarily agreed to do his duty by remaining in Philadelphia despite compelling personal reasons to return home. Listening to the delegates in the Continental Congress while they questioned and revised and deleted his wording of the Declaration was bad enough. But then to be whipsawed by rumormongering enemies back in Virginia, accused of being either a tepid or excessive supporter of the revolutionary cause, this was unbearable.

  Later in his career Jefferson learned to suffer in silence and to present a placid, impenetrable facade to his critics. John Adams commented admiringly on the mature Jefferson’s capacity to remain silent and unperturbed whenever he was the target of innuendo or of the inevitable jealousies generated by ambitious men playing politics. (Adams lamented his own failure to perfect the technique, which he called “the wisdom of taciturnity,” admitting that his own inveterate tendency was to erupt like a volcano and fondly hope to eliminate his critics in a lava flow.) But young Jefferson had not yet perfected the technique either. The enigmatic masks he eventually learned to wear were essential additions to his public personality precisely because he was by nature thin-skinned and took all criticism personally. Fate had selected him to play a prominent role in what posterity came to regard as the most propitious moment in American history. But for a young man of his tender and vulnerable disposition, making history came at an unacceptable personal cost.68

  In September 1776 Jefferson’s prayers were answered when Richard Henry Lee came up from Virginia to replace him in Philadelphia. His exit was less grand but more speedy than his entrance more than a year earlier. Only Jupiter accompanied him this time, and if Jefferson followed his customary habit whenever in a hurry, he drove the horses of his phaeton himself. He could not wait to get back to Martha and Monticello. A month later, when John Hancock wrote in behalf of the Continental Congress asking him to join Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane as a member of the American commission to France, Jefferson sent his regrets, explaining that personal considerations “compel me to ask leave to decline a service so honorable and at the same time so important to the American cause.” He
was played out. Both his pride and his vulnerable core of personal feelings had been wounded. He needed time to heal.69

  2

  PARIS: 1784–89

  I am much pleased with the people of this country. The roughness of the human mind are so thoroughly rubbed off with them that it seems as one might glide thro’ a whole life among them without a justle.

  —JEFFERSON TO ELIZA HOUSE TRIST

  PARIS, AUGUST 18, 1785

  I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasure of this gay capital.

  —JEFFERSON TO BARON GEISMAR

  PARIS, SEPTEMBER 6, 1785

  THE MAN ENTERING Paris in August 1784 was older and more complicated than the young Virginian who had ridden into history nine years earlier at Philadelphia. He was traveling in a phaeton again, but this one was a larger, sturdier carriage, handcrafted by his slaves at Monticello, with glass on four sides to protect the passengers. He was accompanied by his twelve-year-old daughter Martha, named after her mother but best known as Patsy, an uncommonly tall and long-limbed girl with her father’s bright eyes and angular bone structure. His other companion was James Hemings, a nineteen-year-old mulatto slave who had replaced Jupiter as a favorite servant. Hemings was also along to learn the fine art of French cooking.1

  The party required a full week to make the trip from Le Havre to Paris, following the Seine River through Rouen, where centuries ago Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake. “I understand the French so imperfectly as to be uncertain whether those to whom I speak and myself mean the same thing,” Jefferson confessed. The language problem meant that he was “roundly cheated” by porters at several stops. But nothing could spoil the wonder of the French countryside at the start of the harvest season. When they crossed the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly—Jefferson proclaimed it “the most beautiful bridge in the world”—then rolled onto the Champs-Élysées, he was clearly starting a new chapter in his career as America’s minister plenipotentiary to France.2

 

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