Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  [T]he continent was divided into two great political parties, the one of which contemplated America as a nation, and laboured incessantly to invest the federal head with powers competent to its preservation of the union. The other attached itself to the state authorities, viewed all the powers of congress with jealousy, and assented reluctantly to measures which would enable the head to act, in any respect, independently of the members. Men of enlarged and liberal minds… arranged themselves generally in the first party.

  Marshall was arguing a constitutional interpretation that depicted the political coalitions of the 1790s as products of the conflicting perceptions of the constitutional settlement of 1787–88. For Jefferson, on the other hand, the core differences were more ideological than constitutional, the seminal decades were the 1770s, when the true faith was declared, and the 1790s, when it was betrayed. As he put it, the real difference was not federal versus state authority, but “different degrees of inclination to monarchy or republicanism.”47

  Given Madison’s understandable reluctance to devote his retirement years to the task of countering Marshall’s history, Jefferson was thrown back upon his own devices. In 1818 he decided to edit and have bound together for posthumous publication three volumes of private letters, notes and memoranda from his years as secretary of state, thereby creating an archival trail designed to lure subsequent historians away from the false path blazed by Marshall. The modern editors of Jefferson’s papers suggest that we call these documents “Jeffersoniana” instead of the term used by earlier editors, the “Anas,” which is Latin for a collection of anecdotes, table talk and gossip. Whatever we call them, Jefferson’s edited notes, made, as he recalled in 1818, on “loose scraps of paper, taken out of my pocket in the moment and… therefore ragged, rubbed, and scribbled as they were,” were intended to have the look and sound of the real history; these were the secret stories and covert conversations that occurred in corridors and behind closed doors, where the real decisions were made, the real arguments were hammered out, the real power was exercised. Jefferson’s clear purpose was to suggest that Marshall’s account of the Washington administration was only the official version; it never got beneath the polite surface to the messier truths. Jefferson was planting in the record his own handmade explosive device, designed to go off after he was dead and expose the Marshall history as a Federalist fable. His “Anas” or “Jeffersoniana” might be construed, then, as our early American version of such twentieth-century revelations as The Pentagon Papers.48

  Jefferson’s story, which he wanted posterity to know as his final testament of the true history of revolutionary America, took the form of a melodramatic plot populated by schemers, conspirators and corrupt connivers, all driven by a dedication to intrigue. He cast himself in the role of the American innocent, recently returned from his long absence in France, who discovers upon his arrival in New York City in 1790 that the republican principles he has been cherishing so faithfully have in fact been abandoned by a majority of the officials in the Washington administration. At almost all the dinner parties he attended soon after his arrival, the conversation turned toward the subject of monarchy, how its restoration offered the only hope for political stability and how Washington needed to be persuaded to accept the royal mantle. When Jefferson tried to make the case for a kingless version of republican government along the lines intended in 1776, he claimed he could “scarcely find… a single co-advocate… unless some old member of Congress happened to be present.” The old “band of brothers” had been replaced by a gang of closet royalists. Hamilton was the archmonarchist, indeed “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” Even Adams, the old warhorse of ’76, had been “taken up by the monarchical federalists,” who played on his notorious vanity and political ambition to make him a “stalking horse” for the Hamiltonians. The evidence for all this consisted of multiple anecdotes, hearsay reports of private conversations and reliable gossip about what one cabinet member claimed to have heard Hamilton or his cronies whispering to each other over port and cigars.49

  It was crucial for Jefferson’s conspiratorial version of history to claim that Washington himself was oblivious to the plot. This was not easy to do, since Washington was the unquestioned leader of the Federalists and the alleged candidate for coronation by all the other members of the cabinet. Jefferson’s solution was to suggest that Washington was unaware of much that was going on around him. His image of Washington had never been all reverence and flattery. “His mind was great and powerful,” Jefferson observed, “without being of the very first order”; his conversational talents “were not above mediocrity,” and in many public situations, “when called for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed.” He was, in effect, more a man of action than deep understanding; that made him susceptible to clever and crafty intriguers like Hamilton. Jefferson also devoted a substantial portion of his secret history to providing an account of his many private meetings with Washington, in all of which the latter showed himself to be in complete agreement with Jefferson about the need to establish “pure republicanism.” Even those infamous presidential levees, where Washington supposedly held court like an American king, were misleading. Washington’s private secretary had told the attorney general, who had told Madison, who then told Jefferson, that Washington despised the royal trappings of these occasions. No matter what Marshall’s official and officious biography said, Washington’s deepest sentiments agreed completely with Jefferson’s. It was a rather extraordinary revelation and a stunning piece of revisionist history, but the elemental truth about America’s most elemental hero was that he subscribed wholeheartedly to the Republican rather than Federalist persuasion.50

  Although this attempt to capture Washington from the Federalists, indeed to make Washington a Jeffersonian, was—to put it most politely—a highly problematic version of American political history, Jefferson was absolutely correct to recognize that, in the history wars as in the political wars of the 1790s, whoever had Washington on their side possessed a decisive advantage. Unfortunately for Jefferson’s purposes, the early editor of his papers never published the documents he had edited in 1818 in the format he had intended. As a political bombshell designed to detonate after he was gone, the “Anas” or “Jeffersoniana” proved to be a dud. Historians have not been sure how to categorize it, what to say about it, even what to call it. The best of the most recent scholarly appraisals sees it as a graphic example of the way “political gossip” shaped the ideological alignments in the early republic, also as another illustration of how the unprecedented and still-fragile character of political institutions in the 1790s generated a conspiratorial mentality on all sides, indeed a level of mutual suspicion and intrigue that looks utterly paranoid to us, at least until we recognize how uncertain and unstable the political world of postrevolutionary America looked to them.51

  For our purposes, however, Jefferson’s retrospective on the old party battles for the soul of the American Revolution reveals more about how his mind worked than about the battles themselves. Even in his old age, when one might have expected nostalgia and the misty accumulations of sentiment between then and now to have produced a certain mellowing tendency, he remained a dedicated political warrior. Even with Adams urging him in his irresistibly unbridled way to give up the simple moral categories of “us” versus “them,” he clung to those categories more tenaciously than ever. The primal colors of his political imagination remained black and white. The story of the American Revolution that he saw in his head remained, as it had been in 1776, a moralistic melodrama. Whatever final adjustments or accommodations he might be tempted to make as concessions to history’s bedeviling complexity would have to occur within that nonnegotiable moral framework.

  There were, in fact, several such adjustments, all the product of the increasingly retrospective character of his writing in the last decade. In 1821 he spent six months working on his autobiography, carrying the story from his birth
up to 1790, where the secret history he had compiled from his notes would presumably take over the narrative. (He chose not to write anything at all about his presidency.) The autobiography was devoted to retelling two familiar stories in the way he wanted them remembered. The first was about the drafting and subsequent debate in the Continental Congress over the Declaration of Independence. He not only wanted to clarify for all time his authorship of the seminal document but also to reproduce his original draft, before it was edited by the Congress. In effect, he delivered in his autobiography the defense of his original language that his congenital shyness had prevented him from delivering on the floor of the Congress at the time. He also made a point of insisting, against the testimony and memory of everyone else, that all the delegates actually signed the Declaration on July 4. It was obviously important to him to certify the historical accuracy of the date subsequently celebrated as the nation’s birthday.52

  The second story was about the coming of the French Revolution. Here his chief purpose was to counter the charge, which his Federalist critics had made into a familiar refrain, that he had contributed to the radical utopianism of those French philosophes who led France into a bloodbath, or at least had drifted toward disaster with them in the dreamy days before the guillotine. His version of the crucial months emphasized the responsible character of the moderate French aristocrats led by Lafayette. The French Revolution would have been a bloodless and wholly peaceful transition, Jefferson argued, but for the cowardice and indecision of Louis Capet. And the king’s failure to side with the future rather than the past was, he claimed, largely the result of his wife’s influence over him. “I have ever believed,” Jefferson wrote, “that had there been no queen, there would have been no revolution.” The entire tragedy was due not to long-standing historical forces that proved unmanageable but to the ill-timed meddling of one woman.53

  Beyond the boundaries of his autobiography, mostly in his extensive and increasingly burdensome correspondence, he attempted to make three significant modifications in the way he wished to be remembered. The first represented a revision of his much-quoted tribute to the agrarian life initially published in his Notes on Virginia. He wanted it known, and gave permission to be quoted on the matter in the newspapers, that the world had changed dramatically since he wrote Notes, when he had urged Americans to till the land and shun any and all forms of manufacturing. “We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist,” he acknowledged, endorsing a commitment to small-scale domestic manufacturing or home industry. Anyone who opposed this modest shift in America’s economy was out of touch with reality and “must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation [England], or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns.”54

  On the other hand—he did not want to be misunderstood on this point—America should remain a predominantly agricultural economy and society. Domestic manufacturing was permissible, but large factories should be resisted. Most important, the English model of a thoroughly commercial and industrial society in which the economy was dominated by merchants, bankers and industrialists should be avoided at all costs. “We may exclude them from our territory,” he warned, “as we do persons afflicted with disease,” going so far as to recommend that if one region of the United States should ever become thoroughly commercialized, the remaining agrarian region should secede in order to remain immune to the attendant corruptions. He conceded that his insistence on an agrarian character “may be the dreams of an old man, or that the occasions of realizing them may have passed away without return.” But the goal of all statesmen dedicated to the values he cherished most should be to preserve as much of the agrarian character of America as possible. If that turned out to mean merely delaying the inevitable, so be it.55

  A second significant clarification concerned his religious convictions. The Federalist press and New England clergy had been particularly vicious on this score during his presidency, citing his friendship with Tom Paine and his historic stand against any connection between church and state as evidence that he was probably an atheist and certainly not a Christian. In 1816 he announced the completion of what he called “a wee-book,” which was really an outline for a book entitled The Morals and Life of Jesus of Nazareth. The culmination of a similar project begun in 1802, when the attacks on his religious beliefs had begun in earnest, Jefferson intended his sketch of Jesus as moral exemplar to be “a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus… .” What he really meant was that he admired the moral values embodied in the life of Jesus but preferred to separate “what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried” much in the way “as the diamond from the dunghill.” Primitive Christianity, in his view, was similar to the original meaning of the American Revolution: a profoundly simple faith subsequently corrupted by its institutionalization. In the case of the Christian denominations, “the metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded it with absurdities and incomprehensibilities” that it was almost impossible to recover “its native simplicity and purity.” He was particularly harsh on Yale, Harvard and Andover as “seminaries of despotism.” If he had been completely scrupulous, he would have described himself as a deist who admired the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man rather than as the son of God. (In modern-day parlance, he was a secular humanist.) But by insisting on his status as a quasi-Christian, or at least placing on the record his personal acceptance of the term, he blunted one of the most pointed challenges to his prominent place in the mainstream of American history.56

  Finally, Jefferson’s twilight retrospecting allowed him to see his own political achievement from a more long-range perspective and therefore to talk about it in a new idiom. The act of preparing his secret history of the 1790s, for instance, required him to revisit and then reiterate his sense of the Revolution as a liberation movement to free America not just from English tyranny but from all forms of political oppression. This movement was halted and almost overturned by the Federalists in the 1790s, then was rescued and revived by the Republicans in 1800. In a sense, he had always carried this story line around in his head, but in old age he saw it even more clearly, clearly enough in fact to give its climax a name. In 1819, for the first time, he used the phrase “the revolution of 1800” to describe his own election, claiming that it was “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” The act of providing a fresh descriptive label for his ascendance to the presidency did not really alter his long-standing belief in its significance, but it did make the event more memorable and give his version of history a more accessible handle. Subsequent generations of historians did not fail to grab it, thereby implicitly endorsing the Jeffersonian interpretation of the entire revolutionary era.57

  Coining a new phrase is not the same thing, of course, as discovering a new idea. Starting in 1816, however, there is a clear trail of evidence in Jefferson’s correspondence to indicate that he was thinking about what he called “the principles of 1776” in new ways. Again, the correspondence with Adams may have prompted this development, since Adams had remarked in a much-quoted aside that the term “republicanism” was one of those weasel words that different people understood to mean different things. Jefferson’s most familiar formulation tended to follow his binary system of political thought, juxtaposing “republican” and “monarchy,” but then leaving the matter at that, not specifying what “republican” meant beyond the elimination of royal prerogatives and divine right presumptions of power. Indeed one of the most alluring features of Jefferson’s formulation was its eloquent silence on the whole question of what a republican government actually entailed. (Adams had written four fat volumes on this very subject, and Madison had given the matter equivalent analytical attention in The Federalist Papers.) Perhaps the most beguiling facet of Jefferson’s habit of mind
was its implicit assumption that one need not worry or even talk about such complex questions, that the destruction of monarchy and feudal trappings led naturally to a new political order. The best name for that new order had always been “republican.”

  By 1816 he began to find this language inadequate. “In truth, the abuses of monarchy had so filled all the space of political contemplation,” he remarked, “that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy.” But subsequent events demonstrated that “we had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that ‘governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of the people, and execute it.’ ” He made the same point in a slightly different way to John Taylor, his fellow Virginian and even more fervent agrarian enthusiast: “The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government the ingredient of republicanism.” In answer to the Adams claim that “republicanism may mean anything or everything,” Jefferson apprised Taylor that the true doctrine was that “governments are more or less republican as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition.” Whatever evils might flow from what he called “the duperies of the people” were infinitely less threatening or injurious “than those from the egoism of their agents.” Without fully realizing it at the time, he and his fellow revolutionaries in 1776 had launched a political movement whose full implications were only now seeping into conscious articulation. Here, for the first time, Jefferson embraced the idea that would eventually and then everlastingly be associated with his name. What he had always called “pure republicanism” was really “democracy,” and what he had actually done in “the revolution of 1800” was to restore the democratic impulse of the American Revolution after its betrayal by the Federalists.58