The most unusual book he sent Martha in this shipment was Sacontalá: or, The Fatal Ring, an Indian Drama, William Jones’s English translation from the original Sanskrit play by Kalidasa, who was known as the Indian Shakespeare. Sacontalá tells a tale of a maiden and a great raja, who first seduces the maiden and then spurns her. After she gives birth, the raja ultimately accepts the woman and their son.
Sacontalá may have been one of those books Jefferson bought for his daughter because he wanted to read it himself. He had great respect for Jones’s linguistic skills and was fascinated by the transmission of languages throughout the world. The process of translation Jones described in his preface was the kind of scholarly information Jefferson appreciated. Noticing considerable similarities between Latin and Sanskrit, Jones translated Sacontalá verbatim into Latin, creating an interlinear text, which he then rendered into English. Though Jefferson sent the book to Martha, the catalogue of his library indicates that Sacontalá ended up among his books, not hers.
Living in Philadelphia again, he took advantage of the great literary opportunities the city had to offer. He subscribed to Matthew Carey’s American Museum and other magazines. He bought many books and borrowed more from friends. But one particular book he borrowed from James Madison stirred up no end of trouble. Having borrowed Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man—one of the first copies to reach America—from John Beckley, clerk of the House of Representatives, Madison loaned it to Jefferson, urging him to read the book quickly and return it. When Beckley called for it, Jefferson had yet to finish the book. Beckley let him keep it for the time being but asked him to send it directly to Jonathan Bayard Smith, whose son, Samuel Harrison Smith, intended to reprint it. Though Jefferson would become good friends with Samuel Harrison Smith in the coming years, at this time he did not personally know either him or his father.
Once he finished reading Paine’s Rights of Man, Jefferson found it necessary to write a cover letter to Jonathan Bayard Smith explaining why he was sending the book to him. The letter became something more than mere explanation as Jefferson interjected his opinion about the book. Jefferson’s reason for supplying his opinion was a literary one: he wanted to “take off a little of the dryness” of this otherwise formulaic letter of thanks. Reading what Jefferson wrote, Samuel Harrison Smith realized that the secretary of state’s words made good advertising copy. Without securing Jefferson’s permission, he incorporated a passage from the letter in his preface:
The following Extract from a note accompanying a copy of this Pamphlet for republication, is so respectable a testimony of its value, that the Printer hopes the distinguished writer will excuse its present appearance. It proceeds from a character equally eminent in the councils of America, and conversant in the affairs of France, from a long and recent residence at the Court of Versailles in the Diplomatic department; and, at the same time that it does justice to the writings of Mr. Paine, it reflects honor on the source from which it flows, by directing the mind to a contemplation of that Republican firmness and Democratic simplicity which endear their possessor to every friend of the “Rights of Man.”
After some prefatory remarks, the Secretary of State observes:
“I am extremely pleased to find it will be re-printed here, and that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.
“I have no doubt our citizens will rally a second time round the standard of Common Sense.”
Jefferson was shocked when he saw his private words published as part of this book. He had not intended to make his opinion in this matter public. From the surface of the printed page, the word “heresies” glared the brightest. To many readers, there was little doubt that Jefferson had in mind the policies of Vice President Adams, as articulated in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States and in his Discourses on Davila, published serially in the Gazette of the United States. In June, an essay series signed “Publicola” and secretly written by John Quincy Adams attacked Jefferson’s remarks and perpetuated the controversy.
Upon the release of Smith’s edition of Paine, Jefferson wrote President Washington to explain how his words happened to appear in this book. Washington accepted the explanation, but others were unconvinced. Hamilton saw the preface to Smith’s edition of Paine as a clever ploy on Jefferson’s part. He told others that Jefferson’s comments marked his opposition to the government. But, as Jefferson told Madison, Hamilton was twisting his words. Hamilton asserted that Jefferson was attacking the federal government, but Jefferson was really critiquing the enemies of the government, those who demonstrated monarchical tendencies. The bitterness expressed over this issue shows how tensions between the two were escalating during Jefferson’s time as secretary of state.
In late May 1791, Jefferson escaped the temporary capital for a vacation to upstate New York. From Philadelphia, he traveled to New York, where he joined Madison, and together they continued farther north to visit some of the most scenic areas in the nation. As he had on his travels through Europe, Jefferson kept a journal of the trip and also wrote several letters describing the experience. These documents contribute to the story of Jefferson as a travel writer, but they share the same shortcomings as his European travel writing. The matter-of-fact quality of his journal precludes good writing. Alternatively, the letters he wrote to his daughters offer fine examples of Jefferson’s literary craftsmanship, though they illustrate only a small segment of the journey.
The last week of May they sailed the length of Lake George—the highlight of the trip. Jefferson wrote his older daughter. “Lake George is without comparison the most beautiful water I ever saw: formed by a contour of mountains into a bason 35 miles long, and from 2 to 4 miles broad, finely interspersed with islands, its waves limpid as chrystal and the mountain sides covered with rich groves of Thuya, silver fir, white pine, Aspen and paper birch down to the water edge, here and there precipices of rock to checquer the scene and save it from monotony. An abundance of speckled trout, salmon trout, bass and other fish with which it is stored, have added to our other amusements the sport of taking them.”41
Numerous birch trees offered the opportunity to teach Maria about how their bark was used as paper. Her father wrote, “Such a moment is now offered while passing this lake and its border, on which we have just landed, has furnished the means which the want of paper would otherwise have denied me. I write to you on the bark of the Paper birch, supposed to be the same used by the antients to write on before the art of making paper was invented, and which being called the Papyrus, gave the name of paper to the new invented substitute.”42 Jefferson fibs a little here as he tells her that the lack of paper prompted him to use birch bark for the letter. This letter is only known by a surviving draft written on regular paper. It wasn’t Jefferson’s want of paper that prompted him to write on birch bark but his wanting to bring natural history alive for his younger daughter. Maria appreciated his thoughtfulness. She thought the birch bark “prettier than paper.”43
Jefferson and Madison also visited numerous historical sites where battles had been fought during the American Revolution. Jefferson’s letters to his daughters say nothing about the war. Instead, he wrote his son-in-law that he and Madison had visited “the principal scenes of Burgoyne’s misfortunes, to wit the grounds at Still water where the action of that name was fought and particularly the breastworks which cost so much blood to both parties, the encampments at Saratoga and ground where the British piled their arms, and the field of the battle of Bennington, about 9 miles from this place. We have also visited Forts William Henry and George, Ticonderoga, Crown point etc. which have been scenes of blood from a very early part of our history.”44
The differences in content among these letters show how Jefferson carefully shaped his experiences to suit his recipients. Though his responsibilities as secretary of state gave him relatively little time to indulge his literary inclinations, the distance separating him from his fa
mily turned his daughters into keen literary correspondents. Jefferson’s letters to them, read in conjunction with the contemporary comments he made against Hamilton and Adams, make one similarity obvious: Jefferson took the same attitude toward the American government that he took toward educating his daughters. American democracy, too, was a young idea that had to be taught how to shoot.
CHAPTER 28
The Anas
The late eighteenth century was the era of the ana, a time that saw many excellent collections of memorable sayings from remarkable people. It was the time of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson—“the Ana of all Anas,” Robert Southey called it.1 It was also the time of Thomas Jefferson’s The Anas, the finest work of its kind in American literature. The Anas contains notes on Jefferson’s conversations during his time as secretary of state. He did not set out to create a literary work while fulfilling his responsibilities in Washington’s cabinet. But as he continued serving as secretary of state, he realized that what Washington and other members of his administration were saying was worth putting down on paper. Jefferson was motivated to create The Anas for much the same reason he was motivated to take detailed notes of the proceedings of the Continental Congress a decade and a half earlier: they were useful at the moment—for recording important political business—but they were also useful in the long run, as a record of the beginnings of American democracy.
Once he left the office of secretary of state, Jefferson had his notes—“loose scraps,” he called them—bound together. Some years after John Marshall published the final volume of his Life of Washington in the early nineteenth century, Jefferson decided to recopy and edit his notes. He wanted to refute the opinionated inaccuracies that plague Marshall’s biography. Jefferson combined his notes and related correspondence into three volumes, which he had bound in marbled paper and labeled A, B, and C.
In “Explanations of the 3 Volumes Bound in Marbled Paper,” a document typically edited as the introduction to The Anas, Jefferson described the genesis of the work. When he began serving as secretary of state, he took no notes of his meetings with the president or members of his cabinet. Slowly he realized the importance of creating a written record of what they said. He recorded his memoranda on whatever odd slips of paper he had on hand and set these rough notes aside with the intention of making a fair copy of them.
During his retirement from the presidency, he went through these various “ragged, rubbed, and scribbled” notes and gave “the whole a calm revisal.” Much as Notes on the State of Virginia had emerged from the set of miscellaneous handwritten notes about Virginia that Jefferson had gradually assembled, The Anas emerged from the notes he kept while serving in Washington’s administration. He omitted details that were “incorrect, or doubtful, or merely personal; or private, with which we have nothing to do.”2 Historians might wish he had left these loose scraps alone. The fact that he went through and edited the lot, however, enhances the significance of The Anas as a carefully crafted literary work.
The Anas has never been well edited. “Explanations” clearly shows that Jefferson intended the collection to stop at the time he retired as secretary of state and left Washington’s administration, but his editors have frequently tacked onto The Anas notes of other conversations Jefferson recorded during his time as vice president and president, thus destroying the focus and purposefulness of The Anas. Complicating matters further, the materials he had collected together in the three similarly bound volumes were disbound in the early twentieth century and redistributed among his papers in chronological order. Given the state of the documents, the editors of the ongoing edition of Jefferson’s papers have concluded that it is impossible to reconstitute what he originally gathered together as a distinct unit. Consequently, they present his notes individually with the rest of his papers in chronological order. Exercising little caution, previous editors have included many documents Jefferson did not intend to be part of the three volumes bound in marbled paper; overly cautious, the editors of the Jefferson papers have eliminated The Anas as a distinct work.3
They go too far. Though it is impossible to reconstitute the precise contents of those three volumes, to ignore a carefully crafted three-volume work documenting Washington’s administration is to ignore an important part of Jefferson’s literary life. Despite the editorial vagaries, despite the fact that its title is not even Jefferson’s, The Anas deserves consideration as a whole.
Jefferson was aware of the literary tradition of anas, which extended back at least as far as Athenaeus’s Dipnosophistarum, a delightful collection of table talk from ancient times covering a variety of subjects including law, literature, medicine, and philosophy. Before he gave those loose scraps a calm revisal, Jefferson obtained a copy of Natale Conti’s sixteenth-century-edition Athenaeus—Benjamin Franklin’s old copy, no less. In the seventeenth century, both English and French authors began compiling collections of table talk. Jefferson also had in his library a six-volume folio edition of John Selden’s Opera Omnia, which included Table-Talk, a collection of anas Samuel Johnson found superior to its French rivals.4 Instead of chronologically organizing his work, Selden arranged Table-Talk by subject. Jefferson, on the other hand, understood that a chronological organization would contribute significantly to his own work’s historical and literary importance.
Dated August 13, 1791, the first item in The Anas is titled “Notes of a Conversation between A. Hamilton and Th:J.” According to this item, Jefferson mentioned to Alexander Hamilton a letter from John Adams disavowing authorship of the Publicola essays and denying a desire to make either the presidency or the senate hereditary. As part of this initial entry, he recorded Hamilton’s response. Jefferson began writing down the response by paraphrasing what Hamilton said. Partway through the entry, however, Jefferson switched to direct discourse, placing Hamilton’s words within quotation marks. Jefferson’s use of a direct quotation in this instance is rare in his recordings of firsthand conversations in The Anas.
“I own it is my own opinion,” Hamilton said, “tho’ I do not publish it in Dan and Bersheba, that the present government is not that which will answer the ends of society, by giving stability and protection to its rights, and that it will probably be found expedient to go into the British form. However, since we have undertaken the experiment,” he continued, “I am for giving it a fair course, whatever my expectations may be. The success indeed so far is greater than I had expected, and therefore at present success seems more possible than it had done heretofore, and there are still other and other stages of improvement which, if the present does not succeed, may be tried and ought to be tried before we give up the republican form altogether.”5
Though Jefferson enclosed Hamilton’s words in quotation marks, he still qualified them, noting beforehand that the remarks he transcribed were substantially Hamilton’s. After the quotation, Jefferson reiterated: “This is the substance of a declaration made in much more lengthy terms, and which seemed to be more formal than usual for a conversation between two, and as if intended to qualify some less guarded expressions which had been dropped on former occasions.” Jefferson closed with a statement regarding where and when he made this entry: “Th:J has committed it to writing in the moment of A. H.’s leaving the room.”6
This final comment reflects Jefferson’s penchant for precision. Realizing the inherent possibilities for error when recording speech, he made sure to acknowledge the fact. By emphasizing the quotation’s immediacy, he stressed its accuracy. Of all remembered quotations, those transcribed directly after they occurred are more likely to be accurate than those transcribed after the passage of time.
The diction Jefferson used within the quotation is unusual enough to suggest that he was trying to capture Hamilton’s phraseology. Unlike the paraphrases Jefferson made in his legal commonplace book, his entries in The Anas include many colorful expressions and figures of speech. In this first entry, he has Hamilton applying the proverbial phrase, “from Dan to Beersheba.
” Making reference to the northernmost and southernmost places in Judea, this traditional saying is typically used to indicate something that is done to the farthest extent possible.
If he were simply trying to capture the gist of Hamilton’s remarks, Jefferson need not have included this colorful saying. Clearly, he was doing something more than merely recording the substance of Hamilton’s remarks. He was also attempting to capture the flavor of what Hamilton said. His inclusion of this particular phrase also enhances the literary quality of The Anas. Not only does it give The Anas a greater geographical resonance, but it also echoes important works of English literature. “From Dan to Beersheba” was a favorite saying of Laurence Sterne, who used it in both A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Tristram Shandy.7
Jefferson had had numerous conversations with Hamilton and other members of Washington’s administration prior to August 13. Why hadn’t he recorded any of these earlier discussions? For example, why hadn’t he noted the after-dinner conversation he had with Adams and Hamilton in April, the conversation that initiated his split with Hamilton? What was it about this August conversation that compelled Jefferson to get it down on paper and to initiate the series of notes that would become The Anas?
Based on internal evidence within The Anas, Hamilton’s remarks on this occasion were noteworthy because of their contradictory nature and their strange tone. Speaking formally in support of the current government, Hamilton seemed to be refuting earlier informal comments he had made against the government. Jefferson had long since retired from the practice of law, but he retained his lawyer’s mind. Getting Hamilton’s words down on paper, he created a written record he could compare with less guarded remarks Hamilton might make in the future.
Much as he began taking notes about wildflowers before he turned them into his Garden Book, Jefferson began taking conversation notes before he conceived them as a unified collection. Four months separate this first entry from the next in The Anas. When he recorded the August 13 conversation with Hamilton, he apparently had not considered it as the first entry in a series of anas. Instead, it was simply an isolated conversation recorded on a scrap of paper. After the second one, dated December 25, 1791, the entries grow more frequent. Though quite different from the first, this second entry gave Jefferson a better idea of the work as a whole.
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