Once he reached the Revolutionary period, Jefferson’s writing style loosened up considerably. The stiffness that characterizes its early pages disappears, and his voice seems clearer and more natural. Recalling Revolutionary days, he was transcribing anecdotes he had been rehearsing for decades. Mentioning some Virginia patriots who were reluctant to advocate independence, for example, he wrote that they had “stopped at the half-way house of John Dickinson who admitted that England had a right to regulate our commerce, and to lay duties on it for the purposes of regulation, but not of raising revenue.”5 Jefferson’s metaphor—“the half-way house of John Dickinson”—has the quality of a favorite expression, and his correspondence bears out his fondness for the phrase: in one letter Jefferson called the English constitution a “halfway house,” too.6 Furthermore, his words reflect a larger metaphor that had been an important aspect of his public writings: the metaphor of the journey.
Infrequently, Jefferson included snatches of remembered conversation in the autobiography. Portraying his first time as a delegate to the Continental Congress, he incorporated a conversation with William Livingston, a delegate from New Jersey twenty years his senior. Jefferson greatly admired a work he thought Livingston had written and complimented him on it. Instead of expressing gratitude, Livingston rebuked Jefferson, bluntly telling him he had not written the piece.
While this anecdote effectively illustrates Livingston’s contentiousness, its insignificance makes it frustrating. The conversations that occurred behind the scenes of the Continental Congress were some of the most important conversations that ever occurred in American history or, indeed, in the history of democracy. One longs to read more, but the autobiography thwarts that desire. Beyond a couple of Franklin anecdotes, Jefferson recorded few other personal conversations in the pages of his autobiography.
Instead of retelling the story of the congressional proceedings in 1776 that led to the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson included the extensive notes he had taken during the proceedings. This inclusion is consistent with his belief that histories should incorporate primary documents. He also included his original version of the Declaration. He underlined the passages Congress had omitted and situated the replacement text Congress drafted in an adjoining column. He justified the inclusion of his draft by arguing that the sentiments of men are known by what they receive as well as what they reject.
His inclusion of the Declaration in his autobiography marks a departure from something Jefferson told John Campbell a dozen years earlier. Then he had suggested that the Declaration should be excluded from his collected writings because he could make no personal claim to it since it belonged to the American public. Including it within his autobiography, Jefferson was now making a personal claim to it—not to the official text as adopted by the Continental Congress, but to his version. By including his original, he was demonstrating the pride he took in it and reasserting his belief that the original was superior to the official text. Furthermore, by placing his original text of the Declaration in his autobiography, Jefferson was making sure that it would become a part of history, that it would be reprinted and remembered. The strategy worked: literary anthologies today typically reprint this version of the Declaration.
A number of paragraphs in the autobiography begin with dates. Some are the dates that historical events occurred; others are the dates in 1821 when Jefferson was writing the work. On February 6, exactly one month after starting his autobiography, he wrote about thirteen hundred words—a good day’s work. But on Wednesday, the seventh, he grew weary of writing. Referring to the “Bill for Amending the Constitution of the College of William and Mary” and discussing his strenuous efforts to reform the college curriculum, he wrote, “I shall recur again to this subject towards the close of my story, if I should have life and resolution enough to reach that term; for I am already tired of talking about myself.”7
Jefferson’s weariness is understandable. The autobiography was not the only literary task occupying his time that year. He was still maintaining a voluminous correspondence, which often became burdensome. Five years earlier, he had complained to Charles Thomson: “My greatest oppression is a correspondence afflictingly laborious, the extent of which I have long been endeavoring to curtail. This keeps me at the drudgery of the writing-table all the prime hours of the day, leaving for the gratification of my appetite for reading only what I can steal from the hours of sleep. Could I reduce this epistolary corvée within the limits of my friends, and affairs, and give the time redeemed from it to reading and reflection, to history, ethics, mathematics, my life would be as happy as the infirmities of age would admit.”8 Shortly before starting the autobiography, he made a similar complaint to his grandson, Francis Eppes.9 During the intervening years, he had been unable to reduce this “epistolary corvée.”
Writing to friends and family gave him much pleasure, but responding to others fatigued him. James Madison had forwarded a long, closely written letter about the Missouri Compromise from one of his correspondents. Jefferson could not bring himself to read the entire letter, let alone respond to it. He told Madison, “Could I have devoted a day to it, by interlining the words as I could pick them out, I might have got at more. The lost books of Livy or Tacitus might be worth this. Our friend would do well to write less and write plainer.”10 Jefferson’s words reveal new priorities: sorting out the intricacies of political controversy had become far less important to him than delving into the complexities of classical history.
He wrote several other letters to Francis Eppes, who was attending South Carolina College in Columbia. He sent his grandson books, provided advice about his studies, asked questions about the college’s curriculum, and answered questions about his reading. When Francis wrote asking him about the works of Lord Bolingbroke and Thomas Paine, his grandfather responded with a fine comparison between two, analyzing both their opinions and their writings. His response amounts to a lesson on literary style:
These two persons differed remarkably in the style of their writing, each leaving a model of what is most perfect in both extremes of the simple and the sublime. No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style; in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language…. Ld. Bolingbroke’s, on the other hand, is a style of the highest order: the lofty, r[h]ythmical, full-flowing eloquence of Cicero. Periods of just measure, their members proportioned, their close full and round. His conceptions too are bold and strong, his diction copious, polished and commanding as his subject.11
Other correspondence came from unexpected quarters. In February 1821, Jefferson received a letter from Prof. Jared Mansfield of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Established during his presidency, the Academy wished to honor Jefferson for playing an instrumental part in its creation. Consequently, Prof. Mansfield asked him to sit for a portrait. Though flattered, Jefferson, at seventy-seven, answered by quoting Voltaire, who, when requested by a female friend to sit for a bust by the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle at the same age, responded: “I am seventy-seven years old, and M. Pigalle is supposed to be coming to model my face. But, Madame, I must first have a face. You would hardly be able to guess where it ought to be. My eyes have sunk three inches, my cheeks are nothing but old parchment badly glued on to bones which have nothing to hold to. The few teeth I had have departed.” Applied to Jefferson, Voltaire’s words are hyperbolic. In his old age, Jefferson still had a full set of teeth.12
Commissioned by the Academy, the portraitist Thomas Sully came to Monticello in March and stayed for nearly two weeks. Born in England, Sully had immigrated to the United States in his adolescence with his family. His actor-parents traveled around the nation to perform, and they brought Thomas and his many siblings with them; once he turned painter, Sully continued traveling the country executing his commissions. These experiences gave him many good stories and much insight into the character of the nation, an essential quality for any good portrait painter. Th
e turning point in Sully’s career came in 1807, when he visited Gilbert Stuart’s studio in Hartford, Connecticut. Stuart’s painting style significantly influenced Sully’s, and Sully emerged as the finest American portraitist after Stuart.13
During his Monticello sojourn, Sully spent much time talking about art and architecture with Jefferson. He recommended several books, the most notable being Jean Nicolas Louis Durand’s Recueil et Paralle`le desE ´difices de Tout Genre, Anciens et Modernes, a large collection of engravings consisting of architectural plans illustrating works from ancient Egypt to eighteenth-century Europe with an accompanying history of architecture by Jacques-Guillaume Legrand. Given Jefferson’s appreciation of the comparative method when it came to so many other fields of study—anthropology, biography, law, literature—Durand’s comparativist outlook appealed to him. Sully promised to find him a copy of Durand’s work. He was unable to make good on this promise, but Jefferson did obtain a copy of Durand’s work for the University of Virginia library.14 The evidence of Sully’s visit to Monticello suggests that he developed a deep and abiding respect for Jefferson.
Jefferson was not the only member of the household to engage Sully in artistic discussion. Ever eager to expand her knowledge and test her abilities, Ellen, now twenty-four, talked art with Sully, too. She expressed more interest in landscape painting than in portraiture, though. As Sully knew, good art teachers were hard to come by, so he offered her the next best thing: after returning to Philadelphia, Sully found “a work on Landscape painting,” which he sent Ellen as a gift, hoping it would “supply the place of a teacher.”15
Two paintings resulted from Sully’s Monticello visit—or three, if you count the extraordinary portrait of Martha Jefferson Randolph that Sully would paint several years later. The half-length portrait of Jefferson he painted that March served as a study for the elegant full-length portrait he would create for the military academy. Once it was hung, the portrait awed visitors to West Point. James Fenimore Cooper, for one, was thoroughly impressed. Visiting West Point in 1823, he found “a dignity, a repose … a loveliness about this painting, that I never have seen in any other portrait.” Sully’s portrait prompted Cooper to rethink his formerly negative attitude toward Jefferson: “It has really shaken my opinion of Jefferson as a man, if not as a politician; and when his image occurs to me now, it is in the simple robes of Sully.”16 Despite the grandeur of the fulllength portrait, the half-length one is often considered the finest Sully ever painted. He left it unfinished for several years, but in 1830, William Short commissioned him to complete the work. Sully added some final touches, and Short presented it to the American Philosophical Society.
Martha Jefferson Randolph, by Thomas Sully. (Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.)
The half-length portrait depicts a very different Jefferson from the one Jefferson himself was depicting in his autobiography. In his own verbal portrait, Jefferson subsumed his personal life within his public life. He avoided showing his inner feelings or depicting his private relationships in favor of describing what he had contributed to the development of his nation.17 Painting Jefferson at Monticello in his retirement, Sully captured the private Jefferson.
Sully’s painting confirms Francis Calley Gray’s description of Jefferson. Gray had emphasized the fact that even though Jefferson’s homemade garments were unfashionable, he was proud of their local manufacture. Wearing a thick coat trimmed with a fur collar in Sully’s painting, Jefferson appears warm and comfortable yet hardly stylish. Sully’s portrait captures its subject’s nonchalance toward personal appearance. While a diplomat in Paris, Jefferson had made a point of dressing in the latest fashions. At home in retirement, he wore what he pleased.
The face above the fur collar is the best part of Sully’s painting. Jefferson’s sandy red hair had now turned almost completely gray, but he still had plenty of it. In the portrait, his long hair frames his distinctive face. Four decades earlier Mather Brown had depicted the piercing quality of Jefferson’s eyes. Like Voltaire’s, his eyes had sunk a little over the course of his life, but they had lost none of their penetrating power.
Sully’s painting is lit in a distinctive manner, and Jefferson’s body is positioned to give light and shadow their full effect. His body faces out, his right shoulder angled slightly forward and his head turned to his right. The light comes from his right, slightly above and behind him. Consequently, the front of his face is brightly lit. His prominent nose casts a dark shadow, and the left side of his head is slightly shaded. There is figurative truth in this likeness: though part of Jefferson remains in shadow, his intentions are clear to those who look him straight in the eye.
His mouth may be the most unusual feature of the portrait. Jefferson’s thin lips seem tightly clenched, making his mouth a horizontal line. The position of his lips suggests a touch of vanity. Jefferson seems to be holding his mouth immobile to avoid displaying any unnecessary wrinkles. Alternatively, the tight-lipped manner in which he holds his mouth offers a literal equivalent for the tight-lipped manner he was using to narrate his autobiography. Just as Jefferson hesitated to reveal his personal life in the autobiography, he was also trying to reveal little about himself as he sat for Sully—but to no avail. Sully’s keen eye saw through Jefferson’s pose: the portrait depicts his natural dignity, his stately being, and his wisdom.
Progress on the autobiography slowed during Sully’s visit. Jefferson accelerated the story by skipping big chunks of his life. Reaching 1779, the year he was elected governor of Virginia, he deliberately avoided retelling what happened when he was in office, which he excused with the following statement: “Being now, as it were, identified with the Commonwealth itself, to write my own history during the two years of my administration, would be to write the public history of that portion of the revolution within this state.”18 Seeing the story of his life while Virginia governor as identical to the history of Virginia during his governorship, Jefferson saw no reason to retell it, especially since Louis Hue Girardin had recently told it so well. Instead, he referred readers to Girardin’s History of Virginia. Its author, Jefferson explained in his autobiography, “had free access to all my papers while composing it, and has given as faithful an account as I could myself.”19
Usually, aspects of Jefferson’s personal life emerge in the autobiography solely to illuminate his public life. Recalling the offer Congress made in November 1782 to appoint him to negotiate a peace treaty in Europe, he explained why he accepted, when he had previously declined similar appointments: his wife had died in the interim. Instead of making his wife’s death a distinct episode in the autobiography, he mentioned it only as it pertained to his diplomatic career. Jefferson often relived his wife’s death over in his own mind: the scrap of paper that held a lock of her hair shows much evidence of folding and unfolding.20 He refused to share his intimate memories with his readers.
One of the finest episodes in the autobiography stems from his last term in the Continental Congress. Recording a conversation with fellow Virginia delegate John Francis Mercer, Jefferson revealed much about himself:
Our body was little numerous, but very contentious. Day after day was wasted on the most unimportant questions. My colleague Mercer was one of those afflicted with the morbid rage of debate, of an ardent mind, prompt imagination, and copious flow of words. He heard with impatience any logic which was not his own. Sitting near me on some occasion of a trifling but wordy debate, he asked how I could sit in silence hearing so much false reasoning which a word should refute? I observed to him that to refute indeed was easy, but to silence impossible. That in measures brought forward by myself, I took the laboring oar, as was incumbent on me; but that in general I was willing to listen. If every sound argument or objection was used by some one or other of the numerous debaters, it was enough: if not, I thought it sufficient to suggest the omission, without going into a repetition of what had been already said by others. That this was a waste and abuse of the time and patie
nce of the house which could not be justified.21
Upon relating this anecdote, Jefferson drew some general conclusions regarding legislative bodies, taking examples from earlier sessions of Continental Congress, European legislative bodies, and the Virginia House of Burgesses—“the most dignified body of men ever assembled to legislate,” he said elsewhere.22 Continuing his autobiography, he observed:
I believe that if the members of deliberative bodies were to observe this course generally, they would do in a day what takes them a week, and it is really more questionable, than may at first be thought, whether Bonaparte’s dumb legislature which said nothing and did much, may not be preferable to one which talks much and does nothing. I served with General Washington in the legislature of Virginia before the revolution, and, during it, with Dr. Franklin in Congress. I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point which was to decide the question. They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow of themselves. If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150. lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? That 150. lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.23
After these incisive remarks, Jefferson wrote, “But to return again to our subject.” His words seem almost apologetic. They suggest that he considered this anecdote and the conclusions he drew from it a digression, an indulgence, something not directly pertinent to his narrative. The story of Jefferson’s life is a great story, but time and again throughout the autobiography, he backs away from revealing too much of himself. Whenever he catches himself supplying “recollections of myself,” he reverts to “recollections of dates and facts.”
The Road to Monticello Page 78