America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  The allegation that Jefferson engaged in a long-term sexual relationship with Sally, which may have begun as early as 1788, was first made public by the Scottish-born journalist James Callender, in a series of articles written for the Richmond Recorder in the fall of 1802. “It is well known that the man,” Callender wrote of the president, “whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY.” Callender’s reporting never carried much weight because he was known to be irascible and unstable—he died of an apparent suicide a year later—and he had an axe to grind. A former political ally of Jefferson’s, Callender was miffed because the president had not appointed him postmaster in Richmond, as he had expected. In 1868, Martha’s son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, told biographer Henry Randall that Jefferson’s nephew, Peter Carr, fathered Sally’s children, a claim that most historians accepted for more than a century. But the entire landscape changed dramatically in 1997 with the release of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed, currently a professor of history at Harvard. Examining a wealth of sources, including Jefferson’s Farm Book, in which he recorded the births of Sally’s six children and detailed testimonials by two of them, Gordon-Reed argued that Jefferson was likely the father of all six. (In contrast to most of his other slaves, at Jefferson’s behest, Sally, as well as her four children who reached adulthood, all lived in freedom after his death.) In 1998, Nature published the results of a DNA test that revealed a match between the last child, Eston Hemings, and the male Jefferson line, but not with the male Carr line. Today Gordon-Reed’s position represents the scholarly consensus, although some skeptics continue to insist on alternative explanations.

  In the two centuries between Callender’s explosive articles and Gordon-Reed’s scholarly volumes—her follow-up study, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, appeared in 2008—most historians, when they deigned to enter into this debate at all, cited their own idealized view of Jefferson as “proof” that the Federalist journalist must have been slinging mud. “[The charges],” asserted Dumas Malone, “are distinctly out of character, being virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson’s moral standards and habitual conduct.” Though it’s impossible to know with absolute certainty, as Gordon-Reed concedes, whether Jefferson slept with his slave even once, the flip side of this long-standing assumption seems much more plausible. The choice of Sally Hemings as a mistress is entirely consistent with Jefferson’s character disorder. For obsessives, in intimate relationships, as in everything else, control is the be-all and end-all; a genuine partnership with mutual give-and-take is anathema. In Sally, a woman thirty years his junior, whom he happened to own, Jefferson might well have found just what he was after. That was what Aaron Burr concluded, at least according to the late Gore Vidal. In his 1973 historical novel, Burr, the man who served as vice president during Jefferson’s first term describes the submissive Sally as “exactly what Jefferson wanted a wife to be.”

  By the time he entered the White House in 1801—he would be the first president to be inaugurated in Washington, D.C.—Jefferson had built a formidable résumé, which included considerable experience in foreign affairs. After returning from France in September 1789, he accepted President Washington’s request that he serve as secretary of state. He remained in the cabinet until his resignation in late 1793. By then, he was convinced that the president was being unduly influenced by the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. According to Jefferson, Hamilton was an elitist bent on undoing the democratic reforms of the American Revolution. Eager to revive the “spirit of  ’76,” the die-hard antiauthoritarian founded an opposition party, the Republicans. In the presidential election of 1796, Jefferson unsuccessfully opposed John Adams, Washington’s successor as the leader of the Federalists. Since the vice presidency then went to whoever finished with the second most electoral votes, Jefferson had no choice but to serve in the administration of his bitter foe, whom, like Hamilton, he considered a crypto-monarchist. The hotly contested rematch, which took place between April and October 1800—each state chose its electors at a different time—didn’t end until the House of Representatives declared Jefferson the victor in its thirty-sixth ballot on February 17, 1801.

  Jefferson’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, has turned out to be one of the most momentous speeches in American history, even though few in the crowd of more than 1,100, which filled the Senate chamber in the semifinished capitol building, could make out its words. The sociophobe couldn’t project; his soft voice was inaudible to anyone not seated in the first few rows. Fortunately for Jefferson, in contrast to the Declaration, this text would immediately be pored over by newspaper readers across the nation. And it would be well worth the study. Laboring over every word—he cranked out three complete drafts in the two weeks allotted to him—the perfectionist had produced another masterpiece; this one inspired Americans not to break a bond with a foreign ruler, but to cement their bonds with one another. While Republicans called the end product “a Magna Carta in politics,” Federalists also were unstinting in their praise. “We thought him a Virginian,” one Federalist editor conceded, “and have found him an American—We thought him partisan and have found him a president.”

  Like other great literary achievements, his text reads today as if it were a disparate collection of famous quotations. “But every difference of opinion,” declared the new president, eager to reassure an anxious nation that the transfer of power from one party to the other would be peaceful, “is not a difference of principle.” In the first draft, the persnickety prose stylist had prefaced this sentiment with the phrase “but let it not be imagined that,” but he cut the extraneous words in draft number two. Jefferson then uttered the statement that soon echoed around the country, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Paradoxically, he still defined the most pressing threat as the federal government, the very institution that he now headed. He declared his intention to keep it as lean as possible, promising “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another.” And before moving on to his peroration, in which he humbly accepted his demanding new post, Jefferson rallied his fellow citizens around a list of “essential principles,” headed by “equal and exact justice to all men” and “the honest payment of our debts.”

  Attacking the national debt, which had ballooned under the Federalists, became the chief focus of his Republican administration. With the help of his able secretary of the treasury, the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, the compulsive accountant worked tirelessly to clean up America’s finances. Fully aware of the mathematical prowess of the chief executive, Gallatin asked him in a memo dated November 15, 1801, to “calculate what will be the annual sum wanted to pay the interest on, and pay off within eight years, a debt of $21,955,900, bearing an interest of $1,310,401.50.” Since different chunks of the total were lent out at different interest rates, the problem was far from straightforward; nevertheless, an unfazed Jefferson provided the precise answer the next day: $3,277,516. He remains the only president ever to use complex logarithmic equations to crunch the national debt as well as census data. In his first State of the Union Address, which was submitted to, rather than spoken before, Congress that December, Jefferson explained that America’s population was growing geometrically—as per his calculations, it was expected to double in twenty-two years—and that the “multiplications of men…educated in the love of order” meant that he could both pay down the debt and dispense with all internal taxes. And he fulfilled his promises; though to balance the nation’s books, he would reduce the size of the army by half and that of the navy by nearly two-thirds.

  But the president, like the farmer, did not always live within his means. In the spring of 1802, Jefferson became alarmed by the impending transfer of the Louisiana Territory from Spain to France, which had bought back the land from its European neighbor in 18
00. “This little event, of France’s possessing herself of Louisiana,” he wrote in April 1802, “is the embryo of a tornado.” And his fears were warranted; six months after the transfer, Napoleon closed the port of New Orleans to American ships. Instead of waging war, as the Federalists advocated, Jefferson opened up America’s checkbook. Though the Louisiana Purchase, which instantly doubled the size of the country, ran counter to his principles—in addition to adding $15 million to the debt, the deal implicitly chipped away at states’ rights by giving the president authority not specified in the Constitution—he felt that he had no choice but “to get out of the scrape as I can.” And even before the treaty was ratified by the Senate in the fall of 1803, Jefferson asked Congress to fund a trip to the Pacific that became known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His detailed instructions to Clark, embedded in a three-thousand-word missive dated June 20, 1803, whose numerous drafts he kept revising, included several lists of desiderata; besides weather data, his outgoing personal secretary was to gather vast amounts of information on all the Native Americans, animals, vegetables, and minerals that he came across in his travels. This investment would also pay enormous dividends. On account of this string of accomplishments, historian Joseph Ellis has lauded Jefferson’s first term as “one of the two or three most uniformly successful in American presidential history.”

  The American people voiced a similar sentiment in 1804 when they reelected Jefferson in a landslide. He captured a staggering 73 percent of the popular vote—far more than any other presidential candidate since—which translated into 162 electoral votes; his Federalist opponent, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, got only 14. However, in his second term, Jefferson was hamstrung by developments abroad. Hoping to stay out of the protracted war between Britain and France, Jefferson pushed through Congress the Embargo Act of 1807, which banned all international trade. “The idea of ceasing intercourse with obnoxious nations,” Henry Adams has noted, “reflected his own personality in the mirror of statesmanship.” Though the loner managed to get both the hated King George and Napoleon out of his face, the U.S. economy suffered terribly. Jefferson’s personal life also took a turn for the worse after the death of his younger daughter, Polly, in childbirth in 1804. “My evening prospects,” the heartbroken and depressed president wrote that year, alluding to his only surviving child, “now hang on the slender thread of a single life.”

  Fortunately for Jefferson, Martha remained much more devoted to him than to her husband, Thomas Randolph, then a congressman from Virginia, with whom she would have a total of twelve children. “The first and most important object with me,” Martha reassured her father in 1807, “will be the dear and sacred duty of nursing and cheering your old age.” After Jefferson’s retirement, Martha, having already separated from the mentally unstable Randolph, would move with the children to Monticello, where she would also raise her sister’s sole surviving child.

  “Never did a prisoner,” wrote the sixty-five-year-old Jefferson a couple of days before the end of his second term, “feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.” No longer weighed down by pressing political responsibilities, the self-described “hermit of Monticello” began “enjoying a species of happiness that I never before knew, that of doing whatever hits the humor of the moment.” For Jefferson, spontaneous fun meant immersion in one project after another designed to bring more order into his world. Some would be of minimal significance to posterity, but others of considerable. While he may not have been our most productive ex-president—a designation often accorded to Jimmy Carter—he may well have been our most industrious, most neat, and most devoted to the cause of organization.

  Gardening was high on his agenda. For years, Jefferson had collected seeds from all over the world, which he stored in “little phials, labeled and hung on little hooks…in the neatest order,” according to one visitor to Monticello, and he was eager to see what he could grow. A week after returning home from Washington, he started a massive eight-column “Kalendar” in his Garden Book, in which he tracked the hundreds of vegetables that he planted that spring and summer. (Though no subsequent “Kalendar” would be quite as long, Jefferson would compile one every year until 1825.) Applying his characteristic thoroughness, he kept experimenting and refining his methods. When the Roman broccoli which he had first sowed on April 20, 1809, “failed nearly,” the recently retired president didn’t give up; he tried again on May 30 and June 3, and eventually managed to transplant a total of 135 broccoli plants on July 10. “Under a total want of demand except for our family table,” Jefferson wrote a friend in 1811, “I am still devoted to the garden. But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.” He also laid out shrubs and filled in the flower beds that surrounded his house. While Sally’s nephew, his slave Wormley, did the digging, Jefferson trailed behind with his measuring line and pruning knife in order to keep the rows properly aligned. In so doing, Jefferson was paying homage to his obsessive father, who had organized Shadwell’s vegetable and flower gardens in numbered beds ordered in rows designated by letters.

  In March 1815, Jefferson began labeling and organizing his books one last time. Six months earlier, after hearing that the Brits had burned down the original Library of Congress, the deeply indebted farmer had offered to sell his entire collection so that the feds could start anew. By early 1815, the deal was done; Jefferson ended up receiving $23,950 for the 6,047 volumes that, according to his measurements, occupied 855.39 square feet of wall space in bookcases that comprised a total of 676 cubic feet. While Jefferson had already updated his catalog, which subdivided Francis Bacon’s three broad categories into forty-four chapters (subjects)—under Memory, for example, Civil History was chapter 1—he still needed to do some checking and rechecking. “I am now employing as many hours of every day as my strength will permit,” he wrote to President Madison on March 23, “in arranging the books and putting every one in its place on the shelves and shall have them numbered correspondently.” Even with the help of three grandchildren, the operation would take two months. For each book, Jefferson affixed a label that indicated both the chapter to which it belonged and its place on the shelf; in his bookcases, Jefferson had arranged the volumes both by subject and by size—the clunky folios, for example, were stacked together at the bottom. Hoping to prevent Congress from messing up his complex organizational scheme, for which he would later be feted as the “Father of American Librarianship,” Jefferson used his own shelves as shipping crates. However, much to his horror, George Watterson, the Librarian of Congress, while preserving his chapter divisions, decided to organize his books alphabetically rather than by subject. Upon receiving his personal copy of Watterson’s printed catalog, an enraged Jefferson took out his pen and rearranged all his books into their original order. While Watterson did not clean up his mess, several years later, Jefferson instructed his personal secretary, Nicholas Trist, to transform his marked-up catalog into a new manuscript containing his original scheme.

  This compulsive reorganizer also would not hesitate to deface the Western world’s most hallowed texts—the Gospels. In the summer of 1820, Jefferson vented his pique at organized religion by slicing and dicing eight Bibles—two each in Greek, Latin, French, and English—with a razor blade. Pasting the shreds together, he created a new book with parallel passages in the four languages, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. This biography of Christ consisted of nothing but the texts written by the Evangelists as rearranged by Jefferson. Though his political opponents often portrayed him as an atheist, Jefferson was a devout Christian. In 1822, he would summarize his core beliefs in the following list:

  That there is only one God, and he [is] all perfect.

  That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.

  That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself is the sum of religion.

  But this creature of the Enlightenment could not stomach any counterfactual mumbo jumbo. “The Jefferson B
ible,” which he dubbed his “wee little book,” excises all supernatural events, removing both the Annunciation and the Resurrection and every angel. While Jefferson discussed his faith with select friends and family members, he appears not to have shown this book to anyone. He viewed religion as he did most human activities—as a means not to seek interpersonal connection, but to express personal freedom. “I am of a sect by myself,” he wrote in 1819, “as far as I know.”

  Jefferson’s final retirement project has been his most enduring. Despite minor ailments like rheumatism, the still fit former president would remain in good enough health to continue his daily horseback rides until the last few weeks of his life. And in early 1819, he took on a new challenge, that of rector of a new citadel to learning chartered by the Virginia state legislature. “While you have been,” Virginia senator James Barbour wrote to him in January 1825, two months before the University of Virginia held its first classes, “the ablest champion of the rights and happiness of your own generation, you have generously devoted the evening of your life to generations yet unborn.” Eager to instill in America’s youth “the precepts of virtue and order,” Jefferson micromanaged every detail of his new creation. He designed the campus, placing at the center a large domed building, which housed the library—rather than a church—to “give it unity.” He modeled the Rotunda on Andrea Palladio’s Pantheon; on its two sides were several two-story pavilions alternating with one-story dormitories, all of which he numbered in his architectural drawings. He also supervised the recruiting of its first five faculty members from Europe. Throughout the summer of 1824, he spent four hours a day compiling the catalog for its library (his final tally of 6,860 volumes divided into forty-two chapters, which he estimated would cost $24,076, mirrors the numbers for the library that he had sold to the feds a decade earlier). And Jefferson also devised all the university’s rules and regulations, specifying, for example, both that professors were to teach only six hours a week and that the school day was to run from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. In order not to intrude on students, the domineering and controlling leader with the fervent antiauthoritarian streak eschewed a fixed curriculum in favor of electives. However, those who selected classes on law and government would be required to tackle his reading list, at the top of which stood the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and Washington’s inaugural and farewell addresses.