Soon after I had received my complimentary copies of Revolution Song, another piece of mail arrived from someone also exploring the Jefferson trail. The letter came from Paris, and the sender was Mary Jo Salter, a good friend who also happened to be one of America’s most respected poets. She and her husband, the writer Brad Leithauser, were spending a sabbatical year in Paris, where Mary Jo was continuing to perform her duties as poetry editor of the New Republic and completing a volume of new poems. The longest poem in the collection, it turned out, would focus on the ubiquitous Mr. Jefferson. Although she explained that “98 percent of the facts and 92 percent of the interpretations historians can provide about Jefferson will never get into my poem at all,” Mary Jo wondered if I might help with the history, explaining that it would be “a crime to get my substantive fact wrong if one can possibly avoid it.”6
For a poet of Mary Jo’s stature and sensibility, Jefferson was certainly not a political choice, at least in the customary sense of the term. She had no ideological axes to grind, no patriotic hymns to sing. And it made no sense to think that propagandists and poets were plugged into the same cultural grid, which had its main power source buried beneath the mountains around Monticello. So I asked her: Why Jefferson?
That question provoked a spirited exchange of letters over several months. Part of Jefferson’s poetic appeal, it turned out, was his lifelong concern with language. He had also been the subject of several distinguished poets of the past; Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Robert Penn Warren had taken him on. But mostly, Mary Jo explained, “poets are seized by images,” and in Jefferson’s case two specific incidents struck her as poetic occasions: The first was his death on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the acceptance of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress and the same day John Adams died; the second was another eerie coincidence—his purchase of a thermometer on July 4, 1776, and his recording a peak temperature of seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit that special day. These were “poignant and eminently visual events,” she explained, that captured a poet’s imagination. They were the kinds of historical facts that poets usually were required to invent. Whether it was a certain knack or sheer fate, Jefferson’s life possessed the stuff of poetry.7
The thirty-page poem that Mary Jo eventually produced, entitled “The Hand of Thomas Jefferson,” was a meditation on the hand that wrote the Declaration of Independence, was broken in Paris during a romantic frolic with Maria Cosway, then crafted those elegiac last letters to Adams and finally reached across the ages to pull us toward him. When I asked what about Jefferson pulled her, Mary Jo said it was his “accessible mysteriousness,” the fact that there appeared to be a seductive bundle of personae or selves inside Jefferson that did not talk to one another but could and did talk to us. This was a bit different from Peterson’s “protean” Jefferson, which suggested a multidimensional Renaissance Man. Mary Jo’s Jefferson was more like Postmodern Man, a series of disjointed identities that beckoned to our contemporary sense of incoherence and that could be made whole only in our imagination, the place where poets live.8
I was not sure where that left historians, who were not, to be sure, obliged to disavow the use of their imaginations but were duty-bound to keep them on a tight tether tied to the available evidence. Watching Mary Jo work made me wonder whether Jefferson’s enigmatic character might not require the imaginative leeway provided by fiction or poetry to leap across those interior gaps of silence for which he was so famous. Did that mean that any historian who took on Jefferson needed to apply for a poetic license? It was absolutely clear to me that the apparently bottomless and unconditional love for Jefferson at the grass roots level was virtually impervious to historical argument or evidence. It even seemed possible that the quest for the historical Jefferson, like the quest for the historical Jesus, was an inherently futile exercise. No less a source than Merrill Peterson, the best Jefferson biographer alive, seemed to endorse such doubts when he made what he called the “mortifying confession” that after over thirty years of work, “Jefferson remains for me, finally, an impenetrable man.”9
Anyone who paused too long to contemplate the wisdom of the quest was likely to be trampled by the crowds, who harbored no doubts. Upwards of six hundred thousand Jefferson lovers were attracted to a major exhibit on “The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello,” which ran from April to December 1993. Susan Stein, Monticello’s curator of art, had made a heroic effort to reassemble most of the furnishings that had been dispersed starting in 1827, when Jefferson’s crushing debts forced his descendants to auction off the estate. The result was a faithful replication of what Monticello’s interior spaces actually looked like during Jefferson’s lifetime. If the rooms of the mansion were in any reliable sense an accurate reflection of his many-chambered personality, they suggested wildly extravagant clutter and a principle of selection guided only by a luxuriously idiosyncratic temperament: Houdon busts next to Indian headdresses, mahogany tables brimming over with multiple sets of porcelain and silver candlesticks, wall-to-wall portraits and prints and damask hangings and full-length gilt-framed mirrors.10
Perhaps all our lives would look just as random and jumbled if our most precious material possessions, gathered over a lifetime, were reassembled in one place. By any measure, however, chockablock Monticello resembled a trophy case belonging to one of America’s most self-indulgent and wildly eclectic collectors. How did one square this massive treasure trove of expensive collectibles with a life at least nominally committed to agrarian simplicity and Ciceronian austerity? The exhibit suggested that Jefferson lived in a crowded museum filled with the kinds of expensive objects one normally associates with a late-nineteenth-century Robber Baron whose exorbitant wealth permitted him to indulge all his acquisitive instincts. The one discernible reminder of Jefferson’s preference for what he called “republican simplicity” was the most valued item in the exhibit: the portable writing desk on which he had composed the Declaration of Independence. It was on loan from the Smithsonian, where it had resided since 1880, and the only other time it had been permitted to travel was in 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt took it with him the day he dedicated the Jefferson Memorial. The Smithsonian recognized that the writing desk was a sacred relic of American history and insisted on posting a twenty-four-hour guard during the month it was on loan to Monticello. In part because of the sacred desk, the only private dwelling in America to attract more visitors than Monticello that year was Elvis Presley’s Graceland.11
The phenomenon deserved a name or title, so I began to call it the Jeffersonian Surge. Nothing like it had accompanied the 250th birthday of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or John Adams. Nor had Lincoln’s 150th birthday generated anything like this popular outpouring. The Jeffersonian Surge was not a movement led or controlled by professional historians. Jefferson was part of the public domain with drawing power independent of his status in the academic world. The folks who ran publishing houses (seventeen new books with Jefferson’s name in the title appeared in 1993), the producers and directors of films (Florentine Films was now in production, and James Ivory and Ismail Merchant had begun filming in Paris), as well as museum curators and foundation directors, all obviously regarded Jefferson as a sure thing. Compared with the belongings of all other historical figures, things Jeffersonian had a broad, deep and diverse market. It was as if one had attended a Fourth of July fireworks display and, instead of the usual rockets and sparklers, had born witness to the detonation of a modest-sized nuclear bomb.12
In the academic world the winds were gusting in a different direction. Not that scholars had ignored Jefferson or consigned him to some second tier of historical significance. The number of scholarly books and articles focusing on Jefferson or some aspect of his long life continued to grow at a geometric rate; two full volumes were required merely to list all the Jefferson scholarship, much of it coming in the last quarter century.13 The central scholarly project, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, continued to
emerge from Princeton University Press at the stately pace of one volume every two years or so (twenty-five volumes had appeared by 1993), though at the current rate no adult was likely to be alive when the editors ushered Jefferson off to the hereafter.
The problem, then, was not lack of interest so much as lack of consensus about what the man stood for and what his career had accomplished. The love affair that continued to flourish in the public domain had encountered some rough patches in the academic world; indeed, in some scholarly precincts it had turned quite sour. Once the symbol of all that was right with America, Jefferson had become the touchstone for much that was wrong.
You could look back and, with the advantage of hindsight, locate the moment when the tide began to turn in the 1960s. In 1963 Leonard Levy published Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, which, as its title announced, found Jefferson’s record as a liberal defender of minority rights less than inspiring and his rhetoric about freedom of speech and freedom of the press often at odds with his actions. But an even bigger blow fell in 1968 with the publication of Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black, a magisterial reappraisal of race relations in early America featuring a long section on Jefferson. While hardly a heavy-handed indictment of Jefferson, Jordan’s book argued that racism had infiltrated the American soul very early in our history and that Jefferson provided the most resonant illustration of the way deep-seated racist values were buried within the folds of the white man’s personality.14
Jordan adopted an agnostic attitude toward the allegations of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings but, while not endorsing the Sally stories, depicted a Jefferson whose deepest feelings toward blacks had their origins in primal urges that, like the sex drive, came from deep within his subconscious. Many other scholarly books soon took up related themes, but White over Black set the terms of the debate about the centrality of race and slavery in any appraisal of Jefferson. Once that became a chief measure of Jefferson’s character, his stock was fated to fall in the scholarly world.
Another symptom of imminent decline—again, all this in retrospect—was an essay in 1970 by Eric McKitrick reviewing the recent biographies of Jefferson by Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson. McKitrick had the temerity to ask whether it might not be time to declare a moratorium on the celebratory approach toward Jefferson. McKitrick asked: “What about those traits of character that aren’t heroic from any angle?”—traits that went beyond the obvious complicity with slavery. What about his very un-Churchillian performance as governor of Virginia during the American Revolution, when he failed to mobilize the militia and had to flee Monticello on horseback ahead of the marauding British Army? What about the fiasco of his American Embargo of 1807, when he clung to the illusion that economic sanctions would keep us out of war even after it was abundantly clear that they only devastated the American economy?15
From the perspective at Charlottesville, these were impertinent, if not downright hostile, questions. Dumas Malone, the quintessential grand old man of Jefferson scholarship, had toiled for most of his long life, much of that time on the campus at the University of Virginia, to create his authoritative six-volume biography Jefferson and His Time, one of the great labors of love in American scholarship. Merrill Peterson’s scholarly renderings of Jefferson were only slightly less heroic. Now McKitrick was saying that the insights available from the Charlottesville perspective, what he called “the view from Jefferson’s camp,” had just about exhausted their explanatory power.
Rather amazingly it was in Charlottesville that the scholarly reappraisal of Jefferson that McKitrick had called for reached a crescendo. It happened in October 1992, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation convened a conference under the apparently reverential rubric “Jeffersonian Legacies.” The result was a spirited exchange—one reporter called it “an intellectual free-for-all”—that went on for six days. The conference spawned a collection of fifteen essays published in record time by the University Press of Virginia, an hour-long videotape of the proceedings shown on public television and a series of newspaper stories in the Richmond papers and the Washington Post. Advertised as the scholarly version of a birthday party (Jefferson’s 250th was coming up in April), the conference assumed the character of a public trial, with Jefferson cast in the role of defendant.
The chief argument for the prosecution came from Paul Finkelman, a historian then teaching at Virginia Tech, and the chief charge was hypocrisy. “Because he was the author of the Declaration of Independence,” said Finkelman, “the test of Jefferson’s position on slavery is not whether he was better than the worst of his generation, but whether he was the leader of the best.” The answer had the clear ring of an indictment: “Jefferson fails the test.” According to Finkelman, Jefferson was an out-and-out racist who rejected even the possibility that blacks and whites could ever live together on an equal basis. Moreover, his several attempts to end the slave trade or restrict the expansion of slavery beyond the South were halfhearted, as was his contemplation of a program of gradual emancipation. His beloved Monticello and personal extravagances were possible only because of slave labor. Finkelman thought it was misguided—worse, it was positively sickening—to celebrate Jefferson as the father of freedom.16
If Finkelman was the chief prosecutor, the star witness for the prosecution was Robert Cooley, a middle-aged black man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Cooley stood up in the audience during a question-and-answer session to offer himself as “living proof” that the story of Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemings was true. No matter what the scholarly experts had concluded, there were several generations of African-Americans living in Ohio and Illinois who knew they had Jefferson’s blood in their veins. Scholars could talk till doomsday about the absence of hard evidence or documentation. But the evidence did not exist for a good reason. “We couldn’t write back then,” Cooley explained. “We were slaves.” And Jefferson’s white children had probably destroyed all written records of the relationship soon after his death. Cooley essentially pitted the oral tradition of the black community against the written tradition of the scholarly world. His version of history might not have had the hard evidence on its side, but it clearly had the political leverage. When he sat down, the applause from the audience rang throughout the auditorium. The Washington Post reporter covering the conference caught the mood: “Jefferson’s defenders are on the defensive. What tough times these are for icons.”17
Actually, neither Finkelman’s sledgehammer blows nor Cooley’s dramatic personal testimony were accurate reflections of the conference as a whole, though press accounts tended to focus on these presentations because they were the most colorful and controversial occasions. A more balanced assessment of the current state of Jeffersonian scholarship came from Peter Onuf, the successor to Merrill Peterson as Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia and the chief organizer of the Charlottesville conference. In an article entitled “The Scholars’ Jefferson” published in the October 1993 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading scholarly journal in the field, Onuf suggested that Jefferson’s stock was definitely going down but that only a few historians were willing to follow Finkelman all the way and transform Jefferson from the ultimate American hero to the ultimate American villain. Scholars were not quite ready to raze the Jefferson Memorial or chip his face off Mount Rushmore. On the other hand, the mindless devotion to the mythical Jefferson that still dominated the popular culture clearly drove serious students of Jefferson to the edge of sanity. And the filio-pietistic tradition represented by Malone and Peterson was certainly dead in the scholarly world.18
Onuf suggested two sensible ways to understand the somewhat problematic character of the current scholarly situation. First, the democratic revolution that Jefferson had helped launch in America had now expanded to include forms of human equality—especially racial and sexual equality—that Jefferson could never have countenanced or even imagined. He w
as, for that reason, a large and obvious target for those ideologically inspired historians and political pundits who went charging back into the American past in search of monstrous examples of racism, sexism and patriarchy to slay, then drag back into the present as trophies emblematic of how bad it was back then. And he was the perfect target for such raiding parties precisely because so many ordinary Americans had so much invested in him. He was a contested prize in the ongoing culture wars. If history was any kind of reliable guide, the more wild-eyed critics were unlikely to win the war, but the growing emphasis on Jefferson as a slave-owning white racist had the potential to erode his heroic reputation, as the critical judgment of scholars seeped into popular culture. The scholarship on Jefferson, then, was probably a preview of coming attractions in the broader public world.
Second, Onuf suggested that the fascination with Jefferson’s vaunted psychological complexity was gradually giving way to frustration. The famous paradoxes that so intrigued poets and devotees of “protean Jefferson” were beginning to look more like outright contradictions. Onuf described the emerging scholarly portrait of Jefferson as “a monster of self-deception,” a man whose felicitous style was a bit too felicitous, dressing up platitudes as pieces of political wisdom that, as Onuf put it, “now circulate as the debased coin of our democratic culture.” The multiple personalities of Jefferson were looking less like different facets of a Renaissance man and more like the artful disguises of a confidence man.19
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