Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  In 1768 he made two important decisions: first, to build his own home atop an 867-foot-high mountain on land that he had inherited from his father; second, to offer himself as a candidate for the House of Burgesses. The first decision reflected what was to become his lifelong urge to withdraw into his own very private world. The name he first picked for his prospective home was The Hermitage, a retreat that soon became Monticello, his mansion on a mountain and lifetime architectural project. The second decision reflected his political ambition and growing reputation within the transmontane region of the Old Dominion, as well as his emerging stature within the planter elite of the Tidewater. He took his seat in the House of Burgesses in May 1769, then quickly became a protégé of two established Tidewater grandees: Peyton Randolph, an uncle on his mother’s side as well as the most powerful figure in the legislature, and Edmund Pendleton, the shrewd and famously agile apologist for the planter aristocracy.7

  On New Year’s Day of 1772 he completed his self-image as an aspiring “paterfamilias” by marrying Martha Wales Skelton, an attractive and delicate young widow whose dowry more than doubled his holdings in land and slaves. Marriage seemed to steady him. Up until the early 1770s the various account and commonplace books that he kept for recording his dealings and readings seemed to have been written by a series of different people. The handwriting varies wildly with wholly different slants, penmanship styles and spacing. Around the time of his marriage this unconscious experimentation stopped; his writing settled into the clear, unpretentious form that it retained until old age and that is now enshrined in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.8

  His political identity, on the other hand, remained shadowy and marginal. The first vivid image of Jefferson in the House of Burgesses proved emblematic. As a young law student in Williamsburg he stood in the hallway of the House, listening to Patrick Henry toss off his extempore oratorical thunderbolts against the Stamp Act in 1765. Jefferson was a listener and observer, distinctly uncomfortable in the spotlight, shy and nervous in a distracted manner that was sometimes mistaken for arrogance.9

  From his earliest days in the House he opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation and supported nonimportation resolutions against British trade regulations. But so did most other members of the House, along with the entire Tidewater leadership. (In 1771 his political radicalism collided with his domestic agenda when he ordered an expensive piano from London, “of fine mahogany, solid, not veneered,” in anticipation of his marriage to Martha. Even though this violated the nonimportation resolution, he ordered it sent anyway, saying he would store it until the embargo was lifted. The same thing happened three years later on an order of “sashed windows” for Monticello.) He seemed to most of his political contemporaries a hovering and ever-silent presence, like one of those foreigners at a dinner party who nod politely as they move from group to group but never reveal whether or not they can speak the language. He had a deep-seated aversion to the inherent contentions and routinized hurly-burly of a political career and was forever telling his friends that life on the public stage was not for him. Just as his political career was getting started, he seemed poised for retirement.10

  Given his subsequent role in the Continental Congress and then in shaping the course of the American Revolution, his selection to serve on the Virginia delegation in Philadelphia was a fortunate accident. Jefferson was not elected to the original delegation in 1774; he was not considered a sufficiently prominent figure to be included with the likes of George Washington, Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton and Peyton Randolph. In 1775, however, he was chosen as a potential substitute for Randolph—Jefferson was regarded as Randolph’s political godson—in anticipation of Randolph’s decision to abandon his post at Philadelphia in order to assume leadership of what was regarded as the more important business back in Virginia. It would be fair to say that Jefferson made the list of acknowledged political leaders in the Old Dominion, but just barely, and largely because of his ties by blood and patronage with the Randolph circle. If his arrival in Philadelphia in June 1775 marked his entry into national affairs, he entered by the side door.11

  WHIG PRINCIPLES

  THERE WAS ONE significant exception to this dominant pattern of reticence and marginality, but it happened to be the one item that delegates from the other colonies knew about the young Jefferson. “I have not been in Company with him yet,” reported Samuel Ward the day after Jefferson arrived, but “he looks like a very sensible spirited, fine Fellow and by the Pamphlet which he wrote last Summer he certainly is one.” Likewise John Adams recalled that Jefferson entered the Continental Congress carrying “the reputation of a masterly pen… , in consequence of a very handsome public paper which he had written for the House of Burgesses, which had given him the character of a fine writer.”12

  The reference was to a pamphlet that Jefferson had somewhat inadvertently published the previous year. In July 1774 he had taken it upon himself to draft a set of instructions for the first Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress. In a typical act of avoidance he had come up sick for the debate in the Virginia Convention, but friends had arranged for the publication of his draft by a press in Williamsburg. From there printers and newspaper editors throughout the colonies had picked up the pamphlet under the title of A Summary View of the Rights of British America. The audience at whom Jefferson had actually aimed his instructions, the Virginia legislators, chose not to follow them, preferring to recommend that its delegates adopt a moderate posture toward Great Britain. What Jefferson had recommended, and what became the basis of his political reputation outside Virginia, was decidedly more radical. Indeed, if the arguments of Summary View were to be believed, they put him in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in America.13

  The style of Summary View was simple and emphatic, with a dramatic flair that previewed certain passages in the Declaration of Independence (e.g., “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably thro’ every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery”). What most readers noticed, however, and Jefferson later claimed was his chief contribution, was the constitutional argument that Parliament had no right whatsoever to exercise authority over the colonies. While this position had been implicit in the colonial protest literature ever since the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, the clarity of the colonial case had fallen afoul of several complicating distinctions. Granted, Parliament had no right to tax the colonists without their consent, but did it not have the power to regulate trade? Well, yes, it did, but not when the intent of the trade regulation was to raise revenue. But, then, how was intent to be gauged? And what about Parliament’s other legislative actions, like quartering troops in colonial cities and closing Boston’s port? These nagging questions made for a somewhat convoluted constitutional problem. Could Parliament do some of these things but not others? If so, how did one decide which was which? The core appeal of Summary View was that Jefferson cut through the tangle with one sharp thrust: “[T]he British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”14

  The timing of the pamphlet was also exquisite. Several other colonial dissenters—John Adams in Massachusetts and James Wilson in Pennsylvania—were simultaneously reaching the same conclusion about Parliament’s lack of authority in the colonies. It was, as mentioned earlier, the logical implication of the entire colonial protest movement that had begun in 1765. But Jefferson staked out the constitutional ground just as it was becoming the only tenable position for the opponents of British imperial policy to stand on. And he did it in a pamphlet that combined the concision and matter-of-factness of a legal brief with the epigrammatic force of a political sermon.15

  Two other salient features of Summary View received little attention at the time but were destined to loom large in the debates within the Continental Congress over the ensuing months. The first was Je
fferson’s treatment of George III and his attitude toward the British monarchy. The dominant public reaction to Summary View focused on its repudiation of parliamentary authority, because that was the pressing constitutional issue then being faced throughout the various colonial legislatures. What went largely unnoticed was that Jefferson had already moved forward to the next target, the monarchy, which was in fact the only remaining obstacle to the assertion of American independence. To put it somewhat differently, the lengthy indictments against the king that take up two-thirds of the Declaration of Independence were already present in embryo in Summary View.

  Jefferson’s posture toward the monarch throughout Summary View is declaratory rather than plaintive, and the tone toward George III ranges between the disrespectful and the accusatory. The king is not some specially endowed ruler but merely “the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of government erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendence.” Rather than blame the entire mismanagement of imperial policy toward America on Parliament or “the evil ministers to the king,” still the accepted approach within even the radical camp, Jefferson made the king complicitous in the crimes against colonial rights. He accused George III of negligence: permitting colonial assemblies to be dissolved; refusing to hear appeals from aggrieved petitioners; delaying the passage of land reforms. But he also charged the king with outright acts of illegality on his own: sending armed troops into colonial cities to put down lawful demonstrations; prohibiting the natural migration of colonial settlers beyond the Appalachian Mountains. He even introduced the charge that provoked such spirited debate when included in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence—namely, that George III had perpetuated the existence of chattel slavery by repeatedly blocking colonial efforts to end the African slave trade. In effect, with the advantage of hindsight, it is possible to see Summary View as a preliminary draft of the bill of indictment against George III contained in the Declaration, written a full two years before the more famous document and before Jefferson had even taken his seat in the Continental Congress.16

  The second latent feature in Summary View that went unnoticed at the time is of even greater significance in exposing Jefferson’s cast of mind at the dawn of his public career. It is an elaborate and largely mythological version of English history. In the midst of his litany against monarchical abuses of power, Jefferson inserted a long paragraph in which he traced the origin of such abuses back to the Norman Conquest. The source of the colonial problem with British authority did not date from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765; the problem really began in 1066, when the Normans defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. This was the origin of what Jefferson called “the fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king… .” All of English history since the Norman Conquest had been an unfortunate aberration, known under the name of feudalism, which then flared up in a most virulent form in the recent royal exercise of arbitrary power in the colonies. Jefferson indulged his own “fictitious principle” by purporting to discover in the Saxon past of pre-Norman England, and before that in the forests of Germany, a set of people who lived freely and harmoniously, without kings or lords to rule over them, working and owning their land as sovereign agents.17

  The “once upon a time” character of Jefferson’s interpretation, which has also come to be known as the Whig interpretation of history, deserves studied attention as a crucial clue to Jefferson’s deepest intellectual instincts. He had been exposed to the central story line of Whig history in several books that he read as a young man, chiefly Paul de Rapin’s multivolume History of England and Sir John Dalrymple’s History of Feudal Property in Great Britain. He had also read in translation Tacitus’s Germania, the key source for the Whig historians because of its description of the Saxon model of representative government before contamination by feudal monarchs. So Jefferson’s youthful reading in standard works of Whig history unquestionably helped shape his political thinking before 1776 and was one reason he consistently referred to “the ancient Whig principles” as the wellspring for the values underlying the movement for American independence. But the appeal of the Whig histories derived from something more than their rhetorical or logic power. They were influential precisely because they told a story that fitted perfectly with the way his mind worked. Their romantic endorsement of a pristine past, a long-lost time and place where men had lived together in perfect harmony without coercive laws or predatory rulers, gave narrative shape to his fondest imaginings and to utopian expectations with deep roots in his personality. The Whig histories did not create his romantic expectations. They put into words the visionary prospects he already carried around in his mind and heart.

  During the initial months in Philadelphia Jefferson was less concerned with plumbing the depths of his Whig principles than with sharing their practical implications with his fellow delegates. The key term was “expatriation.” The core idea was that America was the refuge for the original Saxon values. Throughout the fall and winter of 1775 Jefferson did extensive research in Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages with the aim of documenting the claim that the earliest migrants from England to America came over at their own expense “unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain” and, most significantly, regarded their migration as a clean break with the mother country. If true, this was revisionist history with the most revolutionary consequences, for it suggested that independence from England was not some future prospect that he and his fellow delegates in the Continental Congress were seriously contemplating; it was an event that had already happened in the misty past.18

  The theory of expatriation was utterly groundless as history. (Jefferson clung to the theory with nearly obsessive tenacity throughout his life, though even he admitted that “I had never been able to get any one to agree with me but Mr. Wythe,” his old law teacher.) John Adams had only recently published his own survey of colonial history, entitled Novanglus, in which he too searched for the sources of American claims to independence from royal and parliamentary authority. But instead of a mystical Saxon past, Adams discovered a complex web of overlapping precedents and contested jurisdictions. This was truer to the inherent messiness of English and colonial history, which had witnessed several major changes in the relationship between royal and parliamentary power during the colonial era, fundamental differences among charters contingent on when different colonies were founded, and only the most gradual realization on the part of English authorities that they in fact were overseeing an empire. Jefferson’s theory of expatriation bore the same relation to colonial history as a nursery rhyme does to a Jamesian novel. That undoubtedly was part of its appeal.19

  The Jeffersonian impulse to invent and then embrace such seductive fictions was not a deliberate effort at propaganda. Jefferson believed what he wrote. True, he could consciously play fast and loose with the historical evidence on behalf of a greater cause. Jefferson’s intellectual dexterity in assigning blame for the slave trade on George III, for example, could be explained as a clever ploy. No one in his right mind believed it, but it could be endorsed as a politically useful misrepresentation. The same thing could be said for his spiffied-up version of the Boston Tea Party in Summary View. In Jefferson’s account, a dedicated group of loyal Bostonians risked arrest and persecution to destroy a cargo of the contraband. Samuel Adams, a major figure in the Continental Congress and the chief organizer of the Tea Party, must have chuckled in satisfaction, knowing as he did that the “loyal Bostonians” were really a group of hooligans and vandals who had disguised themselves as Indians in order to avoid being identified and who had enjoyed the tacit support of the Boston merchants, many of whom had made their fortunes in smuggling. Sam Adams realized that the Tea Party was an orchestrated act of revolutionary theater. Jefferson described it as a spontaneous act of patriotism conducted according to the etiquette of, well, a tea party. But then aga
in, perhaps Jefferson’s version was itself a propagandistic manipulation, just as self-consciously orchestrated as the Tea Party itself.20

  The Saxon myth and the doctrine of expatriation, however, were a different matter. They were not clever and willful distortions. They were complete fabrications. And Jefferson clearly believed they were true. Their distinguishing feature was an otherworldly, almost fairy-tale quality. History is full of wise and great figures whose greatness derived from the will to believe in what eventually proved to be a set of illusions. But Jefferson’s illusions possess a sentimental and almost juvenile character that strains credulity. Since this affinity for idealized or idyllic visions, and the parallel capacity to deny evidence that exposed them as illusory, proved a central feature of Jefferson’s mature thought and character, it seems necessary to ask where it all came from.

  The explanation lies buried in the inner folds of Jefferson’s personality, beyond the reach of traditional historical methods and canons of evidence. What we can discern is a reclusive pattern of behavior with distinctive psychological implications. The youthful Jefferson had already shown himself to be an extremely private temperament. Monticello offers the most graphic illustration of Jefferson’s need to withdraw from the rest of the world, filled as it was with human conflicts and coercions, and create a refuge where the perfect Palladian architecture established the ideal environment for his vision of domestic harmony. And he tended to talk about his craving for a safe haven from the messiness and disorder of the world in decidedly melodramatic terms. “There may be people to whose tempers and dispositions Contention may be pleasing,” he wrote to John Randolph in 1775, “but to me it is of all states, but one, the most horrid.” He much preferred “to withdraw myself totally from the public stage and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquillity, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.” The most astute student of Jefferson’s lifelong compulsion to make and then remake Monticello into a perfect palace and a “magical mystery tour of architectural legerdemain” has concluded that Jefferson’s obsessive “putting up and pulling down” are best understood as a form of “childhood play adapted to an adult world.” Both the expectations that Jefferson harbored for his private life in his mansion on the mountain, as well as his way of trying to design and construct it, suggested a level of indulged sentimentality that one normally associates with an adolescent.21