Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  The very few personal letters from his early years that have survived reflect a similar pattern of juvenile romanticism. At the age of twenty, soon after he had graduated from William and Mary, Jefferson wrote his best friend, John Page: “I verily beleive [sic] Page that I shall die soon, and yet I can give no other reason for it but that I am tired with living. At this moment when I am writing I am scarcely sensible that I exist. Adieu Dear Page.” A few months later he reported to Page his mortification at discovering that his infatuation with Rebecca Burwell, a coquettish beauty then turning heads in Williamsburg, was a hopeless cause. Jefferson had approached her at a dance in the Apollo Room of Raleigh Tavern, only to find himself tongue-tied and Rebecca uninterested. “I had dressed up in my own mind, such thoughts as occurred to me, in as moving language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner,” he explained. “But, good God!”22

  In one sense such fragments of evidence only document that Jefferson was the epitome of the painfully self-conscious teenager (though in fact he was twenty at the time of the Rebecca Burwell fiasco). In another sense, however, they offer glimpses of a very vulnerable young man accustomed to constructing interior worlds of great imaginative appeal that inevitably collided with the more mundane realities. Rather than adjust his expectations in the face of disappointment, he tended to bury them deeper inside himself and regard the disjunction between his ideals and worldly imperfections as the world’s problem rather than his own.

  Jefferson’s strange attachment, then, to the myth of the Saxon past was an early ideological manifestation of a characteristically Jeffersonian cast of mind. It represented his discovery—in truth, his invention—of an idyllic time and place that accorded with his powerful sense of the way things were meant to be. And any compromise of that seductive vision was a betrayal of one’s personal principles. Back there in the faraway world of pre-Norman England, prior to the feudal corruptions, men and women had found it possible to combine individual independence and social harmony, personal freedom and the rule of law, the need to work and the urge to play. Throughout his life Jefferson was haunted by the prospects of such a paradise and eager to find it in bucolic pastoral scenes, distant Indian tribes, well-ordered gardens, local communities (he later called them ward-republics) or new and therefore uncorrupted generations. At the private level the young man who was taking his seat in the Continental Congress had already begun to build his personal version of utopia at Monticello. At the public level he was preparing to release his formidable energies against a British government that, as he saw it, was threatening to disrupt and destroy the patch of potential perfection that was forming on the western edge of the British Empire. Whatever weaknesses this Jeffersonian perspective harbored as a mature and realistic appraisal of the Anglo-American crisis, it possessed all the compensating advantages of an unequivocal moral commitment driven by an unsullied sense of righteous indignation.23

  PROSE ORATIONS

  SUCH ASSETS were not immediately visible to his colleagues in the Continental Congress. We know, with the advantage of hindsight, that Jefferson was destined to emerge in the history books as the most famous figure in Philadelphia in 1776. In the summer of 1775, however, while his authorship of Summary View provided a measure of status and his membership in the Virginia delegation assured that his opinions mattered, no one could have predicted that his contribution over the course of the next year would earn him a permanent place in posterity. Not only was he a thoroughly marginal player within Virginia’s cast of stars, he lacked precisely those qualities that the members of Congress considered most essential. His most glaring deficiency was the talent most valued in Philadelphia: He could not speak in public.

  This was a major liability because the Continental Congress was regarded by most observers as an arena for orators. John Adams, who has left the fullest personal account of the debates and deliberations, had come to Philadelphia the previous year wondering who would be the American Cicero or Demosthenes (and hoping the fates had selected him for both roles). His diary entries convey something of the sense that pervaded the debates, the sense that as each man rose to speak, he was being judged by his colleagues as a contestant in a game of conspicuous eloquence. Adams observed that Edward Rutledge of South Carolina was “sprightly but not deep” and had the distracting habit of speaking through his nose. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania was dismissed as “too much of a talker… . Elegant but not deep.” Roger Sherman of Connecticut was a perfect model of awkwardness: “There cannot be a more striking contrast to beautiful Action, than the Motions of his Hands. Generally, he stands upright with his Hands before him… . But when he moves a Hand, in any thing like Action, Hogarth’s Genius could not have invented a Motion more opposite to grace. It is Stiffness, and Awkwardness itself. Awkward as a Junior Bachelor, or a Sophomore.” By the time Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia Adams himself had begun to emerge as one of the most effective public speakers in the Congress, a man whose own throbbing ego had lashed itself to the cause of independence and whose combination of legal learning and sheer oratorical energy had overwhelmed more moderate delegates in a powerful style that seemed part bulldog and part volcano.24

  Meanwhile the elevated status of the Virginia delegation derived primarily from its reputation for oratorical brilliance. Edmund Pendleton was the silver-haired and silver-tongued master of the elegant style. Jefferson later described him as the “ablest man in debate I have ever met with.” Pendleton’s specialty was the cool and low-key peroration that hypnotized the audience, while his arguments waged a silent guerrilla war against its better judgment, until the matter at issue came around to his way of thinking almost inadvertently, like a natural aristocrat winning a race without ever appearing to exert himself.25

  Richard Henry Lee was more inflammable and ostentatious. If Pendleton’s technique suggested a peaceful occupation, Lee was a proponent of the all-out invasion. Opponents winced whenever he rose to speak, knowing as they did that their arguments were about to be carried off to oblivion in a whirlwind of words. Lee’s theatricality was somewhat contrived; he liked to wrap his hand in a silk handkerchief as he spoke, explaining that he wished to shield onlookers from the unsightly appearance of his mangled hand, missing several fingers because of a hunting accident. Or was it a duel? Lee was to Pendleton as a bomb was to a pistol. But both men were famous on their feet.26

  The undisputed oratorical champion of Virginia of course was Patrick Henry, whose presence in the Virginia delegation generated more public attention than anyone else except George Washington. Henry’s speech against the Stamp Act had been widely publicized throughout the colonies, so he already carried a national reputation for incandescence. As Edmund Randolph put it, “for grand impressions in the defense of liberty, the Western world has not yet been able to exhibit a rival.” If Pendleton was the suave aristocrat and Lee the mannered dramatist, Henry was the evangelical preacher, who came at an audience in waves of emotional inspiration, each separated by exaggerated pauses that seemed to most listeners like the silence preceding divine judgment.

  All of Jefferson’s surviving observations on Henry date from a later time, when their friendship had turned sour (Jefferson claimed that Henry was “avaritious & rotten hearted” and always spoke “without logic, without arrangement…”). But even Jefferson’s criticisms betrayed a certain admiration for Henry’s capacity to sway a crowd by emotional appeals unencumbered with any learning or evidence. In 1784 he warned James Madison that Henry’s opposition to constitutional reforms in Virginia must not be taken lightly since one of his spellbinders could undo weeks of careful work behind the scenes. There was no way to account for his mysterious influence over others or to deal with him in full flight. “What we have to do,” lamented Jefferson to Madison, “is devoutly pray for his death.” In the Continental Congress, of course, Henry’s oratorical brilliance was still a priceless asset rather than a formidable liability. Like Jefferson, Henry was a product of Vi
rginia’s western frontier who had won acceptance from the Tidewater elite, but unlike Jefferson, he always retained the primal quality of a natural force, like the Natural Bridge that Jefferson so admired, one of those spontaneous creations of the gods spawned in the western mountains.27

  Compared with Henry, Jefferson epitomized the diametrically different sensibility of the refined and disciplined scholar. As far as we know, he never rose to deliver a single speech in the Continental Congress. Even within the more intimate atmosphere of committees, he preferred to let others do the talking. John Adams recalled, with a mingled sense of admiration and astonishment, that “during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” No one, however, including the ever-skeptical Adams, ever doubted his radical credentials. His clear denunciation of British authority in Summary View put him on record as an opponent of moderation. But he was utterly useless in situations that demanded the projection of a public presence. He was almost as inadequate in behind-the-scenes arm twisting and cajoling, which were the specialty of John’s cousin Sam Adams. He was simply too shy and withdrawn to interact easily in the corridors.28

  By disposition and habit, Jefferson’s most comfortable arena was the study and his most natural podium was the writing desk. Ever since his college days at William and Mary, continuing through his study and eventual practice of the law, Jefferson spent an inordinate amount of his time alone, reading and taking extensive notes on what he read. He called this practice “commonplacing,” referring to the copying over of passages from Coke or Pufendorf on the law, Milton or Shakespeare on the human condition, Kames or Hutcheson on man’s moral sense. But Jefferson made copying a creative act, often revising a passage to suit his own taste or, more often, blending his own thoughts on the subject into his notes. He was a young man who very much liked to be in control. Solitary study allowed him to work out his private perspectives without interference and without the unpredictability of an improvisational debate.29

  His first act after settling into his quarters on Chestnut Street was to undertake a solitary assessment of how much a war against England might cost the colonies, not in terms of deaths but in terms of dollars. He seemed to believe that an all-out military conflict would not last long. “One bloody campaign,” he wrote a friend, “will probably decide everlastingly our future course.” So his calculations of cost were based on the assumption of a six-month war, which he estimated would require about three million dollars in new taxes.30

  At some point during the summer he commissioned his landlord, Benjamin Randolph, who was a relative on his mother’s side as well as a skilled cabinetmaker, to design a writing desk. He also acquired a new Windsor chair as a comfortable seat. These implements, which eventually became sacred relics because of their subsequent association with the Declaration of Independence, defined the space within which his creative energies could best express themselves. Within a short time his accountlike estimates of military costs were put aside for the more serious business of explaining, in words, why the American colonies must take up arms in the first place.

  The leadership in Congress selected him to draft an address eventually entitled Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms. This was a significant assignment. The address was regarded as a major statement of current thinking in Congress; an earlier effort had floundered over disagreements about language. The selection of Jefferson reflected his reputation as a literary craftsman and the practical recognition that he could make his greatest contribution as a writer rather than a speaker.

  The assignment also forces us to notice an awkward and easily forgotten fact—namely, that although an official declaration of American independence was a year away, the war itself had already started. By the time Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill had already occurred and George Washington had headed off to command an army outside Boston. While the moderates within the Continental Congress continued to hold open the hope of reconciliation with England, by the summer of 1775 the initiative had passed over to the radicals, led by John and Sam Adams, who regarded independence as inevitable. And every action by the British ministry seemed calculated to undercut the moderate faction and make the radicals appear prescient. From the beginning Jefferson identified himself, as did the Virginia delegation, with the radicals. His personal correspondence at this time reflects no doubt that the time for compromise had passed. In June 1775, for example, he wrote relatives in Virginia that “the war is now heartily entered into, without a prospect of accommodation but thro’ the effectual interposition of arms.” A month later he was writing John Randolph that rather than agree to English terms for reconciliation, he “would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.” The question as Jefferson saw it was no longer whether the American colonies would declare independence, but when and how.31

  This is crucial to understand, for it served to shape in subtle but important ways Jefferson’s stylistic agenda throughout the next year as the chief draftsman for the revolutionary cause. On the one hand, the delegates in the Continental Congress were busy raising an army, instructing colonial legislatures on ways to draw up new state constitutions, investigating foreign alliances, overseeing an ongoing war. On the other hand, they were insisting they wished to avoid an open rupture with the mother country and pledging their undying loyalty to George III. Somehow these incompatible political postures, which reflected the split between radicals and moderates in the Congress, had to be stitched together rhetorically. And although the official audience was the English ministry, the actual audience was the American people, or at least the different colonial legislatures that needed to be provided with a way of explaining to themselves why the formerly unthinkable had now become inevitable.

  At the purely constitutional level Jefferson’s argument in Causes and Necessity represented a slight retreat from the position advanced in Summary View. Instead of denying Parliament any legitimate authority in the colonies, Jefferson conceded that “some occasional assumptions of power by the parliament of Great Britain, however unacknowledged by the constitution of our governments, were finally acquiesced in thro’ warmth of affection.” This was undoubtedly a concession to the moderates in the Congress and a reflection of Jefferson’s realization that he needed to accommodate perspectives different from his own. The expatriation theme was also presented in muted form. “Our forefathers… left their native land,” he wrote, “to seek on these shores a residence for civil and religious freedom.” But there was no invocation of the Saxon myth or of the Norman captivity of traditional English rights. Jefferson was bending over backward to avoid alienating the undecided.32

  Jefferson’s main contribution in Causes and Necessities was to provide a story line that brought all American colonists together as innocent victims. Earlier American critics of British policy—men like John Adams, John Dickinson and Daniel Dulany—had made the legal argument that Parliament’s intrusion into colonial affairs after the end of the French and Indian War (1763) was unprecedented. In England Edmund Burke had referred to the period prior to the war as an era of “salutary neglect.” Jefferson’s version of the Anglo-American conflict simply enhanced the dramatic implications of the shift in British policy. Before 1763 the empire was harmonious and healthy, an American version of his earlier descriptions of serenity in the Saxon forests. Then, all of a sudden, “the ministry, finding all the foes of Britain subdued, took up the unfortunate idea of subduing her friends also.” Jefferson showed a flair for, and an intuitive attraction toward, a narrative structure built around moralistic dichotomies. The empire “then and now” set the theme. The story became a clash between British tyranny and colonial liberty, scheming British officials and supplicating colonists, all culminating in the clash at Lexington and Concord between General Thomas Gage’s “ministerial army” and “the unsuspecting inhabitants” of Massachusetts. All this was conveyed in what we might call the sentimental styl
e of the innocent victim.33

  It is impossible to know how much of this cartoonlike version of the imperial crisis Jefferson actually believed and how much was a stylistic affectation. William Livingston, the delegate from New York, observed that Jefferson’s prose in Causes and Necessities reminded him of the oratorical style of the other Virginians: “Much fault-finding and declamation, with little sense of dignity. They seem to think a reiteration of tyranny, despotism, bloody, etc., all that is needed to unite us at home… .” Perhaps Jefferson’s draft represented his attempt to achieve in prose what his Virginian colleagues like Henry were creating in set-piece orations. Within that self-consciously melodramatic tradition, one was allowed to speak of “the unsuspecting inhabitants” of Lexington and Concord, all the while knowing perfectly well that they were lined up in military formation when the British troops arrived.34