A Companion to Thomas Jefferson

By Francis D. Cogliano

A Companion to Thomas Jefferson presents a state-of-the-art assessment and overview of the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson through a collection of essays grounded in the latest scholarship.

• Features essays by the leading scholars in the field, including Pulitzer Prize winners Annette Gordon-Reed and Jack Rakove
• Includes a section that considers Jefferson’s legacy
• Explores Jefferson’s wide range of interests and expertise, and covers his public career, private life, his views on democracy, and his writings
• Written to be accessible for the non-specialist as well as Jefferson scholars
  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781444344615

Book preview

Introduction

FRANCIS D. COGLIANO

On February 17, 1826 Thomas Jefferson wrote to his close friend James Madison. After discussing the appointment of a law professor for the University of Virginia, Jefferson lamented his crushing debts and outlined a lottery scheme which he hoped would solve the problem and save his home. At age eighty-two and in declining health, Jefferson was preoccupied with his legacy. He wrote to Madison, It has … been a great solace to me, to believe that you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued for preserving to them, in all their purity, the blessings of self-government, which we have assisted too in acquiring for them. Jefferson worried that future generations would forget, misconstrue, or misuse his historical legacy. He closed his letter with a plea that his friend Take care of me when dead. (TJ to James Madison, February 17, 1826, TJW, 1515)

Jefferson need not have worried. Although his reputation has waxed and waned over time he has not wanted for the attention of posterity. Since his death on July 4, 1826 biographers and historians have sought to come to grips with Jefferson. They have done so for a vast and interested audience of fellow scholars, politicians, and a general public that has a seemingly insatiable appetite for things Jeffersonian. Several examples illustrate the ubiquity of Jefferson and Jefferson’s image in contemporary America, and beyond. On March 17, 2009 a new play, Red-Haired Thomas by Robert Lyons debuted at New York’s Ohio Theater. Set on Manhattan’s West Side, the play opens with a scene of a half-naked Thomas Jefferson who congratulates himself for having fathered the most human of all human rights – and the most elusive: the right to pursue happiness. He also claims to have fathered two singularly unhappy men: Cliff, a delusional dreamer with a penchant for violence, and Ifthikar, an immigrant from Asia Minor who runs a newsstand." The play examines modern New York life, terrorism, the global financial crisis, and family relationships through the men’s imagined relationship with Jefferson whom a reviewer in the New York Times described as still our shiniest symbol of the democracy that some see as our most valuable export (Soloski 2009, Gates 2009).

Several days after Red-Haired Thomas debuted in New York the right-wing Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann, invoked Jefferson to call for armed resistance to the Obama administration. "I want the people in Minnesota armed and dangerous, she said, on the issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States" (Grandia 2009, emphasis in original).

Enthusiasm for Jefferson is not confined to the United States. On March 10, 2009 a blogger for London’s Daily Telegraph published a series of quotations from Jefferson concerning freedom of religion after advertisements appeared on buses in London and Seattle favoring atheism (Spence 2009). Several days later Modern Ghana News cited the example of Jefferson’s bitterly contested 1800 election and his (eventual) reconciliation with his opponent John Adams to argue for a similar reconciliation between Ghana’s New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress (Damptey 2009). On April 5, 2009 in a column condemning greed Shmuley Boteach argued in The Jerusalem Post that Jefferson’s positive view of human nature had prevailed over Alexander Hamilton’s more pessimistic interpretation. I was raised to believe, wrote Boteach, that an open democratic society is built on the belief that people are ultimately trustworthy. Did not Thomas Jefferson wage a pitched battle against Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, about the goodness inherent in individuals, with Jefferson’s vision winning out? (Boteach 2009). On April 17, 2009 The Australian newspaper declared that President Obama is a modern-day Jefferson (O’Connor 2009). Each of these writers, on four different continents, presumed their readers would understand their references to Jefferson and grasp his contemporary relevance. What is striking is that Jefferson retains a powerful contemporary relevance. Jefferson is unique in his appeal to pundits, politicians, policy-makers, bloggers, writers of letters-to-the-editor, and ordinary people in the United States and beyond. It is difficult, for example, to imagine a contemporary British prime minister invoking William Pitt in an effort to win support for his or her policies or using Gladstonian as a shorthand for all that is good about British political values.

Against the context of intense public enthusiasm, books about Jefferson and his time continue to appear inexorably. In 1960 Merrill D. Peterson wrote, The knowledge of Jefferson possessed by some recent scholars surpasses that of his most intimate contemporaries (if there were any who were genuinely intimate with that reserved man). Their works have achieved a more richly textured and, as the candid observer must feel, a truer image of than in his time (Peterson 1960, 446). A half-century later, Peterson’s words still ring true. Owing to access to digital resources as well as the publication of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson by Princeton University Press students of Jefferson and his time have access to an increasingly wide array of primary source material. This has made possible the publication of an ever increasing (and increasingly sophisticated) scholarship on Jefferson, which this volume seeks to analyze and contribute to.

In October 1992 Peter S. Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia, organized a six-day conference to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth. Arising from that conference was an essay collection, Jeffersonian Legacies, which presented fifteen essays by leading scholars focusing on different aspects of Jefferson’s life and legacy. Jeffersonian Legacies quickly became a landmark in Jefferson scholarship. Nearly a generation has passed since its publication (Jefferson considered a generation to be 19 years in length). The present volume can be read as a sequel to Jeffersonian Legacies, which aims to take stock of the vast and growing scholarly literature on Jefferson and to offer fresh insights from leading scholars on Jefferson and his time. It is organized into three sections. The first contains essays that follow a roughly chronological format and trace Jefferson’s life, major writings, and public career. The second section, of equal length, provides detailed consideration of important themes that run through Jefferson’s life and the scholarly literature. The third, briefer, section presents a series of essays on Jefferson’s legacy – including Jefferson’s effort at fashioning his own legacy as well as the institutions, notably the Papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which have shaped our understanding of Jefferson’s complex legacy. It is not possible to get the last word on Jefferson. This volume is intended to contribute to an ongoing (and never-ending) colloquy on Jefferson and his time.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Frank Shuffelton, an eminent scholar of Jefferson. Frank was to have contributed an essay to this volume, but was prevented from doing so by his untimely death. This collection is the poorer for its absence. Frank provided encouragement, support, and friendship to numerous scholars, including many of those whose essays appear in this volume.

References

Boteach, S. (2009) No holds barred: The Rebbe and the remedy for greed, Jerusalem Post, April 5, 2009, www.jpost.com

Damptey, D. D. (2009) We shall overcome … but when? Modern Ghana News (Accra), www.modernghana.com, March 13, 2009.

Gates, A. (2009) City life gets a bit Jeffersonian, New York Times, March 18, 2009, www.nytimes.com

Grandia, K. (2009) Republican Rep Michele Bachmann’s over-the-top nonsense, March 24, 2009, www.desmogblog.com (accessed March 30, 2009).

O’Connor, B. (2009) Obama as a modern-day Jefferson. The Australian (Sydney), April 17, 2009, www.theaustralian.news.com.au

Peterson, M.D. (1960, repr. 1998) The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. Oxford University Press, New York; University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Soloski, A. (2009) A Founding Father prowls the Ohio theater stage in Red-Haired Thomas. The Village Voice, March 18, 2009, www.villagevoice.com

Spencer, N. (2009) What quotation would you choose?, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk, March 9, 2009, accessed March 10, 2009.

PART I

Jefferson’s Life and Times

CHAPTER ONE

Jefferson and Biography

ANNETTE GORDON-REED

It was the fate of Thomas Jefferson to be at once more loved and praised by his friends, and more hated and reviled by his adversaries than any of his compatriots. Time has produced less abatement of these feelings towards him than is usual; and, contrary to the maxim which invokes charity for the dead, the maledictions of his enemies have of late years been more frequent and loud than the commendations of his friends.

George Tucker, 1837

The argument never ceases. Just who was Thomas Jefferson and what is he – what should he be – to us? Attempts to answer that question began soon after Jefferson drew his last breath on July 4, 1826. His family made the first move with the publication in 1829 of four volumes’ worth of Jefferson’s writings and correspondence. The biographers soon followed, creating narratives that put their own cast on his legacy, hoping to shape posterity’s opinion on where the Virginian should fit in the American pantheon or, sometimes, whether he should be in it at all. From the 1830s until today, the full-length biographies, single- and multi-volume, have poured forth.

It is safe to say that no president besides Lincoln has been the subject of more intense, and varied, investigation. People who love Jefferson have written about him, as have those who loathed him, along with those who are simply deeply conflicted. Like all biographies and written histories, these works are the products of the times in which they were crafted. Some have been more influential and important than others. Because of their talent, or exquisite timing, the authors of those particular volumes managed to use their cultural moment to create a picture of Jefferson that captured the imagination of contemporary readers and, perhaps more importantly, of the historians and biographers who would follow them. Their work covers the field until another strong effort comes to take its place.

The field of Jefferson studies can usefully be divided into three eras, dominated by biographies that were judged the leading word, the definitive treatment of Jefferson for that particular age, with the expectation that the book’s influence would continue far into the future. This is not to say that there were not many fine biographies or books about Jefferson written during these same periods, it is to suggest that the research, insights, and conclusions of the defining books had a greater impact on the field than others. Even though it was not the first biography of Jefferson, the nineteenth century, well into the mid-twentieth century, was the era of Henry S. Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1858. Randall’s work set the tone for writing about Jefferson for his time and influenced generations of biographers who succeeded him up to the present. After Randall came Dumas Malone, who began his majestic six-volume study, Jefferson and His Time, in the 1940s and ended it in the early 1980s. Though not totally eclipsed, the Malone era has been in decline with the rise of more specialized and focused considerations of aspects of Jefferson’s life. Jefferson biography has splintered into a seemingly endless number of fragments. From the 1960s until today we have lived in the era of Jefferson and – Jefferson and slavery, Jefferson and women, Jefferson and the character question. Even as these specialized studies have enriched our understanding of Jefferson, they remind us of the need for a comprehensive treatment that puts the man whole again after all that we have learned from the many sophisticated studies of individuals aspects of his life and attitudes.

What follows is a description and analysis of the progression of Jefferson biography from the earliest time until today, with a particular emphasis on the most influential works. But before Jefferson biographies there was, of course, Jefferson himself. He is at the heart of every attempt to fashion a narrative of his life, not merely because he is the biographical subject at hand, but because he tried to so hard to make historians the object of his influence. Any consideration of the history of Jefferson biographies must begin with him.

The Pitch

It would be hard to imagine any figure in history more self-conscious about his legacy than Thomas Jefferson. From the time he burst onto the scene as a young revolutionary, he had good reason to believe that he would live on in history. He had played an integral role in a movement that had successfully defeated what was at the time the most powerful nation on the earth: Great Britain. As his star in the leadership cadre of the new nation continued to rise, he had even more reason to feel certain that later generations would know his name.

This was not only what Jefferson expected, it was what he very much wanted, and in this he was little different from the other well-known members of his revolutionary cohort. In his influential work, Fame and the Founding Fathers, the historian Douglass Adair cited fame as a key motivator for many members of the founding generation (see Colbourn 1974). It helped shaped their sense of themselves and guided their actions during their lifetimes as they, anachronistically, reached across the centuries and tried to model themselves after the famous men of ancient western civilizations, the Greeks and Romans, and, when the situation warranted, resorted to a mythical Anglo-Saxon past. That made sense, given that they were also scouring history looking for templates for the new republic they wanted to create: one that would stake its own claim on the future. Just as in ancient times, the men who made the American republic would have to have the character to pull it off – or at least be seen as having the character to do so. But it was not celebrity during their lifetimes that mattered; the much longed-for goal was fame in posterity.

Jefferson biographer Fawn Brodie observed that Jefferson had a superb sense of history and an exact understanding of his own role in it (Brodie 1974, 22). As one who read history and appreciated its pivotal role in determining what later generations felt about events and people of the past, Jefferson realized that his legacy would ultimately be in the hands of historians. How would they go about making their judgments? What material would they use to assess the meaning of his life’s work and those of the other American Revolutionaries? Who will write the history of the American Revolution? John Adams asked Jefferson during one exchange in their famous late-in-life correspondence. Nobody; except it’s (sic) external facts, Jefferson responded. Then he explained. The men who made the Revolution – including himself – kept sparse, if any notes, about what was going on. Therefore, their thoughts, feelings, and motivations at the time, which was the life and soul of history must forever be unknown (John Adams to TJ and Thomas McKean, July 30, 1815; TJ to John Adams, August 10[11], 1815, in Cappon 1959, 2: 451, 452).

Jefferson’s answer to Adams about the American Revolution presents a telling window into his thoughts on the nature and substance of history overall. As the historian Francis Cogliano has noted, Jefferson believed that in order for history to retain its power and significance, it had to be based upon primary sources (Cogliano 2006). Documentary evidence, written by the people who were involved in the events, or were the subjects of historical inquiry, provided the chief, if not only, means for getting at the real truth of what had gone on in the past. This conception of history as necessarily coming from the actual participants describing what actions they took and, perhaps, expressing their thoughts and feelings about events as they were unfolding formed the basis for Jefferson’s understanding of how to present himself to posterity. If historians were to be his judges, he wanted to address them and influence their project as much as possible. With this philosophy in mind, he set out to establish what he wanted to be the historical truth of his life, even as he drew sharp limits around what parts of his life were to be included in the historical record.

Of course, many histories of the Revolution have been written – and good ones too. The documentary record is more extensive than Jefferson knew of or imagined. In addition, the understanding of the kinds of things that could be a part of the record has greatly expanded. Perhaps it is here that models from ancient history most poorly served Jefferson’s understanding of what was likely to happen when future historians wrote about him and his times. The words of non-elite men, women, and slaves have been added to the mixture of the attempt to tell the story of America’s origins. History is no longer simply what great men did, said they did, and their explanation for why they did it. As a result the ground has shifted decisively underneath Jefferson’s historical feet. Even without that shift, Jefferson’s statement about the primacy of documentary records does not get at the true heart of the historical enterprise, or how responsible historians go about shaping the legacies of historical figures.

What historians lack in firsthand experience of their subject matter, they more than make up for with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight and the capacity to play the omniscient observer – to analyze the Rashomon-like narratives that always exist whenever multiple people are involved in an unfolding story. After considering all viewpoints they are, at least, in the position to come to a reasonable conclusion about the relative reliability of the often competing and contradictory stories. Every individual in Jefferson’s cohort experienced that time in his or her own way and, thus, had his or her own version of the truth. Jefferson well understood that it was the historian’s job to interpret the documentary record, to consider the evidence as presented, and to arrive at reliable conclusions about the past, and he was withering when he came upon historians who failed at the task. There is also little doubt that his tendency to divide the world up into the forces of good (truth) and the forces of evil (falsehood) led Jefferson to believe that with strategic prompting – particularly, his strategic prompting – future historians (who undoubtedly would be living in a more progressive and enlightened time) would recognize the truth as he saw it.

But what form would the prompts take? What could he leave behind to tell the story of himself and his times in the way it needed to be told? He could leave his own words, created in the moment that would give future generations the facts about his era and allow them to see his thoughts and reactions to all the events that mattered. Unlike other prominent men of the time, Jefferson did not, as a general rule, keep a journal, which would seem a logical thing to have done for one so keen on speaking directly to generations in the future. The closest he came to keeping a diary was the Anas, his record of his days as Secretary of State in the Washington administration. Jefferson’s initial reason for keeping the notes of his conversations with other members of the cabinet fit perfectly with his belief in the critical importance of contemporary accounts of historical events. And make no mistake; Jefferson knew that what was going on in the Washington administration would be seen as historic. What Jefferson later did with the Anas – revise it and add to it based on his later recollections – and why he did so, show that by the end of his life he well understood the threat that competing narratives in history could pose for his legacy and for later generations’ understanding of what went on in the early American republic. One description of Jefferson’s writings in the Anas suggests why he did not resort to this form more generally.

In these diary notes – vivid, racy, almost prehensile in the way they reach out for the target – Jefferson emerges as a political rhetorician of no mean power, using a salty vocabulary of epithet. We see him at a level considerably below the lofty plane of disinterested public servant that formed his self image. He seems too familiar with the wiles, cabals, and maneuvers of his enemies to convince the reader that this is alien territory to him.

(Lerner 1996, 138)

To the extent that Jefferson wanted historians to accept his own image of himself, the Jefferson of the Anas was almost certainly not his preferred presentation. The exigencies of the moment – he redid the Anas in response to the completion and publication of John Marshall’s five-volume biography of George Washington, which he considered to be so much Federalist inspired propaganda – were such that he could not restrain himself. He felt that he could not pass up the chance to set the record straight while settling some old scores with his nemesis Alexander Hamilton along the way. One could speculate that Jefferson was not entirely comfortable with the idea of keeping a daily record of his reflections on circumstances outside of his political life. Journal-keeping creates the greater chance for informality, and informality carries the risk of the unintended revelation. A Jefferson diary, the kind of thing any student of Jefferson would love to have in hand, might reveal way more of himself than he cared to share with posterity, even if he were as circumspect as possible.

Jefferson’s most direct attempt to communicate with later generations was his autobiography begun in 1821 at the age of seventy-seven. He claimed that writing the Autobiography was intended for his own ready reference and for the information of his family (Ford 1914, 3). But surely such a thing would not have to be published, and Jefferson’s voice throughout the document suggests that he expected the book to be read by others beside his family. It is a fairly perfunctory affair, in terms of the information provided, the length, and the time he spent on it. After only several months, he abandoned the effort. It begins with a maddeningly terse account of his family history and ends in 1790 with his arrival in New York to take up his role as Secretary of State after finishing his time abroad as Minister to France. Jefferson lived another thirty-six years after that, years that he evidently did not care to describe in autobiographical form. His heart was not in it. At one point he says flatly, I am already tired of talking about myself (Ford 1914, 78).

If Jefferson did not wish to reveal his life in a series of daily reflections or by simply writing a straightforward narrative, he had another means. Letters were his preferred mode of presentation to the audience of the future. He believed that the letters of a person, especially of one whose business has been chiefly transacted by letters, form the only full and genuine journal of his life. This bit of Jeffersonian hyperbole – the only full and genuine journal – fit perfectly with his ideas about the proper way to prepare oneself for history. His letters, written in the daily course of his life would give real time information to later generations about the things they needed to know. Written while the issues discussed were fresh in the mind, they would be more accurate than an autobiography written, sometimes, long after the salient events occurred. Jefferson’s explanation for the superiority of letters as the medium for telling a life story neatly circumscribes the boundaries of what would be presented. The words business and transacted immediately signal that the professional, rather than personal life was to be the primary focus.

Jefferson thought that biographies of great men should be about their public lives, the domestic sphere having no real place in the record except insofar as it intersected with the public life. Marriage was a public event, and therefore, it made sense to mention his wife, Martha, in his Autobiography and refer to her illness as a reason for not initially accepting the new government’s commission to go to France in the early 1780s. In 1817, when a man who was thinking of writing a life of Jefferson wrote to ask for the names of Jefferson’s grandchildren, Jefferson responded that he did not want to bore the public with information that had nothing to do with his life as a public man; the reason he was being written about in the first place (TJ to Joseph Delaplaine, April 12, 1817, TJP).

It is not as though there was no precedent for consideration of, or interest in, the private lives of famous people. The goings on among the royalty of Europe were of great interest to members of the public – marriages, mistresses, and children, legitimate and not – were all fodder for conversation. Jefferson himself was interested in this too. George Ticknor, then a professor at Harvard, visited Jefferson in retirement. Ticknor, who in this instance comes across as quite priggish, was a little dismayed to see that Jefferson had a fondness for what Ticknor called documents of regal scandal, a memoir detailing the private escapades of figures of royalty. Ticknor felt it beneath Jefferson to be interested in gossip. But he was, probably like most people, interested in the lives of other human beings. His letters often contain information about the private lives of his cohort. There he is in 1784 gossiping to James Madison about the middle-aged Arthur Lee courting a 17-year-old heiress. Writing from Paris, he instructed a correspondent to tell him those who die, so that he would not be surprised upon his return, who marry, who hang themselves because they cannot marry (Gordon-Reed 2008, 310; TJ to Eliza House Trist, August 15, 1785, quoted in Brodie 1974, 185–186).

And Jefferson was being disingenuous when he offered that members of the public would be bored reading about his domestic life. He knew that people wanted to know the details behind the scenes at Monticello. From the 1790s on, his neighbors gossiped about his relationship with Sally Hemings and her background as his wife’s half-sister. Newspapers openly speculated about how these tangled relations may have affected Jefferson and his legal white daughters (Gordon-Reed 2008, 90, 554–561). In a world where interracial sex was punished by law and social opprobrium, details about his life at Monticello had splashed onto front pages all over the country beginning in 1802. His resounding re-election in 1804 certainly gave evidence that it was what he had done for the country up until that point, and what he said he pledged to do in the future, that was of chief concern to most Americans, not making a judgment about him based upon the way he lived on his mountain. Of course, being unwilling to make a negative judgment was not the same as being uninterested. Talk about this aspect of Jefferson’s life continued until his death, and endured beyond it. This, of course, was never a subject that would appear in his own letters.

The result of Jefferson’s lifelong presentation of himself in letters was the creation of a staggering epistolary record of nearly 18 000 documents. Because his letters to people prompted responses, we are able to see how others interpreted Jefferson and his words. The letters are not all business, but they do amount to a carefully, sometimes exquisitely, crafted recounting of Jefferson’s life as a public man – a near perfect gift for historians employing the traditional method of immersion in primary documents. He had done his part – gone as far as he was willing to go – to help prepare for history’s judgment. When he died, on July 4, 1826, matters were out of his hands.

The Responses

Although Henry Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson dominated in the nineteenth century, he was not the first to write a full-length biography of Jefferson. B.L. Rayner’s work, with the same title as Randall’s, appeared in 1834. Though that book has largely been forgotten, it should be mentioned simply because it was the first to present Jefferson’s life from the cradle to the grave. Probably because of his connection with the University of Virginia and his great stature, George Tucker, a professor of Moral Philosophy at Jefferson’s university, is often cited as Jefferson’s first serious biographer and, though his work is nowhere near as well known as Randall’s, Tucker helped set the tone for nearly all Jefferson studies to come. Writing in 1837, Tucker recognized the immediate problem with Jefferson as a subject, and it was a problem that Jefferson was very much attuned to: the Virginian was a deeply controversial figure, no less so as the years passed and new generations of leaders sought to define themselves as descendants of the revolutionary generation. Jefferson’s time as the head of the Republican Party left an indelible stamp on him and his career. The feelings about him in the country – among those who had an opinion – tended toward the extreme: he was either loved or hated. Tucker wrote in his preface, the author was … aware that in undertaking to write the life of one, who was the object of such lively and opposite sentiments, he engaged in a hazardous task. He knew that with one portion of the public, any praise would be distasteful; and that with another portion, nothing less than an unvarying strain of eulogy would prove satisfactory (Tucker 1837, 1: vii).

It would probably be irrational to expect that the University of Virginia professor Tucker would be able to see Jefferson in a neutral light. And, sure enough, despite his rejection of the unvarying strain of eulogy approach to writing about Jefferson, Tucker was clear about his aim in telling Jefferson’s story. He believed that of all our public men, the greatest injustice had been done to Mr. Jefferson; that the prejudice felt towards him would be naturally extended to his opinions; and that in the vehemence, perseverance and ability with which he had been assailed, injury was likely to be done to the cause of political truth and sound principles. Anticipating later Jefferson biographer, James Parton’s famous pronouncement, If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If Jefferson was right, American is right (Parton 1874, iii), Tucker collapsed the man into the country, or he correctly discerned that many in the country might use their view of Jefferson himself – the way he conducted himself as a politician, the crafty operator of the Anas mentioned above – as an excuse to reject the principles for which he stood.

Tucker’s approach was made necessary by the 1829 publication of an edition of Jefferson’s papers. Jefferson had left his epistolary record as a legacy to his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. As part of the family’s effort to raise money to pay down the debt that had overwhelmed Jefferson at the end of his life, Randolph decided to publish the papers after his mother and sisters had diligently transcribed the documents that they were willing to make public. Although he left out letters that might be incendiary – criticisms of George Washington, other political figures, and the correspondence with James Callender who first wrote publically about his grandfather’s relationship with Sally Hemings, there was still enough in the letters to reopen old political wounds.

Despite the fact that Randolph had given him access to all of Jefferson’s papers and cooperated fully with him, Tucker was blunt to the point of insult about his feeling that the family erred in publishing many of the letters. He came perilously close to calling them stupid for having done so.

For the want of caution in making that publication, owing, it is presumed to a mistaken opinion of the claims of the public, the ill-will which had been felt against Mr. Jefferson as the leader of his party received a fresh impetus, and was in some measure imparted to a new generation. In the warmth of their resentment, his unreserved communications to confidential friends have been regarded as if they had been deliberately written by him for the press; and the ebullitions of feeling, uttered when the fever of party excitement was at its height, and when he was goaded by every species of provocation, have been considered as the settled convictions of his mind.

(Tucker 1837, 1: viii)

Tucker simply did not believe that Jefferson would have wanted a good many of the letters in Randolph’s volume published. Publishing them sent the wrong message – that Jefferson was, in effect, deliberately picking a fight from the grave. That was not correct, Tucker argued. The Sage was not sending a message to anyone by publishing these letters, because the decision to do so was made by Thomas Jefferson Randolph. The Anas was one thing. Jefferson clearly wanted to get that into the public arena in defense of himself and his party, at the discretion of his executor… But, for the selection of the letters for publication from the mass of his voluminous correspondence, Mr. Randolph and the friends he consulted are alone responsible (Tucker 1837, 1: ix). It was not so much that the letters were published, it was that they were published so soon after Jefferson’s death, when some of the political controversies surrounding his public life were still fresh. So, Tucker approached his project as if he were on a rescue mission.

Unlike Raynor, Tucker was given access to all of Jefferson’s papers, even the ones that remained unpublished. He worked closely with Jefferson’s friend and political compatriot, James Madison, consulted with members of Jefferson’s family, and scoured the public record. The result was a two-volume set that, generally, followed Jefferson’s prescription for how biographies of political figures should be written, with an almost total focus on his life as a public man, making only token forays into the more personal aspects of his life. To the extent that Tucker got personal, it was always with material that was relatively safe. For example, he included letters that Jefferson wrote as a young man pining away for the affections of Rebecca Burwell. While this was certainly intimate, and presented a side of Jefferson that had not been shown before, no one could hold these youthful effusions against him. Neither the words Maria Cosway nor Sally appear in the book, though Tucker mounted a vigorous defense of Jefferson’s private life never once stating with specificity why any defense was necessary (Tucker 1837, 2:127–8). One can speculate that Jefferson would have been generally happy with his first brush with a historian’s scrutiny.

Jefferson’s second major brush with history came when Henry S. Randall, published his three-volume work, The Life of Thomas Jefferson in 1858. One wonders, however, what Jefferson would have thought of this thoroughly nineteenth-century work which, in many ways, has helped to shape a narrative of Jefferson’s life that continues to resonate. Randall, a native of New York state who had a career as a writer and as a politician, veered away from Jefferson’s script for the maintenance of his legacy. To be sure, Randall used Jefferson’s letters and the public record of his life, and emphasized the importance of contemporaneous accounts of events, but he greatly expanded the category of information that should be included in the biography. This Life of Thomas Jefferson was not simply about business transacted or the great man at work. Randall did something else that would likely have surprised and, perhaps, dismayed Jefferson. He explained that, in addition to letters and public documents, he had another resource too valuable to pass up.

Mr. Jefferson has a number of surviving grandchildren, who lived from ten to thirty years under the same roof with him. They had ample opportunities for observing him in nearly every relation of his private life – as the father, the master, the neighbor, the farmer, the friend, the companion under all circumstances, the father, the businessman, etc. From the lips of their parents – Mr. Jefferson’s two daughters – they constantly heard him described as the son and the husband. Their recollections were generally rendered precise and minute by the intense interest with which, from infancy, they regarded everything connected with one revered as few men were ever revered in their family. And these recollections, whether their own or derived from their parents, were supported by contemporaneous memoranda made by Mr. Jefferson or themselves, by contemporaneous correspondence, and by various family records.

(Randall 1858, 1: vii–viii)

As Lisa Francavilla has shown, Jefferson’s grandchildren were eager to help Randall write a book about their grandfather. Over the years, they had chafed at every criticism, every potentially embarrassing statement, about him. They wanted to use what they knew about him to help Randall paint a portrait of their grandfather that they could feel comfortable with. They even discussed Sally Hemings with him, creating the cover story that would influence historians well into the twentieth century, although they insisted that he not discuss publicly what they had told him (Francavilla 2006, Gordon-Reed 1997, 78–103). Not only did Randall speak with Jefferson’s grandchildren, he interviewed people who had been enslaved at Monticello including most prominently, Wormley Hughes, a member of the Hemings family. Jefferson’s grandchildren’s memories, and those of people like Hughes, would flesh out the private life, or those aspects of it that could be shared openly. Randall would employ personal recollections and the informal, but telling, anecdote to create a fuller picture of Jefferson the man.

One seriously doubts that Jefferson the eighteenth-century man would have been enthusiastic about this very nineteenth-century appeal to sentimentality, one that put his private life on a par with his public life as a means of assessing his character and legacy. People living in this time were the beneficiaries of what Daniel Walker Howe has called the communications revolution that had taken place in the 1830s and 1840s, when technology began to transform people’s expectations about how much could be known and how quickly (Howe 2007, 5). This was also the age of the daguerreotype that presented people and places with a seeming authenticity seldom achieved with portraits. It is very likely that these transformations affected readers’ expectations about the nature of portraits painted in literature. Randall’s work was the first real indicator of how changes in society would affect the way historians and others would present Jefferson’s life.

There was one constant, however. Randall’s preface shows that he, like Tucker before him, understood that in writing about Jefferson he was writing about a man who excited great passion. He also believed that Jefferson had been subjected to more sustained and virulent criticism than any other figure from the founding era, presenting the remarkable spectacle of a reputation more assailed by class and hereditary hate than any other, and all others belonging to our early history – scarcely defended by a page where volumes have been written to traduce it. Yet, despite this, Randall observed that Jefferson’s reputation was steadily and resistlessly spreading until all parties [sought] to appropriate it – until not an American man between the Atlantic and Pacific dare place himself before a popular constituency with the reviling of Jefferson on his lips (Howe 2007, vii). This was written in 1858, and in a few years Americans on both sides of the Civil War would seek to use Jefferson’s reputation to further their cause. But there would also be a number of men, before, during, and after the war, who did, in fact, revile Jefferson either as the man who made the words All men are created equal part of the American creed, thus giving Abolitionists and President Abraham Lincoln an argument against slavery, or as the man whose strong states’ rights beliefs gave support to those who would break apart the American union.

Randall’s biography of Jefferson would remain the standard work until Dumas Malone began writing what would be his six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time, in 1948. By the time Malone took Jefferson up as a subject, the writing of history had long since become professionalized with doctoral programs and professional associations that created standards and practices among those who wrote history. Malone, who served as a professor at several prestigious institutions, was firmly a part of the tradition. He set out to produce what was, for his time, a modern take on Jefferson, one that emphasized the public life, but also gave attention to the private man and his family. Although Malone was apparently not under the influence of Sigmund Freud, the insights of psychology in general – accepting the notion that people had inner lives to be plumbed – had entered modern culture. One could not write a biography in the twentieth century without some attention to that. Why did a person do a particular thing? How did it likely feel to have this or that thing happen? What were his relations with his parents and siblings like? All of this is in Malone, and other twentieth-century writings about Jefferson, to one degree or another. It is safe to say that Jefferson would not have expected that any of this would be a part of the process of considering his legacy.

Malone moved away from the Randall model in one important way. Although he did not eschew it totally, he declined to make much use of the family anecdotes or the stories of enslaved people at Monticello that Randall saw as one of the greatest contributions of his biography of Jefferson. In keeping with his sense of what it meant to be a professional historian, Malone preferred to stick with documents, making heavy use of Jefferson’s letters, with all the benefits and problems that approach entails. He wholeheartedly embraced Jefferson’s prescription for how to assess the meaning of his life, and he embarked upon his project at precisely the right time to do so.

Unlike Tucker and Randall, Malone did not have to view his project as a form of rescue mission. As Merrill Peterson very famously showed in his prize-winning work, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, published in 1960, Jefferson’s reputation was in a period of ascendency in the 1940s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a great admirer of Jefferson, had built the Jefferson Memorial and generally burnished his image after he had suffered a long period of relative eclipse in the aftermath of the Civil War. Malone recognized this himself back in 1948. He wrote that attitudes about his subject had changed from the days of the middle of the nineteenth century, when slaveholders tended to deride his sayings about human equality and Unionists to deplore his emphasis on State rights (Malone 1948, viii). Under these circumstances, Malone was free to give full vent to his sympathetic impulses toward Jefferson with the advantage of having a prodigious amount of material with which to work. There is no question that Malone was the biographer that Jefferson would have expected and hoped for. Whether that was entirely a good thing is debatable.

Over the next four decades, years that saw tremendous changes in American society, Malone produced five more biographies of Jefferson. The drama of the American Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, and the evolution of American family brought about a change in the perception of Jefferson and the meaning of his life. Scholars were asking different questions about him where Malone’s work generally played up Jefferson’s eloquent statements against slavery, historians and other commentators noticed that, after he gained power, he did nothing to move against the institution and, instead, allowed for its spread into the Louisiana Territory. They noticed that, although he owned upward of 600 people over the course of his life, he freed only a handful of them. Then there were his negative comments in The Notes on the State of Virginia about black people and the impossibility of America existing as a multiracial society. These issues could not be glossed over in a country coming to grips with its past as a slave society and the legacy of white supremacy. And, as the years progressed, Malone had to deal with them in ways that he could not have anticipated when he began his project.

And then there was the inevitable change in perception that comes with long study and knowledge of a person. Where Malone’s earlier volumes bordered on hagiography, by the time he got to the final volume, The Sage of Monticello, Malone understood that he was dealing with a far more complicated figure – an actual human being rather than demigod – than he had imagined when he started his work. It was not just that he grew in his understanding of Jefferson on his own; other scholars who did not simply pick up the bread crumbs Jefferson had sprinkled in the forest to lead them back to him, gave evidence of Jefferson’s great complexity.

Historians have pointed to Leonard Levy’s Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, published in 1965, as a particular turning point. In it, Levy turned the image of Jefferson as the Apostle of Liberty on its head. Levy’s Jefferson was a ruthless political ideologue with scant regard for the rights of his political opponents, whom he persecuted with tactics that were illegal (Cogliano 2006, 7). After Levy came such works as John Chester Miller’s Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. Miller, also, was highly critical of Jefferson. Malone did not have to accept these men’s opinions about Jefferson to understand that the days of hero worship were over.

Malone may have come to understand that Jefferson was not just a topic for biographers, who can have a tendency, if they are not careful, to overidentify with their subjects; numerous historians could weigh in on specific aspects of his life and offer important insights and analyses. The era of Jefferson and, born in the 1960s, continues today with such works as Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Burstein’s Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, and Virginia Scharff’s The Women Jefferson Loved. Without the burden of having to re-cover the territory of biography, these scholars began to devote time and energy to intense and close readings of aspects of Jefferson’s life, public and personal.

By the 1990s it was clear that some comment had to be made on all of this. Where did things stand with the study of Jefferson? Another major turning point in the field occurred in 1993 with the publication of Jeffersonian Legacies, a compilation of essays edited by Peter S. Onuf. That book attempted to answer, among other things, the question, Whither Jefferson studies? The work grew out of a conference held at Monticello to mark Jefferson’s 270th birthday. Historians gathered to consider what to make of the all the various new views of Jefferson that that had emerged from the varied specialized looks at this life. Tackling delicate subjects like Jefferson’s life as a slaveholder, his attitudes to race, and his problematic family entanglements, this volume sounded a clarion call for a new approach to Jefferson biography for the twenty-first century.

There is one final major turn in the history of Jefferson biography that must be mentioned: Fawn Brodie’s 1974 biography, Thomas Jefferson and Intimate History. Brodie’s book was really the last truly influential full-fledged biography of Jefferson, sparking great controversy and spinning off other considerations of aspects of his life. She explained her enterprise in a way that makes clear that her treatment of her subject took her furthest away from what Jefferson intended historians to do when assessing his life, though he would have welcomed a historian who was as sympathetic to him as she was.

Though this volume is an intimate history of Thomas Jefferson, it attempts to portray not only his intimate but also his inner life, which is not the same thing. The idea that a man’s inner life affects every aspect of his intellectual life and also his decision-making should need no defense today. To illuminate this relationship, however, requires certain biographical techniques that make some historians uncomfortable. One must look for feeling as well as fact, for nuance and metaphor as well as idea and action.

(Brodie 1974, xiii–xiv)

Brodie wrote in fairly open opposition to what had gone before in Jefferson biographies. She, too, believed in the value of primary documents and combed all the libraries and collections that other historians had used, but to different effect. She wrote, What is new here consists in good part of what in these library collections has been passed over, or ignored because it did not fit into the traditional notions and preconceptions of Jefferson’s character (Brodie 1974, xiv). She also did something that was unheard of in Jefferson scholarship until that point: she used the words of enslaved people to help define Jefferson’s life and character. Randall had done this to an extent, but followed the old prescription of using only words that showed Jefferson in what the historians would have considered to be a good light. Her acceptance of the recollections of Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson, who said that Jefferson did, in fact, have a long-term liaison with Sally Hemings, set her apart from the men who had taken charge of presenting Jefferson’s life story to the world. She put these recollections at the back of her book alongside the recollections of Henry S. Randall, who recounted the Jefferson family story about the paternity of Hemings’s children – they were the children of Peter Carr, he said – to James Parton who was doing his own biography of Jefferson. The very act of putting these documents alongside those of one whose maleness and whiteness would grant the privilege of being seen as the authority was a transformative act. She helped to change Jefferson biography forever.

So, where are we now? The fragmentation of Jefferson’s story continues, with the result that the narrative of Jefferson’s life set by Randall in the 1850s and refined by Malone in the 1940s remains largely (and startlingly) intact. One thing is abundantly clear: we are certainly long past the time for needing to see Jefferson as either God or the Devil. The latter image is what we seem to be stuck with today, and it has grown more than tiresome. But all is not lost. Historians have done monumental work on the development of slavery, the institution that Jefferson lived with from the time of infancy until his death. They have done rich work on all aspects of the American Revolution, giving a fuller picture of all the different players and issues on both sides of the Atlantic. The publication of Jefferson’s amazing epistolary record continues apace. It is high time to use all that we have learned over the past five decades of American history to create a Jefferson biography for the twenty-first century, one that all Americans can read and feel that they have received the true measure of his influence and legacy in the world, for good and for ill.

References

Brodie, F.M. (1974) Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. W.W. Norton, New York.

Cappon, L.J. (ed.) (1959) The Adams–Jefferson Letters, 2 vols. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

Cogliano, F.D. (2006) Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.

Ford, P.L. (ed.) (1914) The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. G.P. Putnam, New York.

Francavilla, L. (2006) Holding in Trust for the Uses of Others: Jefferson’s Grandchildren and the Creation of the Jefferson Image. Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Worcester, MA.

Gordon-Reed, A. (1997) Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.

Gordon-Reed, A. (2008) The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. W.W. Norton, New York.

Howe, D.W. (2007) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848. Oxford University Press, New York.

Lerner, M. (1996) Thomas Jefferson: America’s Philosopher-King. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ.

Levy, L.W. (1963) Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Malone D. (1948) Jefferson the Virginian. Little, Brown, Boston.

Parton, J. (1874) Life of Thomas Jefferson. James R. Osgood and Co., Boston.

Peterson, M. (1960) The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. Oxford University Press, New York.

Randall, H.S. (1858) The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 3 vols. Derby & Jackson, New York.

Tucker, G. (1837) The Life of Thomas Jefferson: Third President of the United States, 2 vols. Carey, Lea & Blanchard, Philadelphia.

Further Reading

Burstein, A. (1995) The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Burstein, A. (2005) Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. Basic Books, New York.

Colbourn, T. (ed.) (1974) Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair. Norton, New York.

Ellis, J. J. (1996) American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Malone, D. (1951) Jefferson and the Rights of Man. Little, Brown, Boston.

Malone, D. (1962) Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty. Little, Brown, Boston.

Malone, D. (1970). Jefferson the President: First Term 1801–1805. Little Brown, Boston.

Malone, D. (1974) Jefferson the President: The Second Term, 1805–1809. Little, Brown, Boston.

Malone, D. (1981) The Sage of Monticello. Little, Brown, Boston.

Miller, J. C. (1977) The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. Free Press, New York.

Onuf, P. (ed.) (1993) Jeffersonian Legacies. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.

Rayner, B. L. (1834) Life of Thomas Jefferson. Lily, Wait, Colman and Holden, Boston.

Scharff V. (2010) The Women Jefferson Loved. Harper, New York.

CHAPTER TWO

Jefferson’s Virginia

MICHAEL A. MCDONNELL

Introduction

For many, Jefferson’s Virginia might be summed up with a tour of his hilltop home, Monticello. Standing alone amidst the forests above Charlottesville, it represents the fortitude, ingenuity, and accomplishments of the inhabitants of the oldest colony. Moreover, its size and the carefully preserved treasures it contains easily help conjure images of the age of tobacco, over which great landholding planters held sway. At the same time, Monticello’s grand neoclassical design reminds us of the learned and enlightened gentlemen who ruled colonial Virginia and who led the 13 colonies decisively into rebellion, revolution, and the creation of a new nation. In many ways, then, Jefferson’s Monticello is a lasting and fitting symbol of the venerated Virginia in which the author of the Declaration of Independence lived.

But for the tourist willing to dig deeper into the history of Monticello, the home reveals a much more complicated and often contradictory picture of Jefferson’s Virginia. It was, of course, built on lands that had been taken by force from their original native owners. It was, in turn, built and maintained by enslaved African laborers forced to do the bidding of a master who owned them for life. Jefferson’s relationship with one of those enslaved Africans, Sally Hemings, within the walls of Monticello speaks volumes of the tortured gender and race relations of the era. Moreover, Jefferson’s flight from Monticello in the face of British advances into Virginia during the American Revolution hints at the uncertain outcome of that war and the many divisions and conflicts among Virginians that frustrated a young wartime Governor Jefferson. Finally, the history of Monticello after Jefferson’s death – when his daughter was forced to sell it to pay his debts – reflects the relative decline and eclipse of Virginia as pre-eminent among the new states in the fledgling nation. If we look beneath the surface, then, Jefferson’s Virginia was as complex, contradictory, and multifaceted as the home in which he lived.

Virginia to 1750

Jefferson’s Virginia, of course, had its roots in the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Often noted as the first permanent English settlement in the New World, Jamestown looms large in the historical imagination as a place of beginnings. It has served, for some, as the place where American history began. Others see it as the place of origin of representative government, or the birthplace of democracy. Still others have seen it as a starting point for a slave-based plantation system. British historians have emphasized its role as the beginning of England’s overseas empire. In reality, it was none of these things.

Of late, historians interested in developing a new Atlantic World perspective have helped put the founding of the colony into a wider context of European imperial rivalry, numerous false starts, and a complex social, economic, political, and intellectual climate of colonial motivation and experimentation (Applebaum and Sweet 2005). Perhaps the most important insight to be gained from this recent scholarship, however, is that the diverse currents of this Atlantic world, and especially those connecting the British Isles with Africa and America would continue to shape Virginia in profound ways right up until Jefferson’s death in 1826.

Jamestown was shaped, for example, by the false hopes and ill-conceived thinking of the English who were desperate to get a foothold in the Americas to counter the claims of their European rivals. The particular site was chosen mainly on its merits as a defensive base against maritime predations by those rivals. Few immediately noticed that the tidewater river was unsuitable for drinking and that the site was mosquito-infested and offered few opportunities for hunting and farming.

Invariably, the inhabitants of the original settlement suffered from malnutrition, salt-poisoning, and disease, and divisions quickly emerged among the desperate survivors and between them and the numerous nations that composed the powerful Powhatan Confederacy upon whose lands they had inadvertently trespassed. As late as 1619, after thousands of English had come ashore, the population of the tiny beachhead struggled to reach 700. As many as 400 more of these were killed when the Powhatan Confederacy, now under the leadership of Opechancanough and provoked by English encroachments on their land, launched a war of extermination against them in 1622. For most early Virginians, natives and newcomers alike, the colony was a disaster.

Fortunately for the European survivors, the colony was ultimately saved by the successful introduction of tobacco. John Rolfe had grown tobacco in Virginia as early as 1612, after he observed Native Americans growing the crop, but it was not until he introduced new Spanish strains that Virginia-grown plants could compete with those grown elsewhere. In 1616, colonists in Virginia sent 2500 pounds of tobacco to England, which was quickly snapped up by a population eager to indulge, initiating a tobacco-growing boom that lasted for several decades. By 1640, planters in Virginia and the new colony of Maryland exported three million pounds of tobacco per year.

But if the colony found its salvation in tobacco, it would prove to be a poisoned chalice. The successful cultivation of tobacco required two main ingredients – land and labor. Intensive planting quickly exhausted the soil, requiring large estates and a near constant search for new lands to exploit. It was also a labor-intensive crop, one that needed close and careful attention but mostly a large unskilled labor force top lant, weed, top, harvest, cure, sweat, sort, barrel, and transport the large one thousand pound hogshead barrels that became the norm for exporting tobacco to Europe. Economies of scale meant that while a single farmer might be able to cultivate an acre or two of tobacco alone, those who had the capital to buy both land and labor quickly expanded their holdings.

Thus, the early history of Virginia was dominated and shaped by the aggressive pursuit of both labor and productive land. Planters strove to occupy the rich lands of the Tidewater region, particularly up along the banks of the four main rivers that bisected the colony and their tributaries. These rivers were generally navigable by ocean-going vessels for almost a hundred miles inland, giving tobacco planters direct access to the ships that would transport their