Thomas Jefferson

America's Philosopher-King

Max Lerner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781560002628
• eBook ISBN: 9781351471961
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Over the course of more than six decades as an author, journalist, and professor, Max Lerner studied and assessed many presidents, yet Thomas Jefferson received his most sustained attention. To Lerner, Jefferson came closest in the American context to Plato's "philosopher-king," the ideal thinker and leader. Because of his keen sense of Jefferson's virtues and his unique place in United States history, Lerner began work on a book about Jefferson in 1957, rewriting it several times throughout his life, always with the intention of introducing general readers to "a thinker and public figure of enduring pertinence."

In this volume, Lerner uses the facts of Jefferson's life and work as the springboard to insightful analysis and informed assessment. In considering Jefferson, Lerner combines biographical information, historical background, and analytical commentary. The result is a biographical-interpretive volume, a primer about Jefferson that not only describes his accomplishments, but discusses his problems and failures.

As political figures have declined in esteem in recent decades, the media has probed deeper into previously private lives. Historians, biographers, and others have revealed personal details about deceased prominent figures. Two centuries after he helped create America, Jefferson remains a figure of enduring fascination within academic circles and beyond. Max Lerner helps explain and clarify not only this unending fascination, but the timeless relevance of the nation's devoutly democratic yet singularly authentic "philosopher-king."

1

The Making of a Revolutionary, 1743–1784

In those days in Virginia, as in England, leadership was likely to come from an elite of birth. Virginia government was government by gentry; Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, although a farmer with little education, belonged to the substantial plantation gentry, married a Randolph, became a land surveyor and land speculator, and was drawn into the circles of larger wealth and higher social standing. The eldest son and most talented child in a family of eight children, Thomas was born on 13 April 1743, at Shadwell in what is now Albemarle County, in the Piedmont area of Virginia. For several years, as a very young child, he lived farther east at Tuckahoe, where his father ran a plantation entrusted to him by his Randolph kin. Jefferson’s earliest memory was of being transported regally, at the age of three, sitting on a pillow held by a slave on horseback, on the family journey from Shadwell to their temporary home. Later the boy grew up at Shadwell, largely surrounded by womenfolk, but with a strapping vigorous father who had learned the surveyor’s craft and who brought into his son’s life the eye-opening sense of rough travel and adventure on the western Virginia frontier, which he explored on horse, to spy out new rich soil and survey it and perhaps acquire it by patent from the Governor’s Council.

That was how Peter Jefferson himself built up his own landed estate. He became a vestryman, church warden, and a member of the House of Burgesses, and as a self-made and self-taught man he was a sturdy member of the rising gentry of the Virginia middle country. Thomas Jefferson, as his son, stood thus between the Tidewater and the frontier, at the convergence of the aristocratic and democratic impulses in Virginia. One of the remarkable facts about his later development was that he was to remain part of his aristocratic environment, fully at ease in it, yet also transcending it as the militant champion of a populist democracy.

At fourteen, on his father’s death, Thomas as the eldest son became the head of the family. His inheritance was 2,700 acres of land and a number of slaves, a cherry tree desk, a bookcase with forty volumes, some mathematical and surveying instruments, and the ease of living and the social standing of the Randolph and Jefferson names; but it was also a feeling for his natural environment, a respect for books, a sense of a lucid and ordered life, with the draughtsmanship cleanly done and the account books well kept. The boy probably saw little of his father, who was often away on long exploring and surveying journeys, and from the age of nine to fourteen Tom boarded with a clergyman teacher. Yet, he seems to have identified strikingly with a father who taught him to ride and shoot, took him hunting, and talked to him of the importance of books, who clearly owed nothing to anyone but was his own self-reliant master, with a self that an impressionable, growing boy could use as a model to grow by. To have such a father torn away when you were fourteen was not an easy thing to get over. Possibly it was because his dependency needs were unfulfilled that young Jefferson attached himself to several older men as he came of age, and most of his later life acted the father role to a number of younger men.

He got more than a casual, back-country education. For five years before his father’s death he studied Latin, Greek, and a little French with a Scottish clergyman, William Douglas, thus getting a “classical education,” that rarity in a state that was then almost without formal secondary schools except for a few private “academies.” Jefferson got more of his real education from Rev. James Maury, the first of a succession of men who helped shape his character and mind after his father’s death. Maury ran a little school on his plantation for a handful of the neighborhood youth, and young Jefferson boarded with him for several years until he was ready for college. They were his early shaping years intellectually, from fourteen to seventeen, and while Maury was a rigid churchman and half a Tory, his mind—with its classical scholarship, its feeling for language and style, its knowledge of literature and of “natural philosophy,” the science of the day—left an impress.

What else left an impress on the boy in those years we can only conjecture: the sweep of the Virginia landscape, with its tobacco fields and its still untamed areas, with the rugged beauty of hill and river and forest, which was to give meaning to the idea of Nature in Jefferson’s thought; the doubtless well-thumbed books in the library his father left him, including some Whig versions of English history, Baron George Anson’s Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740–1744, volumes of state trials and Virginia laws, and the accepted works of Shakespeare, Swift, Pope, and Addison; a sense of classical history and civilization that came with the study of the classical languages, and perhaps the image of the hero-patriots of antiquity. There was also a hero-patriot in contemporary England, where the dramatic and contagious figure of William Pitt fought a relentless political war against Robert Walpole and the Hanoverian dynasty and, while establishing England’s imperium from Passy to the plains of Abraham, upheld brilliantly in Whig fashion the rights of freeborn Englishmen against absolute power. One can only guess at what it meant to young Jefferson, at seventeen, to have such models as the Virginia country gentlemen, the patriots of antiquity, and the British Whigs, who showed how politics can be conducted in the grand libertarian style.

Jefferson was not quite seventeen when he entered as a student at the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg—a lanky, freckled, hazel-eyed, reddish-haired youth, with large hands and feet, shy manners, more than a hint of a precocious mind, and earnest habits of reading and application. He was bored to death in the backwater of Shadwell and eager for the larger life that Williamsburg promised as a college and a colonial capital. While many Virginia families preferred an education in England over one in the colonies, young Jefferson was happy at the chance (as he put it in a letter to his guardian) to continue his classics, study mathematics, make friends, and cut down on the expenses of entertainment at Shadwell. The mélange of benefits described in the letter gives us a glimpse of the awkward, shrewd, and hungry mind of the young man who had been thrown on his own resources so early, and had an intellect to shape and a life to make.

The College of William and Mary, where Jefferson was enrolled as a student for two years and a month, had been intended at its founding, in 1693, as a training ground for Anglican clergymen and public servants. With a faculty largely of churchmen it was controlled rather tightly by the Crown, and the British thought it important enough to set aside the colonial tobacco tax as its source of subsidy. By today’s standards it was not much of a college, with less than a hundred students, a tiny, quarrel-ridden faculty, only a few courses, and scarcely any equipment for science, a constant guerrilla war over salaries and taxes, and with a President who drank because of his crises and was dismissed because he drank. Yet for Jefferson it proved to have three essentials for a great education: fellow students who together comprised the recognized blood and ability of Virginia; a teacher of stature who also brought Jefferson into the close circle of his friends; and Williamsburg itself as a political community, to serve as a smith for the forging of a political mind.

Each of these three elements deserves an added note. The college was a cradle of talent, very much as Oxford and Cambridge were, but the landowner strain was, if anything, less diluted than in England with the sons of merchants and parsons. Jefferson’s talent for friendship gave him a recognized place among the sons of the Virginia planter elite—the Pages, Carrs, Walkers, Garrisons, Randolphs, Amblers, Skeltons, Moores, Tylers, and Eppeses. He was not plagued by the class feeling that one found in the later English universities, nor the status insecurities of the later American ones. He could devote himself, even in a provincial Virginia village, to the languages, mathematics, natural history, music, and moral philosophy that derived from the humanistic tradition of Europe.

By a happy chance the British had moved the colonial capital from Jamestown to the college town of Williamsburg. Jefferson, along with the other students, was thus able to attend the meetings of the Burgesses, followed by the sessions of the General Court. Through his friends he knew the members of the Governor’s Council. During the “public times” he attended the theater performances, danced at the balls, and talked with the delegates and lawyers about the moot issues of the day. Williamsburg was for him, as Dumas Malone has suggested, not only a way of learning the intellectual tradition, but a school of manners and a political listening post. Together the college and the capital formed an unparalleled training ground for statesmanship, an engine for transforming young men of birth and promise into leaders of the colony and (as it turned out) of the emerging nation. What the massive universities of Europe and America are straining to do today, with their far more complex mixture of human material of diverse origins, this tiny disorganized college, housed in a few brick buildings in a colonial village capital, was able to do without sweat and strain for a handful of young men who danced, gambled, grumbled, had college rows—and somehow shaped themselves into a great governing generation.

But if Jefferson learned from both the college and the capital he learned even more from a trio of men—William Small, George Wythe, and Francis Fauquier. Small was a Scotsman, only nine years older than Jefferson, M. A. fresh out of Aberdeen, professor of mathematics, natural philosophy, and the sciences, and when the chair of moral philosophy fell vacant he doubled in that. It was one of those happy accidents when the right student and right teacher meet, and something happens in the younger man that changes him forever. The two spent all their available time together, so that in effect Small was Jefferson’s private tutor—or perhaps better, they formed an apprentice-master relation, the best possible kind of learning arrangement. Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography that Small had “a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged and liberal mind. He, most happily for me, became soon attached to me and made me his daily companion when not engaged in the school; and from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science, and of the system of things in which we are placed.”

Small opened for Jefferson the world of European intellectual experience. As it happened he came from Scotland exactly at the time when Scottish intellectual life had entered upon a Renaissance, and when Scottish thinkers—Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith—were dazzling the younger men not only in Britain, but throughout Europe. He had a bent for science, which he communicated to Jefferson, but behind it there was the thinking embodied in Scottish moral philosophy, with Hutcheson in the lead, and with a stress on private judgment based on available evidence in all moral and political matters. Benjamin Franklin had come into touch with this movement of thought when he visited Edinburgh and spent some time with Lord Henry Homes Kames, who had written on “natural religion.”

Now young Jefferson became exposed to it. A self-reliant, sturdy young man, Small was something of a teaching rebel. For the old method of recitation by rote he substituted the lecture system; for the tension of hostile discipline imposed by the faculty he substituted an easy cordiality. He came under faculty attack, remained in Williamsburg only six years, and returned to Britain, where he was helpful to James Watt in the development of his steam engine. But the young Scotsman, who cared passionately about mathematics and science and their practical applications, left an enduring mark on his Virginian student, and gave strong support to his investigative bent.¹

Through Small the young student was brought into touch with two other men who helped shape the bent of his talent—the principal legal scholar of Virginia, George Wythe, and the Lieutenant Governor and ranking British official in Virginia, Francis Fauquier. The three older men often dined together, usually at the Governor’s palace, and young Jefferson felt lucky to share their conversation. Wythe was an important lawyer, a man not only of legal scholarship, but of a classical learning approaching pedantry. Fauquier, very different, was a man of the world in his fifties, an accomplished amateur at many things, including music, the study of the weather—and gambling. But his strength lay in Edmund Burke’s “unbought grace of life,” in food and drink and entertainment, in an urbanity of mind and elegance of manner that got him warmly received as governor in a restive colony, and in a style of Renaissance versatility, which his young friend may have caught from him.

When young Jefferson came to choose a profession he turned, not surprisingly, to the law, since it fitted into the interest evoked in him by the political and legal life of the colonial capital. Rather than going to the Inns of Court, in England, as some young Americans of his social rank did, he preferred to stay in America. He afterward generalized this decision, and he was to wage a protracted campaign against having young Americans go abroad for their professional studies; but along with this budding cultural nationalism there was at the time the practical fact of a good master being available to him. In the fashion of the time he read law as an apprentice with Wythe; he was deeply influenced by “Coke on Littleton,” on the crucial theme of landed property law, as well as by the other textbook volumes in Edward Coke’s Institutes; he briefed a number of the cases in two “Commonplace Books”—notebooks in which the young law apprentice shaped a kind of legal case method of his own, long before James Barr Ames and C. C. Langdell at Harvard Law School.

The young lawyer practiced the legal arts for seven years, until he was thirty. It was a successful and effective career at the bar. True, he had neither the deep erudition of Wythe nor of Stevens Thomson Mason, nor the fiery courtroom eloquency of Patrick Henry, who more than made up in charisma and emotional power for what he lacked in legal learning. Jefferson’s voice was weak, his courtroom manner diffident and unaggressive. Yet, he had an authentic legal brilliance, with his lucid style and the economy and authority of his mind. In a single year, according to The Life of Thomas Jefferson (1858) by Henry S. Randall, Jefferson “was retained as attorney or counsel in no less than four hundred and thirty cases, in all, in 1771, and in three hundred and forty-seven in 1772.” These were mostly small cases before the county courts, where he established invaluable relationships with the laymen magistrates, thus building a base for his later political career; and he also practiced before the General Court and made abstracts of its cases, along with the leading British decisions of his day, to serve as guides for colonial law. It was his legal training that enabled him, in an essay written in 1764 (“Whether Christianity is a Part of the Common Law”) and in a later famous letter to John Cartwright, to offer a legal base for that separation of church and state which was dear to him. But one should add, as Gilbert Chinard has done, that his English common-law studies gave his thought an empiric and even conservative bent.

He was clearly one of the rising young men of the colony, adept not only in council, but in the elegance of the living style he was adopting. Even in his years as a lawyer he had not ceased to be a planter, keeping an eye on his estates and on his family. He began to build at Monticello, studying the chaste and austere formal style of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, and of his English disciples, and applying it to the protracted process of designing and building his own house as an amateur of the arts. The man who was to call for a periodic revolutionary refreshment of liberty had a precise and orderly life-style of his own: from one angle the role of revolution, in his thinking, was to remove the artificial obstructions of tyranny and restore man to his “natural order.” He courted and married an attractive young widow of a prosperous family, Martha Wayles Skelton, gave up his legal practice, and settled down in a wing of his unfinished house to the peaceful life of an accomplished country gentleman.²

But he was not to pursue it for long. The tensions in imperial relations between the colonies and Great Britain were mounting. Jefferson became, at twenty-five, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, joining in the company of colonial leaders who were increasingly engaged in a struggle with the mother country over trade, taxes, colonial autonomy, and the “rights of freeborn Englishmen.” Jefferson had not yet become a rebel, but the role he played in deliberation with small groups of his colleagues (he never shone in open public debate) helped him to test and sharpen some of the principles he was later to apply to the theory and art of rebellion. A small group of younger men, with Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee as leaders, began to meet informally at the Raleigh Tavern and set up the first colony-wide Committee of Correspondence, to keep in touch with patriots in other colonies and achieve some unity of action. He read John Locke and Montesquieu intensively at this time, and the fruits of his reading and thought were evident in a twenty-three-page pamphlet he drew up—A Summary View of the Rights of British America—for the Virginia delegation to present to a colonial Continental Congress held in Philadelphia in 1774.

The ground that Jefferson took in this widely read and quoted pamphlet was high and radical ground: that the colonies denied any authority in the British Parliament over them; that in the early colonial charters there was a compact between colonies and king; that they acknowledged the authority of the king as co-equal sovereignties along with England—as “having the same executive chief but no other necessary political connection”; in short, that the colonies were part of what the British empire was later to become after Lord John George Lambton Durham’s report—a “commonwealth of nations.” This was radical ground to take—too radical for a number of the older and more wary colonial leaders. It went beyond the Stamp Act and the other specific colonial grievances to the question of basic imperial relations.

After taking part in the Virginia assembly, where he backed up Patrick Henry’s resounding call to arms, with its famous “Liberty or Death” peroration, Jefferson spent ten days making the journey of over three hundred miles to Philadelphia, where another Continental Congress was trying to give direction to the colonial military resistance after Bunker Hill. There he first met Benjamin Franklin, and began what was to prove a long friendship with John Adams, who noted the Virginian’s “reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent for composition.” Again Jefferson took little part in the general debates, but was effective on the small drafting committees. Despite his youth he was becoming the propaganda and manifesto expert of the little band of revolutionaries, their spokesman to the world, and a master of the war of ideas. While at Philadelphia he also drafted, in June, a constitution for his own Commonwealth of Virginia. Scholarship suggests that while it came rather late, it was debated, and some of its features (including the preamble) adopted. Yet the crucial reforms Jefferson suggested in it were not adopted—the idea of every man having land and an equal vote, the phased liquidation of slavery, the abolition of primogeniture and entail, and the guarantee of religious freedom.

Jefferson was clearly an earnest young revolutionary, committed to a meaningful internal democracy and freedom as well as to independence from Great Britain. He continued to fight for these reforms in the Assembly, until he pushed through the statute for religious freedom, which he drafted and in which he took an inextinguishable pride, but even at his death, fifty years later, he was still critical of the state constitution. Meanwhile, his preamble to it, indicting King George III for his acts of misrule, had an important meaning in his development—that of taking the critical step of repudiating the ties of the colonies with the British monarch as well as with the British Parliament.

He was now ready for his great task of political comp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chronology of Thomas Jefferson
• 1. The Making of a Revolutionary, 1743–1784
• 2. A Diplomat in Europe, 1785–1789
• 3. The Struggle for National Mastery, 1789–1800
• 4. The Practice and Theory of Foreign Policy, 1789–1795
• 5. The Two Revolutions
• 6. A Party Leader’s Path to the Summit, 1789–1800
• 7. Jefferson in Power: The “Jeffersonian Revolution” and the Presidency, 1801–1805
• 8. Jefferson in Trouble: Conspiracy, Embargo, and Civil Liberties, 1805–1809
• 9. Twilight of a Life—And A Great Correspondence, 1809–1826
• 10. Reformer, Educator, Humanist: The Rounding Out of a Mind and Will, 1809–1826
• 11. Jefferson’s Cosmos as a Frame for His Thought
• 12. Last Days and Death, 1826
• 13. The Shadow of Jefferson: Legend, Image, Idea
• 14. Ambiguity and Unity in Jefferson’s Thought
• Appendix: Jefferson as a Man of Letters
• Index