The Mind of Thomas Jefferson

Peter S. Onuf

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813934235
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia americana temprana

In The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, one of the foremost historians of Jefferson and his time, Peter S. Onuf, offers a collection of essays that seeks to historicize one of our nation's founding fathers. Challenging current attempts to appropriate Jefferson to serve all manner of contemporary political agendas, Onuf argues that historians must look at Jefferson's language and life within the context of his own place and time. In this effort to restore Jefferson to his own world, Onuf reconnects that world to ours, providing a fresh look at the distinction between private and public aspects of his character that Jefferson himself took such pains to cultivate. Breaking through Jefferson's alleged opacity as a person by collapsing the contemporary interpretive frameworks often used to diagnose his psychological and moral states, Onuf raises new questions about what was on Jefferson's mind as he looked toward an uncertain future. Particularly striking is his argument that Jefferson's character as a moralist is nowhere more evident, ironically, than in his engagement with the institution of slavery. At once reinvigorating the tension between past and present and offering a new way to view our connection to one of our nation's founders, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson helps redefine both Jefferson and his time and American nationhood.

PART I

Jefferson and the Historians

MAKING SENSE OF JEFFERSON

In 1960 Merrill Peterson concluded in his book The Jefferson Image in the American Mind that Thomas Jefferson had finally, belatedly, ascended to a crucial “place in the symbolical architecture of this nation.” It was now possible for scholars to take the measure of the man. “The scholarly wish to possess Jefferson for himself might never be realized,” Peterson wrote, “but a Jefferson about whom politicians cease to contend, whose ideas suffer drastic erosion from all sides, and whose own history proves to be a rewarding field of study in itself—this figure invites the true scholar and begs the true historical discovery.” In the academy, observed Peterson, the multiple Jeffersons of the party polemicists were already giving way to a new image of the culture hero—”the civilized man,” with his multiplicity of interests and achievements.¹

Peterson looked forward to the elaboration of a scholarly, nonpartisan Jefferson image. Historians no longer saw American history as a great, ongoing struggle between Jeffersonian democrats and Hamiltonian aristocrats, the “people” and the “interests.” Indeed, as Peterson showed, this genealogy of the parties had always been somewhat suspect, and the confusion became complete when Democratic New Dealers invoked Jefferson’s “progressive spirit” to justify their neo-Hamiltonian programs of state intervention: “After the Roosevelt Revolution, serious men stopped yearning for the agrarian utopia, politicians (and most historians too) laid aside the Jefferson-Hamilton dialogue, and almost no one any longer maintained the fiction that American government was run, or ought to be run, on the Jeffersonian model.” The “disintegration of the Jeffersonian philosophy of government heralded the ultimate canonization of Jefferson.”²

Peterson’s Jefferson Image is superb cultural history but poor prophecy. This is not to say that historians have neglected Jefferson. When Peterson wrote, Dumas Malone was moving into high gear with his definitive six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time (1948–81).³ The greatest monument to Jefferson scholarship, the comprehensive edition of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, continues its stately progress, more than a half century after it was launched.⁴ Meanwhile, writing about Jefferson for both scholarly and general audiences has expanded exponentially.⁵ Yet Jefferson’s image is as controversial now as it ever has been.

Peterson underestimated the capacity of scholars to divide into hostile “parties,” regardless of the state of party conflict in the larger political culture. The old history of the parties not only distorted Jefferson’s image but also deflected more fundamental questions about the new nation’s character. Identifying with either Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton reinforced the faith of historians and politicians alike in the vitality and future prospects of the American political system. But the proliferating “new” histories of the 1960s and 1970s opened up profound and troubling questions about the course of American history as advocates of fresh approaches and methodologies sought to reconstruct the field as a whole—in ways involving and affecting the image of Jefferson.

For students of Revolutionary and early national America, Jefferson remains a fascinating and contested figure. It is not simply a question of his ubiquity, or the massiveness of his archives, or the historiographical tendency to revise the revisionists. The compulsion to characterize Jefferson reflects the convergence of important trends in the discipline and in the larger culture. The discrepancy between his idealistic professions and his membership in Virginia’s slaveholding planter elite presents an interpretative challenge—and provokes scholars to moral judgments.

Controversy over the Jefferson image became particularly intense in the 1990s. In The Long Affair, the Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien explicitly challenges Jefferson’s “place” in the nation’s “symbolical architecture,” portraying his subject as a philosophical terrorist and slaveholding racist.⁶ While most critics denounced O’Brien for his interpretative excesses, well-received studies by respected scholars also questioned Jefferson’s standing in the pantheon. Joseph J. Ellis’s prizewinning American Sphinx, the best single-volume biography now available, focuses on the psychological strategies that enabled Jefferson to sustain a dangerously adolescent idealism that at least squinted toward terrorism.⁷ Echoing another of O’Brien’s arguments, Pauline Maier’s American Scripture downplays Jefferson’s role as “author” of the Declaration of Independence: in countless communities across the continent, ordinary Americans drafted their own declarations, anticipating and shaping the document Jefferson wrote and that the Continental Congress edited into its familiar, “scriptural” form. These writers all ask whether Jefferson really deserves his exalted position among the Revolutionary founders, an even more urgent question in the wake of DNA tests suggesting the strong possibility that he conducted a long-standing sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings.⁸

For most commentators today, Jefferson’s fitness as a national icon has been cast as a question of character. Though this certainly reflects our current predispositions, it is fair to suggest that Jefferson brought the character question on himself, for character was his own constant concern. He devoted his political life to exposing the secret machinations of “monocrats” and “aristocrats” while establishing a new republican regime based on “natural”—authentic and responsive—representation. Though he was an advocate of transparency, his modes of self-presentation left his private life opaque and elusive. The impulse to unmask Jefferson, to make sense out of his complex career, is a mark of his continuing significance in our public culture.⁹

The Character Issue

The Revolutionary period was a crucial transitional moment for Western moral theory and practice. This was the time when a universal human nature became recognized—or constructed—and when natural philosophers naturalized racial (and gender) differences. “Equality” and “nature,” the key premises of Jeffersonian thought, were contemporaneous constructs. The appropriation and elaboration of these ideas helped Jefferson and his Revolutionary colleagues solve compelling problems as they established a new republic on the periphery of the “civilized” world, but doing so inevitably raised new issues.¹⁰

The dissonance of planter privilege with enlightened theory constitutes an illuminating text for this broad political and ideological transformation. The ways in which Jefferson resolved, or perhaps more accurately simply lived with, these conflicting demands constitute his “character.” That character, for all its fascination, many present-day scholars find discomfiting, if not repellent. Jefferson’s inner life, insofar as it can be recovered, manifests little evidence of distress, so thoroughly did he rationalize and repress his wants and griefs. Peterson writes that Jefferson was “an impenetrable man,” a conclusion echoed in the title of Joseph Ellis’s Sphinx.¹¹ A generation ago, when Fawn Brodie offered an “intimate history” of Jefferson, making what turns out to be a plausible case for the relationship with Hemings, she was roundly castigated for unsubstantiated and implausible speculations.¹² But more recent writers, however they weighed in on the Hemings question, have operated under the assumption that the real Jefferson can be known. The most successful of these works, Andrew Burstein’s The Inner Jefferson, a sensitive study of Jefferson as a literary sentimentalist, and Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an eloquent and exhaustive reconsideration of the evidence and arguments concerning the relationship, show that this will be no easy task, for these two Jeffersons don’t seem to have too much in common.¹³ But the effort to put Jefferson back together again, to make sense of his character, has already yielded impressive results. Denial of the possibility of Jefferson’s relationship—and of the centrality of slaveholding in all aspects of his life—has been the major obstacle to understanding. This obstacle has now been removed.

We know Jefferson better, but where does that leave us? Jefferson’s characteristically judgmental frame of mind, along with the dualistic, not to say Manichaean, view of the world it reveals, tempts historians to judge him in turn, sometimes harshly, on moral grounds. Critics underscore the discrepancy between the Declaration’s appeal to natural rights and Jefferson’s failure to do anything about slavery, at Monticello or anywhere else. However successful historians may be in explaining this apparent contradiction, Jefferson will continue to be a controversial figure as long as race remains the great and unresolved American dilemma.¹⁴ There is a powerful moral animus in present-day writing on the subject—an animus that sometimes strains scholarly standards of dispassionate investigation. But it would be a mistake to reject this literature as presentist, as it is a mistake to dismiss forays into Jefferson’s private life as prurient and unseemly.¹⁵ There is a powerful integrative impulse in both enterprises. It is precisely because historians want to make sense of Jefferson, because they want to grasp exactly what it was that the Revolutionary founders intended and accomplished, that they are contesting this terrain so passionately.

The slavery problem, for Revolutionaries generally and Jefferson in particular, has especially complicated our understanding of the Revolutionary transformation and brought moral questions to the fore. Why did Jefferson never take steps to dissociate himself—or, more to the point, his slaves—from the horns of his dilemma? Surely, nobody knew better than Jefferson, Revolutionary reformer, that exceptional, unnatural historical conditions are subject to change. Thus we confront the difficult image of the democratic founder who professed a profound hostility to slavery but could never extricate himself from an institution that guaranteed the welfare and well-being of his “country,” Virginia.

Republicanism and Liberalism

Jefferson has always inspired controversy, among friends as well as foes. In his own lifetime, even Jeffersonians could invoke the master’s authority for dizzyingly various ends. At his death, Peterson reports, his eulogists were hard-pressed to make sense out of him: “he remained an enigma, a figure of contradiction, a man of many faces.”¹⁶ For us, Jefferson’s contradictions should be an opening to understanding. Consciousness of our own ambivalent situation—at the far side of the modernity Jefferson helped invent—should enable us to construct a more dynamic and compelling Jefferson image from the contradictory influences and impulses of a long life.

Exponents of the republican synthesis set the stage for a more complex and satisfying view of Jefferson by resituating him in the Revolutionary narrative. The immediate effect of rediscovering the Real Whig tradition was to displace the liberal John Locke and his American disciple Jefferson from their preeminent place in the American founding.¹⁷ But while the republican revisionists challenged the conventional depiction of Jefferson as the forward-looking inventor of American nationality, they assigned him a conspicuous role as a history-minded defender of colonial rights and privileges.¹⁸ Lance Banning’s The Jeffersonian Persuasion, published in 1978, and Drew R. McCoy’s The Elusive Republic, which appeared two years later, pointed Jefferson backward, emphasizing the anachronistic premises of his political thought and—more explicitly in McCoy’s work—his confused and agonizing encounter with modernity.¹⁹ In doing so, both writers betrayed an ambivalence about Jefferson’s influence on the new American political order and about the salience of Jeffersonianism—with its legacy of Real Whig paranoia about abuses of governmental power—for the constructive tasks of state making in the new republic.

The revisionists’ mixed feelings about Jeffersonianism is a function of their understanding of America’s imminent transition toward a recognizably modern, liberal capitalist regime. For them, Jefferson was important, for better or worse, because he was oblivious to the shape of things to come. Critics have challenged the revisionists’ displacement of the liberal tradition and their portrayal of Jefferson as a man at odds with his times.²⁰ Exponents of liberalism recast the Revolution in progressive, forward-looking terms, with Jefferson taking the lead role. Joyce Appleby’s Capitalism and a New Social Order, which came out in 1984, seeks to remove Jefferson and his followers from the republican synthesis. Her Jeffersonians are not the fearful oppositionists that Banning and McCoy depicted, but, rather, champions of a progressive “reconceptualization of human nature,” Lockeans in politics and Smithians in economics. Embracing capitalism, the great solvent of the traditional order, they reject the authority of history. “This rejection of the past,” Appleby concludes, “constitutes the most important element in the ideology of the victorious Jeffersonian Republicans.”²¹

The echoes of the party struggles of the 1790s thus still reverberate in the academy. The quarrel now, as then, centers on the fundamental character of the new American regime. But it does not follow that we are doomed to perpetual reenactment of our primal political drama. In fact, exponents and critics of the republican synthesis have reached a working, if somewhat begrudging, consensus on once controversial questions. The liberal and republican Jeffersons may look in opposite directions, but they share a sense of the world historical significance of the American Revolution.²² Similarly, both Jeffersons offer a radical critique of the corruption of the old regime, inspired in the one case by an enlightened, liberal vision of the future...