The Books: “American Sphinx : The Character of Thomas Jefferson” (Joseph Ellis)

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Next book in my American history section is American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph (“Yeah. I was in ‘Nam. DOH.”) Ellis.

My favorite of all of his contemplative biographies – he really just hits his stride here. Jefferson, too, is more of an enigma than John Adams was – Adams was pretty much whatyou see is what you get – He also unburdened himself to his wife in letter after letter after letter – so he really had an intimate personal relationship with someone where he could really be himself, flaws and all. Jefferson didn’t really have that. Perhaps the closest he came to it was with Adams himself at the ends of their lives when they renewed their friendship. But even then … you can feel his formal manner protecting … what? Protecting something.

Speaking personally – having read the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson – I can say that Jefferson’s brief brief moments of deep feeling are so so moving, more so than Adams’ more regular effusions – because you sense that these moments really COST Jefferson something. You feel for him. You get the sense that Jefferson might have had to lie down after writing the letter of condolence to John Adams on the death of Abigail. Open feeling did not come easily to him.

He’s an enigma. A political animal. A lovelorn suitor (his letters to women are revealing as well – in their teasing almost coquettish tone – except with Abigail – he got the sense that that crap would not fly with HER). A farmer and inventor. Full of contradictions. Unreconcilable. He did not reconcile any of his contradictions by the time he died – they were all still there – but that’s what makes him an interesting study. He tended to see the world in a polar-opposite kind of way. Most people who are political animals do. There’s THIS way that will counteract THAT way. Jefferson seemed to believe that harmony could, actually be achieved on this earth. I disagree with him – uhm – look at all of human history – but that whole polar-opposite thing is one of the reasons why the Declaration of Independence is such a TIMELESS document. Perhaps its goals (at least its humanist goals) can never be fully achieved – but also perhaps they aren’t meant to be. Perhaps their real role in human history (and that second paragraph is what people know by heart – and not just Americans – it’s not a goal for ONE people, it’s a goal for all humanity – it’s universal, therein lies the appeal) but anyway – perhaps that second paragraph can never be actually achieved – but is a constant reminder of the GOOD that is in us, of man’s inherent dignity. Never forget your rights as a human being. Never ever forget it. Those rights must ALWAYS be fought for. The rest of the document, with its King George did THIS to us, did THAT to us – is more easily achieved – it’s a checklist. But that second paragraph? Is it a utopia? Have we ever achieved it? I don’t think so (and I believe I’ve expressed here before my distrust of people who get all googly-eyed with excitement over utopias) – and perhaps Jefferson did believe that it was achievable, I don’t know. Now let me go off in my own contemplation: I think ugliness truly HURT Thomas Jefferson. I think he preferred solitude, quiet, and purity. People who prefer those things can have a rough time when they come down off the mountaintop. HOWEVER, on the flip side of that – Jefferson was a master political manipulator. He SAID he wanted to retire, yet he had Madison reporting to him left and right about what was going on. I think both sides are true. I don’t think one side is a lie, and the other side is the REAL Jefferson. I think he truly loved purity, solitude, and quiet intellectual contemplations. I think he truly did detest the ugliness that came out of people when they played politics hard. I think he wished the world was a nicer calmer place. But I also think he couldn’t have backed out of politics if he tried. He needed to be in the game, as ugly as it could get. And he played it ugly himself. But then somehow – with Madison as his front-man, he could somehow claim that he had nothing to do with it …

None of this is reconciled. So Ellis picked a good title for his book, I’m thinkin’.

Jefferson’s discomfort with irreconcilable differences was really made clear (at least to us – years in the future) during the French Revolution. I often wonder what he REALLY thought about it. He was actually THERE during some of the main events of that bloody revolution – and his letters are well-known. Adams was horrified at the excesses of the revolution. Jefferson stood by it – in what seemed at the time like a breezy indifference to horror. He seemed to RELISH the blood running in the streets, etc. As long as the king was put down! Same thing with Shays Rebellion. Abigail wrote him a letter about the rebellion and how frightening she found it – how fragile was civil society … and he wrote back his now-famous letter saying “I like a little revolution now and then … it’s like a storm that clears the atmosphere.” Abigail was horrified. It seems that Jefferson was one of those men who wanted constant revolution. And there was a side of him that did.

Hoo hoo. I’ll stop now.

Ellis’ book is not set up like a typical biography. He chooses certain chunks of years – and analyses what was going on there, and how it created or revealed “the charater of Thomas Jefferson”. It’s fascinating – it’s for true junkies like myself. If you want a more typical biography, or if you don’t know that much about Jefferson – then this probably isn’t the one to start with. But if you’re already a bit down the Jeffersonian path, I HIGHLY recommend this one.

I’ll post an excerpt about the French Revolution.

From American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis.

So much history happened in prerevolutionary France during the last two years of Jefferson’s ministry that it is not easy to summarize his shifting political positions, except perhaps to say that he presumed that France would emerge from the ferment as some kind of constitutional monarchy. Despite his earlier characterizations of the French king as a drunken sot, completely out of touch with the needs and frustrations of the French people, by the summer of 1788 he had come to regard Louis as an enlightened ruler who was anxious to play a crucial role in forging political alliances between the nobility and the members of the Third Estate. (In the end Louis XVI turned out to be like George III, fated to do precisely the wrong thing at just the right time, what Jefferson called “a machine for making revolutions.”) But his fondest hopes for the recovery of political stability rested with the group of moderate and enlightened aristocrats, led by his good friend Lafayette, called the Patriots or the Patriot Party. Although he was prepared to acknowledge that the situations were fundamentally different, Jefferson seemed to regard the Patriots in France as counterparts to the Federalists in America; they were “sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, longed for occasions of reforming it” and were dedicated to “the establishment of a constitution which shall assure … a good degree of liberty.” Lafayette was cast in the role of a French Madison, orchestrating the essential compromises among the different factions and thereby consolidating the energies of the revolution within a political framework that institutionalized the maximum gains that historical circumstances would allow.

Jefferson was prepared to recognize that those circumstances were not ideal. The deeply rooted class divisions of French society were on display during the debates within the Estates-General that he attended in May and June 1789, as were the still-powerful legacies of feudalism, which had all but vanished in America but in Versailles took on the highly virulent and visible form of costumed lords and courtly processions. Given these entrenched impediments to a fully flowered revolution along American lines, Jefferson advised his friends in the Patriot Party to settle for the English consitutional model, supplemented by one important American addition – that is, he recommended the retention of the French monarchy, though with vastly reduced powers, the creation of a bicameral legislature with the upper chamber reserved for the clergy and nobility and — the American contribution — the insistence on a declaration of rights that protected basic liberties from violation by kings, lords or even elected legislators. Characteristically, he devoted most of his time and energy to drafting the Charter of Rights, which called for the abolition of all pecuniary privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the nobility, civilian rule over the military, equal treatment under the law and a modified version of freedom of the press. With France as with America, his fondest political topic was not the artful arrangement of government power but rather the cordoning off of a region where no government power could exist. He conveyed his draft to Lafayette in June 1789; it served as the basis for the Declaration of Rights that Lafayette presented to the National Assembly the following month.

By that time Jefferson was confident that the danger of disintegration and violent revolution had been averted. “The great crisis being now over,” he wrote to Jay, “I shall not have a matter interesting enough to trouble you with as often as I have lately.” The Estates-General had not taken his advice and established a separate chamber for the clergy and nobility, but enough of the privileged classes had gone over to the Third Estate to make the newly established National Assembly a representative, if somewhat unwieldy, body. Nevertheless, as he explained to Tom Paine on July 11, 1789, the French Revolution was effectively over. “The National assembly (for that is the name they take) … are now in complete and undisputed possession of sovereignty. The executive and the aristocracy are now at their feet. The mass of the nation, the mass of the clergy, and the army are with them. They have prostrated the old government, and are now beginning to build one from the foundation.”

The following day Paris exploded in a series of riots and mob actions that have been memorialized in countless histories, novels and films on the French Revolution: the assault on the Customs House, the stoning and eventual massacre of the royal cavalry; the storming of the Bastille and subsequent beheading and dismemberment of its garrison. After five days of random violence and massive demonstrations, Jefferson described to Jay the scene as Louis XVI returned to the capital, with Lafayette at his side, to be greeted by “about 60,000 citizens of all forms and conditions armed with the muskets of the Bastille and … pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, sythes, etc.” and all shouting “vive la nation.”

If one were to conjure up a scene designed to weaken Jefferson’s faith in the inherent benevolence of popular movements or to shake his apparent serenity toward popular rebellions, one could hardly do better. Therefore it is worth noting that, though shocked at first by the random and savage character of the mob violence, he never questioned his belief in the essential rightness of the cause or the ultimate triumph of its progressive principles. His letters to Jay and Madison described the carnage of July 1789 as an unfortunate but temporary aberration that in no way called into question the prospect for an enduring and peaceful political settlement. He seemed to regard the spasm of violence as the product of a misguided decision by the king or his ministers to increase the troop strength in the city rather than as ominous evidence of deep and irreconcilable class resentments. By early August, in fact, he was convinced that the storm (shades of Shays’s Rebellion) had passed the future looked clear and bright: “Quiet is so well established here that I think there is nothing further to be appreheded. The harvest is so near that there is nothing to fear from the want of bread. The National assembly are wise, firm and moderate. They will establish the English constitution, purged or its numerous and capital defects.”

It was in this brave and buoyant mood that Jefferson sat down on September 6, 1789, to write what has subsequently proved to be one of the most famous letters in his vast correspondence. “The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society,” he explained to Madison, “has presented the question to my mind.” The question itself was not entirely new. It was “Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another,” which Jefferson claimed had implications that had not been sufficiently appreciated in either Europe or America. His answer to the question had the kind of unequivocal ring that he normally reserved for documents like the Declaration of Independence. “I set out on this ground,” he announced, “which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”

Exactly what Jefferson meant by this proposition has been the subject of endless debate among historians for some time. In the letter itself Jefferson seemed to be advocating some version of generational sovereignty. “We seem not to perceive,” as he put it to Madison, “that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.” He produced elaborate calculations based on Buffon’s demographic tables to show that, on average, a generation lasted about nineteen years. It therefore followed from the principle – “the earth belongs always to the living generations” – that all personal and national debst, all laws, even all constitutions, should expire after that time.

Madison, always the gentle critic of Jeffersonian ideas, complimented Jefferson on his “interesting reflections,” then proceeded to demolish the idea of generational sovereignty, which was not really an idea at all, he suggested, but rather a dangerous fantasy. In the course of presenting his argument, Jefferson had asked Madison to imagine “a whole generation of men to be born on the same day, to attain mature age on the same day, and to die on the same day.” Here, Madison observed not so diplomatically, was the chief clue that Jefferson was engaged in magic more than political philosophy. For there is not, and never can be, a generation in Jefferson’s pure sense of the term. Generational cohorts simply do not come into the world as discrete units. There is instead a seamless web of arrivals and departures, along with an analogous web of obligatory connections between past and present generations. These connections are not only unavoidable but absolutely essential for the continuation of civilized society.

Madison did not say it, but the whole tenor of his response implied that Jefferson’s letter was an inadvertent repudiation of all the painstaking work that he and his Federalist colleagues had been doing for the past two years. For Jefferson’s idea (or, if you will, fantasy) struck at the very stability and long-term legality that the new Constitution was designed to assure. The notion that all laws, contractual obligations and hard-won constitutional precedents would lapse every nineteen or twenty years was a recipe for anarchy. Like Jefferson’s earlier remark about wanting to see “a little rebellion now and then,” which it seemed to echo, the generational argument struck Madison as an utterly irresponsible and positively dangerous example of indulged speculation and just the kind of abstract reasoning that gave French political thinkers a reputation for building castles in the air.

As usual, Jefferson listened to Madison’s advice. He never put forward his generational argument as a serious legislative proposal, and he refrained from ever mentioning the matter to Madison again. But whatever practical problems the idea posed, whatever its inadequacies as a realistic rationale for legal reform, he clung to it tenaciously, introducing it in conversations and letters for the rest of his life. If, as Madison had suggested, the core of the idea was incompatible with the way the world actually worked, it was compatible with the way Jefferson’s mind worked. Indeed, there is no single statement in the vast literature by and about Jefferson that provides as clear and deep a look into his thinking about the way the world ought to work. The notion that “the earth belongs to the living” is in fact a many-faceted product of his political imagination that brings together in one place his essential obsessions and core convictions.