Next Daily Excerpt:
Next book in my American history section is Thomas Jefferson: A Life
Now I like Willard Sterne Randall’s books – I read his one on Hamilton, his one on Washington, and this enormous one on Jefferson. It truly is enormous – and my particular copy has really small print, which is a bit of a challenge. This is the problem when you have bad eyes. Anyhoo … It was published in 1994, I believe – and sadly he seems hell-bent on making the claim that Jefferson was NOT sexually involved with Sally Hemings. He seems strangely invested in the fact that Jefferson did NOT screw around with her. I just don’t have that anxiety – and therefore, he seems a little bit untrustworthy as a biographer. The whole DNA study published its results in 1998 and obviously nobody can ever say, without a shadow of a doubt, “He slept with her and fathered children” … but it also seems to me that you cannot say the OPPOSITE, without a shadow of a doubt either. Ya know why? Cause we weren’t there. Mkay? Hitchens, in his book on Jefferson, gets very frustrated in his unbelievably articulate way with biographers like Randall – saying that make no mistake, there is racism in such defensiveness. Randall’s just one in a long long long line of biographers who pooh-pooh the rumors – he’s not the only one. Jefferson has had overly protective biographers for YEARS. And this isn’t about yanking him off his mountaintop, and sullying his reputation. This is about what might or might not have happened. In my mind, it is completely not inconceivable that Jefferson would have messed around with a slave – not at all – he was ambivalent enough about his own slaveowner status, and in denial enough about the fact that he even HAD slaves (the entire design of Monticello reinforces this – He put effort into HIDING the slaves) … Again, none of this, to me, makes Jefferson a limb of Satan. He was a man of his time, and I just find it all INTERESTING. I would rather look at the rumors with open eyes, rather than say “No. That could not have happened” right up front. What are you so afraid of, Randall? What are you protecting??
BUT his over-protectiveness of Jefferson is not enough for me to NOT recommend this book. I really like Randall’s writing, I like his incorporation of primary documents (I think his books are filled with more of his subjects’ words than his own words – and I really like that) – and it’s very in-depth. It’s a good old-fashioned massive biography, and if you want to get a good linear look at Jefferson’s life, I can recommend this book.
I’m going to post an excerpt about Jefferson’s intellectual influences. I always love it when biographers include that kind of stuff in their books … what books did this person read? What books did he own? What were his main influences?
Thomas Jefferson: A Life
Beginning in 1770, shortly after British troops shot down Boston protestors in the Boston Massacre, Jefferson had begun studying systems of government, following Diderot’s injunction in that Bible of the Englightenment, the Encyclopedie: “Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection.” He was not seeking a philosophical system to adopt whole. As Merrill Peterson has pointed out, Jefferson “was distrustful of philosophical systems generally,” considering them “prisms of the mind.” He regarded thought as a tool for reshaping life, not for absorbing some grand design. His thinking was pragmatic, always as unfinished as his house at Monticello would be. But that was the whole point with both his thinking and his constructions, the doing of them. The delight was to finish neither, but to revise, constantly. He borrowed fully to assemble an eclectic set of principles which, he believed, provided the greatest flexibility, dynamism, durability. To prepare for the future, he reached back. He brushed aside whole systems. Years later, asked to be a godfather, he refused: “I had never sense enough to comprehend the articles of faith of the Church,” he replied. Already a confirmed deist who believed in natural religion and morality, he regarded the clergy of the established Church of England as part of the problems of the British Empire, not as a solution. In concluding his brief in the Lunan case in 1774, he had written, “In truth, the alliance between church and state in England has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the clergy, and even bolder than they are.” It was at about this time, this fecund summer of 1774, that, questioning the legal foundations of the established church, he penned a little essay in his commonplace book under the title, “Whether Christianity is a Part of the Common Law.”
For nearly fifteen years, Jefferson had followed the developments and writers of the Enlightenment, which had its roots in early eighteenth-century England. His three personal patron saints were Bacon, Newton, and Locke. While remaining a nominal Anglican and serving as a parish vestryman, Jefferson had drifted away from the Church of England as a student about the time he had begun to study “moral sense” Enlightenment philosophy under the tutelage of Dr. Small at William and Mary. As an old man, he wrote to John Adams in 1823:
I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was demonism. If ever man worshipped a false God, he did … not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent Governor of the world, but a demon of malignant spirit.
His commonplace books contain numerous excerpts from the religious thoughts of Locke and Shaftesbury and his disciple Francis Hutcheson. A third-generation Presbyterian minister, Hutcheson gave enormously popular lectures at the University of Edinburgh, included James Boswell and David Hume among his students, had rejected Calvinist orthodoxy, and was once tried by the Presbytery of Glasgow for teaching “false and dangerous” doctrines. Hutcheson’s “moral sense” philosophy asserted that moral goodness could be measured by the extent to which one’s actions promoted the happiness of others. He also agreed that it was possible to experience a God-given knowledge of good and evil without resorting to the studying of God. Moral-sense philosophy weighed virtue in social terms: “That action is best which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.” One of Hutcheson’s disciples, Thomas Reid, held that “moral truths” could be divided into truths “self-evident to every man whose understanding and moral faculty are ripe” and truths that had to be “deduced by reasoning from those that are self-evident.” Another Scottish exponent of the moral-sense school was Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose thoughts Jefferson commonplaced copiously and who was listed under three headings in Jefferson’s book-buying recommednation to Skipwith in 1771. Jefferson’s study of Kames as early as 1767 led to his conviction that primogeniture in Virginia, the law requiring the leaving of all property to the firstborn son, had been unjustly transported from England and become early entrenched there. Jefferson had studied Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morals and Natural Religion during his student days, his boyish marginal notations surviving in one of the few books to escape the flames at Shadwell. From Kames, young Jefferson learned that “there is a principle of benevolence in man which prompts him to an equal pursuit of the happiness of all.” There were echoes of Kames in contemporary Scot Adam Smith’s philosophical writings. “All constitutions of government,” Smith wrote, “are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them.” And there were echoes of all these Scottish moral philosophers in Jefferson’s political writings between 1774 and 1776.
If Jefferson had any religious credo, it was a utilitarian faith in progress. With Bacon, he believed that mysteries beyond human understanding should be set aside so that the mind was freed to attack real obstacles to happiness in life. Like the philosopher Baron de Holbach, who wrote that “man is unhappy only because he does not know nature,” he believed that enlightenment provided a route to happiness. If man studied nature, he could bring himself into harmony with the natural order of his environment and use its laws to set himself free. He saw this as the pursuit of happiness that was his right as well as his deepest desire. Because there were individual definitions of happiness, societies needed the freedom that would allow pluralism and tolerance. Jefferson believed that limitless progress was possible, that man had all the “necessities” for progress, if not perfection:
Although I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the world, yet I believe it susceptible to much improvement and, most of all, in matters of government and religion, and that the diffusion of knowledge among people is to be the instrument by which it is effected.
It is not from the Scottish religious reformers but from English and European writers of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Age of Reason that Jefferson drew his evolving notions of government. From Bacon, the grandfather of the English Enlightenment, Jefferson had learned to use his powers of observation and question any opinion, regardless of its source. He adhered to Bacon’s admonition to apply reason and learning to the functions of government to improve society. Jefferson was influenced by Newton’s Principia, which held that the universe was a great clock invented, made, and set in motion by a deity, but he had adapted Newton’s view to his own quest for a world of order and harmony. Like Newton, Jefferson did not believe in miracles. Jefferson’s third hero from the time of his boyhood studies was Locke, who had joined the empiricism of Bacon and Newton to the realm of politics. Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding for the first time fed his natural optimism and gave him hope that mankind could be improved by education. From Locke and his Scottish adherents, Jefferson had adopted the theory of the Second Treatise of Government that legitimate authority to govern was derived from the consent of the governed, which had first been granted while mankind had still been in a “state of nature” when all human beings were by right free and equal. Locke underpinned all of Jefferson’s political thought.
