Jefferson loved books,” Michael Beran, lawyer and journalist, writes in Jefferson’s Demons, a work that seeks to plumb the depths of the third president’s complicated, troubled psyche. Jefferson especially liked old books, “and more especially classical ones.” He preferred Homer in the original Greek to Alexander Pope’s English translation, and he was thankful, in his words, for the people “who directed my early education.”
As anyone who has gained a decent introduction to the classical languages knows, Jefferson’s education was enviable. He knew that Greek and Latin were far from “dead.” And because he was a serious student, he knew much more. President Kennedy quipped that Jefferson by himself generated more brainpower than a room full of cold-war savants. And Jefferson still lends prestige to his alma mater, the College of William and Mary.
But then, perhaps Jefferson wasn’t really educated at all. If being educated means knowing how to act decently, courageously, and consistently with integrity, then maybe he was something of an ignoramus. Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills’ book, “Negro President,” might be taken to support this view. At the end of his grim but fascinating tribute to the Federalist party and antebellum New England secessionists, Wills tells us that Jefferson’s efforts to extend southern slavery weren’t born of “any evil intent on his part.” But that comes too late; the bulk of Wills’ narrative paints Jefferson the slaveholder as scheming and sinister. Jefferson, Wills suggests, wanted the American capital where it is mainly to ensure the comfort of slave-holding politicians.
Did Jefferson father children by his slave, Sally Hemings? Beran denies that the evidence is conclusive. Conversely, New York Law School professor R. B. Bernstein, in his sometimes tedious but always informative introduction to Jefferson’s life, reports that “the odds of anyone but Jefferson being the father” of at least one of Hemings’ children are “ten thousand to one.” Wills, meanwhile, relates a cynical but accurate gibe directed at the third president in his own day-namely, that, given the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, if Jefferson fathered Hemings’ five surviving slave-kids, then he had bestowed upon his beloved South a tidy trinity of votes.
Of course, Jefferson was a man of his own time, and hypocrisy pervaded Virginia’s debt-ridden and pompous planter class. William Byrd II’s hilarious and disgusting diary provides one example. “At night I asked a negro girl to kiss me,” says the upstanding memoirist. “Then came Mrs. Johnson [not Mrs. Byrd] with whom I … went to bed … and rogered her twice.”
Can we expect Jefferson to have risen above this? Yes and no. No, because the roots of upbringing, childhood experience, and the subculture one lives in can’t usually be dug up completely. Yes, because Jefferson was extraordinary. We expect more from him. At the least, we expect that he might have followed George Washington’s example and provided in his will for the freedom of all his slaves. Had he done so-had James Madison, his friend, done so-had Patrick Henry done so-then a precedent might have been set which, in turn, might have bolstered the abolitionist movement, which then might have averted war and a failed post-bellum reconstruction. Which, finally, would have saved us from parasites on the public’s long-suffering like Alabama’s George Wallace, New York’s Al Sharpton, and comparable racial racketeers. As any half-awake schoolboy knows, Master Jefferson is judged by his own words: “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator” with the “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Then again, judge not lest ye be judged. America’s 21st-century Christians are just as fat, semiliterate, wasteful, and TV-addicted as their “non-Christian” peers; the porn industry thrives in this supposedly Christian republic. Our progeny will curse us, too. And Martin Luther King knew and said what many of Jefferson’s critics fail to say or say weakly-or, as in Wills’ case, say reluctantly at the end of intemperate books-to wit, that the check Jefferson helped to write would, it’s true, be returned to blacks in search of liberty with “insufficient funds” stamped on it. But the check was written, and in time sufficient funds would find their way into the appropriate account. Jefferson wrote the check he himself wasn’t bold enough, or insightful enough, to cash. But it’s worth something that he wrote it.
What Beran and Bernstein take seriously, and Wills apparently does not, is Jefferson’s belief that Federalists-Alexander Hamilton and his disciples-were bent on destroying the agrarian republicanism he idealized. Wills is obviously right to point out that Jefferson defended and promoted southern interests, and there’s no point in disputing that southern interests were inextricably linked to the “slave power” (as abolitionists said). But Beran and Bernstein are right to see complexity: Jefferson was deeply fallible but also “prophetic,” says Beran. Bernstein, too, acknowledges Jefferson’s myriad hypocrisies, but “[w]hatever we may think of Jefferson as a person or as a politician, we can never take away from him his remarkable gift as a writer or his ultimate claims to fame.”
Wills’ case is simplistic if engaging and provocative: Federalist excesses are airbrushed, Jeffersonian republicans are mauled; the Federalist Sedition Act gets a pass, Jefferson’s Kentucky resolution, which denounced the Act as unconstitutional, gets hammered. (But even “historians” as egregious as Gore Vidal and Howard Zinn see that Jefferson was on to something.1)
Wills’ portrait of Jefferson is of a man who relentlessly sought to enlarge the slave culture. But, so far as I can recall, Wills never mentions that Jefferson likened the country’s hold on slavery to a fool trying to hold a wolf by the ears. Wills tells us that Jefferson approved of the Missouri Compromise, which gave Congress more members sympathetic to slavery (and also brought free Maine into the Union), but he doesn’t remind us that Jefferson likened the debate surrounding the compromise to a “fire bell in the night,” announcing catastrophe for a slaveholding nation.
“Negro President” excels at giving the reader a feel for the political problems slavery posed to the country: John Quincy Adams, in the House of Representatives, appears fearless and courageous in taking on slave power; we learn that secessionist feeling surfaced several times in New England when pro-slave partisans, bolstered by the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, seemed unbeatable; and Wills lifts the undaunted abolitionist Timothy Pickering, John Adams’ secretary of state and, later, congressman from Massachusetts, from relative obscurity, writing at the end of his book that Pickering has “not yet received his due.” Indeed, “Negro President” has less to do with Jefferson than with Pickering.
Where Wills is tendentious, risk-taking (some claims are made without clear evidence), and potentially misleading, Bernstein is even-handed. His fine biography, an overview of Jefferson’s life, offers nothing new or rousing; it will be useful especially to readers coming at Jefferson for the first or second time.
Like Wills and Beran, Bernstein sees Jefferson enmeshed in conflict, actual and psychological. Here’s Jefferson “grappling with the new nation’s diplomatic problems”; there he is “keeping an anxious eye on developments at home”; over yonder he’s “Exasperated by his treatment at Hamilton’s hands”; now he’s remaining “determined to end the Barbary states’ attacks on American shipping.” Jefferson “seethed … warned … insisted.”
Similar language appears in Jefferson’s Demons, where we find the Virginian bewailing, despairing, bitter, angry, raging, hating, furious, trembling, anathematizing, self-pitying and dreaming of “ransoming a captive Israel” from the centralizing schemes of Alexander Hamilton, “high priest of federalism.” But too often Beran’s prose, usually violet, slips into deep purple. When, at the beginning of the Revolution, Jefferson
rose from his sickbed … he behaved like a man who had made his peace with destiny; he would not resist history; it was perhaps inescapable anyway. Yet however reconciled to his decision he now was, Jefferson knew that his crossing into history would inevitably involve the destinies of others besides himself, among them those to whom he was closest. The tears of these hostages to his fortune (for tears there must have been, though the formal record is blank) must have salted whatever imaginations of their futures broke his sleeps to perplex him in the night.
Making peace with destiny? Crossing into history? Salting imaginations? (A few pages later, Beran has Jefferson “emboweled” in “complicated glooms.”) That may be good civic-club speechmaking, but it’s bad writing, chiefly because it’s nonsense. Jefferson, a prose master if nothing else, wouldn’t have put up with it.
At some point this country will have to get beyond slavery and its “legacy.” Thomas Jefferson the man can’t help us with that; Jefferson the idealist can. And perhaps he would agree with me that when that time arrives, the country will, to a small extent, more closely resemble the kingdom of heaven, where status and congenital physical properties are irrelevant. In that day, college and employment applications won’t ask pernicious questions about a phantom called “race.” (As a matter of principle, I always check the “other” category and write “human” in the space provided.) Black neighborhoods like the one I grew up in will have given up anti-white hatred and a debilitating refusal to accept personal responsibility. And whites will genuinely regret the fundamentally unchristian stupidity of their forbears who made boundaries of skin pigmentation.
May that day come quickly.
Preston Jones, a contributing editor to Books & Culture, teaches at John Brown University.
1. Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (Yale Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 163-164; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, rev. ed. (HarperCollins, 2003), p. 100.
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