Author’s Note
Apart from Abraham Lincoln, more has been
said and written about Thomas Jefferson than about any other American
President. Although Washingtons monument stands taller in the
national capital, the monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson loom much
larger. As ideological bastions to the modern-day Republican and
Democratic parties, respectively, they endure as much fuller and
ultimately grander testaments to their subjects, and welcome millions of
visitors each year to a seemingly unassailable atmosphere of American
grandeur.
These are the monuments. And then there are the men.
Lincoln, so widely venerated for his service to the nation
in a time of war, had a very discrete, though not fully discreet,
tenure as a statesman. A local lawyer and politician of some influence
in his adopted home state of Illinois, Lincolns rise to widespread
prominence was relatively rapid, and the national spotlight was
his for less than a decade. Despite the intensity of his presidential
tenure, his days and works present a manageable challenge for the
biographer, cut short as they were by the assassins bullet that
ended Lincolns life at the age of 56. In a way, this limited period
of service helps make Lincolns achievements all the more digestible,
if not always palatable. In the elementary schoolroom he is hailed
as the prophet of emancipation and union, and while the reality
is much more complicated than this, the laundry list that adds
up to his legacy is more or less secure.
Not so Jefferson. A much more nebulous case, he was a
major political figure for half-a-century, surviving well into
his eighty-third year. An extremely precocious statesman, he served
as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and authored the
Declaration of Independence at the age of thirty-three. From thence,
he went on to hold various important offices, including that of
governor of Virginia, ambassador to France, Secretary of State,
Vice President, and finally, President of the United States of America.
Further, Jefferson lived for almost two decades beyond his retirement,
serving as a close adviser to proteges James Madison and James
Monroe, who succeeded him as the fourth and fifth Presidents of
the United States, respectively.
All public figures, even the saintly Lincoln, are prone
to accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy, and the longer the
tenure the louder the charges. While Jefferson was been vilified
at times throughout his long career, he seemed to emerge from his
deathbed remarkably unscathed, given his many transgressions.
In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the amnesia of
history did much to solidify a reputation that was rarely on solid
ground during his checkered and tumultuous life. However, in recent
scholarship, Jeffersons character has begun to suffer once again
from a litany of severe and even virulent criticisms. It is true
that many specific details of Jeffersons life remain obscured, much
as he would have wished. But clearly, the day of the blindly venerating
biography has passed, and Jefferson can no longer escape the scrutiny
that his formidable legend was once strong enough to obscure.
To be sure, Jeffersons contributions to the enormous empire
that emerged out of colonial America are inestimable. This makes
him a vital subject for historical inquiry. But because of his
inherent contradictions, Jefferson remains a confusing enigma to
all who study him. Indeed, the early history of the United States
itself is thoroughly confused and confusing, in no small part due
to the confusing character of Thomas Jefferson himself. Try as
one might to maintain the Jefferson mystique, there is little to
mask the fact that his professed values, personal as well as political,
rarely measured up to his actual practices. Like Jefferson, the
United States has suffered, then as now, from an equivalent plague
of hypocrisy with regard to conflicts between values and practices.
The following study is an attempt to provide a balanced
account of Jeffersons remarkable legacy, celebrating the praiseworthy where
possible and condemning the profane when necessary. Such an even-handed
approach is essential to an understanding of Jefferson, as well
as to a proper picture of what the United States has been, and
of what it has become. Nevertheless, in forming value judgments
about the past and its inhabitants, whether in positive or negative
terms, the makers of history are wise to remember that while they
retain the capital advantage of looking backward, their subjects,
just as they themselves, forever were, are, and will be handicapped
by the blinding light of an ever-encroaching future.
Context
Although Christopher Columbus is popularly considered
to be the foremost pioneer of Renaissance European exploration
in the Western Hemisphere, he spent most of his time in the Caribbean
islands and never actually reached the mainland of what is today
the United States of America. The eastern seaboard of the continent,
which had previously been visited by Scandinavian Vikings between
the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, proved resistant to settlement and
remained largely unexplored until the later stages of the sixteenth
century.
Whereas the Spanish made inroads in the southern and western portions
of the American continent, and the French advanced into the interior,
the English concentrated their early colonial efforts along the
Atlantic coast. Even before the well-known journey of the Mayflower
and the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the English
had another plan for settlement in the form of the Virginia Company.
Named after Queen Elizabeth I in honor of her long-time chastity,
Virginia was a vast area of land that covered a significant portion
of the present-day Southeastern United States, stretching to the
Mississippi River and, by some claims, beyond.
Early publicity for the colony was drummed up by adventurer
Sir Walter Ralegh and Thomas Harriot, whose Briefe and
True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, first published
in 1588, was meant to encourage widespread enthusiasm for the venture.
These early efforts were frustrated by poor organization and harsh
living conditions, and it wasnt until several years later that
a viable settlement was finally established.
Initial advances in Virginia, at outposts such as Jamestown,
were made largely on the strength of tobacco cultivation. These
efforts were pushed forward by settlers like John Rolfe in the
face of royal disapproval over trade in narcotics. Additionally,
colonists struggled with early disputes against the native Powhatan
tribe. These last were somewhat eased by the marriage of Rolfe
and Pocahontas, daughter of the Powhatan chief, but sporadic conflicts
would continue to flare between settlers and natives for decades.
The Virginia Company lost its charter in 1624, and was
completely dissolved by 1630. In the succeeding decades, the Commonwealth
of Virginia came under the administration of the British crown,
with a local governing body known as the House of Burgesses. This
legislative wing was overseen by a group of royal governors, and
ultimately under the absolute rule of the imperial monarch. Such
an absolute hierarchy was weakened by the progress of the English
Civil War, and by the time of the Glorious Revolution the House
of Burgesses enjoyed more autonomy than ever before.
During colonial times, the Commonwealth of Virginia was
an empire within a larger empire, maintaining claims to various
portions of the American continent, and populated by a small cadre
of powerful landowners who furthered their economic interests through
the use of chattel slavery. Gradually, an established aristocracy
entrenched itself in the agriculturally rich Tidewater region.
This was the Virginia that Thomas Jefferson was born into.
As a frontier youth of sorts, Jefferson had a clear sense
of the vast American canvas that the several European powers were
struggling to control. The British did much to advance their claims
in America with a victory in the Seven Years War, but incurred
severe debts in the process. With a floundering enterprise in
India also depleting finances, the British turned to the American
colonies in hopes of generating much-needed revenues via taxation.
Such presumption on the part of Parliament was not well received
in the American colonies, and before long a few strains of dissent
had smoldered into an outright rebellion. The Revolutionary War
was ultimately a success for the American rebels, but only on the
strength of overwhelming military aid provided by France. In fact,
while the Americans declared their independence in 1776, and officially
established it in 1783, they were essentially beholden to the larger
European powers during the first several decades of their existence
as a sovereign nation.
Distrustful of a powerful central government, the United
States originally organized themselves according to a weak federal
plan under the Articles of Confederation. This approach was quickly shown
to be inadequate, and a re-organization occurred under the Constitution,
ratified in 1788. The first two Presidents, George Washington
and John Adams, proceeded with an eye to consolidating federal
power under a strong executive branch of government.
Although Jefferson was the self-professed enemy of such
nationalization, he did even more than his predecessors to cement
the overriding power of the federal body as third President. Through the
Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act, Jefferson unleashed an
unprecedented fiscal and political reach, giving the federal government
the unassailably strong position it enjoys even at present. But
while United States continued to prosper in the wake of the War of
1812, trouble loomed in the clashes to come between abolitionists
and large scale slave owners.
Jefferson, never able to resolve this problem for himself,
would pass the legacy of conflict on to the next generation. Ultimately,
it would take the cauldron of a civil war to solve the slave problem.
Only through this destructive process was the United States finally molded
into the inviolable entity that we know today.
