PROLOGUE Jeffersonian Surge: America, 1992-93

If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong.
If America is right, Jefferson was right.
--James Parton (1874)

You could reach into your pocket, pull out a nickel and find him gazing into the middle distance--as my liberal friends noted, always looking left. You could go to Charlottesville, Virginia, and see full-length statues of him on the campus he designed, then travel a few miles up his mountaintop and visit his spirit and mansion at Monticello. As of 1993, you could follow the James River down to Williamsburg, a route he took many times as a young man, and see another full-length statue of him on the campus of the College of William and Mary, a recent gift from the college he founded to the college from which he graduated, there looking off to the right--as my conservative friends noted--apparently studying the comings and goings at the adjacent women's dormitory. You could head north out of the Tidewater region, past Civil War battle sites--Cold Harbor, Chancellorsville, Fredricksburg--where both Union and Confederate soldiers believed they fought in behalf of his legacy. And you could cross over the Potomac from Virginia to the District of Columbia and find him in his own memorial on the Tidal Basin, looking straight ahead in this rendition, with plaques on the marble walls around him reproducing several of his most inspirational declarations of personal freedom. Or if you shared his romance with the American West, you could catch him in his most mammoth and naturalistic version on Mount Rushmore.

But these were all mere replicas. In November 1993 a reincarnated Thomas Jefferson promised to make a public appearance in the unlikely location of a large brick church in Worcester, Massachusetts. On this raw New England evening an impersonator named Clay Jenkinson had come to portray the flesh-and-blood Jefferson, alive among us in the late twentieth century. My own sense was that forty or fifty hardy souls would brave the weather and show up. This, after all, was a semischolarly affair, designed to recover Jefferson without much media hoopla or patriotic pageantry. As it turned out, however, about four hundred enthusiastic New Englanders crowded into the church. Despite the long-standing regional suspicion of southerners, especially Virginians (John Adams had said that "in Virginia, all geese are swans"), the appearance of Jefferson was obviously a major attraction.

The American Antiquarian Society hosted a dinner before the event. All the community leaders, including the superintendent of schools, the heads of local insurance and computing companies and a small delegation from the Massachusetts legislature, seemed to have turned out. What's more, representatives from the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities had flown in from Washington. Also present were two filmmaking groups. From Florentine Films came Camilla Rockwell, who told me that Ken Burns of Civil War fame was planning a major documentary on Jefferson for public television. And from the Jefferson Legacy Foundation came Bud Leeds and Chip Stokes, who had just announced a campaign to raise funds for a big-budget commercial film on Jefferson. (From Leeds and Stokes I first learned that another major film, on Jefferson in Paris, was already planned, starring Nick Nolte in the title role.) Their entourage included an Iranian millionaire who said that he had fallen in love with Jefferson soon after escaping persecution by the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran, an experience that gave him unique access to Jefferson's genius in insisting upon the separation of church and state.

It was during the dinner that the germ of the idea made its first appearance in my mind, initially in the form of a question: What was it about Jefferson? Granted, 1993 was the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth, so a momentary surge in his reputation was to be expected. But were there any other prominent figures from the American past who could generate this much contemporary interest? There were only two possible contenders, so it seemed to me, both of whom also occupied sacred space on the Mall in the nation's capital, the American version of Mount Olympus. There was George Washington, the "Father of Our Country," who had the largest monument to patriarchal achievement in the world, dwarfing the memorials of the other American icons. Then there was Abraham Lincoln, who had a bigger memorial on the Tidal Basin than Jefferson and was usually the winner whenever pollsters tried to rate the greatest American presidents.

But Washington usually lost out to Jefferson; he seemed too distant and silent. There were no words etched on the walls of the Washington Monument. He was the Delphic oracle who never spoke, more like an Old Testament Jehovah who would never come down to earth as Jefferson was doing tonight. Lincoln was a more formidable contender. Like Jefferson, he was accessible and had also spoken magic words. Ordinary citizens tended to know about the Gettysburg Address nearly as much as the Declaration of Independence. But Lincoln's magic was more somber and burdened; he was a martyr and his magic had a tragic dimension. Jefferson was light, inspiring, optimistic. Although Lincoln was more respected, Jefferson was more loved.

These were my thoughts as we walked across the street to the church where Jenkinson was scheduled to re-create Jefferson. He appeared on the sanctuary steps in authentic eighteenth-century costume and began talking in measured cadences about his early days as a student at the College of William and Mary, his thoughts on the American Revolution, his love of French wine and French ideas, his achievements and frustrations as a political leader and president, his obsession with architecture and education, his elegiac correspondence with John Adams during the twilight years of his life, his bottomless sense of faith in America's prospects as the primal force for democracy in the world.

Jenkinson obviously knew his Jefferson. As a historian familiar with the scholarly literature I was aware of several tricky areas where a slight misstep could carry one down a hallway of half-truths, places where a little knowledge could lead one astray in a big way. But Jenkinson never faltered. He was giving us an elegantly disguised lecture on American history that drew deftly on the modern Jefferson scholarship.

Two things he did not do were also impressive. He did not try to speak with a southern or Virginian accent. He obviously realized that no one really knows how Jefferson talked or sounded, whether the accent was more southern or English or some unique combination. So Jenkinson spoke American. He also did not pretend to be in the eighteenth century. His Jefferson had materialized in our world and our time. He could not be accused of committing the sin of "presentism" because he was not making any claims about being oblivious to the fact that it was now, not then.

Indeed, most of the questions from the audience were about current affairs: What would you do about the health care problem, Mr. Jefferson? What do you think of President Clinton? Do you have any wisdom to offer on the Bosnian crisis? Would you have committed American troops to the Gulf War? Sprinkled into this mixture were several questions about American history and Jefferson's role in its making: Why did you never remarry? What did you mean by "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence? Why did you own slaves?

This last question had a sharp edge, and Jenkinson handled it carefully. Slavery was a moral travesty, he said, an institution clearly at odds with the values of the American Revolution. He had tried his best to persuade his countrymen to end the slave trade and gradually end slavery itself. But he had failed. As for his own slaves, he had treated them benevolently, as the fellow human beings they were. He concluded with a question of his own: What else would you have wanted me to do? A follow-up question at this point could have ignited some intellectual fireworks, but no one asked it. The audience had not come to witness an argument so much as to pay its respects to an icon. If Jefferson was America's Mona Lisa, they had come to see him smiling.

Despite the obviously respectful mood, it still surprised me that no one asked "the Sally question." My own experience as a college teacher suggested that most students could be counted on to know two things about Jefferson: that he had written the Declaration of Independence and that he had been accused of an illicit affair with Sally Hemings, a mulatto slave at Monticello. This piece of scandal had first surfaced when Jefferson was president, in 1802, and had subsequently affixed itself to his reputation like a tin can that rattled through the ages and pages of history. I subsequently learned that Jenkinson had a standard response to "the Sally question," which was that the story had originated with a disappointed office seeker named James Callender who had a long-standing reputation for scandalmongering (true enough) and that Jefferson had denied the charge on one occasion but otherwise refused to comment on it (also true). A few months after I saw him at Worcester, Jenkinson was the main attraction at a gala Jefferson celebration at the White House, where he won the hearts of the Clinton people by saying that Jefferson would dismiss the entire Whitewater investigation as "absolutely nobody's business."

Jenkinson's bravura performance that November night stuck in my mind, but what became an even more obsessive memory was the audience. Here, in the heart of New England (surely Adams country), Jefferson was their favorite Founding Father, indeed their all-time American hero. In its own way their apparently unconditional love for Jefferson was every bit as mysterious as the enigmatic character of the man himself. Like a splendid sunset or a woman's beauty, it was simply there. Jefferson did not just get the benefit of every doubt; he seemed to provide a rallying point where ordinary Americans from different backgrounds could congregate to dispel the very possibility of doubt itself.

In a sense it had always been this way. Soon after his death in 1826 Jefferson became a touchstone for wildly divergent political movements that continued to compete for his name and the claim on his legacy. Southern secessionists cited him on behalf of states' rights; northern abolitionists quoted his words in the Declaration of Independence against slavery. The so-called Robber Barons of the Gilded Age echoed his warnings against the encroaching powers of the federal government; liberal reformers and radical Populists referred to his strictures against corrupt businessmen and trumpeted his tributes to the superiority of agrarian values. In the Scopes trial both William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were sure that Jefferson agreed with their position on evolution. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt both claimed him as their guide to the problems of the Great Depression. The chief chronicler of the multiple Jeffersonian legacy, Merrill Peterson, gave it the name "protean," which provided a respectably classical sound to what some critics described as Jefferson's disarming ideological promiscuity. He was America's Everyman.

But at least until the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt there were critics. The main story line of American history, in fact, cast Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the lead roles of a dramatic contest between the forces of democracy (or liberalism) and the forces of aristocracy (or conservatism). While this formulation had the suspiciously melodramatic odor of a political soap opera, it also had the advantage of reducing the bedeviling complexities of American history to a comprehensible scheme: It was the people against the elites, the West against the East, agrarians against industrialists, Democrats against Republicans. Jefferson was only one side of the American political dialogue, often the privileged side to be sure, the voice of "the many" holding forth against "the few."

To repeat, this version of American history always had the semifictional quality of an imposed plot line--the very categories were Jeffersonian and therefore prejudicial--but it ceased making any sense at all by the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt invoked Hamiltonian methods (i.e., government intervention) to achieve Jeffersonian goals (i.e., economic equality). After the New Deal most historians abandoned the Jefferson-Hamilton distinction altogether and most politicians stopped yearning for a Jeffersonian utopia free of government influence. No serious scholar any longer believed that the Jeffersonian belief in a minimalist federal government was relevant in an urban, industrialized American society. The disintegration of the old categories meant the demise of Jefferson as the symbolic leader of liberal partisans fighting valiantly against the entrenched elites.

What happened next defined the new paradigm for the Jefferson image and set the stage for the phenomenon I witnessed in that Worcester church. Jefferson ceased to function as the liberal half of the American political dialogue and became instead the presiding presence who transcended all political conflicts and parties. As Peterson put it, "the disintegration of the Jeffersonian philosophy of government heralded the ultimate canonization of Jefferson." The moment of Jefferson's ascent into the American version of political heaven can be dated precisely: April 13, 1943, the day that Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin. "Today, in the midst of a great war for freedom," Roosevelt declared, "we dedicate a shrine to freedom." Jefferson was now an American saint, our "Apostle of Freedom," as Roosevelt put it; he concluded by quoting the words inscribed around the inside of the Jefferson Memorial's dome: "For I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Jefferson was no longer just an essential ingredient in the American political tradition; he was the essence itself, a kind of free-floating icon who hovered over the American political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams.

The more I thought about it, the clearer it seemed to me that the audience at Worcester offered a nice illustration of what we might call grass roots Jeffersonianism. Scholars and biographers of Jefferson seldom pay much attention to this phenomenon, since it has almost nothing to do with who the historical Jefferson really was, and the mental process at work, at least on the face of it, appears to resemble a blend of mindless hero worship and political fundamentalism. But it seemed to me that lots of ordinary Americans carried around expectations and assumptions about whet Jefferson symbolized that were infinitely more powerful than any set of historical facts. America's greatest historians and Jefferson scholars could labor for decades to produce the most authoritative and sophisticated studies--several had done precisely that--and they would bounce off the popular image of Jefferson without making a dent. This was the Jefferson magic, but how did the magic work?

The obvious place to look was the shrine on the Tidal Basin. According to the National Park Service, about a million visitors pay their respects to Jefferson in his memorial each year. On the March day in 1993 that I visited, several hundred tourists walked up the marble steps, then proceeded to spend a few minutes studying the dignified statue of Jefferson and snapping pictures. Then most of them looked up to the four inscribed panels on the walls and read the words, often moving their lips and murmuring the famous phrases to themselves. The first panel, which attracted more attention than the others, contained the most famous and familiar words in American history: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Actually, these are not quite the words Jefferson composed in June 1776. Before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, Jefferson's early draft made it even clearer that his intention was to express a spiritual vision: "We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness." These are the core articles of faith in the American Creed. Jefferson's authorship of these words is the core of his seductive appeal across the ages, his central claim, on posterity's affection. What, then, do they mean? How do they make magic?

Merely to ask the question is to risk being accused of some combination of treason and sacrilege, since self-evident truths are not meant to be analyzed; that is what being self-evident is all about. But when these words are stripped of the patriotic haze, read straightaway and literally, two monumental claims are being made here. The explicit claim is that the individual is the sovereign unit in society; his natural state is freedom from and equality with all other individuals; this is the natural order of things. The implicit claim is that all restrictions on this natural order are immoral transgressions, violations of what God intended; individuals liberated from such restrictions will interact with their fellows in a harmonious scheme requiring no external discipline and producing maximum human happiness.

This is a wildly idealistic message, the kind of good news simply too good to be true. It is, truth be told, a recipe for anarchy. Any national government that seriously attempted to operate in accord with these principles would be committing suicide. But, of course, the words were not intended to serve as an operational political blueprint. Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. He was, however, an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary. The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable. The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness. Jefferson guards the American Creed at this inspirational level, which is inherently immune to scholarly skepticism and a place where ordinary Americans can congregate to speak the magic words together. The Jeffersonian magic works because we permit it to function at a rarefied region where real-life choices do not have to be made.

And so, for example, in that Worcester church or in the hallowed space of the Jefferson Memorial, American citizens can come together in Jefferson's presence and simultaneously embrace the following propositions: that abortion is a woman's right and that an unborn child cannot be killed; that health care and a clean environment for all Americans are natural rights and that the federal bureaucracies and taxes required to implement medical and environmental programs violate individual independence; that women and blacks must not be denied their rights as citizens and that affirmative action programs violate the principle of equality. The primal source of Jefferson's modern-day appeal is that he provides the sacred space--not really common ground but more a midair location floating above all the political battle lines--where all Americans can come together and, at least for that moment, become a chorus instead of a cacophony.

As a practicing professional historian who had recently decided to make Jefferson his next scholarly project, I found this a rather disconcerting insight, full of ominous implications. Jefferson was not like most other historical figures--dead, forgotten and nonchalantly entrusted to historians, who presumably serve as the grave keepers for those buried memories no one really cares about anymore. Jefferson had risen from the dead. Or rather the myth of Jefferson had taken on a life of its own. Lots of Americans cared deeply about the meaning of his memory. He had become the Great Sphinx of American history, the enigmatic and elusive touchstone for the most cherished convictions and contested truths in American culture. It was as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, had discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing.

. . .

NOT JUST ANY man can become Everyman. During the preceding five years, while I was working on a book about the life and thought of John Adams, only a few scholarly friends ever asked me what I was doing or, once apprised, felt any urge to follow up with inquiries that indicated Adams touched their lives in any way. (The most common response from my nonacademic friends was that they knew the Adams face because it appeared on their favorite beer, but they were mistaking John for his cousin Sam.) Working on Jefferson, on the other hand, was like entering an electromagnetic field where lots of friends and neighbors--businessmen, secretaries, journalists, janitors--already resonated with excitement. When my furnace stopped working in the dead of the winter, the local repairman noticed the books on Jefferson piled up in my study. As I held the flashlight for him in the basement while he lay on his back replacing worn-out parts of the heat pump, he talked for a full hour about how critics had maligned Jefferson as an atheist. The repairman was a devout Christian and had read somewhere about Jefferson's keen interest in the Bible. No, sir, Jefferson was a good Christian gentleman, and he hoped I would get that right in my book.

A neighbor who taught in the local high school, upon learning that I was working on Jefferson, promised to send me a book that he had found extremely helpful in distilling the Jeffersonian message for his students. A package then arrived in the mail that contained three copies of Revolution Song, which was not written but "assembled" by one Jim Strupp in order to "provide young people with a contemporary look into the beliefs, ideals and radical thought of Thomas Jefferson." The blurb on the cover went on: "In our country today, true democratic government is betrayed at all levels. As democracies emerge around the world, they are also subtly being destroyed." The hyperventilating tone of Revolution Song was reminiscent of those full-page newspaper ads in which Asian gurus or self-proclaimed prophets lay out their twelve-step programs to avert the looming apocalypse. Actually, the propagandistic model for Revolution Song was even more provocative: "This little book attempts to serve as a democratic alternative to the works of Chairman Mao and other non-democratic leaders." It was designed as a succinct catechism of Jeffersonian thought, a "little blue book" to counter Mao's "little red book." No matter that Mao was in disgrace, even in China, and that communism since 1989 was an ideological lost cause, loitering on the world stage only as an object lesson in political and economic catastrophe. The global battle for the souls of humankind was never-ending, and Jefferson remained the inspirational source, the chosen beacon of the chosen people, still throwing out its light from Monticello, his own personal City on a Hill. Silly stuff, to be sure, but another example of how hauntingly powerful Jefferson's legacy remained at the popular level.

Soon after I had received my complimentary copies of Revolutionary Song, another piece of mail arrived from someone also exploring the Jefferson trail. The letter came from Paris, and the sender was Mary Jo Salter, a good friend who also happened to be one of America's most respected poets. She and her husband, the writer Brad Leithauser, were spending a sabbatical year in Paris, where Mary Jo was continuing to perform her duties as poetry editor of the New Republic and completing a volume of new poems. The longest poem in the collection, it turned out, would focus on the ubiquitous Mr. Jefferson. Although she explained that "98 percent of the facts and 92 percent of the interpretations historians can provide about Jefferson will never get into my poem at all," Mary Jo wondered if I might help with the history, explaining that it would be "a crime to get my substantive facts wrong if one can possibly avoid it."

For a poet of Mary Jo's stature and sensibility, Jefferson was certainly not a political choice, at least in the customary sense of the term. She had no ideological axes to grind, no patriotic hymns to sing. And it made no sense to think that propagandists and poets were plugged into the same cultural grid, which had its main power source buried beneath the mountains around Monticello. So I asked her: Why Jefferson?

That question provoked a spirited exchange of letters over several months. Part of Jefferson's poetic appeal, it turned out, was his lifelong concern with language. He had also been the subject of several distinguished poets of the past; Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Robert Penn Warren had taken him on. But mostly, Mary Joe explained, "poets are seized by images," and in Jefferson's case two specific incidents struck her as poetic occasions: The first was his death on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the acceptance of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress and the same day John Adams died; the second was another eerie coincidence--his purchase of a thermometer on July 4, 1776, and his recording a peak temperature of seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit that special day. These were "poignant and eminently visual events," she explained, that captured a poet's imagination. They were the kinds of historical facts that poets usually were required to invent. Whether it was a certain knack or sheer fate, Jefferson's life possessed the stuff of poetry.

The thirty-page poem that Mary Jo eventually produced, entitled "The Hand of Thomas Jefferson," was a meditation on the hand that wrote the Declaration of Independence, was broken in Paris during a romantic frolic with Maria Cosway, then crafted those elegiac last letters to Adams and finally reached across the ages to pull us toward him. When I asked what about Jefferson pulled her, Mary Jo said it was his "accessible mysteriousness," the fact that there appeared to be a seductive bundle of personae or selves inside Jefferson that did not talk to one another but could and did talk to us. This was a bit different from Peterson's "protean" Jefferson, which suggested a multidimensional Renaissance Man. Mary Jo's Jefferson was more like Postmodern Man, a series of disjointed identities that beckoned to our contemporary sense of incoherence and that could be made whole only in our imagination, the place where poets live.

I was not sure where that left historians, who were not, to be sure, obliged to disavow the use of their imaginations but were duty-bound to keep them on a tight tether tied to the available evidence. Watching Mary Jo work made me wonder whether Jefferson's enigmatic character might not require the imaginative leeway provided by fiction or poetry to leap across those interior gaps of silence for which he was so famous. Did that mean that any historian who took on Jefferson needed to apply for a poetic license? It was absolutely clear to me that the apparently bottomless and unconditional love for Jefferson at the grass roots level was virtually impervious to historical argument or evidence. It even seemed possible that the quest for the historical Jefferson, like the quest for the historical Jesus, was an inherently futile exercise. No less a source than Merrill Peterson, the best Jefferson biographer alive, seemed to endorse such doubts when he made what he called the "mortifying confession" that after over thirty years of work, "Jefferson remains for me, finally, an impenetrable man."

Anyone who paused too long to contemplate the wisdom of the quest was likely to be trampled by the crowds, who harbored no doubts. Upwards of six hundred thousand Jefferson lovers were attracted to a major exhibit on "The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello," which ran from April to December 1993. Susan Stein, Monticello's curator of art, had made a heroic effort to reassemble most of the furnishings that had been dispersed starting in 1827, when Jefferson's crushing debts forced his descendants to auction off the estate. The result was a faithful replication of what Monticello's interior spaces actually looked like during Jefferson's lifetime. If the rooms of the mansion were in any reliable sense an accurate reflection of his many-chambered personality, they suggested wildly extravagant clutter and a principle of selection guided only by a luxuriously idiosyncratic temperament: Houdon busts next to Indian headdresses, mahogany tables brimming over with multiple sets of porcelain and silver candlesticks, wall-to-wall portraits and prints and damask hangings and full-length gilt-framed mirrors.

Perhaps all our lives would look just as random and jumbled if our most precious material possessions, gathered over a lifetime, were reassembled in one place. By any measure, however, chockablock Monticello resembled a trophy case belonging to one of America's most self-indulgent and wildly eclectic collectors. How did one square this massive treasure trove of expensive collectibles with a life at least nominally committed to agrarian simplicity and Ciceronian austerity? The exhibit suggested that Jefferson lived in a crowded museum filled with the kinds of expensive objects one normally associates with a late-nineteenth-century Robber Baron whose exorbitant wealth permitted him to indulge all his acquisitive instincts. The one discernible reminder of Jefferson's preference for what he called "republican simplicity" was the most valued item in the exhibit: the portable writing desk on which he had composed the Declaration of Independence. It was on loan from the Smithsonian, where it had resided since 1880, and the only other time it had been permitted to travel was in 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt took it with him the day he dedicated the Jefferson Memorial. The Smithsonian recognized that the writing desk was a sacred relic of American history and insisted on posting a twenty-four-hour guard during the month it was on loan to Monticello. In part because of the sacred desk, the only private dwelling in America to attract more visitors than Monticello that year was Elvis Presley's Graceland.

The phenomenon deserved a name or title, so I began to call it the Jeffersonian Surge. Nothing like it had accompanied the 250th birthday of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or John Adams. Nor had Lincoln's 150th birthday generated anything like this popular outpouring. The Jeffersonian Surge was not a movement led or controlled by professional historians. Jefferson was part of the public domain with drawing power independent of his status in the academic world. The folks who ran publishing houses (seventeen new books with Jefferson's name in the title appeared in 1993), the producers and directors of films (Florentine Films was now in production, and James Ivory and Ismail Merchant had begun filming in Paris), as well as museum curators and foundation directors, all obviously regarded Jefferson as a sure thing. Compared with the belongings of all other historical figures, things Jeffersonian had a broad, deep and diverse market. It was as if one had attended a Fourth of July fireworks display and, instead of the usual rockets and sparklers, had born witness to the detonation of a modest-sized nuclear bomb.

Shock waves from the Surge had even been felt at the highest reaches of the national government. During the Democratic primary, in the spring of 1992, candidate Bill Clinton had been accused of sexual impropriety by one Gennifer Flowers, who claimed they had enjoyed a lurid affair during his days as governor of Arkansas. This story provoked a flurry of newspaper and television reports on the sexual adventures of past presidents, primarily John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. Several stories also mentioned Jefferson's alleged affair with Sally Hemings. In the fall, just before the presidential election, the Atlantic Monthly put Jefferson on its cover and featured an essay entitled "Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue."

The author of the essay was Douglas Wilson, a respected Jefferson scholar who had no previous record of dabbling in contemporary American politics. His main target was what he called presentism, the presumption that the past can be judged by the standards of the present. Wilson's main intent was to defend Jefferson's reputation from contamination by its association with Clinton's alleged womanizing. But the piece also cut in the other direction, toward the present, by pointing out that few scholars accepted the allegations of Jefferson's liaison with "Black Sal," thereby suggesting that slanderous assaults on their character were, and always had been, an integral part of public life that national figures had to expect and endure. In that sense Clinton could claim that, like Jefferson, he was just another victim of sensationalistic rumormongering. After Clinton won the election, word was leaked by his staff that the president-elect was reading a big new biography of Jefferson by Willard Sterne Randall, which also took a dim view of the whole Sally Hemings business. As if this were not enough to seal the bond between Clinton and Jefferson, Clinton made a point of taking a televised tour of the mansion and then retracing Jefferson's steps from Monticello to Washington just prior to his own inauguration.

IN THE ACADEMIC WORLD the winds were gusting in a different direction. Not that scholars had ignored Jefferson or consigned him to some second tier of historical significance. The number of scholarly books and articles focusing on Jefferson or some aspect of his long life continued to grow at a geometric rate; two full volumes were required merely to list all the Jefferson scholarship, much of it coming in the last quarter century. The central scholarly project, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, continued to emerge from Princeton University Press at the stately pace of one volume every two years or so (twenty-five volumes had appeared by 1993), though at the current rate no adult was likely to be alive when the editors ushered Jefferson off to the hereafter.

The problem, then, was not lack of interest so much as lack of consensus about what the man stood for and what his career had accomplished. The love affair that continued to flourish in the public domain had encountered some rough patches in the academic world; indeed, in some scholarly precincts it had turned quite sour. Once the symbol of all that was right with America, Jefferson had become the touchstone for much that was wrong.

You could look back and, with the advantage of hindsight, locate the moment when the tide began to turn in the 1960s. In 1963 Leonard Levy published Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, which, as its title announced, found Jefferson's record as a liberal defender of minority rights less than inspiring and his rhetoric about freedom of speech and freedom of the press often at odds with his actions. But an even bigger blow fell in 1968 with the publication of Winthrop Jordan's White over Black, a magisterial reappraisal of race relations in early America featuring a long section on Jefferson. While hardly a heavy-handed indictment of Jefferson, Jordan's book argued that racism had infiltrated the American soul very early in our history and that Jefferson provided the most resonant illustration of the way deep-seated racist values were buried within the folds of the white man's personality.

Jordan adopted an agnostic attitude toward the allegations of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings but, while not endorsing the Sally stories, depicted a Jefferson whose deepest feelings toward blacks had their origins in primal urges that, like the sex drive, came from deep within his subconscious. Many other scholarly books soon took up related themes, but White over Black set the terms of the debate about the centrality of race and slavery in any appraisal of Jefferson. Once that became a chief measure of Jefferson's character, his stock was fated to fall in the scholarly world.

Another symptom of imminent decline--again, all this in retrospect--was an essay in 1970 by Eric McKitrick reviewing the recent biographies of Jefferson by Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson. McKitrick had the temerity to ask whether it might not be time to declare a moratorium on the celebratory approach toward Jefferson. McKitrick asked: "What about those traits of character that aren't heroic from any angle?"--traits that went beyond the obvious complicity with slavery. What about his very un-Churchillian performance as governor of Virginia during the American Revolution, when he failed to mobilize the militia and had to flee Monticello on horseback ahead of the marauding British Army? What about the fiasco of his American Embargo of 1807, when he clung to the illusion that economic sanctions would keep us out of war even after it was abundantly clear that they only devastated the American economy?

From the perspective at Charlottesville, these were impertinent, if not downright hostile, questions. Dumas Malone, the quintessential grand old man of Jefferson scholarship, had toiled for most of his long life, much of that time on the campus at the University of Virginia, to create his authoritative six-volume biography Jefferson and His Time, one of the great labors of love in American scholarship. Merrill Peterson's scholarly renderings of Jefferson were only slightly less heroic. Now McKitrick was saying that the insights available from the Charlottesville perspective, what he called "the view from Jefferson's camp," had just about exhausted their explanatory power.

Rather amazingly it was in Charlottesville that the scholarly reappraisal of Jefferson that McKitrick had called for reached a crescendo. It happened in October 1992, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation convened a conference under the apparently reverential rubric "Jeffersonian Legacies." The result was a spirited exchange--one reporter called it "an intellectual free-for-all"--that went on for six days. The conference spawned a collection of fifteen essays published in record time by the University Press of Virginia, an hourlong videotape of the proceedings shown on public television and a series of newspaper stories in the Richmond papers and the Washington Post. Advertised as the scholarly version of a birthday party (Jefferson's 250th was coming up in April), the conference assumed the character of a public trial, with Jefferson cast in the role of defendant.

The chief argument for the prosecution came from Paul Finkelman, a historian then teaching at Virginia Tech, and the chief charge was hypocrisy. "Because he was the author of the Declaration of Independence," said Finkelman, "the test of Jefferson's position on slavery is not whether he was better than the worst of his generation, but whether he was the leader of the best." The answer had the clear ring of an indictment: "Jefferson fails the test." According to Finkelman, Jefferson was an out-and-out racist who rejected even the possibility that blacks and whites could ever live together on an equal basis. Moreover, his several attempts to end the slave trade or restrict the expansion of slavery beyond the South were halfhearted, as was his contemplation of a program of gradual emancipation. His beloved Monticello and personal extravagances were possible only because of slave labor. Finkelman thought it was misguided--worse, it was positively sickening--to celebrate Jefferson as the father of freedom.

If Finkelman was the chief prosecutor, the star witness for the prosecution was Robert Cooley, a middle-aged black man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Cooley stood up in the audience during a question-and-answer session to offer himself as "living proof" that the story of Jefferson's liaison with Sally Hemings was true. No matter what the scholarly experts had concluded, there were several generations of African-Americans living in Ohio and Illinois who knew they had Jefferson's blood in their veins. Scholars could talk till doomsday about the absence of hard evidence or documentation. But the evidence did not exist for a good reason. "We couldn't write back then," Cooley explained. "We were slaves." And Jefferson's white children had probably destroyed all written records of the relationship soon after his death. Cooley essentially pitted the oral tradition of the black community against the written tradition of the scholarly world. His version of history might not have had the hard evidence on its side, but it clearly had the political leverage. When he sat down, the applause from the audience rang throughout the auditorium. The Washington Post reporter covering the conference caught the mood: "Jefferson's defenders are on the defensive. What tough times these are for icons."

Actually, neither Finkelman's sledgehammer blows nor Cooley's dramatic personal testimony were accurate reflections of the conference as a whole, though press accounts tended to focus on these presentations because they were the most colorful and controversial occasions. A more balanced assessment of the current state of Jeffersonian scholarship came from Peter Onuf, the successor to Merrill Peterson as Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia and the chief organizer of the Charlottesville conference. In an article entitled "The Scholars' Jefferson" published in the October 1993 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading scholarly journal in the field, Onuf suggested that Jefferson's stock was definitely going down but that only a few historians were willing to follow Finkelman all the way and transform Jefferson from the ultimate American hero to the ultimate American villain. Scholars were not quite ready to raze the Jefferson Memorial or chip his face off Mount Rushmore. On the other hand, the mindless devotion to the mythical Jefferson that still dominated the popular culture clearly drove serious students of Jefferson to the edge of sanity. And the filio-pietistic tradition represented by Malone and Peterson was certainly dead in the scholarly world.

Onuf suggested two sensible ways to understand the somewhat problematic character of the current scholarly situation. First, the democratic revolution that Jefferson had helped launch in America had now expanded to include forms of human equality--especially racial and sexual equality--that Jefferson could never have countenanced or even imagined. He was, for that reason, a large and obvious target for those ideologically inspired historians and political pundits who went charging back into the American past in search of monstrous examples of racism, sexism and patriarchy to slay, then drag back into the present as trophies emblematic of how bad it was back then. And he was the perfect target for such raiding parties precisely because so many ordinary Americans had so much invested in him. He was a contested prize in the ongoing culture wars. If history was any kind of reliable guide, the more wild-eyed critics were unlikely to win the war, but the growing emphasis on Jefferson as a slave-owning white racist had the potential to erode his heroic reputation, as the critical judgment of scholars seeped into popular culture. The scholarship on Jefferson, then, was probably a preview of coming attractions in the broader public world.

Second, Onuf suggested that the fascination with Jefferson's vaunted psychological complexity was gradually giving way to frustration. The famous paradoxes that so intrigued poets and devotees of "protean Jefferson" were beginning to look more like outright contradictions. Onuf described the emerging scholarly portrait of Jefferson as "a monster of self-deception," a man whose felicitous style was a bit too felicitous, dressing up platitudes as pieces of political wisdom that, as Onuf put it, "now circulate as the debased coin of our democratic culture." The multiple personalities of Jefferson were looking less like different facets of a Renaissance man and more like the artful disguises of a confidence man.

The final word came from Gordon Wood, generally regarded as the leading historian of the revolutionary era, who was asked to review the published collection of essays that came out of the Charlottesville conference. Wood argued that the core of the Jefferson problem was not his inevitable flaws but our unrealistic expectations. "We Americans make a great mistake in idolizing ... and making symbols of authentic figures," Wood warned, "who cannot and should not be ripped out of their time and place." No real-life historical figure could ever prove a satisfactory hero because his human weaknesses would always undercut his saintly status. "By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendent moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be," Wood wrote, "we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this eighteenth-century slaveholder."

It seemed to me that Wood's point was true enough; in fact, just the kind of sober assessment of the Jefferson problem one wanted to hear amid all the shrill pronouncements. But it also seemed abundantly clear that it would make absolutely no practical difference. Yes, perhaps we all would be better served if Americans were allowed to select their heroes (and villains) only from fictional characters, who would therefore never disappoint us. But we won't and can't. We would be even better served if we discarded our need for heroes altogether. But no people in recorded history have ever been able to do that, and there was no reason to believe that modern Americans would prove an exception. Moreover, the scholarly instinct to establish a secure checkpoint between the past and the present in order to prevent the flow of traffic back and forth, while it had the advantage of deterring those ideologically motivated raiding parties that wanted to go back to capture heroes and villains to suit their own political agenda, also had the disadvantage of making history an irrelevant, cloistered, indeed dead place, populated only by historians.

The Jefferson genie had long since escaped from the historical bottle anyway. There was no putting him back. Evidence of Jefferson's natural tendency to surge out of the past and into the present kept popping up in the press even as the 250th anniversary celebrations died down. The New York Times reported a special mock-trial session organized by the New York City Bar Association, presided over by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, designed to try Jefferson on three charges: that he subverted the independence of the federal judiciary, that he lived in the lavish manner of Louis XIV (the Monticello exhibit), and that he frequently violated the Bill of Rights. Though the prosecution possessed a hefty load of evidence for conviction, Jefferson was found not guilty on all charges; the lawyers for both sides toasted his name.

Meanwhile, down in northern Virginia the Washington Post reported a new development in the escalating protest against the plan to locate a new Walt Disney theme park in the historic region around several Civil War battlegrounds. A wealthy Iranian real estate owner named Bahman Batmaughelidj had gone over to the opposition. Called Batman in the press, he turned out to be the same Iranian philanthropist I had met that night in Worcester. He had learned that the Walt Disney Corporation was the producer and main distributor of the Merchant and Ivory film Jefferson in Paris, which endorsed the story of Jefferson's sexual liaison with Sally Hemings. He had now decided to throw his considerable weight against the Disney theme park scheme because of Disney's complicity in the reinvigoration of the Sally scandal. "Americans don't realize," Batmaughelidj warned, "how profoundly Jefferson and his ideas live on in the hopes and dreams of people in other countries. This movie will undercut all that. People all around the world will view it as the defining truth about Jefferson. And of course it is a lie."

WELL, THE TRULY defining truth about the Sally Hemings story is that we will never know. Barring an exhumation of Jefferson's remains and a DNA comparison with Hemings's descendants, a procedure that might well be scientifically unfeasible, the available evidence on each side of the controversy is just sufficient to sustain the debate but wholly insufficient to resolve it one way or the other. Anyone who claims to have a clear answer to this most titillating question about the historical Jefferson is engaging in massive self-deception or outright lying. This is one mystery destined to remain unsolved.

But it seemed to me that there were many others, several with even greater potential to affect our contemporary connection with the magic that emanates from the sphinxlike Jefferson, that do have discernible answers. At some point in our history the Jefferson mythology had broken free of any connection with the historical Jefferson. Even serious-minded commentators were making pronouncements about the Jeffersonian legacy and its meaning for our time, both pro and con, which they felt no obligation whatsoever to relate back to the once-living American revolutionary. The correct version of Jefferson was that which best accorded with one's present-day political needs, implying that the evidence from the past was either irrelevant or so infinitely malleable to be shaped however one wished. This kind of thinking represents an even more insidious version of the effort to sever any link between past and present, this time by denying that history has any integrity, or even any existence at all, apart from serving as a convenient general store for our ever-shifting national needs. This is presentism with a vengeance, the mirror image of the misguided scholarly tendency to declare the past off-limits to nonscholars, which in contrast might be called "pastism."

Somewhere between presentism and pastism, it was now clear to me, lay the only sensible road to the historical Jefferson. The opportunity to observe the excesses and intellectual pyrotechnics associated with Jefferson's 250th birthday, to experience directly the energy released in the Jeffersonian Surge, was excellent training for the trek back to the past. One could embark on the venture with a much keener sense of how much was at stake, of how silly and naive it would be to presume that Jefferson would stay put like most historical subjects, of how fully he embodies our will to believe, of how much we need to build bridges over the expanding gap between the scholars' Jefferson and the Jefferson of popular culture.

Exposure to the Surge also provided excellent conditioning in another sense. It reinforced my resolve to insist that there really was a living, breathing person who walked the earth between 1743 and 1826 and was more than the figment of posterity's imagination. He did not realize, until late in his life, that he was destined to become an American demigod, just as he did not realize, again until late in his life, that the political legacy most closely associated with his name would be called democracy. Unlike Washington, he was never a legend in his own time, always a controversial figure who combined great depth with great shallowness, massive learning with extraordinary naivete, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception. His flaws, in other words, should be just as interesting to us as his strengths, and the way they interacted with one another over time, as he, like all of us, managed his way through life, not his inexorable growth toward greatness, should be the essence of his story. The Jefferson Memorial is enduringly situated on the Tidal Basin, the mansion at Monticello is impeccably restored, and the face on Mount Rushmore is forever. The Jefferson image is safely enshrined in the national memory. Nothing that we learn about the human flaws of the historical Jefferson can put the icon at risk. It is safe to get to know him as he really was.

Copyright © 1996 Joseph J. Ellis. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-44490-4