Thomas Jefferson's Birthday

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson – Joseph J. Ellis

Writing for the popular audience, Joseph J. Ellis presents information in longish essays. This book features five monographs that focus on Jefferson in his different roles: continental congressman, minister to France, political consultant based at Monticello in the mid-1790s, first-term as president, and finally a retired guy in the evening of his life.  Not a Jefferson partisan, Ellis examines the Jeffersonian cast of mind and character and has tough things to say. Sally Hemings was out of the scope of this book.

Studying Jefferson in his own time, in his own context, we see that he really was an ideologue. That is he was a believer in “an organized collection of seductive hopes and wishes, a systematic way of going wrong with confidence,” to quote John Adams. Jefferson bemused Adams for thinking that just because he (Jefferson) could imagine ideals he could make those ideals existent in the real world.

From his young adulthood, Jefferson had a deep-rooted hostility to concentrations of political power. In the Declaration of Independence, he criticized the King and monarchy. Later, he castigated Hamilton and the Federalists for conspiring to build “tyrannical” federal power. In our present political culture, the deep suspicion of central power especially from faraway places comes right from Jefferson’s visceral distrust.

However, Jefferson’s high Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals did not extend to what we moderns understand as democracy. He believed in property qualifications to vote and he thought ordinary people should not hold national office. Ellis asserts that Jefferson was a founder of not democracy, but American liberalism in the sense of an 18^th century liberal’s belief in individual freedom, unimpeded by government.

Ellis also emphasizes the fact that Jefferson had an amazing way of framing ideas. He was not a democrat but he discovered the kind of rhetoric that would work in a democratic society. Before the revolution, writing was targeted to a narrow audience of the educated elite, but taking a page from Tom Paine, Jefferson discovered the elements of rhetoric that would appeal to The People. It had to be simple. For instance, issues of colonial dependence and independence were complex but in the Declaration Jefferson he cast the debate in either/or terms, between enslavement to British tyranny or freedom. Jefferson also found that language had to be ambiguous and allusive, meaning anything to any reader. For example, extremists on the left and right can warm their hands with the fire of “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ...” Ellis calls Jefferson our master of illusion, a master of our will to believe, because of his elusive use of evaporative language.

The problem with this book is the Ellis generally leaves alone Jefferson as tough politician and canny administrator. Jefferson, I think, for all his high-minded ideology and lofty ideals, had few illusions about how the world worked. He made serious contributions as secretary of state, as behind the scenes political consultant and boss man, and as president leading up to the War of 1812. Jefferson had to balance his principles (limited federal power) with real world goals (acquire territory, remove foreign presence, etc.) in order to accomplish big things like the Louisiana Purchase.