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 18th 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.
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