The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790. Thomas Jefferson
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his best in cool contemplation. He had his finest ideas and achieved his finest expression of them in the crucible of controversy. His mind worked best when he had to respond to crisis or rise to a rhetorical occasion. He was in his element looking to the future, ill at ease looking to the past.
Alas.
We have his words, wrought in the heat of battle, and we steer by them still. But we have nothing, here, to elaborate or explicate them. We have no hint, in this autobiography, how he came by the convictions they enunciate so eloquently.
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” How did Jefferson arrive at such a sublime acceptance of other religions and of irreligion? “You must . . . neither believe nor reject anything because other persons . . . have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by heaven.” How did he set aside the faith of his fathers and friends and put his trust solely in his own reason? How did he get clear of the established church of Virginia and of Protestant Christianity more broadly? How did he substitute a “wall of separation” between church and state for the government-mandated religion on which he grew up?
This memoir opened a clear, wide window on the war that Jefferson and his allies waged to win Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom. It gave posterity a richly revelatory account of that bitter struggle, which certainly lasted longer and was perhaps more acrimonious even than the Revolution itself. But in it Jefferson betrayed nothing of the seeds of his own command of that war. He imputed motives to others who fought on one side or another, about which he could have only guessed. He said not a word about the evolution of his own religious views, about which he was the ultimate and almost the only authority.
By contrast, Franklin marked telling milestones on the march of his religious thinking throughout his autobiography. He did not tremble to describe the depth of his detachment from the conventional beliefs and practice of his parents and of their Puritan neighbors in Boston. He confessed the heterodoxy and the blasphemousness of his early ideas and the cynicism and faithlessness of his later professions of outward propriety. We meet the man in Franklin, merely the politician in Jefferson.
If Franklin exceeded Jefferson in the radicalism of his religiosity—in his youthful denial of the distinction between good and evil and in his lifelong flirtation with notions of polytheism and reincarnation—Jefferson exceeded Franklin in the depth of his antipathy to authority. “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” he wrote to one friend. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” he told another. “A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” he assured a third.
These were mighty words even if they were only words. But in fact they were much more. They informed Jefferson’s actions. His was a career of courage in opposing the highest powers in the land. He assailed King George III in the Declaration. He opposed George Washington in launching the Democratic-Republican Party. He alienated his fellow planters in instigating disestablishment and instituting a regime of sweeping religious liberty. He repudiated the law of the new nation in promoting the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Indeed, he set himself against cultural tradition itself. “The earth belongs to the living,” he insisted, and any deference of present to past was an illegitimate concession of governance to ancestors in their graves.
Where did that seething antipathy to power come from? Franklin wrote openly of his early conflicts with his father and with the constituted authorities of Boston. Jefferson wrote not at all of his relationship with his father, or of his feelings on losing his father when still just fourteen, or of his experience with his appointed guardian through the rest of his minority.
Americans may be as instinctively anti-authoritarian as any people on the planet. Jefferson was the most searing, soaring, searching voice of that animus against authority that we have ever had. How did he achieve that voice, at once so passionate and so measured? How did he keep his heart in such exquisite equipoise with his head? How did he arrive at such audacity and such assurance, to give utterance to our deepest dreams? Could there be questions more interesting to American readers? And could there be an autobiography more obtuse than this one to those questions? Jefferson did not even seem to suspect that his audience might be interested in asking them. He showed no slightest interest of his own in addressing them.
It is inconceivable that Jefferson was so unconcerned with what moved men. He was, after all, the greatest politician in our history. He could not have been the builder of our most consummately triumphant party organization if he had ignored what men wanted. He could not have been our president most masterful in handling Congress if he had been heedless of why they wanted what they wanted.
But he did not write as he ruled. In his recollections he displayed a disingenuous indifference to men’s inner drives. He neither acknowledged nor explored his own, and he did not often impute any to those around him. Instead, he indulged in a bloodless democratic fantasy. At almost every decisive juncture, he explained developments by a disembodied movement of “the mind” of “the times.”
In 1773, when a cadre of rebellious young Burgesses led by Jefferson and Patrick Henry pushed to organize inter-colonial committees of correspondence, the “old and leading members” of the assembly were not “up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required.” In 1775, when independence was at hand, the deputies who hesitated were “not yet up to the mark of the times.”
Jefferson’s delusory democracy posited a unified “people” and an evolutionary ripening of “the public mind.” It did not matter to him, in his memoirs, that Virginia had in fact harbored large numbers of loyalists and multitudes who did their damnedest to remain neutral. On the day appointed for election of delegates to the first Continental Congress, “the people met generally, with anxiety and alarm in their countenances, and the effect of the day through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man and placing him erect and solidly on his center.”
It did not matter to him that many elected representatives in the second Congress held back from declaring independence, on the instructions of the voters who sent them. The will of “the people” could run contrary to the instructions they had voted. “The voice of the representatives” was “not always consonant with the voice of the people.”
It did not even matter to him that overt opposition was rampant, or that he had no idea what he was talking about. At the call for a constitutional convention in 1787, “the people . . . agreed with one voice” to attempt a new compact to remedy the “incompetence” of the Articles of Confederation. This was sheerest nonsense. Popular opinion on the work of the Philadelphia convention was wildly divided. A majority of voters actually voted against the Constitution when it was submitted to them for ratification. And in any case Jefferson was not there to take the temperature of the electorate. He was an ocean away, in France, at the time. His account of the campaign for the new Constitution had nothing to do with reality but much to do with the cast of his mind. It expressed his impassioned yearning for an undifferentiated “people” devoted to the common good.
And yet he knew better. The people he idealized might unite now and then, for the public weal, but that was not their natural bent. “The pressure of an external enemy” had “hooped us together” in the war for independence, but once the war was over and “peace and safety were restored,” such virtuous citizenship ceased. “Every man” looked to his own “profitable occupation.” Jefferson was painfully aware that self-interest was the default position in American life.
He strained mightily against that awareness. He let his hopes get the best of his fears. He gave in to wishful thinking. In his first inaugural address, he proclaimed America “the strongest government on earth,” despite the fact that its army was a pathetic thing and its navy nearly nonexistent. It was strong, he said, because “every man” would “fly” to defend that government if it called. (A few years later, when he called on his countrymen to uphold his embargo on commerce with Britain, he discovered the fatuousness of that faith.)
He exercised his imagination in fanciful