American Sphinx (43 page)

While Jefferson had never been oblivious to the matter of posterity’s judgment, in about 1816 his interest in what history would say about him intensified. The obvious reason for this discernible shift was age. Whatever revisions or additions he might wish to make for the historical record could not wait much longer because his time was running out. The correspondence with Adams, by forcing him into a dialogue with a lovable antagonist, probably also prompted his retrospective tendencies. In 1816, moreover, he was drawn into the debate about William Wirt’s highly successful biography of Patrick Henry. Wirt had consulted Jefferson about the sources of Henry’s histrionic style. “You have given them quite as much lustre as themselves would have asked,” Jefferson apprised Wirt, thereby expressing in diplomatic fashion his long-standing opinion that Henry was vastly overrated. Jefferson suggested only one revision, a passage in which Wirt described Henry actually reading a book. “The study and learning ascribed to him, in this passage,” Jefferson so delicately observed, would be inconsistent with “the excellent and just picture of his indolence through the rest of the work.” In partial compensation for the obvious fact that he despised Henry, Jefferson allowed himself to be quoted in the published book to the effect that Henry deserved credit for fomenting opposition to British policies in the 1760s, saying that “Mr. Henry certainly gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution.”
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This apparently harmless remark produced a loud howl from several New Englanders, including the ever-ready Adams, who interpreted the celebration of Henry’s early efforts in behalf of American independence as a sly plot to make Virginia rather than Massachusetts the real cockpit of the Revolution. Jefferson expressed his surprise at the vehemence of the New England retaliation. He was the last man to champion Henry as a significant figure, and the whole argument about who was first was silly, like asking “who discovered gravity.” But the debate dragged on—Adams was inspired to put forward James Otis of Massachusetts as Henry’s predecessor in the contest for primacy as “the first American revolutionary”—until Jefferson issued a concession. He had “never meant to intercept the just fame of Massachusetts, for the promptitude and persevereance of her early resistance.” He was even willing to cede her the title as “the cradle of independence,” though he felt obliged to add that with regard to principles of the Revolution, “some of us believe that she had deflected from them in her course,” even as “we retain full confidence in her ultimate return to them.”
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Jefferson preferred to avoid such trivial arguments about specific events or personalities, except when the contested topic was the Declaration of Independence; there he was ready to defend his own version against all encroachments, sensing that it was the historical equivalent of the motherlode. His major concern was the larger outline of the story that would get passed down to posterity about the meaning of the American Revolution. Madison’s retirement from the presidency in 1817 raised expectations that his old partner in the political wars would devote his energies to writing a Jeffersonian version of American history. He urged Madison to “apply your retirement to the best use possible, to a work which we have both wished to see well done. . . .” He promised to place all his personal letters and notes “entirely at your command.” As in the party battles of the 1790s, Jefferson wanted Madison to take the point; it was essential to his own stature, as well as a temperamental imperative, that Jefferson himself remain behind the scenes and above the fray. But this time Madison pleaded declining health and sheer fatigue and turned down the invitation.
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As Jefferson saw it, this left the field almost entirely in the hands of the enemy. Hamilton’s son, it was well known, was already writing a biography of his father, which would, Jefferson warned, surely promote “the rancor of the fiercest federalism.” Then there was that treasure trove of un-Jeffersonian wisdom stockpiled at Quincy. “Mr. Adams’ papers,” Jefferson noted ominously, “and his biography, will descend of course to his son [John Quincy Adams], whose pen . . . is pointed, and his prejudices not in our favor.” All the old moral dichotomies took command of Jefferson’s imagination again: the Whigs versus the Tories; the Republicans versus the Federalists; “pure republicanism” versus corrupted impostors. Having won all the major battles during their lifetimes, Jefferson feared that he and his political disciples were about to lose the decisive war for posterity after they were dead.
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In fact the chief traitor had already struck and littered the historical record with lies that, again as Jefferson saw it, falsified the true story of the American Revolution beyond recognition. The culprit was none other than Jefferson’s chief tormentor, the ever-resourceful John Marshall, who had somehow found time while serving as chief justice to publish between 1804 and 1807 a five-volume biography of George Washington. Adams, who might have been expected to find Marshall’s Federalist interpretation to his liking, instead described the mammoth work as “a Mausoleum, 100 feet square at the base and 200 feet high,” and predicted that it would prove “as durable as the Washington benevolent Societies”; in other words, it would sink from its own weight and ponderous prose. But Jefferson was just as certain that Marshall’s biography, which was based on Washington’s actual correspondence and benefited from Marshall’s reputation for thoroughness and probity, would establish itself as the closest thing to an official history of the era. Marshall’s narrative followed a story line that Jefferson considered an artful lie. The most offensive fifth volume offered this summary statement:

[T]he continent was divided into two great political parties, the one of which contemplated America as a nation, and laboured incessantly to invest the federal head with powers competent to its preservation of the union. The other attached itself to the state authorities, viewed all the powers of congress with jealousy, and assented reluctantly to measures which would enable the head to act, in any respect, independently of the members. Men of enlarged and liberal minds . . . arranged themselves generally in the first party.

Marshall was arguing a constitutional interpretation that depicted the political coalitions of the 1790s as products of the conflicting perceptions of the constitutional settlement of 1787–88. For Jefferson, on the other hand, the core differences were more ideological than constitutional, the seminal decades were the 1770s, when the true faith was declared, and the 1790s, when it was betrayed. As he put it, the real difference was not federal versus state authority, but “different degrees of inclination to monarchy or republicanism.”
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Given Madison’s understandable reluctance to devote his retirement years to the task of countering Marshall’s history, Jefferson was thrown back upon his own devices. In 1818 he decided to edit and have bound together for posthumous publication three volumes of private letters, notes and memoranda from his years as secretary of state, thereby creating an archival trail designed to lure subsequent historians away from the false path blazed by Marshall. The modern editors of Jefferson’s papers suggest that we call these documents “Jeffersoniana” instead of the term used by earlier editors, the “Anas,” which is Latin for a collection of anecdotes, table talk and gossip. Whatever we call them, Jefferson’s edited notes, made, as he recalled in 1818, on “loose scraps of paper, taken out of my pocket in the moment and . . . therefore ragged, rubbed, and scribbled as they were,” were intended to have the look and sound of the
real
history; these were the secret stories and covert conversations that occurred in corridors and behind closed doors, where the
real
decisions were made, the
real
arguments were hammered out, the
real
power was exercised. Jefferson’s clear purpose was to suggest that Marshall’s account of the Washington administration was only the official version; it never got beneath the polite surface to the messier truths. Jefferson was planting in the record his own handmade explosive device, designed to go off after he was dead and expose the Marshall history as a Federalist fable. His “Anas” or “Jeffersoniana” might be construed, then, as our early American version of such twentieth-century revelations as
The Pentagon Papers
.
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Jefferson’s story, which he wanted posterity to know as his final testament of the true history of revolutionary America, took the form of a melodramatic plot populated by schemers, conspirators and corrupt connivers, all driven by a dedication to intrigue. He cast himself in the role of the American innocent, recently returned from his long absence in France, who discovers upon his arrival in New York City in 1790 that the republican principles he has been cherishing so faithfully have in fact been abandoned by a majority of the officials in the Washington administration. At almost all the dinner parties he attended soon after his arrival, the conversation turned toward the subject of monarchy, how its restoration offered the only hope for political stability and how Washington needed to be persuaded to accept the royal mantle. When Jefferson tried to make the case for a kingless version of republican government along the lines intended in 1776, he claimed he could “scarcely find . . . a single co-advocate . . . unless some old member of Congress happened to be present.” The old “band of brothers” had been replaced by a gang of closet royalists. Hamilton was the archmonarchist, indeed “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” Even Adams, the old warhorse of ’76, had been “taken up by the monarchical federalists,” who played on his notorious vanity and political ambition to make him a “stalking horse” for the Hamiltonians. The evidence for all this consisted of multiple anecdotes, hearsay reports of private conversations and reliable gossip about what one cabinet member claimed to have heard Hamilton or his cronies whispering to each other over port and cigars.
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It was crucial for Jefferson’s conspiratorial version of history to claim that Washington himself was oblivious to the plot. This was not easy to do, since Washington was the unquestioned leader of the Federalists and the alleged candidate for coronation by all the other members of the cabinet. Jefferson’s solution was to suggest that Washington was unaware of much that was going on around him. His image of Washington had never been all reverence and flattery. “His mind was great and powerful,” Jefferson observed, “without being of the very first order”; his conversational talents “were not above mediocrity,” and in many public situations, “when called for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed.” He was, in effect, more a man of action than deep understanding; that made him susceptible to clever and crafty intriguers like Hamilton. Jefferson also devoted a substantial portion of his secret history to providing an account of his many private meetings with Washington, in all of which the latter showed himself to be in complete agreement with Jefferson about the need to establish “pure republicanism.” Even those infamous presidential levees, where Washington supposedly held court like an American king, were misleading. Washington’s private secretary had told the attorney general, who had told Madison, who then told Jefferson, that Washington despised the royal trappings of these occasions. No matter what Marshall’s official and officious biography said, Washington’s deepest sentiments agreed completely with Jefferson’s. It was a rather extraordinary revelation and a stunning piece of revisionist history, but the elemental truth about America’s most elemental hero was that he subscribed wholeheartedly to the Republican rather than Federalist persuasion.
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Although this attempt to capture Washington from the Federalists, indeed to make Washington a Jeffersonian, was—to put it most politely—a highly problematic version of American political history, Jefferson was absolutely correct to recognize that, in the history wars as in the political wars of the 1790s, whoever had Washington on their side possessed a decisive advantage. Unfortunately for Jefferson’s purposes, the early editor of his papers never published the documents he had edited in 1818 in the format he had intended. As a political bombshell designed to detonate after he was gone, the “Anas” or “Jeffersoniana” proved to be a dud. Historians have not been sure how to categorize it, what to say about it, even what to call it. The best of the most recent scholarly appraisals sees it as a graphic example of the way “political gossip” shaped the ideological alignments in the early republic, also as another illustration of how the unprecedented and still-fragile character of political institutions in the 1790s generated a conspiratorial mentality on all sides, indeed a level of mutual suspicion and intrigue that looks utterly paranoid to us, at least until we recognize how uncertain and unstable the political world of postrevolutionary America looked to them.
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For our purposes, however, Jefferson’s retrospective on the old party battles for the soul of the American Revolution reveals more about how his mind worked than about the battles themselves. Even in his old age, when one might have expected nostalgia and the misty accumulations of sentiment between then and now to have produced a certain mellowing tendency, he remained a dedicated political warrior. Even with Adams urging him in his irresistibly unbridled way to give up the simple moral categories of “us” versus “them,” he clung to those categories more tenaciously than ever. The primal colors of his political imagination remained black and white. The story of the American Revolution that he saw in his head remained, as it had been in 1776, a moralistic melodrama. Whatever final adjustments or accommodations he might be tempted to make as concessions to history’s bedeviling complexity would have to occur within that nonnegotiable moral framework.

There were, in fact, several such adjustments, all the product of the increasingly retrospective character of his writing in the last decade. In 1821 he spent six months working on his autobiography, carrying the story from his birth up to 1790, where the secret history he had compiled from his notes would presumably take over the narrative. (He chose not to write anything at all about his presidency.) The autobiography was devoted to retelling two familiar stories in the way he wanted them remembered. The first was about the drafting and subsequent debate in the Continental Congress over the Declaration of Independence. He not only wanted to clarify for all time his authorship of the seminal document but also to reproduce his original draft, before it was edited by the Congress. In effect, he delivered in his autobiography the defense of his original language that his congenital shyness had prevented him from delivering on the floor of the Congress at the time. He also made a point of insisting, against the testimony and memory of everyone else, that all the delegates actually signed the Declaration on July 4. It was obviously important to him to certify the historical accuracy of the date subsequently celebrated as the nation’s birthday.
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