American Sphinx (44 page)

The second story was about the coming of the French Revolution. Here his chief purpose was to counter the charge, which his Federalist critics had made into a familiar refrain, that he had contributed to the radical utopianism of those French philosophes who led France into a bloodbath, or at least had drifted toward disaster with them in the dreamy days before the guillotine. His version of the crucial months emphasized the responsible character of the moderate French aristocrats led by Lafayette. The French Revolution would have been a bloodless and wholly peaceful transition, Jefferson argued, but for the cowardice and indecision of Louis Capet. And the king’s failure to side with the future rather than the past was, he claimed, largely the result of his wife’s influence over him. “I have ever believed,” Jefferson wrote, “that had there been no queen, there would have been no revolution.” The entire tragedy was due not to long-standing historical forces that proved unmanageable but to the ill-timed meddling of one woman.
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Beyond the boundaries of his autobiography, mostly in his extensive and increasingly burdensome correspondence, he attempted to make three significant modifications in the way he wished to be remembered. The first represented a revision of his much-quoted tribute to the agrarian life initially published in his
Notes on Virginia.
He wanted it known, and gave permission to be quoted on the matter in the newspapers, that the world had changed dramatically since he wrote
Notes,
when he had urged Americans to till the land and shun any and all forms of manufacturing. “We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist,” he acknowledged, endorsing a commitment to small-scale domestic manufacturing or home industry. Anyone who opposed this modest shift in America’s economy was out of touch with reality and “must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation [England], or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns.”
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On the other hand—he did not want to be misunderstood on this point—America should remain a predominantly agricultural economy and society. Domestic manufacturing was permissible, but large factories should be resisted. Most important, the English model of a thoroughly commercial and industrial society in which the economy was dominated by merchants, bankers and industrialists should be avoided at all costs. “We may exclude them from our territory,” he warned, “as we do persons afflicted with disease,” going so far as to recommend that if one region of the United States should ever become thoroughly commercialized, the remaining agrarian region should secede in order to remain immune to the attendant corruptions. He conceded that his insistence on an agrarian character “may be the dreams of an old man, or that the occasions of realizing them may have passed away without return.” But the goal of all statesmen dedicated to the values he cherished most should be to preserve as much of the agrarian character of America as possible. If that turned out to mean merely delaying the inevitable, so be it.
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A second significant clarification concerned his religious convictions. The Federalist press and New England clergy had been particularly vicious on this score during his presidency, citing his friendship with Tom Paine and his historic stand against any connection between church and state as evidence that he was probably an atheist and certainly not a Christian. In 1816 he announced the completion of what he called “a wee-book,” which was really an outline for a book entitled
The Morals and Life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The culmination of a similar project begun in 1802, when the attacks on his religious beliefs had begun in earnest, Jefferson intended his sketch of Jesus as moral exemplar to be “a document in proof that
I am a real Christian,
that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. . . .” What he really meant was that he admired the moral values embodied in the life of Jesus but preferred to separate “what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried” much in the way “as the diamond from the dunghill.” Primitive Christianity, in his view, was similar to the original meaning of the American Revolution: a profoundly simple faith subsequently corrupted by its institutionalization. In the case of the Christian denominations, “the metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded it with absurdities and incomprehensibilities” that it was almost impossible to recover “its native simplicity and purity.” He was particularly harsh on Yale, Harvard and Andover as “seminaries of despotism.” If he had been completely scrupulous, he would have described himself as a deist who admired the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man rather than as the son of God. (In modern-day parlance, he was a secular humanist.) But by insisting on his status as a quasi-Christian, or at least placing on the record his personal acceptance of the term, he blunted one of the most pointed challenges to his prominent place in the mainstream of American history.
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Finally, Jefferson’s twilight retrospecting allowed him to see his own political achievement from a more long-range perspective and therefore to talk about it in a new idiom. The act of preparing his secret history of the 1790s, for instance, required him to revisit and then reiterate his sense of the Revolution as a liberation movement to free America not just from English tyranny but from all forms of political oppression. This movement was halted and almost overturned by the Federalists in the 1790s, then was rescued and revived by the Republicans in 1800. In a sense, he had always carried this story line around in his head, but in old age he saw it even more clearly, clearly enough in fact to give its climax a name. In 1819, for the first time, he used the phrase “the revolution of 1800” to describe his own election, claiming that it was “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” The act of providing a fresh descriptive label for his ascendance to the presidency did not really alter his long-standing belief in its significance, but it did make the event more memorable and give his version of history a more accessible handle. Subsequent generations of historians did not fail to grab it, thereby implicitly endorsing the Jeffersonian interpretation of the entire revolutionary era.
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Coining a new phrase is not the same thing, of course, as discovering a new idea. Starting in 1816, however, there is a clear trail of evidence in Jefferson’s correspondence to indicate that he was thinking about what he called “the principles of 1776” in new ways. Again, the correspondence with Adams may have prompted this development, since Adams had remarked in a much-quoted aside that the term “republicanism” was one of those weasel words that different people understood to mean different things. Jefferson’s most familiar formulation tended to follow his binary system of political thought, juxtaposing “republican” and “monarchy,” but then leaving the matter at that, not specifying what “republican” meant beyond the elimination of royal prerogatives and divine right presumptions of power. Indeed one of the most alluring features of Jefferson’s formulation was its eloquent silence on the whole question of what a republican government actually entailed. (Adams had written four fat volumes on this very subject, and Madison had given the matter equivalent analytical attention in
The Federalist Papers.
) Perhaps the most beguiling facet of Jefferson’s habit of mind was its implicit assumption that one need not worry or even talk about such complex questions, that the destruction of monarchy and feudal trappings led naturally to a new political order. The best name for that new order had always been “republican.”

By 1816 he began to find this language inadequate. “In truth, the abuses of monarchy had so filled all the space of political contemplation,” he remarked, “that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy.” But subsequent events demonstrated that “we had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that ‘governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of the people, and execute it.’ ” He made the same point in a slightly different way to John Taylor, his fellow Virginian and even more fervent agrarian enthusiast: “The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government the ingredient of republicanism.” In answer to the Adams claim that “republicanism may mean anything or everything,” Jefferson apprised Taylor that the true doctrine was that “governments are more or less republican as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition.” Whatever evils might flow from what he called “the duperies of the people” were infinitely less threatening or injurious “than those from the egoism of their agents.” Without fully realizing it at the time, he and his fellow revolutionaries in 1776 had launched a political movement whose full implications were only now seeping into conscious articulation. Here, for the first time, Jefferson embraced the idea that would eventually and then everlastingly be associated with his name. What he had always called “pure republicanism” was really “democracy,” and what he had actually done in “the revolution of 1800” was to restore the democratic impulse of the American Revolution after its betrayal by the Federalists.
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In a sense, pretty much as Jefferson claimed, the democratic implications of the American Revolution had been there all along, but once he began to feel more comfortable with the term, describing all Americans, for instance, as “constitutionally and conscientiously democrats,” the very usage of the term forced a fuller explication of its portentous significance and cast a new light over his old attitudes toward government. The voluntary consent of the individual citizen, it was now clear, was the elemental principle and political power source. Jefferson’s level of mistrust toward the different branches of the federal government had followed naturally from this principle: The federal courts were the furthest removed from popular consent, and he hated them the most; the Senate came next, followed closely by the president, then the House of Representatives; the state legislatures were then closer to the popular will; county representatives were closer still, and town or what he called ward officials stood face-to-face with the elemental source itself, the semisacred “will of the people.”
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Jefferson’s idealization of local government as the epitome of the democratic experience was probably connected to a statewide educational scheme he was devising for Virginia about this time (more on this shortly) that divided each county into ten to twelve wards, where he wanted state-supported primary schools established. The intimate, face-to-face character of government at the ward level helped Jefferson visualize the democratic essence. Almost every other political thinker of note in America, especially and exhaustively Adams and Madison, had begun with the presumption that the intimacy of local politics could not be replicated at the national level, which therefore required different and more complex political principles and institutional mechanisms to work effectively, indeed to work at all. But Jefferson did not think about politics in this conventional fashion. For him democracy was to politics as agrarianism was to the economy or health was to the human body. It could never be completely perfect, but the more of it, the better. His discovery of the wards as the primal democratic unit or the “pure and elementary republics” led him to what we might call a theory of democratic contagion: Combine the wards and they will congeal to form a democratic state; then, as the states interact to form a nation, they “will make of the whole a true democracy.”
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In general, the depictions of democracy he provided in his correspondence after 1816 tended to operate at imaginary extremes. On the one hand, there was the individual voter in the town or ward, registering his personal preference. On the other, there was an impersonal and faceless aggregate called the people. When pressed to sharpen the focus on “the people,” he developed an explanation based on who was
not
in the picture. Infants and children were obviously excluded, as were women, who “could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings with men.” Slaves were also absent, on the principle that those “who have no will could be permitted to exercise none in the popular assembly.” The picture of “the people” that he saw in his head, then, included “qualified citizens only.” On the question of whether citizenship required the ownership of property he remained silent until near the very end. In 1824, however, in response to a request about the revision of the Virginia constitution, he came out in favor of the elimination of the property requirement for voting, saying it disenfranchised men who otherwise were expected to serve in the militia. His final verdict on the social composition of “the people,” then, was that it included all the adult white males of the population.
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When not pressed, however, Jefferson preferred to keep the focus fuzzy. Specific questions about who should vote missed the larger point, which was that, thanks to the American Revolution, consent had replaced coercion as the operative principle of government, and political power, if it aspired to become legitimate authority, needed to pass muster with a majority of the citizenry. Efforts to clarify the somewhat misty and mystical notion of “the people” or “the will of the people” never made much headway with him, perhaps suggesting that he understood that if democracy were to become a political religion, it needed to preserve a sense of mystery at the core. He even opposed efforts to organize discrete interest groups to represent segments of the popular will to the federal government, what we would now call lobbyists. He regarded such associations as “dangerous machines,” which should be “frowned down” as mere “clubbists of Washington” that were “unnecessary, presumptuous, and of dangerous example.” The sprawling and inchoate character of popular opinion, it seems, was one of its chief blessings, not to be tampered with, orchestrated or analyzed. Even the term “democracy” itself, though he used it more frequently in those latter years, never achieved a secure and prominent place in his political vocabulary, retaining, as it did for him, some of the old eighteenth-century connotations of mob rule or anarchy, which he obviously opposed, or conveying to the younger generation, especially westerners, the rightful ascendance of ordinary citizens to public office, which he also found unacceptable. It was the vital idea beneath all the distinctions and definitions that mattered most to him, and the realization that, at least in retrospect, he had helped bring it to life.
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