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By Joseph J. Ellis
© 1996 by Joseph J. Ellis
Published by Vintage Books
ISBN 0-679-76441-0
$14.00
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For those of you who read the last installment of Between the Covers you know that I thoroughly enjoyed Ellis' latest book Founding Brothers. It was on the strength of that I purchased American Sphinx his 1996 National Book Award winning biography of our second president, Thomas Jefferson. Ellis piqued my curiosity about the character of Jefferson in several of the chapters in Founding Brothers and I wanted to find out more about this man. I had seen him portrayed by San Neill in the television special and had heard about the new research in the Sally Hemmings case. So armed with an insatiable curiosity I wandered into Kevin Magee's Half Moon Bay Books and plucked it off his shelf.
Almost immediately I discovered it wasn't going to be the same read as his latest book. The introduction finds Ellis drawing parallels between Jefferson and himself; same height, same hair color, same Virginia background, even going to the same college. Ellis started to emerge as a man deeply in awe of Thomas Jefferson yet almost mystified about what he believed to be the man's enigmatic character.
Ellis' thesis is that Thomas Jefferson was a man whose capacity for self-deception was enormous. He could cetrainly keep a secret, and especially from himself. Ellis' book is less a biography (what I was actually looking for) than an in-depth character study, albeit one spiced with the author's prejudices, vis a vis the Sally Hemmings issue, etc. Ellis spends a great deal of time explaining away Jefferson's ability to compartmentalize his thinking processes. Jefferson seems to have been able to take up completely contradictory positions on basic political and moral issues without realizing the incongruousness of it. During the presidential campaign of 1800 Jefferson hired one James Callendar to slanderize John Adams, having him reviled in the press with innuendo and half-truth. When asked about it he denied even knowing the man even after their correspondence about their affair was made public. He simply convinced himself that he had done nothing wrong and was honestly shocked when Adams, taking offense, broke off their friendship of more than thirty years. It was ironic that the same scandalmonger who, after not getting what he believed to be his proper reward for his work in the defamation of John Adams, turned his vitriol on Jefferson and published the first public accusations of Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings.
Ellis shows Jefferson manifesting his unique ability in numerous situations. He was consumed with idea of retiring the national debt while he himself became more indebted with every passing day. He was a man whose idea of a perfect federal government was no government at all yet who was twice president. He was a man who on the one hand despised all forms of argumentation and confrontation but on the other is generally credited with the birth of the two party system in American government. But such dichotomies apparently did not trouble Jefferson. He was a man who lived more in his mind and the perfect idyll he created there than in the world with its harsh realities. Jefferson's version of the "Spirit of 1776" was that the revolution was fought to eliminate a central government and create a society where individulaism meant the ability to see the influence of government fade the farther one got from local politics. He believed, perhaps niavely, that humanity was basically good and that left to its own would almost always "do the right thing." But the president who believed in minimalist Federal power was also the president who, without approval from Congress or other authorized body, spent 15 million dollars to purchase the Louisana Territory from Napolean Bonaparte. Here he acted more like a soverign ruler than had either of his predecessors or indeed would any president until Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.
Even as he paints this picture of Jefferson's juxtaposing opinions peacefully coexisting with one another Ellis ignores his own conclusions when considering the Sally Hemmings case. In an appendix to American Sphinx where he discusses the possibility of whether or not Jefferson could have fathered children by one of his slaves Ellis reasons that because Jefferson was a "romantic of the mind" he would not have resorted to pursuits of earthly delight with Sally. He draws upon Jefferson's relationship with Mrs. Maria Cosway Here while in Paris as the American representative. Using correspondence exchanged between Jefferson and Mrs. Cosway Ellis concludes that Jefferson most probably did not consumate his affair with her, preferring instead to internalize his romantic feelings towards her.
Yet this is precisely the sort of situation where Jefferson could have seperated the mental from the physical, and participated with abandon in the latter while the former would have taken over and rationalized any guilt or misgivings away. Jefferson was to exhibit this type of behavior again and again in both his private and public lives. In Ellis' defense American Sphinx was written before the genetic findings of Dr. Eugene Foster were available. While these findings do indeed seem to indicate that Sally Hemmings bore Thomas Jefferson at least one son they are not 100% irrefutable. It was not Thomas Jeffersons DNA that was used in the tests but rather that of a direct descendant. I don't think Jefferson is in any danger of exhumation though. Add to that the knowledge that DNA degrades over time even and those who do not believe the author of the Declaration of Independence would have had a physical relationship with one of his slaves continue to have a toehold on which they may stand and opine.
If I may indulge my own prejudices for a moment it is precisely that sort of behavior which makes Thomas Jefferson great. Here was a man who truly believed deep within his soul that there was no difference in the humanity of the different races. The Hemmings incident confirms this. He was able to love a woman of mixed race and father her children. The fact that during his lifetime he steadfastly remained silent about it was more a product of the times, and perhaps of Jefferson's ability to hold opposite opinions on a topic. His belief that emancipation could only occur with complete segregation stemmed from the fact he honestly believed that the black race would never forgive the white race for enslaving them, not from any desire to be rid of blacks. In this he was both right and wrong. Blacks and whites will forever remember the inhumanity of slavery but are able to live in an integrated society.
But this book is about much more than Sally Hemmings or any other single aspect of Thomas Jefferson's complex and varied life. It is about the man himself and his character. Is it a biography of Jefferson? No, it is much more than that.---JBW
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By Gordon S. Wood
© 1991 by Gordon S. Wood
Published by Vintage Books
ISBN 0-679-73688-3
$16.00
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I meant to write this review a long time ago. Yet every time I started I got caught in a trap, wanting to say so much and not knowing how to say it. This book has so much to offer, so many keen insights into the nature of the American Revolution, that I was overwhelmed by the multitude of things I wanted share with you, to draw to your attention. So I wrote nothing. I sat in my chair, feet on the desk and keyboard in my lap, staring at the monitor, frozen in a frenzy of inactivity. Yet the desire to make more people aware of this unassuming book kept pulling at me, drawing me back to the keyboard, telling me I must continue. So continue I shall.
Gordon Wood is University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University. He is widely regarded as one of the leading experts on American colonial history. The book grew out of a series of lectures given at New York University in February of 1986. Afterwards Professor Wood received a fellowship at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Behaviorial Sciences at Stanford University and it was there he enlarged the lectures and wrote the bulk of the book.
Is this work a "popular" history, intended to enthrall and entertain the reader while covering the basics of its topic? Most definitely not. It is a scholarly treatise written for the professional historian or perhaps for a graduate-level course in American History. Yet is is one of the most compelling books I have ever read on the subject. It was not an easy read but on page after page Wood makes plain his evidence for the book's thesis, that the American Revolution is the line that divides the old world from the new, the Age of Kings from the Age of Man. The "shot heard 'round the world" sounded the death knell of life as it had been and simultaneously rang in the modern age. If I had to recommend but one work that clearly states what the War for American Independence meant to everyone and everything that was to come after, it would be The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
The trouble here lies in our inability to imagine the American Revolution as a radical event. We think of revolutions and revolutionaries in modern terms. Che Guevarra, now there was a proper radical. Bearded, clad in faded fatigues, hanging out in the jungle with an AK-47. Or Fidel Castro, similarly clad and acoutred. Even Mao with his big blue jacket and his Little Red Book fits the part. But John Adams, the Massachusetts lawyer who successfully defended the English soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, really doesn't seem the type. Neither does George Washington, or Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. These were educated, highly moral men in frock coats and breeches instead of camouflage, but the changes they wrought upon the world were greater than those brought about by any group of radicals before or since.
One of the most salient facts of the American Revolution was that it was the first, and to date, the only revolution that did not incenerate itself in the conflagration it kindled. The English Civil War saw Oliver Cromwell's head on a lance and a king returned to the throne within fifteen years of the surrender of Charles I after the Battle of Marston Moor. The French Revolution bathed the country in blood and saw Napolean assume the mantle of First Consul, becoming a virtual dictator no better than the kings guillotined but a few short years before. The Russian and Chinese communist revolutions also littered their respective countries with the bodies of murdered citizenry. But not the revolution in America. It established a government that anticipated the orderly transition of power and created a union of seperate states that would grow together and become a single nation.
But Professor Wood's book is about much more than that. It deftly describes how the independent spirit that flourished in America from its beginning changed every facet of life and how it was lived, from the unquestioned patriarchy of the home to the freedom of an unindentured workplace, from a repudiation of a born aristocracy to the usual government by the disinterested rich. (Prior to the Revolution all governmental positions in the "republican" countries of Europe were thought best held by those white males wealthy enough to remain aloof from the petty concerns of those they governed and would thereby deliver the most impartial justice according to the law. Benjamin Franklin once turned down a government position pleading that he had not enough money do devote himself fully to the job.) The list goes on enumerating so many aspects of a life we take for granted that actually had their beginnings in pre- and post-revolutionary America.
Is this a book for everyone? No. It it a book you should read anyway? Most certainly yes.