Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. As the writer
of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious
Freedom, he is almost certainly the most striking champion of political and
spiritual freedom in his country's history. He voiced the aim of the new nation
in matchless phrase, and one may distrust if any other American has been so
often refer. As a public official legislator, diplomat, and executive, he
operates the province and commonwealth of Virginia and the young American
republic almost 40 years. This powerful advocate of liberty was a planter and
surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, he
inherited lofty social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary,
and then read law. In 1772, he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took
her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello.
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Opinions differ about his demeanor of foreign affairs as president. He conquered
the vast province of Louisiana and maintained neutrality in a world of war, but
his policies failed to safeguard neutral rights at sea and forced hardships at
home. As a result, his administration reached its nadir as it ended. Until his
last year as president, he implement leadership over his party that was to be
matched by no other 19th century president, and he get pleasure from remarkable
popularity. He was rightly hailed as the "Man of the People," because he wanted
to conduct the government in the popular interest, rather than in the interest
of any privileged group, and, insofar as potential, in accordance with the
people's will.
He was a tall and vigorous man, not mainly impressive in person but amiable,
once his original rigidity wore off. He was habitually tactful and notably
respectful of the attitude and personalities of others, though he had slight
tolerance of those he alleged unfaithful to republicanism. A devoted family man
who set great store by privacy, he built his house upon a mountain, but he did
not look down on people. A eminent architect and naturalist in his own right, a
amazing linguist, a noted bibliophile, and the father of the University of
Virginia, he was the chief patron of learning and the arts in his country in his
day. Moreover, with the possible exception of Benjamin Franklin, he was the
closest American estimate of the universal man.
Freckled and sandy haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was expressive as
a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of
Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he donated his pen rather than his voice
to the patriot cause. As the "silent member" of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33,
drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following, he labored to make
its words a reality in Virginia. Most especially, he wrote a bill establishing
religious freedom, sanction in 1786. Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as
minister to France in 1785. His compassion for the French Revolution led him
into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in
President Washington's Cabinet. He resigned in 1793.
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Sharp political disagreement developed, and two separate parties, the
Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form. Jefferson steadily
assumed leadership of the Republicans, who empathize with the revolutionary
cause in France. Attacking Federalist policies, he divergent a strong
centralized Government and championed the rights of states.
Jefferson retired to Monticello to ponder such projects as his grand designs for
the University of Virginia. A French nobleman experimental that he had placed
his house and his mind "on an elevated situation, from which he might
contemplate the universe."
Peterson revealed that Jefferson had become America's Everyman, the cult hero
for wildly divergent and often antagonistic political movements throughout the
19th and 20th centuries. The term Peterson used was "Protean Jefferson," which
gave a suitably classical sound to what others might regard as Jefferson's
enchanting ideological promiscuity. Southern secessionists loved him; Northern
abolitionists worshiped him; Gilded Age moguls echoed his caveat about federal
power; Populists adored his advice about the evils of a banking conspiracy and
the dominance of agrarian values. In the 1925 Scopes trial, both William
Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were sure that Jefferson agreed with their
positions on evolution. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt both assert him as
their guide to the problems of the Great Depression. In the 1930s, isolationists
and interventionists cited him as their spiritual counselor.
In the hands of a poet like Salter or a novelist like Byrd, Jefferson became not
Everyman but Postmodern Man, a series of overlie and interacting personae that
talked to us but not to each other. He could walk past the slave quarters on
Mulberry Row at Monticello without doubts or guilt while daydreaming about the
rights of man with utter genuineness.
Jordan's major point was that racism had permeated the American soul very early
in our history and that Jefferson simply provided the most booming example of
the virulence of racist values and the commingling of racial and sexual drives.
Jordan's interpretation adopted an agnostic attitude toward the accusation of a
sexual liaison with Sally Hemings. Jordan argued Jefferson's deepest outlook
toward blacks had their origins in primal urges that, like the sex drive, came
from deep within his subliminal.
During the last 17 years of his life, Jefferson remained in Virginia. His
collapse tended to be forgotten, and as the "Sage of Monticello”, he engaged in
a vast and rich correspondence with John Adams and others. He deserted
newspapers for Tacitus and Thucydides, he said, and until his dying day, he
spread on classical writings. He read them in the original, as he did authors in
French, Spanish, and Italian. Toward the end of the War of 1812, he sold his
superb collection of books to the government for the Library of Congress, of
which he has been admired ever since as the virtual founder.
References
Peterson, Merrill (1960) The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Byrd, Max (1993) Jefferson: A Novel. New York: Bantam Books.
Jordan, Wintrop (1977) White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,
1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968; New
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