Jefferson Thomas - Thomas Jefferson - Author of America

Author of America

Christopher Hitchens

E M I N E N T L I V E S For Brian Lamb: a great Virginian and a great American,

a fine democrat as well as a good republican,

who has striven for an educated electorate Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

Chapter One: All Politics Is Local: 7

Virginia to Philadelphia

Chapter Two: War and Revolution in Virginia 33

Chapter Three: Revolution in France 53

(and a Meeting with Sally)

Chapter Four: Interregnum 67

Chapter Five: Secretary of State 75

Chapter Six: In Waiting 103

Chapter Seven: Mr. President 125

Chapter Eight: Disappointment: The Second Term 155

Chapter Nine: Declining Years 171

iii About the Author Books in the Eminent Lives Series Other Books by Christopher Hitchens Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Eminent Lives, brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures, joins a long tradition in this lively form, from Plutarch's Lives to Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Pairing great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view, the Eminent Lives are ideal introductions designed to appeal to the general reader, the student, and the scholar. "To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant," wrote Strachey: "That, surely, is the first duty of the biographer." Acknowledgments

M y principal thanks are due to the late William Apple

ton Coolidge of Topsfield, Massachusetts. A direct descen- dant of Ellen Wayles Coolidge, Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter by Thomas Mann and Martha Jefferson Randolph, he endowed the Atlantic Crossing scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, which first brought me to these United States in 1970 and which makes me, I suppose, an indirect beneficiary of the peculiar Monticello system.

In January and February of 2004, I was invited to give four lec- tures and two seminars on Thomas Jefferson at the James Madison College of Michigan State University. The LeFrak Forum and Sym- posium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy provided me with an environment that was at once welcoming and intimidating, and I want very warmly to thank its directors, Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and Richard Zinman, for giving me the opportunity of testing my opinions and conclusions against those of superior mind and experience.

vii Acknowledgments

It was a fair wind that brought me, some years ago, into contact with Professor Annette Gordon Reed of New York University. Her pursuit of truth in the study of Jefferson is a model of historical ob- jectivity, forensic scruple, and moral sense.

To have decided to pass a certain time "immersed" either in Jef- ferson's work or in works about Jefferson is as impossible to regret as it is near impossible to undertake. No single person can now claim to have the entire store of existing knowledge. Everybody concerned must, of course, dip their flags to Julian Boyd, editor of the still- expanding twenty-seven-volume edition of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson prepared for the press at Princeton University, and to Dumas Malone's six-volume biography Jefferson and His Time. It is an honor, even when it is not a pleasure, to register disagreement with the second of these. The finest, and the best written, of the more condensed Jefferson biographies is Merrill Peterson's, suc- ceeded, as I am sure he would himself admit, by the work of R. B. Bernstein.

Gore Vidal's Burr is the best fictional re-creation of the period and forms a keystone in the grand historical-novelistic architecture that is already Mr. Vidal's memorial. Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Long Affair is the most eloquent of the anti-Jeffersonian nonfictions, followed by the work of Albert Jay Nock. John Chester Miller's The Wolf by the Ears was for me the most various and illuminating ac- count of the slavery question. On the much-neglected subject of the Barbary war, I found myself gratefully dependent upon Jefferson's War, by Joseph Whelan, and upon To the Shores of Tripoli, by A. B. C.

viii Acknowledgments

Whipple, upon Evan Thomas's John Paul Jones, and even more de- pendent on Linda Colley's Captives, which reminded me once again that much of the Jeffersonian story is to be found in books that are ostensibly concerned with other subjects. This would also be true of Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose's account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of John Keane's exceptional biography of Thomas Paine, of Ron Chernow's exemplary life of Alexander Hamilton, of Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and of Theodore Draper's astonishingly original account of the American Revolution, A Struggle for Power, which replaces that emphasis on radicalism in another way. Those who study Jefferson must also study Edmund Burke, an obvious admission which again puts me in the debt of Conor Cruise O'Brien for his book The Great Melody and of David Bromwich for his meticulous editing of Burke's writings On Empire, Liberty, and Reform.

Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family, by Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman, is one of the most striking pieces of Americana ever published. It assembles all the living descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and prints their photographs as well as their narratives. The book carries an introduction by Lucian K. Truscott IV, an "authorized" direct descendant of Jefferson--his fifth great-grandson--whose decency and honesty helped bring about this reunion, and who thereby helped refute his ancestor's sorry belief that such love, coexistence, and mutual esteem would never be possible. Mutato nomine, et de te fabula narratur.

ix Acknowledgments

To list more sources might be to run the risk of boasting rather than acknowledging. I have learned in the course of this undertak- ing that anyone who writes about America is writing about Thomas Jefferson in one way or another, and so--as with the magnificent Jef- ferson Room in the Library of Congress, where I have spent so many absorbing days in the last quarter-century--I am tempted to annex, with all their ambivalence, the incised lines that commemorate Sir Christopher Wren at St. Paul's: Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

x Introduction

T o begin, then, at the conclusion. On June 24, 1826, Thomas

Jefferson wrote his last letter. Addressed from his Virginia home, Monticello, it was sent in response to an invitation from Roger C. Weightman, the chairman of a Washington committee to celebrate the then-impending fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson proffered regrets that his fast-declining health would prevent him from making the journey to the capital. He went on to elaborate this regret in the following manner:

I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and ex

changed there congratulations personally with the small

band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with

us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to

make for our country, between submission or the sword; and

to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our

1 Christopher Hitchens

fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and pros

perity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the

world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others

later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the