The Editors of TIME - Thomas Jefferson: Americas Enduring Revolutionary

CONTENTS

Parts of this book were previously published in TIME and SOUTHERN LIVING magazines.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Americas Enduring Revolutionary

A LEGACY OF MYTH AND CONTRADICTION

While we now realize that Thomas Jefferson was a flawed great man, his words and deeds still offer much to inspire and move us

BY JOSEPH J. ELLIS

MY EXPOSURE TO THE abiding potency of Thomas Jeffersons legacy began in Richmond, Va., where I was speaking during a book tour for my biography of Jefferson, American Sphinx. A well-coiffed woman who described herself as a poet got up and proclaimed that everything I was saying about Jefferson was wrong; as she explained in her rich Southern accent, Mr. Jefferson appeared to me in my bedroom last night and warned me that you would tell lies about him. She then finished with a flourish: Mr. Ellis, you are a mere pigeon on the great statue of Thomas Jefferson. When she came up to get her book signed, I had sufficiently recovered to muster a response: Madam, it makes no difference whether or not you regard me as a pigeon. But you ought not regard Jefferson as a statue.

One could argue that all the prominent founders come down to us as statues, mythologized and capitalized as Founding Fathers, creatures of legend more than history. Jeffersons legacy has certainly benefited from inclusion within this semisacred tradition, though in his case the electromagnetic field is stronger. More always seems at stake. James Parton, one of Jeffersons earliest biographers, declared that the man from Monticello enjoyed a special aura: If Jefferson was wrong, Parton observed, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right. Apparently if American history were a casino, whoever held the Jefferson card could never lose.

The Jefferson Memorial was created by John Russell Pope, the architect who designed the memorial to President Theodore Roosevelt that was planned for the Tidal Basin. Roosevelts cousin President Franklin Roosevelt decided not to build it so he could instead erect a monument to Jefferson, a spiritual leader of the Democratic Party

Jeffersons legacy also possessed the remarkable ability to float from one political camp to another. How else to explain what we might call Jeffersons disarming political promiscuity? Both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas claimed that Jefferson was on their side in their famous debates over slavery and sovereignty in 1858. Both North and South went to war believing they fought for Jeffersonian principles. Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat Franklin Roosevelt insisted both that Jefferson was their political hero in the presidential election of 1932. The beat goes on. Whether it is abortion, gun control, health care or gay rights, partisans on both sides of our most contested issues often identify as disciples of Jefferson.

The historical Jefferson ascended into Americas political version of heaven and was canonized as an all-purpose American saint on April 13, 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin of the National Mall. The real man who walked the earth from 1743 to 1826 was replaced by an incandescent symbol whom Roosevelt called the Apostle of Freedom.

Roosevelts more urgent purpose was to enlist Jefferson in what he called a great war for freedom against Americas totalitarian enemies in World War II. This same juxtaposition of freedom vs. tyranny worked its rarefied magic a few years later to make the Jeffersonian message the sanctioned rationale for the struggle against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, one could easily puncture the inflated rhetorical balloons that Roosevelt released. Two inconvenient facts come to mind: first, that Roosevelt appropriated [i.e., stole] land on the Tidal Basin already assigned for a memorial to his cousin Theodore, in order to give the Democratic Party a shrine that offset the prominence of the Lincoln Memorial and the great Republican hero; second, that FDRs New Deal embodied the essence of everything about federal power that Jefferson despised.

But the deeper truth is that not just any man can become Americas Everyman. There were reasons why the Jeffersonian image possessed such infinite malleability; why, if you will, it could float so freely from his age to ours. Jefferson himself seemed to recognize the primal source of his everyman legacy when he chose to place Author of the Declaration of American Independence as the first entry on his tombstone.

When the 33-year-old Jefferson sat down in mid-June of 1776 at his portable deskcustom designed for him by a former slavehe was writing what became the magic words of American history. Here they are:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of HappinessThat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

These have become the most important 55 words in American history, the essence of the American Creed. It was Abraham Lincoln, no less, who first called attention to their abiding significance:

All honor to Jeffersonto the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth ... and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

The abstract truth was a Jeffersonian version of heaven on earth, where the inherent tension between individual freedom and social equality has been miraculously resolvedthink Marxs version of a classless society after the state withers awayand all men and women can live together in perfect harmony once, to paraphrase an 18th century French philosopher, the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest. It is a glimpse of paradise that is the faith-based source of Jeffersons enduring allure and the centerpiece of the liberal tradition in American history.

Once folded into the Bill of Rights, Jeffersons enshrinement of individual rights became an expansive mandate to end slavery, grant women the vote, prohibit racial segregation and in all likelihood sanction gay marriage. Although it is disconcerting to realize that Jefferson himself would have disavowed much of the Jefferson legacy, it is based squarely in the words he wrote and what they have come to mean for us.