THOMAS JEFFERSON’S INVISIBLE FAMILY

A review of Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008)

(Rating 5 of 5)

Despite that the rumors of the relationship between he and Sally Hemings plagued President Jefferson throughout his presidency, as people faded into history Thomas Jefferson’s secret family became more invisible to historians.  Some of this is understandable; after all, if James Callender reported a sunny day, you would logically assume that it had been hailing.  Also, Jefferson’s legal white family did a good a job of covering it up, making sure that there would be no letters surviving in which Sally was acknowledged. 

            In 1998, with DNA test results it was confirmed that it was most probable that Thomas Jefferson was father of Sally Hemings’s children.  When the DNA results came out denial was replaced with a different reaction.  Jefferson suddenly became a sex-crazed man who fornicated with every female slave he saw.  (Remember the Jefferson DNA results came out when President Clinton was being investigated.) Every story about him was now believed.  By the year I graduated High School a TV movie was made called An American Scandal: The Sally Hemings’s Story starring Sam Neill (from Jurassic Park) as Thomas Jefferson.[1] The movie seemed to involve everything that was said about Jefferson from Callender himself. 

Early attack ad against Jefferson

 

            Dr. Gordon-Reed wrote her first book on the Jefferson-Hemings story in 1997.   That book titled Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which I have not yet read, was proven right within a year.  This book continues on some of the themes of first one with a larger scope.  The Hemingses of Monticello focuses on the entire Hemings family that resided at what is now a historic landmark.  Gordon-Reed recreates events for her readers as best possible with the remaining evidence to uncover what really went on at Monticello.

            The author tends to write from a left-wing academic perspective.  That is not a criticism just an observation.  What is interesting however was reading some of the reviews of goodreads, many accused the professor of being ‘angry’ something I find absurd.  Yes, she calls American slavery out for the evil oppressiveness that it was.  Yet, if anything she almost strikes me as a Jefferson apologist; when discussing Jefferson she often brings up the culture he was raised in, political, economic, and social pressures that he was facing.  One can argue that she makes a ‘judge by his own time period not ours' defense except, unlike some of her critics, she actually does it very well.  

 

As a teenager I thought was movie was bad, after reading this book I downgraded it to awful.

            

          The most famous member of the Hemings family is Sally, seeing that she is the one who was involved intimately with President Jefferson.  This makes sense, as Dr. Gordan-Reed points out, when one considers the only reason we know about any of these people is because of the legal status of ownership that Jefferson had over them.  Since Thomas Jefferson was so important to the history of the county and the world, anyone who played a role in his life by default becomes important.  

           Anyone who had spent any time at Monticello in Jefferson's time would know who the Hemings were.  In slave hierarchy of Monticello the Hemings family was one of the two at the top.  (The other was the Grangers.) Nevertheless while explaining this Dr. Gordon-Reed reminds the reader that they are still slaves, and cautions us against thinking of them as privileged.  Most of Jefferson’s personnel body servants were Hemings.  Members of the Hemings family did not wait on guests as maids or waiters; they were carpenters, chefs, and other artisans.  Most of the men had free reign to come and go as they pleased, the reason why is most of the story.  

The story of the Hemings family begins with the birth of Elizabeth Hemings.  Her mother was an African who had been brought to Virginia as a slave by the international slave trade; her name is lost to history but the name of the man she was with is not.  He was Captain John Hemings, and he was not her owner.  As Dr. Gordon-Reed explained, slave status was inherited from your mother. (Mom was free, you were free; Mom was a slave, you were a slave.)  Captain Hemings would try to buy his lover and their daughter but was denied.  Instead, they would be sold to the Wayles family. Gordon-Reed also explained what the term concubine meant in an early eighteenth-century context, far from the more foreign exotic definition the word would later take on, in this time period it meant ‘unofficial’ wife.  She explains that it was rather common for Southern slave owners who were widowed, to take a concubine.  This would be the fate of Elizabeth Hemings as she became the concubine for John Wayles, whose daughter Martha would go on to marry Thomas Jefferson.  Elizabeth Hemings was already a mother before she became involved with Wayles, they would several children together mostly famously Sally Hemings.  When Wayles died the Hemings matriarch and her children would have their world transferred to Monticello.  

This story however is not only about one person or a couple but about a family.  Robert and James Hemings, who were the famous Sally’s full-blooded brothers, were a major part of both her life and Jefferson’s.  Their lives were interesting and atypical for slaves, the brothers had freedom of movement, could earn money by hiring out their services during times that Jefferson had no need of them.  Robert would go on to marry outside of Jefferson’s slave system and James who would go on to be become a fully trained chef in France. 

             It is very rare that a book can completely change your view of something.  This book however made me change my view on a very important historical topic.  That is oral history and tradition.  I have been one of those who compared oral history to playing the game of telephone throughout the generations.  I think my overall hostility to it is driven from some of the way some of its advocates will often present it: as if these are almost sacred words that can not be challenged.  To me, evidence should always be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism, one of the things that studying written sources show us is there can be contractions in various accounts, trying to get at the truth can rather tricky and I tend to distrust people who claim ‘my relative’ was there and get really weary when someone tries to add it to the historical record.  How Dr. Gordon-Reed won me over was showing how oral tradition can be balanced against written and archeological sources and used as evidence. 

First, not every person who had a family history that claimed linage to Jefferson was right.  Gordon-Reed actually debunks a couple of them, while showing the strong case for Jefferson and Hemings.  She also shows how actions of family and descendants can be used to determine what the relationship between a mother and a father who were slave and owner actually was.  Gordon-Reed explains that sexual encounters were often between slave women and free white men were done in one of three ways.  Rape was a primary method through violence or threat.  The second was a causal consensual sexual encounter, and third was in an actual secret relationship.  How the family of the woman acted and later spoke of the man is a good indicator on what happened.  When investigating the question of whether or not Hemings and Jefferson actually loved on another the author concludes in the affirmative, and she bases this not only on Jefferson’s actions but the actions of those around him.                               

“On the other hand, if they saw him acting in as decent a fashion as possible, that he was now bound to them by blood might have made at least some of them more inclined to see him in a positive light, thus shoring up the affective role that they certainly played in his life.  As will be shown in the chapter to come, members of the Hemings’s family, free and enslaved, sometimes responded to Jefferson in ways that suggest they thought of him as more a version of an in-law than the rapist of their family member.” (p.363)

            In a bizarre and twisted way in that relatives owned members of their own kin, the Jeffersons and the Hemingses were family.  Thomas Jefferson was united to them by both blood and marriage, his lover was his late wife’s half-sister and her children were his.  When each of them became adults they were freed and left Monticello with pockets full of money and, for the boys, a completed training in carpentry.  By leaving they would never see either parent again, for they would go into society with their true identities hidden.  This book is full of eye-opening information.  I highly recommend it.

---

[1] I think since the movie’s release the name has changed a couple of times. 

{Video is and interview Dr. Gordon-Reed did for the Big Think. Video is located on their page.}

AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION

A review of Willard Sterne Randall’s Thomas Jefferson: A Life (1993)

(Rating 4 of 5)

 

Willard Randall’s take on the life of Thomas Jefferson is worth reading.  The strength of the book comes from his coverage of Jefferson’s developmental years.  The later part of his life is glossed over rather quickly.  For example there is only one chapter covering his two-term, and rather eventful, presidency.  So this book is good for what drove President Jefferson and what events contributed to his personality but not very useful when covering his presidency.  That is not necessarily a bad thing when you consider that Jefferson’s time as the President of United States is well covered by other historians, but it is worth noting.  

            One of things I learned in this book that I like about Jefferson was his resistance to adopt any one political ideology or philosophy.  The book shows Jefferson referring to the adoption of a philosophy to fitting your mind in a prism that limits the way you view the world.  That part really spoke to me because that is how I view things as well; I always dislike trying to label myself with any word to describe me and how I think.  Randall does a good job showing where Jefferson gets his ideas and beliefs.  

 

“It is not from the Scottish religious reformers but from English and European writers of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Age of Reason that Jefferson drew his evolving notions of government.  From Bacon, the grandfather of the English Enlightenment, Jefferson had learned to use his powers of observation and question any opinion, regardless of its source.  He adhered to Bacon’s admonition to apply reason and learning to the functions of government to improve society.  Jefferson was influenced by Newton’s Principia, which held that the universe was a great clock invented, made, and set in motion by a deity, but he had adapted Newton’s view to his own quest for a world of order and harmony.  Like Newton, Jefferson did not believe in miracles.  Jefferson’s third hero from the time of boyhood studies was Locke, who had joined the empiricism of Bacon and Newton to the realm of politics.  Locke’s An Essay Conserving Human Understanding for the first time fed his natural optimism and gave him hope mankind could be improved by education.  From Locke and Scottish adherents, Jefferson had adopted the theory of the Second Treatise of Government that legitimate authority to govern was derived from the consent of the governed, which had first been granted while mankind had still been in a ‘state of nature’ when all human beings were by right free and equal.  Locke underpinned all of Jefferson’s political thought.” (p.205)

            There is great deal of information of Jefferson’s career in the Continental Congress, his horrendous stint of Governor of Virginia, and his time abroad negotiating on America’s behalf in Europe.  Jefferson considered his authorship of the Declaration to be one of the finest moments of his personal career, although he did not think so at the time.

“The debate was one of the more painful ordeals of Jefferson’s long political career.   He sat there, beside Franklin, silent in his humiliation at the number, extent, and importance of the changes.  He mostly maintained this silence for years, but what little he wrote indicates his mounting disgust at the timidity of the conservatives in Congress, their slashing deletions of at least two major clauses in Jefferson’s draft declaration.”

           

On Sally Hemings Randall could not have been more off.  Although it is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction, Randall does do a good job correcting the lies of James Callender the propagandist, and some of the unhistorical flaws of the work of Fawn M. Brodie.  However he was clearly wrong about the final conclusion.  

“Sally Hemings’s lover was, in other words, a son of Dabney Carr and Jefferson’s sister Martha.  It is impossible to believe that Jefferson abandoned his love for Maria Cosway to force his affections on even the most beautiful adolescent girl.” (p.477)

            I bet that statement is a little embarrassing now!  DNA reveled in 1998 that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ kids.  So, on this issue, he is definitely wrong. 

            In America over the last seventy years there has been a great deal of debate over the Executive Branch’s use of military force without the consent of the Congress.  Many who feel offended by all such actions often cite the founders and the U.S. Constitution.  However if one looks at what the Founders themselves did when managing the government of the Constitution, and they might find themselves coming to a far different conclusion. A good example is Jefferson’s actions against the pirates.

“At the first full cabinet meeting on May 15, President Jefferson confronted his first foreign policy crisis, one he had tackled first as minister to France fifteen years earlier.  Tripoli had attacked American ships in the Mediterranean.  Putting into effect his long-held views on the subject, Jefferson had already assembled an American naval squadron at Norfolk that was ready to sail.  An American navy sailing off Tripoli, he told his cabinet, ‘might lead to war.’  He wanted his cabinet’s opinions and approval.  All five members agreed on sending the squadron but disagreed over Jefferson’s authority to act while Congress was adjourned.  Navy Secretary Smith and Treasury Secretary Gallatin backed Jefferson’s position that the president could use military force to defend the United States, but Attorney General Lincoln argued that without a formal declaration of war by Congress, American warships could destroy North African pirates wherever they could be found.” (p.549) 

Thomas Jefferson: A Life is good book about a very complicated figure.  James Madison once warned people who study Jefferson to be ready for a great deal of twists and turns when going through his mind.  Randall acts as fairly good guide. 

{Video is taken from the HBO John Adams series}

A BRIEF NOTE ON JEFFERSON

A Review of R.B. Bernstein’s Thomas Jefferson (2003)

(Rating 4 of 5)

R.B. Bernstein’s biography on Thomas Jefferson packs a great deal of information into a very little space. Inside this a fewer than two-hundred-and-fifty-page work, is the life of the third president of the United States. Yet, the work has very ease flowing narrative that makes it enjoyable to read.

Thomas Jefferson’s entire life is put into to nicely fit little chapters. The Revolution starts right at the second chapter, which makes sense considering Jefferson was only thirty. The second chapter covers Jefferson’s glory years in the Continental Congress fighting for independence and authoring the Declaration. While the third and fourth chapters focus on some of Jefferson’s less than great moments, such as his disastrous governorship of Virginia to his time as U.S. Minister to France, where he to in love with the French Revolution.

https://youtu.be/QcWaCsvpikQ

The fifth chapter focuses Jefferson coming home to be the nation’s Secretary of State, under President George Washington, that he finds very frustrating and leaves after a single term. The next chapter goes into his brief exile from politics where he plots the campaign of 1796. Through a fluke in the Constitution, in 1796, he is elected his opponent's, John Adams, vice president, and in 1800 is stuck in House of Representatives battling a tie with his own running mate. These elections and his vice presidency are all in chapter seven.

Chapter eight covers his glorious first term as president. From his brilliant inaugural address to his brilliant, although accidental, purchase of the Louisiana territory. Other then the Declaration of Independence, I feel that Jefferson’s first term as President is his great accomplishment.

The next chapter covers his not-so-great-second term as President. Although he does abolish U.S. participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, his 1808 trade embargo caused a huge economic downturn for the nation. Unpopular though the embargo was, Jefferson’s chosen successor, James Madison, is elected to replace him. The final chapter is Jefferson in retirement, his thoughts, fears and founding of the University of Virginia.

“Unfortunately, the students showed little inclination to behave like the serious scholars whom Jefferson had hoped to welcome. Instead, they carried on in ways resembling Jefferson’s idle, boisterous classmates at William and Mary. Their favorite activities were drinking, gambling, and riots, all of which Jefferson denounced as ‘vicious irregularities.’ In particular, the students’ nighttime raids up and down the Lawn, known as ‘calathumps,’ alarmed and outraged him. Those who took part in calathumps wore masks to avoid being recognized and punished as they shouted and yelled, fired guns into the air and whirled noisemakers, broke windows, and otherwise made a ruckus.” p.176

This book is a good one-stop little biography of the nation’s third president. The book covers all that was stated in this small review and much more, it has some surprising depth for such a small book. It is a good starting point for someone who knows nothing about Thomas Jefferson.

{Video from the already classic HBO John Adams series is Jefferson being at his most silly fortunately for him James Madison would be at his side during his presidency to talk good sense to him.}

An Interesting Person on an Interesting Person

A review of Christopher Hitchens’ Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (2005)

(Rating: 4 of 5)

I have always found Christopher Hitchens to be a fascinating individual. A man who has spent time all over the political spectrum, whom I have had the pleasure to watch on Bill Maher’s Real Time. Politically speaking I do not agree with him on much of anything although I do think he is one of the greatest thinkers of our time. He was once regarded by Gore Vidal to be his heir apparent, however he (Vidal) no longer feels this is the case.

In this little 188-page biography for the Eminent Lives series, Hitchens writes about the United States of America’s third President, Thomas Jefferson. Hitchens is clearly a Jefferson fan; he took his American citizenship oath at the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. In this book, he details Thomas Jefferson’s political career from an early legislator to his time as President of the United States. He also spends one brief chapter on President Jefferson’s post-presidential years. Through out the work Hitchens tries to explain what it is that makes Thomas Jefferson so important and Revolutionary.

“Jefferson was not a man of the Enlightenment only in the ordinary sense that he believed in reason or perhaps in rationality. He was very specifically one of those who believed that human lay in education, discover, innovation, and experiment…. He studied botany, fossils, crop cycles, and animals. He made copious notes on what he saw. He designed a new kind of plow, which would cut a deeper furrow in soil exhausted by the false economy of tobacco farming. He was fascinated by the invention of air balloons, which he instantly saw might provide a new form a transport as well as a new form of warfare. He enjoyed surveying and prospecting and, when whaling became an important matter in the negotiation of a commercial treaty, wrote a treatise on the subject himself.” p.43-4

Although a romantic, Hitchens does not shy away from criticizing Jefferson if and when he feels it is necessary. He points out some of Jefferson’s hypocrisy both political and personnel. To Hitchens, Jefferson’s greatest accomplishment was his dedication to the ideal of religious freedom for all.

“So Jefferson took the same view of Haiti as he had of Virginia: the abolition of slavery could be as dangerous and evil as slavery itself. He did not, through this blinker of prejudice, at first discern that events in Haiti would one day provide him with an opportunity of historic dimensions.” p.101

This is a great little one-stop biography, even if you are not a fan of Mr. Hitchens himself that should not stop anyone from enjoying this work. Hitchens writes with whit and humor, and he makes analogies to events that have occurred long after Jefferson’s own time and before it. The book is like reading a 200-hundred page article that he has written for Vanity Fair.

{Video is from C-Span}

CLASH OF THE TITANS

A Review of James F. Simon’s What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall And The Epic Struggle to Create a United States (2006)

(Rating:5 of 5)

Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall were two of the most important men in our nation’s history. They both served in the American Revolution, Jefferson more famously as the author of the Declaration of Independence and as diplomat, and Marshall as a junior officer in George Washington’s army. Their careers, however, would intersect when they both reached their pinnacle. Thomas Jefferson as President of the United States and John Marshall as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The battles between the Jefferson Administration and the Marshall Court were critical in shaping the government that we know today. In his work, What Kind of Nation, Simon describes these battles and recreates the world from which they had been fought.

Since Jefferson in this stage of his life, his political career from the 1770s onward, is better known even amongst us plain general knowledge historians, I found some of his descriptions on Marshall’s career far more interesting. George Washington’s recruitment of him as a congressional candidate, during a visit to Mount Vernon, with the former president’s nephew Bushrod, is one such adventure.

“Over the next four days, Washington flattered, cajoled, and entreated both men to agree to become candidates for Congress. Bushrod could not, and did not, refuse his esteemed uncle. Bust Marshall balked, even when Washington arrange another festive banquet in his honor in nearby Alexandria. He must make good on his debt, Marshall told Washington, and a seat in Congress would not allow him to do so. Finally, on the fourth day, Marshall decided to leave before sunrise to avoid another confrontation with his mentor. But Washington, anticipating his guest’s early departure, greeted him on the piazza—in full military uniform—and made a last plea to Marshall.” p.68

Marshall would not serve in Congress long. President Adams makes him the country’s new Secretary of State, after getting rid of his previous Hamilton-dominated Cabinet officers. After Adams stunning defeat to his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, in the election of 1800, Adams begins to stuff the court with Federalist judges, appointing his own Secretary of State, Mr. Marshall, to the top job.

This sets the stage for the great battles that take place between the two American icons. The most famous of these is without a doubt, Marbury vs. Madison. The circumstances for this are very odd, and Simon points out in his book there were many reasons that the Chief Justice could have abstained from the case. Marshall was the Secretary of State whose commissions his predecessor refused to deliver. However, he carefully danced around those issues and gave the most important decision ever. He did not rule against the Jefferson Administration, in fact, they received what they originally asked for. He also ruled a part of the law, the part that gave the Supreme Court more power no less, unconstitutional.

“But although Marshall had satisfied the Republicans’ short-term interests by rejecting Marbury’s claim, he had purchased an enormous piece of constitutional real estate for the Court. Marbury v. Madison established the Court’s authority to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional, a power that would prove to be of historic significance in securing the institution’s parity with Congress. Marshall’s opinion also served notice that the Court, not the president, would be the ultimate judge of claims or executive privilege, an authority of seismic proportions.” p.187

Political battles raged the removal of justices sought through the method of impeachment, once successfully with John Pickering, once unsuccessfully with Samuel Chase. Ironically, the presiding officer of the impeachment trials was outgoing Vice President Aaron Burr who Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party had dumped in favor of George Clinton. The vice president had just been just been acquitted in a murder trial over the death of Alexander Hamilton*. Simon describes a Vice President Burr who is eager to have on grandee final on the stage of American politics, and give Thomas Jefferson more fits**.

A few years after his tenure as vice president, Burr is on trial himself for alleged treason to the country, the judge in his trial was none other than Chief Justice John Marshall who was riding circuit as Supreme Court justices did in Marshall’s time***. Simon tells this story in stunning detail and great analysis.

“The Burr prosecution produced an ironic reversal of roles for Jefferson and Marshall. The president, author of the Declaration of Independence and a supporter of many of the individual rights contained in the Bill of Rights, pursued Burr and his associates with a vengeance that ignored basic civil liberties. The chief justice, whose major libertarian concern was the protection of private property, became the vigilant defender of criminal suspects’ constitutional rights.” p.258

In his battles with Alexander Hamilton, one can conclude that Thomas Jefferson won in life and fame but Alexander Hamilton ended up with the nation that he, not Jefferson, wanted. With John Marshall, Jefferson is still more famous nationally and internationally, but Marshall’s career as chief justice surpassed Jefferson’s presidency by twenty-six years and his life by nine; in addition, it was Marshall’s view on the Constitution that prevailed, not Jefferson’s. With a brilliant narrative, James Simon brings these epic legal battles from the past back to life.

*Burr had killed Hamilton in a now famous duel, but the jury ruled it was a ‘fair fight’ and he was not guilty of murder.

**As if almost stealing the election of 1800 was not enough.

***This process ended in the early twentieth century.


{Video taken from PBS documentary The Supreme Court}

The Unfinished Autobiography of… Thomas Jefferson

A review of the Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson (1821 original printing) (2005 current printing)

(Rating:4 of 5)

Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, is one of the most important men in the history of the world and one of the most hard to study. James Madison*, Jefferson’s secretary of state and successor as president, warned future scholars who would try to study the author of the Declaration of Independence that he was a man of many contradictions and is extremely hard to nail down**. No one who can be in public life as long as Thomas Jefferson was and do so without some sort of inconsistency, since no one stops learning and changing, but Jefferson jumps around more issues then most. Some of his contradictions are extremely famous. Jefferson was a champion of small federal government and more local state power. Nevertheless, he would become one of the presidents most responsible for the increase in federal power with the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson was also a man who detested slavery to the point, as president, abolishing the overseas slave trade in America, and yet he was a man who owned slaves all his life. In this work, Jefferson tells his own story. Unfortunately, like dear Dr. Franklin before him, he does not get to complete his tale.

Jefferson grew up in a world that was changing all around him, born in the middle of the Enlightenment; the old ways were constantly being challenged by new ideas and ways of thinking. Jefferson himself would play a major role in the ever-changing world that he was a part of. As a young man, the American colonies’ crisis with their mother country grew larger and Jefferson was a passionate advocate for the American cause. In this work, he lays out the argument of the colonies against mother country.

“In this I took the ground that, from the beginning, I had thought the only one orthodox or tenable, which was, that relation between Great Britain and these colonies was exactly the same as that of England and Scotland, after the accession of James, and until the union, and the same as her present relations with Hanover, having the same executive chief, but no other necessary political connection; and that our emigration from England to this country gave her no more rights over us, than the emigrations of the Danes and the Saxons gave to the present authorities of the mother country over England.” p. 7

Basically, what Jefferson brilliantly explains was that the only thing the colonies had in common with Great Britain is that we shared the same king. Other then the shared monarch, we had no other legal connection. This is why the Declaration of Independence targets King George III personally, because from the American position he was the only link we had to break.

My favorite part of the autobiography is when Jefferson gets distracted and starts complaining on how infective legislatures can at times be. What starts out as a topic on the Articles of Confederation’s treaty ratification methods, becomes a rant on his poor colleagues.

“Our body was a little numerous, but very contentious. Day after day was wasted on the most unimportant questions. A member, one of those afflicted with the morbid and copious flow of words, who heard with impatience any logic which was not his own, sitting near me on some occasion of a trifling but wordy debate, asked me how I could sit in silence, hearing so much false reasoning, which a word should refute? I observed to him, that to refute was easy, but to silence was impossible; that in measures brought forward by myself, I took the laboring oar, as was incumbent on me; but that in general, I was willing to listen; that if every sound argument or objection was used by some one or other of the numerous debaters, it was enough; if not, I thought it sufficient to suggest the omission, without going into a repetition of what had been already said by others: that this was a waster and abuse of the time and patience of the House, which could not be justified. And I believe that if members of deliberate bodies were to observe this course generally, they would do in a day, what takes them a week; than may at first be thought, whether Bonaparte’s dumb legislature, which said nothing, and did much, may not be preferable to one which talks much, and does nothing. I severed with General Washington in the legislature of Virginia, before the revolution, and, during it, with Dr. Franklin in Congress. I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point, which decides the question. They laid their shoulders to the great points knowing that the little ones would follow themselves. If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise, in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together, ought not to be expected. But to return again to our subject.” p.52-3

In addition to being a leader in the American Revolution, Jefferson was also on hand in France to witness the emerging French Revolution. Jefferson would be a defender and cheerleader for the French Revolution long after he actually should have been. One of the most interesting parts is he blames the entire event of Queen Marie Antoinette.

“The King was now become a passive machine in the hands of the National Assembly, and had he been left to himself, he would have willingly acquiesced in whatever they should devise as best for the nation. A wise constitution would have been formed, hereditary in his line, himself placed at its head, with powers so large as to enable him to do all the good of his station, and so limited, as to restrain him from its abuse. This he would have administered, and more than this, I do not believe, he ever wished. But he had a Queen of absolute sway over his weak mind and timid virtue, and of a character the reverse of his in all points.” p.92

Jefferson telling his own tale is a fascinating read, it is so sad they did not live long enough to finish the whole thing. It would have been nice hearing him describe his time as the first secretary of state, second vice president, and third president. Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable work.

* As fond as I am of Mr. Jefferson, I really feel that Madison was the greater of the two but that is a story for another time.
** I am not quoting Madison directly, but paraphrasing. However I think you, the reader, can get the main idea.



{Video taken from the classic 1776 musical from 1972.}