Jefferson, Thomas

From Philosopedia.org

Jefferson, Thomas [President] (1743—1826)

The third U.S. President was the nation’s most intellectual and philosophic chief of state. Jefferson established as well as designed the buildings of the University of Virginia. He believed in the trinity . . . but his was Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. Jefferson’s was the god of nature, not that of revelation or theology. The Declaration of Independence, except for minor alterations by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and others made on the floor of Congress, was his work. It took until 1786 for his bill establishing religious freedom in Virginia to pass, and it was grounded in the belief that man’s opinions cannot be coerced—had it not been for his efforts, others might have established a United Protestant Church of America with who-knows-who as its “pope.”

Of particular interest to humanists is 'The Jefferson Bible, in which Jefferson textually extracted the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, and French. Some religionists were alarmed that Jefferson had excised references to the supernatural. As a result and for protection, many buried their Holy Bibles in the ground, fearing the Jefferson text would be designated the only one allowed. In 1800, the New England Palladium wrote, “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some devoted to the worship of the most High.” Such a viewpoint was known to Jefferson, who expressed in allusions to Connecticut, for example, that the New England clergy represented

• . . . the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence of those advances of the mind which had carried the other States a century ahead of them.

To John Adams, Jefferson wrote that he longed for the time when “this den of the priesthood is at last broken up.” To the Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802, Jefferson wrote,

• I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American People which declared that their legislators should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

In 1998 James H. Hutson, chief of the Library of Congress’s manuscript division and a Presbyterian, questioned Jefferson’s meaning, saying it “was never conceived by Jefferson to be a statement of fundamental principles; it was meant to be a political manifesto, nothing more.” Conservative religionists claimed this was proof that Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church and State” metaphor should never have been interpreted as an overarching principle. Disagreeing, Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, countered that Hutson’s view was “merely one opinion” that most scholars do not hold.

The 6’ 2 1/2” tall statesman, whose pet mockingbird pecked its food from its master’s own lips, invented a revolving chair, a pedometer, a revolving music stand, a letter-copying press, and a hemp machine. Unlike Franklin, who wore plain clothes, the reportedly reddish-haired Jefferson dressed like a dandy and was often seen wearing striped linen, a powdered wig, and a large topaz ring. Visitors to his home at Monticello see his skill as an architect. The “dumb waiters,” according to Susan R. Stein’s The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (1993), were private service trays that also were a fad in Paris, built to insure that servants could not overhear conversations. At a time when Paris was experiencing a revolution, Jefferson went on a buying spree, sending eighty-six large crates of goods back for his public and private use—these included seven busts by Houdon, forty-eight formal chairs, damask hangings, four full-length mirrors in gilt frames, and 120 porcelain plates. The Sèvres table sculptures had been made for Louis XVI (and it is not clear how Jefferson managed to obtain them). The Monticello home’s entrance featured what he called “my Indian hall” and contained painted buffalo robes, moccasins, a head dress, and specimens such as mastodon bones, mounted moose, and elk antlers from the Lewis and Clark and other expeditions. One of the few items left, after his death and when his daughter had to sell everything in order to pay off his huge debts, was the famous clock in the entrance hall — it was not removable.

The best way to categorize such a complex thinker, remarked Eugene R. Sheridan, is to quote his letter to the Rev. Ezra Styles Ely (25 June 1819):

• I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.

Jefferson also wrote to Benjamin Rush,

• I am a Christian, in the only sense he [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.

To Benjamin Waterhouse in 1811 he referred to the Revelation of St. John as “the ravings of a maniac,” adding,

• The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, Materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.

In 1822, in another letter to Waterhouse, Jefferson wrote, “. . . that there is one only God, and he all perfect” (26 June 1822).

To John Adams, he wrote, “I have read his [Priestley’s] Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus, over and over again; and I rest on them . . . as the basis of my own faith” (22 August 1813). In another letter to Adams (11 April 1823), Jefferson wrote, “And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.”

Dr. J. Thomas in his Dictionary of Biography says that Jefferson “in religion is denominated a freethinker.” He spoke in old age of “the hocus-pocus phantom of God, which like another Cerberus had one body and three heads.” Religious liberals often quote his sentence, “The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. No man has the power to let another prescribe his faith.” As a summary, and sounding like the deist of his time, he wrote of his hope that “. . . there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.” Publicly, however, he remained a member of the Church of England, was a friend of the local priest, supported the priest’s church, but made himself unavailable to become a godparent because of his not being a trinitarian. Jaroslav Pelikan, President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has termed Jefferson a “rationalist Anglican.” Robert S. Alley, professor of humanities emeritus at the University of Richmond, however, holds (Free Inquiry, Fall 1998) that “Any perusal of the Jefferson writings will establish that the Sage of Monticello was a Deist.”

To the minister of the First Parish Church (Unitarian) in Portland, Maine, Jefferson once requested the services of a Unitarian minister for himself and for a small group of friends. The reply was that there was no one available to be sent so far away, to which a disappointed Jefferson is said to have remarked that he would have “to be a Unitarian by myself.”

Meanwhile, Jefferson also wrote

• I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

In 1815 when he listed his Albemarle County property for tax purposes, he included all the pictures, mirrors, chairs, and small items, but the list began with the big items:

5640. acres of land

90. slaves of or about the age of 12 years

12. do. [ditto] of 9. and under 12 years

73. heads of cattle

27. horses, mares, mules and colts.

On the Fourth of July, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was deathly ill. The day before, his pulse was barely perceptible but he had said he wanted so badly to live until the 4th as well as to outlive John Adams, who also was ill. “This is the Fourth?” he asked N. P. Trist, husband to one of Jefferson’s granddaughters. It was only 11 PM, and Trist did not answer. Jefferson repeated the question, and Trist nodded yes, a forgivable white lie. Jefferson lived until the afternoon of the 4th, dying almost precisely at the time that John Adams did. The coincidence led a New York newspaper to report that the “like had never happened in the world, nor can it ever happen again, we may almost say with certainty.” In Washington, D.C., the National Intelligencer agreed: “No language can exaggerate it—no reason account for it. It is one of those events which have no example on record, and as a beauteous moral must forever stand alone on the page of history.”

Much of Virginia’s Declaration of Human Rights, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian Pauline Maier, was copied from George Mason’s preliminary draft of Virginia’s Declaration of Human Rights, including the words that “all men are created equal.” In her American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, Maier wrote that Jefferson’s draft was wordy, that one-fourth was cut by Congress.

Jefferson’s extravagant lifestyle and generosity to friends left him debt-ridden. In a will signed only a few months before his death at the age of eighty-three, he took notice that he was survived by only one of his six children, Martha, and her bankrupt husband, Thomas Mann Randolph.

Jefferson at one point was forced to sell part of his incomparable library to Congress for $23,950 in order to pay off some of his debts, and his bequest of the remaining collection of books to the University of Virginia greatly helped that school. To his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson gave “my silver watch in preference to the golden one, because of its superior excellence, my papers of business going of course to him, as my executor, all others of a literary or other character I give to him as of his own property.” And to James Madison he gave a gold-mounted walking staff of animal horn as “a token of the cordial and affectionate friendship which for nearly now an half century has united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have deemed for the greatest good of our country.”

A great debate has ensued concerning Jefferson’s views about the Negroes of his time. Pulitzer-Prize-winning author David K. Shipler has noted the powerful contradiction of the Jefferson legacy. On the one hand, Jefferson was for individual liberty for everyone of every race. On the other, notes Shipler,

• He believed in the inferiority of black people, demonstrating how even a great thinker can remain captive of the racist stereotypes of his time. . . . In his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1785, Jefferson observes his slaves and endorses virtually every stereotype—positive and negative—that today characterizes the system of prejudices about black people physically, mentally, sexually, emotional. . . . “They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor,” he argues, adding that this “renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold than the whites. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. . . . They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. . . . In memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.

Jefferson, Shipler notes, “opposed racial mixing and intermarriage. His idea was to free the slaves, train them for self-sufficiency, and then deport them, for he saw no possibility that blacks and whites could live together. . . . There are two histories of Jefferson, the two histories of America. If we face Jefferson,” Shipler declares, “we face ourselves.”

Indicative of a possible new attitude toward Jefferson is that of Conor Cruise O’Brien, who, in The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785—1800 (1996), has termed him a radical and a racist, one whose flaws are beyond redemption and whose reputation is undeserved. For O’Brien, Jefferson represents a liberal tradition which is intellectually, socially, and politically untenable. O’Brien is ferocious in his attack on the long affair with French revolutionaries and with Jefferson’s handling of slaves, particularly one Jame Hubbard. Also, he predicted that

• . . . the American civil religion, official version—let me call it ACROV—will have to be reformed in a manner that will downgrade and eventually exclude Thomas Jefferson. Finally, I believe that Jefferson will nonetheless continue to be a power in America in the area where the mystical side of Jefferson really belongs: among the radical, violent, anti-federal libertarian fanatics.” He adds, “I believe that the orthodox multiracial version of the American civil religion must eventually prevail—at whatever cost—against the neo-Jeffersonian racist schism. That the orthodox version should prevail is vital not only for America but also for the future of nonracial democracy, and of Enlightenment values generally, in those parts of the world where these are now dominant or where people are struggling to bring them into effective being.

O’Brien called attention to Jefferson’s unethical link with The National Gazette, a newspaper he covertly supplied with pro-French-revolutionary editorial guidance while he was Secretary of State. And he cited Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” words used to excuse much bloodshed.

Similarly, Michael Lind’s The Next American Nation (1995) attacked Jefferson as “the greatest southern reactionary” in American history, adding, “Jefferson was obsessed, in particular, by the fear that his precious Anglo-Saxon nation would be corrupted by inter-marriage with nonwhites. . . . Every major feature of the modern United States—from racial equality to Social Security, from Pentagon to the suburb—represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism.”

Further evidence of changing attitudes about Jefferson is found in Joseph J. Ellis’s American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997). Ellis describes the person who drafted the Declaration of Independence as a foppish young man with limited political skill, a shy man of whom John Adams said, “During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” As for Jefferson’s character, Ellis wrote, “He was never a legend in his own time, always a controversial figure who combined great depth with great shallowness, massive learning with extraordinary naïveté, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception.” Ellis, who read all 60,000 of Jefferson’s letters, plus the letters of his friends and enemies, thinks that “the more you immerse yourself in the Jefferson papers, the more difficult it becomes to imagine a liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It’s ironic, the more grounded you are, the more likely you are to get this wrong.”

However, Jefferson’s 1785 and 1787 negative views on blacks were set down when he was in his 30s. In 1809, he wrote a letter to Henri Grégroire that contained the following, which Shipler does not cite:

• Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them [blacks] by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation. . . . On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief. [He never reversed his statement that sodomy should be punished by castration. See entry for homosexuality.]

Monroe Trotter, a leading black editor in the early 20th century, claimed that he was a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Hemimgs was half-sister to Jefferson’s wife, Martha, both having been fathered by the same owner of a plantation. By the age of fifteen, Sally had accompanied Jefferson’s daughter on a voyage to join Jefferson in Paris, and many believe she became his concubine. Before returning to the United States, Hemings allegedly extracted the promise that he would free any children that she might bear him before they reached the age of twenty-one. Over the years, she gave birth to six children, some if not all of whom were thought by some to have been Jefferson’s.

Willard Sterne Randall, however, called the Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship fanciful: “She was only eight when Jefferson last resided at Monticello and was mourning his wife’s death.” The alleged “Congo Harem” which Jefferson was supposed to have had, Randall believes, was a politically motivated and preposterous rumor.

DNA tests in 1998, however, proved Randall and others wrong. Blood samples collected by Tufts University Professor Eugene A. Foster confirmed the oral tradition that, indeed, the nation’s third President fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’s children. Fifty-two-year-old John Jefferson of Norrisville, Pennsylvania, has been shown to be a direct descendant of Hemings through Eston Hemings Jefferson. His Y chromosome matched blood samples taken from the descendants of Jefferson’s uncle, Field Jefferson. “I’ve known it practically all my life,” Jefferson said in a public statement.

Commenting on the 1998 DNA evidence of miscegenation, Prof. Annette Gordon-Reed of New York Law School and author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, said, “If people had accepted this story, he would never have become an icon. All these historians did him a favor until we could get past our primitive racism. I don’t think he would have been on Mount Rushmore or on the nickel. The personification of America can’t live thirty-eight years with a black woman.” Prof. Gordon-Reed, however, may have revealed her own prejudgments, critics were quick to note.

Dr. Eugene A. Foster, the author of the original DNA analysisand a co-author of the Nature article that contained the test results, has complained that individuals have misunderstood his work. The retired pathologist, writing in Nature (January 1999), supported the view that any of several males in the Jefferson family could have fathered Eston Hemings, the child whose descendants bear the Jefferson Y chromosome. Foster believes it is more probable that Jefferson was Eston’s father, rather than other individuals suspected at the time, two of Jefferson’s nephews on his sister’s side.

At a 1999 family reunion in Monticello, the eighty-sixth such, both the Jefferson and Hemings families met. Many of the two hundred Jefferson descendants were unwilling not only to open their arms to descendants of Jefferson’s slave but also were unwilling to open the family cemetery. The six-member executive committee of the Monticello Association declared, according to their president, Robert M. Gillespie, “More evidence is coming forward, and we invited it. But let’s make sure we make the correct decision, not a quick decision.” As a result, the official organization of Jefferson’s family went on record as not being prepared to accept the Hemings line as Jefferson descendants.

As the century ended, Daniel P. Jordan, now the Jefferson Memorial Foundation president, announced that “although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainy, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” James Truscott, president of the Monticello Association that previously had resisted the notion, declared his group would issue a report some time in 2000. For freethinkers, the DNA test results were easily accepted as fact. Individuals and events need to be seen in the context of their times. If Jefferson had sexual relations with a person considered little more than property by others, and if their relationship continued for a long time, this is not necessarily bad news. The findings are replete with humanistic overtones.

Jefferson’s tombstone at Monticello, Virginia, is inscribed with “O.S.” (old style calendar; the year began in March rather than January), not “A.D.” (year of Our Lord):

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson,

Author of the Declaration of American Independence,

Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,

and Father of the University of Virginia

Born April 2, 1743 O.S. Died July 4, 1826

(See entry for E. C. Vanderlaan contains Benjamin Rush’s telling Jefferson that George Washington did not like to discuss his religious outlook. Roger E. Greeley offers a collection of the intellectual Jefferson’s quotes in Thomas Jefferson’s Freethought Legacy [1995]. See entry for Territory of Jefferson [[1]])

{BDF; CE; CL; EU, Eugene Sheridan; FUS; HNS2; JM; Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1996; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; U; UU; Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, 7 January 1999; Washline, September 1997}