Clay S. Jenkinson

Book Review Essay

The Ordeal of Thomas Jefferson

Whirl Is King

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase, by Roger G. Kennedy. Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 368 pages. $30.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America, by Jon Kukla. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 430 pages. $30.00 cloth.

As the Twenth-First Century Begins, we are living through the post-dated tragedy of Thomas Jefferson. Even though he declared unambiguously that "all men are created equal," Jefferson owned more than two hundred slaves at any given time. Although this whopping contradiction did not go unnoticed in his lifetime, including by Jefferson himself, until recently the Sage of Monticello has been accorded what can only be called undeserved good will on this issue. Now that Jefferson the slaveholder is no longer permitted to operate behind a protective shield of decorum and sympathy, however, he is being scrutinized — and condemned — as never before.

For most of American history, Jefferson's complicity in the problem of slavery was regarded as an artificial issue. Yes, the argument went, Jefferson owned slaves, but slavery was an institution that was thrust upon him by accident of birth. He was always willing to denounce slavery as the outrage that it was, he did what he could to persuade his fellow planters to diminish or eliminate its horrors, and he would have done more if it had been possible within the political and social milieu from which he derived his power. Jefferson famously declared in a letter to John Holmes on April 22, 1820, that he regarded the economic loss that would attend general emancipation as a mere "bagatelle" that would not cost him a moment's anxiety. (All that can be said of such a wild claim is that he probably meant it when he wrote it, even though he was even less able to face the economic ramifications of manumission than his fellow planters.)

During the thirty years since Fawn Brodie's groundbreaking, controversial (and biographically thin) "intimate history" of Jefferson was published in 1974, a new synthesis has gradually crystallized, one that gives Jefferson less benefit of the doubt about his place in the perpetuation of slavery. The new synthesis acknowledges that slavery was central to Jefferson's life, lifestyle, and power; that he did not do much more than talk a good game about the eradication of slavery; and that from about 1785 on he grew increasingly complacent and defensive on the issue. By 1819, he was wholly committed to the extension of slavery into the American West.

For two hundred years, Jefferson was judged on the issue of slavery according to what he wrote about it. "Indeed I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just and his justice cannot sleep forever" (1785) or "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free" (1821) represent the best of Jefferson's great soul, and they have been allowed to represent his attitude in toto. Of late, however, he has been judged according to his actions, not his words, and his golden Enlightenment pronouncements have not only not been permitted to cover his actual behavior between 1776 and 1826 but also to prove that he was a contemptible hypocrite or a mere rhetorician. Now that we are no longer evading the centrality of slavery in American history, Jefferson is undergoing a measurable diminishment as an American hero.

Jefferson was a tragic figure, and if we had spent the last two hundred years attempting to make sense of the tragedy, to absorb the truth that he was a deeply flawed man, then we might be able to evaluate him today with something like equanimity. But the Herculean efforts of Jefferson's protectors — especially Dumas Malone, the author of the six-volume definitive biography of Jefferson — have been so imbalanced, so unwilling to face the Jefferson problem, that they have brought on the severe reaction that has recently set in. In a sense, recent scholarship about Jefferson has been as much a reaction to Malone's hagiography as it has been about Jefferson himself.

Roger Kennedy Sees this as a subset of a larger pattern in Jefferson's life. Although he acknowledges the idealism and the aspirational in Jefferson's character, he sees Jefferson as a leader of insufficient strength, stamina, and moral courage to fight for his vision of America and — more importantly — against the more self-serving plans of his fellow southerners to perpetuate the plantation system. For Kennedy, Jefferson also failed to protect the lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor of the American Indians he professed to admire and befriend. He knew what true stewardship of the American soil would require but did not stand in the way of those who preferred a purely extractive approach to American agriculture. He had a romantic attachment to the individualist small holder and squatter's rights, but he acted on behalf of speculators and large plantation owners. He hated America's economic enslavement to British banks, factors, and creditors, but he let himself fall hopelessly into debt and led the planter class into deeper and deeper dependence on the British cotton industry. He ached for a republic, but he bought an empire the first chance he got.

Jefferson's Lost Cause is unrelentingly critical of Jefferson. Kennedy's argument is that the United States might have become Jefferson's agrarian republic, his pastoral Eden of sturdy small landholders; but in order to have achieved that Virgilian end, Jefferson would have had to throw all of his mighty energies at the project and struggle against members of the planter class that had brought him to power. He was, as most historians agree, not temperamentally equipped to fight (at least in his own person) in the political arena. Even if Jefferson had been willing to engage in the gargantuan struggle for equality, liberty, and yeomanry, he might have lost the battle, Kennedy admits, but there was no way the struggle was going to be won if Jefferson refused to commit himself unambiguously to it. What Kennedy proves is that in spite of the better angels of his character and in spite of his carefully crafted verbal denunciations of slavery, Jefferson invariably acted in ways that perpetuated slavery, projected it onto the tabula rasa of the American West, and prevented any significant erosion of the power of the planter aristocracy.

The horror of this for Kennedy is that, whatever he wrote in those golden letters with what John Adams called his "peculiar felicity for expression," Thomas Jefferson steadfastly acted on behalf of the slaveholders, land speculators, monoculturists, and social elites, and in doing so he helped "re-enslave" the American South to British capitalists. In short, Thomas Jefferson was a friend to slavery. Kennedy virtually makes Jefferson the father of the Civil War. Although Jefferson's Lost Cause is annoyingly un-dispassionate and judgmental, it is quite difficult to counter Kennedy's argument. By choosing to present Jefferson in the worst possible light, Kennedy has shown that Jefferson looks pretty unattractive in that light and that the Jefferson mythology has been strangely at odds with what have to be seen as undeniable facts about his life and work.

Unfortunately, there is a dangerous presentism in Kennedy's work. He is not interested in reconstructing how Jefferson and his fellow Americans saw the world or how their choices may have reflected the larger purposes of the United States in the early national period, or at least the southern states in the Age of Jefferson. He excavates the past only to excoriate a certain class of people in the past, and his response to Jefferson is to convict him of moral cowardice rather than to appreciate the complex set of social dynamics that brought him to act as he did. Kennedy does not attempt to chart how Jefferson had to let go of his agrarian dream or the ways in which he sought to preserve what portion of it he could hope to bring to fruition. He pays almost no attention to the larger strategic and national security concerns of the Jefferson administration, and he refuses to investigate Jefferson's argument that securing the arena of American happiness is only the first step, to be followed in the course of human events by the gradual but earnest expansion of good ideas and republican ideals as enlightened generation follows enlightened generation. In other words, Kennedy finds no room in his analysis for Jefferson's marvelous middle-distance optimism, his belief that American life will inevitably work out the kinks as "we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man" (in a letter to John Adams on January 1, 1811).

It is not that Kennedy does not admire Jefferson. Sadly, what he admires is the rhetorical legacy of brilliant articulations of American aspiration rather than genuine action in the rough arena of American political life. Kennedy writes: "In the end, they honored Jefferson for his eloquence, as we do. He found winged words for conceptions otherwise creeping about in the treatises of his less gifted contemporaries. He could thus affect profoundly and for the better the uses of land in the United States after the nation began ridding itself of the plantation system" (p. 242, my emphasis). Kennedy's Jefferson is a man who postponed the agrarian paradise he envisioned more beautifully than anyone did since the classical world. He implies that Jefferson never wrote a systematic account of his political philosophy because that would have required him to come to terms with the inconsistencies that so annoy modern historians. He calls Jefferson a "fragmentarian, offering bits of theory in letters and in pages and paragraphs within his public papers" (p. 41). Kennedy's Jefferson is a poetic squanderer of the American dream.

Kennedy's litany of Jefferson's betrayals of his agrarian ideal is as hard to absorb as it is hard to deny. He purchased the Louisiana Territory with dubious constitutional authority. He made no effort to keep slavery out of the territory he had purchased from France — in fact, his actions were intended to bring about precisely the opposite result. He authorized a form of territorial administration on New Orleans and lower Louisiana that not only directly contradicted all of his accumulated pronouncements about self-government and the ability of average human beings to manage their own public affairs but that also imposed the reductionist Anglo-Saxon taxonomy of free man vs. slave, black vs. white on a multicultural community that had for decades acknowledged a flexible continuum of racial and social possibilities. He conspired to marginalize or politically neutralize those (such as Alexander McGillivray and William Augustus Bowles) who sought to find a path that would respect the rights and capacities of Native Americans and incorporate their communities within the American republic rather than expel them to the Far West. He refused to lend his name to efforts by young men like Edward Coles to experiment in supervised manumission. He did what he could to help Napoleon crush the black slave rebellion in Haiti, and in 1819 he supported the extension of slavery into Missouri on the patently absurd principal that the diffusion of slavery would somehow lessen its horrors.

Kennedy is certainly right to argue that Jefferson exaggerated the ways in which he "laid the axe" to the Virginia aristocracy. It is clear that Jefferson detested the smugness, the philistinism, and the idleness of the tidewater class of planters, but his distaste for their world amounted to little more than occasional sarcastic comments. It somehow became clear to them early on that for all of his idealism, Jefferson was not prepared to thwart their will, that his propensity to wax eloquently about liberty would not impede their land development plans in any meaningful way. So they entrusted him with power, and even took a certain pleasure in contemplating the ways in which his idealistic pronouncements made them seem more willing to make enlightened choices — under the right conditions — than they in fact were.

Kennedy's only attempt to redeem Jefferson is his argument that some elements of what he calls the lost cause found their way into public policy after the southern states bolted from the union in 1861. Without the clog of southern obstructionism, Lincoln was able to pass the Homestead Act (1862), the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862), and get started the transcontinental railroad system that would carry all those Jeffersonian family farmers to their Edenic garden plots in the West. "[C]ommencing in 1861, Abraham Lincoln redeemed his country and Jefferson's Lost Cause" (p. 241).

The best thing about this book is that Kennedy challenges the myth of inevitability, the notion that in spite of the best efforts of idealists and men of principle like Jefferson, things moved inexorably toward the destruction of American Indian culture, environmental degradation, and the Civil War. Kennedy writes:

Perhaps Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause never had a fair trial. One could argue that he had no sooner sketched it out than it was overwhelmed by the predilections of his fellow planters for quick returns on their investments in land and slaves, by the blandishments of British credit, and by the immense hydraulic suction of British demand for raw cotton. That is not the view taken in this book, however. Though these forces worked powerfully against his cause, a series of occasions were presented to him and others when the outcome was not predetermined. From each of these turning points, another trajectory of events might have commenced (p. 46).

As Aristotle was the first to point out, a tragic character is not a mere victim of circumstance. He must make choices that contribute to his downfall. "The tragic flaw central to this drama," Kennedy writes, "was Jefferson's timidity in risking affront to those whose approval he craved. The tragedy for them was that they had insufficient interest in the long-term health either of society or of the land to accommodate the inconveniences espoused in his young manhood" (p. 241). In other words, Jefferson knew better, but he lacked the moral courage to challenge his grasping and less enlightened countrymen. "[T]he planters had neither the will nor the energy to break their previous habits of dependence upon international markets and their reliance upon enslaved labor" (p. 45). The one man who might have lifted them to a higher level of justice became increasingly silent as the nation broke its revolutionary promise.

It is important to read every incident of Jefferson's life in its historical context. Kennedy, for example, reads Jefferson's refusal in Paris to join les Amis des Noirs, a French abolitionist society, as more proof that "Jefferson was driven by an insatiable hunger for the approval of his fellow planters" (p. 30). This could not be more unfair. At the time of this incident, Jefferson was the American minister to the court of Louis XIV and was in Paris in an official U.S. diplomatic capacity. His every action could be construed as reflecting official U.S. policy. Furthermore, he was all too aware that his protégé, James Monroe, had been recalled by the Washington administration in 1796 after he showed too much personal enthusiasm for the principles of the French Revolution. Diplomats are successful to the extent that they subordinate their own politics to the official policies of the nations they represent. Jefferson rightly declined to join les Amis des Noirs. This does not rule out the possibility that he lacked the moral courage to fight against the continuation of slavery or that he was driven by perhaps something less than an "insatiable" hunger for the approval of his fellow citizens (not necessarily southern planters), but it is important to read every incident of Jefferson's life in the historical context, and it would seem to be impossible to produce a balanced evaluation of Jefferson without finding things to appreciate in his character and achievement. In other words, an understanding of Jefferson requires a certain generosity of spirit, without which he can be exposed, as Joseph Ellis and others have recently done, as a man comically or tragically detached from the real world. Revisionists like Kennedy seem to take joy in reading every incident in Jefferson's life in the way that exposes him as a man who lacked integrity.

Kennedy's book may be willfully judgmental, grossly unsympathetic, and unrelentingly critical, but it is hard not to acknowledge that he is essentially right. If, as Kennedy insists, Jefferson was wrong, at least in his actions, then we must ask what place in our national narrative Jefferson will occupy in the twenty-first century. Kennedy's book is just one of many recently published studies that choose to expose Jefferson's weaknesses with little or no sympathy for his larger achievement or the complexities of his Enlightenment project. Anthony Wallace's, Jefferson and Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (1999) excoriates Jefferson for his contemptible hypocrisy and ruthlessness toward Indians and Indian policy. Herbert E. Sloan's Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (1995) insists that Jefferson was little short of criminal in his handling of his private financial affairs. Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (1996) argues that the twentieth-century statesman most closely resembling Thomas Jefferson was Pol Pot of Cambodia! Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997) offers a delightful — but ultimately condescending — analysis of Jefferson's zany evasiveness and his lifelong naiveté. Pauline Maier's American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1977) attempts to put to rest the idea that Jefferson did anything original or extraordinary in penning the Declaration of Independence. Even the quasi-official Jeffersonian Legacies, edited by the University of Virginia's Peter Onuf, concludes that the legacy is deeply clouded with error, miscalculation, Machiavellian tendencies, and racism.

It is, in short, open season on Thomas Jefferson. Now that the king has been shown to be woundable, everyone seems to feel compelled to attack him in one exposed flank or another. The benefit of the doubt has dissipated "like morning fog" (to use one of Jefferson's favorite similes), and the glare of Jefferson's weaknesses has become blinding. As the twenty-first century opens, there is a curious bifurcation in writings about Thomas Jefferson. The middle ground has disappeared. Those who love him mostly love him uncritically and refuse to absorb even a moderate dose of the sadder truth about his life and character. Those who fault him have decided that the glories of Jefferson are mostly smoke and mirrors or the benefits of leading a privileged, unreal, unjust life, which have the effect of making his sins seem even more malevolent than they were.

John Kukla's A Wilderness so Immense is a splendid book. It is readable, intelligent, balanced, thoughtful, and comprehensive. This is precisely the sort of history that academics can credit and the general public can read with delight. He puts all of the complexities on the table, and it is clear that he has read the fundamental documents with fresh and insightful eyes. His study belongs as much to the emerging genre of bioregional history as it is a straight, comprehensive account of America's acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803. Kukla brings the smell of the soil, the serpentine bends of the Mississippi River, the architecture of New Orleans, and the sartorial splendor of the ancien regime to our senses, and he teases out unusual details about men, places, events, and documents without ever becoming mannerist. He is also able to summarize complex events with fair-minded lucidity.

The phrase that Kukla comes back to again and again is Timothy Pickering's dismissal of the newly acquired population of Louisiana as a "Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum of savages and adventurers." The crabby and dour Pickering of Massachusetts (1745–1829), possibly the least attractive member of the founding generation, was attempting to craft the most contemptuous phrase possible to describe the sorts of undesirables that Jefferson — with scant constitutional authority — suddenly had incorporated into Pickering's Anglo-Saxon republic. Kukla's argument is that so long as the American people subscribed in some sense to Pickering's monocultural arrogance, the American experiment was bound to be painful and fundamentally at odds with Jefferson's famous rhetoric, but that the dynamics of our history have led us inexorably downstream to a more inclusive, more democratic, more respectful, and more tolerant national identity. In other words, the goal of America, whether Jefferson understood it or not, was that we would one day become a "Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum," a better model to the world than the limited white protestant republic that seemed so paradisiacal to certain founders. Jefferson's greatness is bound up with his ability to dream the universal even when he was only able to live the contingent. Omnium gatherum reverberates through A Wilderness So Immense as a more beautiful alternative to e pluribus unum.

Kukla is just as aware as Kennedy is of the terrible paradoxes of American history, particularly the tragedy of Thomas Jefferson; but by leaving out the righteous indignation, he stands a much better chance of persuading us that we must re-evaluate our past. When he writes that "America's barely visible first steps along the Trail of Tears were taken in the White House as Thomas Jefferson pondered the implications of the Louisiana Purchase" (p. 303), we can hear the historian's sense of the sorrow of the national experiment or perhaps Virgil's awareness of the cost of empire, but not ex cathedra judgment.

The book begins and ends with careful and lovely personal reflections that linger with readers. At the beginning, Kukla reminisces: "The power and destiny of the Lower Mississippi is scarcely imaginable along the north shore of Lake Itasca [putative 'source' of the Mississippi], ... Here, fifty years ago, a tow-headed and dimpled midwestern child splashed from rock to rock across the shallow brook, cheerfully ignorant that he was ankle deep in the first tide of a turbulent force of nature and history. Everything impressive about the Mississippi River lay far downstream in his distant future" (p. 4). His last words show that it is possible to write one's historical politics without a whiff of righteousness: "If a candid reconsideration of the Louisiana Purchase helps us see diversity rather than dichotomy in the history we share with one another and with the world, perhaps we Americans can begin to look back at the Louisiana Purchase as a tributary in a long and slow and often tragic story of eventual inclusion. And perhaps the most fascinating part of the story of the Louisiana Purchase — the destiny of America — remains farther downstream" (p. 340). In other words, it is just possible that if we live according to our best Jeffersonian selves, we might become a "Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum of savages and adventurers" after all. A Wilderness So Immense is as good a book as has ever been written about the events that led to the Louisiana Purchase.

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