{"id":18356,"date":"2024-12-05T01:00:56","date_gmt":"2024-12-05T07:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/?p=18356"},"modified":"2024-12-04T18:13:25","modified_gmt":"2024-12-05T00:13:25","slug":"getting-to-know-thomas-jefferson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/getting-to-know-thomas-jefferson\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to Know Thomas Jefferson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As editor-in-Chief of the inaugural issue of the now-defunct theme-based journal, <em>The Journal of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s Life and Times<\/em>, I was asked to write the feature, introductory essay, which I titled \u201c\u2018A silent execution of duty\u2019: The Republican Pen of Thomas Jefferson.\u201d It was a daunting task, as I aimed to introduce the journal by constructing an essay that would give readers some feel for the breadth and depth of Jefferson\u2019s mind. Given the obvious spatial constraints, there were two available paths. On the one hand, I could focus on Jefferson\u2019s intellectual breadth by giving a relatively exhaustive account of his interests and saying little about each. On the other hand, I could focus on Jefferson\u2019s intellectual depth by introducing readers to a handful of his interests and going into some detail on each of them. The advantages, and disadvantages, of each approach are sufficiently plain so that no discussion of them is needed. I chose the latter.<\/p>\n<p>On finishing the essay, I became frustrated that I had not done justice to the categories I had culled\u2014Jefferson as liberal revolutionist, utopist, natural scientist, and moralist\u2014which were in some sense culled arbitrarily. Thus, I promised myself that in the near future, I would give Jefferson\u2019s large and singular mind the scholarly attention it merits\u2014hence, my book, <em>The Cavernous Mind of Thomas Jefferson, An American Savant<\/em>. In that book, I have chapters on Jefferson as lawyer, moralist, politician, scientist, epistolist (letter-writer), aesthetician, farmer, educationalist, and philologue, and those nine chapters still do not fully Jefferson\u2019s cavernous mind: e.g., I say nothing about Jefferson\u2019s passions for and expertise in music and architecture.<\/p>\n<p>How does one go about capturing the mind of an extraordinary character like Thomas Jefferson?<\/p>\n<p>Biographer Henry Adams, in his <em>History of the United States during the First Administration of America, during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson,<\/em> offers this cautionary advice. \u201cA few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception, and a few more strokes would answer for any member of their many cabinets; but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.\u201d The sentiment\u2014poetic, almost impenetrably so\u2014bespeaks large, perhaps matchless, complexity of personhood. Jefferson\u2019s portraiture, Adams\u2019 words imply, is a task for no ordinary artist, but one with equal, or nearly so, complexity\u2014otherwise there can be no detailing with the fine pencil.<\/p>\n<p>The scenario is more complicated. Scholars today often lament that we cannot get at the historical Jefferson even with a fine pencil. It is commonly asserted that Jefferson was slippery and deceptious in his writings\u2014especially his letters\u2014that he aimed to placate correspondents by writing what they wished to hear, not what he believed to be true. Thus, the argument goes, it is nearly impossible to know the person behind the pen. One writer, Pete Onuf, goes so far to say that so great was Jefferson\u2019s slipperiness and deceptiveness that we cannot know the person behind the pen.<\/p>\n<p>Thomas Jefferson loved to write. That is how he best expressed himself. His correspondence consists of some 19,000 letters. He drafted numerous bills; wrote several addresses, reports, messages, proposals, replies, and directives as a public servant; began a late-in-life autobiography (which he never finished); wrote critical essays or commentaries; wrote a book; and usually took notes when he travelled in the event that any of his observations should prove serviceable at some future time. Jefferson writes in his autobiography:<\/p>\n<p><em>I have always made it a practice whenever an opportunity occurred of obtaining any information of our country, which might be of use to me in any station public or private, to commit it to writing. These memoranda were on loose papers, bundled up without order, and difficult of recurrence when I had occasion for a particular one.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Last, he even wrote his own epitaph. And so, to know best Jefferson, one has to know well his writings and one has to study the things that he studied.<\/p>\n<p>The task is not Gordian, but instead complex. Jefferson, I believe, was not so protean and deceptive, as biographer after biographer seems to say these days. He is a difficult task for a biographer who wishes to get at the man not because of his slipperiness, but because of his dimensionality\u2014his numerous and varied interests\u2014and his politeness\u2014he would speak to others of things in which they, not he, took especial interest. Jefferson was many things to many persons because he was many things. He was a person of extraordinary depth and breadth.<\/p>\n<p>Like no president before or after him, Jefferson was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/omnilegent\">omnilegent<\/a>, or nearly so. He had one of the largest libraries in the young nation and it was not for show, but for use. As his library swelled in size, so too did his mind. He was not only well-read, but knowledgeable in numerous subjects: e.g., law, architecture, agriculture, gadgetry and invention, paleontology, music, political practice and theory, education, Classics, philosophy, history, religion, philology, and literary criticism. Hence, we can grasp the poignancy of John F. Kennedy\u2019s remark on April 29, 1962, at a White House dinner party in honor of Nobel Prize winners, \u201cI think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If it is the case that Jefferson\u2019s cavernous mind is the chief reason that he can be portrayed only with a fine pencil, then aiming to understand Jefferson by exposition of the most prominent aspects of his mind\u2014e.g., his interests in law, in philosophy, in husbandry, in language, in beauty, and in science\u2014offers any Jefferson scholar the best chance of grasping him. That is what I aimed to do in my book <em>The Cavernous Mind of Thoams Jefferson<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>That Jefferson had a keen interest in such diversity of subjects is not a matter of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/thesaurus\/mercurial\">mercurial<\/a> appetite\u2014as it were, a fussy stomach that is easily bored with flavors\u2014or political intrigue\u2014<em>viz<\/em>., pandering to others for political gain. Jefferson had a profound interest in the human condition and in humans\u2019 fit in cosmic affairs. And so, he was a man who, when he took interest in something, dove into that subject with a vigor, focus, and enthusiasm that too few persons possess. Moreover, convinced of cosmic purposiveness, Jefferson needed to know how the things he examined fit together. Ever dissatisfied with the appearance of truth\u2014verisimilitude or truthiness\u2014he aimed always at a full grasp or understanding of things. Like too few others of his day, he was a true student\u2014to my mind the best example from America\u2014of the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n<p>Yet today\u2019s world is markedly different from Jefferson\u2019s. Ours is an age of specialization. Cosmic purposiveness, a teleological concern, is pass\u00e9. The sciences, seen as working together to offer a depiction of cosmic intention, have become dissociated and particularized. We care not whether the sciences are complementary, so long as each solves problems it aims to solve in its own way. In business, we are educated to perform a particular task at a corporation and not to worry about how the business as a whole works. All is well, if at week\u2019s end, we get our paycheck.<\/p>\n<p>Jefferson\u2019s time, in sharp contrast, was an age of wonder, excitement, and unity of purpose, due to belief in scientific progress and, for many, cosmic goodness. That is why Jefferson insisted that professors at the University of Virginia were to be expert specialists in their own field, but also men who could converse intelligently on all other fields of science. That scholarly ideal is foreign to us. Ours is an age of perplexity and apathy, as our cosmos is indifferent to the fate of humans. We are willing to contribute to the public good or listen to the advice of scientific researchers, all specialists, so long as we can be sure that there is something in it for us. Thus, the differences between Jefferson\u2019s time and ours are in large part responsible for Jefferson\u2019s inaccessibility to us.<\/p>\n<p>Because his interests were so broad, he is for many of today\u2019s scholars a comical, na\u00efve, or at least perplexing figure. Yet to be wholly understood, Jefferson cannot be measured by today\u2019s precise, but limited tools of the particular sciences. Doing so, we completely miss the measure of the man. That egregious mistake is captured beautifully by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his booklet that comes down to us as <em>On Certainty<\/em>. A painting is made to be appreciated from a certain distance, says he. We gain no finer appreciation of that work of art by standing inches from it and staring at its \u201cparticulars\u201d\u2014a shot, unfortunately, at analytical philosophers such as me.<\/p>\n<p>And so, to understand Jefferson as a person consisting of varied personae\u2014to understand the cavernous mind of Thomas Jefferson\u2014we must make an especial effort to see how those personae hang together, and they do hang together. We must see Jefferson as a whole, at a certain distance, and from his own <a href=\"https:\/\/www.collinsdictionary.com\/dictionary\/english\/zeitgeist\"><em>Zeitgeist<\/em><\/a>, not ours. Otherwise, the various personae will make him appear to be a comical, na\u00efve, and perplexing figure\u2014that is the tack of many of today\u2019s denigrative Jeffersonian scholars\u2014when he was a man of clarity of vision and unity of focus.<\/p>\n<p>Enjoy the video below\u2026.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"RTJ #38 Getting to Know Jefferson\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qRzTo-eYDD8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As editor-in-Chief of the inaugural issue of the now-defunct theme-based journal, The Journal of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s Life and Times, I was asked to write the feature, introductory essay, which I titled \u201c\u2018A silent execution of duty\u2019: The Republican Pen of Thomas Jefferson.\u201d It was a daunting task, as I aimed to introduce the journal by constructing an essay that would…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":18043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[319,5,6,24],"class_list":["post-18356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-blog","tag-m-andrew-holowchak","tag-southern-culture","tag-southern-history","tag-thomas-jefferson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}