Alf J. Mapp: Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity. Lanham: Madison Books, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 13, 1988.
In Professor Mapp’s estimation, contemporary liberals have too easily appropriated Thomas Jefferson as one of their own. They “begin with the assumption that Jefferson was a liberal and then either… exclude from consideration or treat as an anomaly at of his words and actions inconsistent with the liberal image.” Mapp calls this error, not mendacity: After all, “most biographies of Jefferson in recent years have come from either academe or journalism at a time when the bias of both professions has been distinctly liberal.”
It is a generous and probably accurate judgment by a generous and scrupulous historian. Mapp’s generosity comes as the overflow of a sort of filial affection, a love of ‘his own.’ A Virginian to the bone, he honors the Old Dominion’s most celebrated son. If this love occasionally makes him too generous to Jefferson (“America’s philosopher-king”), it also animates his research—undertaken with diligence and presented with warmth.
Mapp tells Jefferson’s story up to his election to the presidency in 1800, with a few glances ahead at his term in office. At William and Mary College, his anti-clerical mathematics professor, William Small, “enlisted Jefferson in the Enlightenment,” introducing him to the writings of Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Jefferson in his maturity would call these the three greatest men in the history of the world. That includes Moses (Mapp imagines Jefferson’s classification of the Old Testament under “ancient history” as a sign of piety) and Jesus (whom Jefferson regarded as human, simply). Throughout his life, Jefferson remained “extremely reticent in matters of faith even when… his silence cost him politically,” perhaps because speech would have cost him more. In swearing eternal opposition “to every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” Jefferson very much had religion in mind.
On morality and politics, Jefferson was not reticent at all. Mapp successfully defends his man against the standard charges. Yes, Jefferson opposed slavery while holding slaves. But no major Virginia landowner of the day could sustain himself, along with an uncorrupt political career, without them, given the economic conditions of that time and place. Jefferson advocated not immediate but gradual abolition, the only kind that might have been enacted. In his early career he consistently charged that the king of England had foiled attempts by Virginia to outlaw importation of slaves, and he tried to insert an antislavery clause into the Declaration of Independence. Congress later defeated his proposal to bar slavery from new states after 1800, a law that probably would have averted the Civil War.
Somewhat less plausibly, Mapp tries to reconcile Jefferson’s preference for ‘strict construction’ of the United States Constitution with the Louisiana Purchase, a move that document doesn’t explicitly permit, and one that Jefferson himself admitted, in private correspondence, to have been beyond the letter of the law. Here Mapp cites what he calls Jefferson’s “pragmatic idealism”; “though preferring strict construction,” Jefferson “had been unwilling to let it stand in the way of important opportunities for his country” before the Purchase, and would continue to think that way thereafter. Jefferson was no ideologue, despite some tendencies in that direction. One might say that the Sage of Monticello required strict construction most consistently of his enemies, the Federalists, whom he sincerely suspected of oligarchic and even monarchic ambitions. For himself and his political friends, he unbent a little, and the republic was better (undeniably bigger) for his prudent (if somewhat self-indulgent and partisan) flexibility.
On education, Jefferson most assuredly practiced what he recommended to others. His daughter Patsy received an education equivalent to that of a young gentleman, thanks to her father’s shrewd application of Lockean liberalism: “The chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead I calculate about fourteen to one,” he wrote to a friend, “and of course [I conclude] that the education of her family will probably rest on her own ideas and direction without assistance.” It would be interesting to know the basis of that Jeffersonian estimate—whether, for instance, he was surveying the population of eligible young men in his neighborhood, his state, his country, or the world at large. No dogmatic egalitarian he, no matter what population sample he had in mind.
Perhaps to improve the odds for his prospective granddaughters, Jefferson worked to educate his countrymen, as well. While Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, he wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia, a pioneering work on New World biology, linguistics, and anthropology. Mapp rightly associates such activities with Jefferson’s commitment to religious toleration, which he considered conducive to unhindered scientific studies.
This notwithstanding, Mapp emphasizes Jefferson’s ‘romantic’ side, writing extensively and well on Jefferson’s sensitivity to art and nature, and his susceptibility to intelligent women. In the Dialogue Between the Head and the Heart, Jefferson’s farewell love letter to Maria Cosway, the Heart wins, even as it relinquishes its beloved. Mapp mistakes this for divergence from the Enlightenment, overlooking the strong moral sentimentalism of that movement, from which Romanticism came, after rejecting rationalism. Mapp’s own romantic streak gets the better of him here, and his prose turns lush in describing Jefferson’s last hour with Mrs. Cosway as “encapsulated in the awareness of impending frustration, and made the sweeter for it like grapes nestled in their sour skins.” There’s a lot of “must have” speculation about Jefferson’s feelings and thoughts in the book; added to Mapp’s weakness for merely decorative literary quotations and allusions, the thing flirts with melodrama and occasionally succumbs.
Does it all make the portrait of a man as conservative as he was liberal? Not really: But Mapp does portray an undeniably great liberal, never quite too doctrinaire to forget that liberty is about liberty as much as equality, and to defend liberty against tyrants with an aristocrat’s spirit. This is what our contemporary progressives, calling themselves liberals, seldom think or do any longer.
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