Last week, I finished Jon Meacham’s Art of Power, a book that is meant to provide a portrait of the great Thomas Jefferson. I began this work last summer and was delighted to finally finish it after my reading hiatus during my first year of medical school. I have nothing but the highest praise for this book, as did the committee for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and I recommend it to all lovers of history. It was astonishing to me how little I knew about our third president and the man who occupies the now antiquated two-dollar bill. Meacham takes the reader on a seamless sequence of snapshots through this monumental figure in American history, of which I will highlight a few.
Jefferson was a complicated, contradictory figure who has been praised by liberals and conservatives alike throughout the American epoch. He is known as the philosopher and architect of the Declaration of Independence – the arbiter of liberty and proponent of egalitarianism. He is also notorious for his ownership of slaves and his surreptitious sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemmings. Neither Meacham’s book nor this post will attempt to vindicate Jefferson of his convoluted ideologies and personal innuendos; however, several aspects of his illustrious life deserve mention.
Jefferson occupied nearly every significant executive office in the nascent United States of America. Besides his most obvious claim to fame (as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence), he also served as the governor of Virginia during the American Revolution. Subsequently, he was the American ambassador to France during the period of the drafting of the Constitution. While in France, his friendship with Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, (Marquis de Lafayette) would inspire the French Revolution. In fact, Lafayette used Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as a blueprint for his own Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Never mind the infamous guillotine and Robespierre Reign of Terror that ensued, these two Declarations form the very backbone of the implicit “human rights” that we in Western society now take for granted. Jefferson was a philosopher, inspired by Enlightenment ideals and imbued with a vision for human society that permeates every aspect of our lives today.
After France, Jefferson went on to occupy the three highest executive offices in America. He served as Secretary of State for George Washington, Vice President for John Adams, and as the third president of the United States. As president, he doubled the land size of the U.S. I was born in Baton Rouge and have been a Mississippi citizen my entire life, but it had never truly dawned on me before that Jefferson quite literally purchased the area that I have always called my home. He secured this purchase from Napoleon Bonaparte, using his friend James Monroe as the ambassador. Driving through Louisiana, I never knew the full significance of cities bearing the names of Monroe and Lafayette – all place names of men from a time gone by.
With the recent popularity of the musical Hamilton, this Treasury Secretary has come in vogue among millennials. I had the delight of seeing the musical firsthand this past spring in Chicago, and I was amused by the caricature the show makes out of Jefferson. The tensions were no joking matter. The two were sworn enemies, the Anglophilic Federalist in constant opposition to the Francophilic Republican. Jefferson even had a bust of Hamilton placed directly facing his own bust in his home of Monticello, so that even in death the two could oppose each other. The Federalist-Republican controversy was inflammatory, and an essential handful of men fought for the soul of the developing country. The lives of five of these men (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe) were so interconnected as to be almost dizzying, and they would all five serve as the first presidents of the United States. Tragically, neither Hamilton nor his assailant (Aaron Burr, vice president of Jefferson) would ever become the Commander in Chief.
His impressive political life notwithstanding, the true eminence of Jefferson lies in his philosophical disposition and reverence of knowledge. In fact, my first true exposure to Jefferson was on a trip to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where Jefferson donated his private library. Jefferson implores, “fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God. If there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” It was comments like this that earned Jefferson the reputation for being an atheist, although in reality he was more of a Deist. He remained a member of the Anglican Church his entire life.
Jefferson never wasted a day, constantly employing himself in pursuit of self-betterment. He knew multiple languages, played various instruments, and was an autodidact in geology, astronomy, agronomy, viniculture, architecture, and numerous other subjects. He furnished his home Monticello with all manner of art and sculpture, desiring it to reflect his own rich mental life. In a letter to his nephew Peter Carr, he reminded him “you are now old enough to know how very important to your future life will be the manner in which you employ your present time.” This was the mantra by which Jefferson lived, and his illustrious public career and private accomplishments speak for themselves.
The final accomplishment of Jefferson was his establishing the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Believing that “ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head,” he sought to provide an institution in which students could resist the mental atrophy to which we are so often prone to gravitate. In the most surreal historical coincidence, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams exited this world on July 4, 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was ushered peacefully into “that eternal sleep which, whether with or without dreams, awaits us hereafter.” The life and death of this giant of America nearly brought me to tears. Jon Meacham masterfully accomplishes what Abraham Lincoln once wrote – “all honor to Jefferson!”
Written by Cal Wilkerson
Brains and Brawn 