Thomas Jefferson: Author of America by Christopher Hitchens

In his brilliant and detailed study Lincoln at Gettysburg, Gary Wills shows how the "new birth of freedom" promised in Abraham Lincoln's legendary address requires nothing less than a remaking of the American Revolution by infusing the Constitution with values found in the Declaration of Independence—reconnecting America's moral foundation to its legal framework.

Lincoln is here not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg, but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution....He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit...

It is impossible to understand the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson, that cornerstone of America's moral foundation, without grappling with the seeming paradox that his life's work both helped to cause, and provided a solution for, this infected atmosphere.

The latest book from Christopher Hitchens, a slender biography entitled Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, draws a provocative portrait of Virginia's favorite son, showing Jefferson in all of his brilliance as well as his baffling contradictions. Hitchens is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair whose work regularly appears in The Atlantic, Slate, Harpers and elsewhere; and he is a Visiting Professor of Liberal Studies at New School University in New York (in the interest of disclosure, I was a member of the first class he taught there in 1998). As an erudite student of political philosophy, Hitchens is well suited to write an essay that is neither hagiography nor hatchet job, but rather a nuanced study of a monumental and contradictory personality.

In his contradictions, Thomas Jefferson can be said to embody the character of the United States itself:

The truth is that America has committed gross wrongs and crimes, as well as upheld great values and principles....It has an imperial record as well as an isolationist one. It has a secular constitution but a heavily religious and pietistic nature. Jefferson is one of the few figures in our history whose absence simply cannot be imagined...

As author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson "allied the plain language of Thomas Paine to the loftier expositions of John Locke..." and in doing so, he "radicalized Locke by grounding human equality on the observable facts of nature and the common human condition." The radical idealism of the Declaration leads directly to the greatest of Jefferson's incongruities.

It is a well known fact that Jefferson's original draft contained a strong condemnation of slavery—a paragraph that was excised in committee. In theory, Jefferson understood the horrors of slavery and often worked toward ending that peculiar institution. In practice, of course, the third president of the republic was a slaveholder himself who never once freed any of his slaves—that is, except for the children of Sally Hemmings, and then only because he was their father.

Hitchens does not shy away from the Hemmings question like so many other biographers, and he does not attempt to explain away or justify Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery. His inconsistencies on this question, rather, are essential to any understanding of the man.

Jefferson is depicted as a brilliant but stubborn man—prone to false modesty, incapable of forgetting a slight and adept at turning animosity to his advantage. He is, of course, best remembered as an icon (though Jefferson would detest the word) of the Enlightenment; author of American democracy and inspiration to the philosophes of 1789. Hitchens shows how Jefferson, as George Washington's Secretary of State, used his ties with Jacobin France as a buffer against his enemies Alexander Hamilton and John Adams whom he felt were too close to the Crown, but ended up like one of the "starry-eyed fellow travelers" who were undeterred by Stalin's show trials and refused to disbelieve in the god that failed.

Jefferson's career belies F. Scott Fitzgerald's oft-repeated line that there are no second acts in American lives. He was able to weather this storm, as he had the disaster of the Virginia governorship before it, biding his time and waiting for the advantage to swing back his way. Jefferson's political saga suggests a new definition of genius: the ability to make opportunity appear to be destiny.

Article Author: Pete Blackwell

Pete Blackwell is a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. He lives in St. Louis, Gateway to the West and proud home of Provel cheese.

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