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.

Ralph Lerner: The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, February 10, 1988.

Among the dozens of books timed for release during the Constitutional bicentennial, surely there must be a few really good ones? As last year wound down, this polite hope had begun to dim, as your reviewer scanned a landscape dotted with ideological sinks, hacked shrubbery, and little mounds of pedantry. But here at last stands an impressive, steep hill, the view it affords worth the climb.

Professor Lerner notes that contemporary scholars leave the American Founders “strangely bereft of revolutionary intent, or conviction, or clarity, or significance.” Reducing these statesmen to creatures of their ‘time’—of economic, social, and/or ‘cultural’ forces—”recent students of the American past still have not faced up to what, from our present-day point of view, is perhaps the most incredible assumption of the Revolutionary generation: that their highest and deepest motives derived from their reasoned understanding.”

Lerner’s task is scholarly, and more than scholarly: If human beings cannot really think beyond their contemporary circumstances, what good is having a republic, or keeping it? Our very ideas of the good itself will shift meaninglessly with the breezes of fashion. We will have not a public philosophy but a string of ideologies, one as empty as the next. What serious man or woman would fight for a myth known to be a myth? Lerner undertakes to “recover the Revolution” both for scholars and for citizens.

Beginning with John Adams, “the very model of a thinking revolutionary,” Lerner proves that the Founders balanced their revolutionary fervor—unmitigated, it would have led to the utopian terror of 1790s France—with a prudence made of equal parts moderation, intelligence, and experience. The Founders saw greater possibilities in human nature than had most previous statesmen, but unlike so many of their successors in this country and others, they also saw “the mixed motives of man.” They devised institutions to mitigate the worst effects of those motives and to encourage the best.

Even the most ‘optimistic’ of the Founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, never quite lost sight of these realities. Franklin “wishes to be a great mover of men, but all things considered, he would prefer they did not know it at the time.” His powerful curiosity limited his utilitarianism, and vice-versa. Jefferson’s revolutionary recasting of Virginia’s legal system “was to take place within certain legal constraints”—existing English and colonial legislation—combining “a sense of open possibilities and cherished constraints.” The “politics of reason” turns out to have been, of all things, reasonable.

Even the early Supreme Court justices sought to educate citizens in republicanism, doing so with a “mixed spirit of high hope and sober sense, equally removed from the doctrinaire and from cold legalism.” They insisted upon “the close connection between self-restraint and true liberty,” carefully “appealing to fairly narrow calculations of self-interest” at first, then “broadening the range of considerations as the argument moved from self to nation to type of regime.” Their arguments consistently aimed at “making the republicans safe for the republic.”

A republic of reasonable citizens faces many problems, given the human propensity for lapses into unreason. In America the presence of three races tested the Founders’ claim to secure natural rights, rights belonging to man as man. Visible differences of skin color betokened even more serious differences of custom. Lerner devotes a fascinating chapter to the Founders’ policy with respect to American Indians. Such men as Jefferson, Washington, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall believed none of the convenient fictions about the white man’s providential obligation to conquer the red man. But they saw that “Indians had for the most part little or no use for the Europeans’ economics, politics, or god,” and for their part most whites felt much the same way about the Indians’ customs. The federal government had insufficient power to halt the white settlers’ predation against the Indians, but attempts were made to convert these societies of hunters and gatherers to agriculture. Usefully enough, this policy would have required them to use much less land.

As Tocqueville writes, and as Lerner observes, the American Indians’ habits recalled nothing so much as the medieval aristocracy, with its warrior spirit, its pride, and its contempt for physical labor. The custom of chattel slavery brought out the same traits in white Southerners. Tocqueville also saw that aristocracy was giving way to democratic man—in North America, the practical if unimaginative Yankee. Red men and Southern gentry were “hopeless anachronisms in an age on the make.” Tocqueville hoped that a few remaining aristocratic virtues might at least temper democrats, as they exerted heroic efforts for “unheroic objectives.”

Lerner agrees with Tocqueville, who teaches that the modern alternative to ‘America’—that is, to commercial republicanism—is not aristocracy but ‘Russia’—a despotism based upon a sort of egalitarianism, the Hobbesian equality of shared oppression. Had Tocqueville lived to see Marxism-Leninism, he might have rewarded himself with a grim smile or (more likely) the sterner pleasure of indignation. He did indeed see both Hegelianism and socialism, detesting both.

Only the spirit of liberty counteracts egalitarianism, Tocqueville argues. And liberty requires certain virtues in order to defend itself. Lerner’s book shows how the American Founders understood the relationship of equality and liberty, governed by balance institutions and civic virtues. Their work remains timely, here and throughout the world, because these revolutionaries thought as well as they acted.