America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Read online

  During his student years in Williamsburg, Jefferson enjoyed the company of just a few flesh-and-blood friends. His closest was John Page, a classmate at William and Mary (and later a governor of Virginia) with whom he would chitchat about both his studies and town gossip. But in contrast to Page and other peers who found wives soon after finishing college, Jefferson was too socially obtuse to get anywhere near the altar in the 1760s. At nineteen, he developed a crush on Rebecca Burwell, a bright and attractive sixteen-year-old living at the home of her uncle, a senior member of the Governor’s Council. With Rebecca, as with his books or anything else that piqued his interest, he had only one gear—the obsessional. In December 1762, of the woman of his dreams, whom he still hardly knew, he confided to Page, “There is so lively an image of her imprinted in my mind that I shall think of her too often I fear for my peace of mind.” The following fall, the perpetually tongue-tied Jefferson fell into a “most melancholy fit” when she rejected his awkward proposal of marriage one evening at a dance. “When I had an opportunity of venting…[my thoughts],” he wrote to Page, “a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder, and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible remarks of my strange confusion!” Not yet ready to give up, Jefferson tried again during a follow-up conversation. But rather than pleading his case by insisting upon the depth of his love, Jefferson decided to go around her; as he informed Rebecca, he now planned to ask her family for the right to her hand sometime in the future. “His idolizing dreams,” Jon Kukla, author of Mr. Jefferson’s Women, has written of this episode, “had blinded him to the existence of the real girl.” Confused, if not incensed by Jefferson’s second proposal, Rebecca soon made plans to marry someone else. Upon hearing the news, a devastated Jefferson came down with a “violent head ach.”

  The bachelor’s next stab at romance was so disastrous that it would reemerge decades later as Exhibit A in America’s first presidential sex scandal. In 1768, as Jefferson would acknowledge in 1805, a few years after newspapers such as the New York Evening Post first reported the story, he made unwelcome advances toward Betsy Walker, the wife of John Walker, a classmate at both Reverend Maury’s and William and Mary. (Exhibit B would be his liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, which began several years after his wife’s death; and to these accusations he would never respond.)

  In July 1768, Walker, later a U.S. senator from Virginia, asked Jefferson, his “neighbor and fast friend” and the executor of his will, to look after his wife and infant daughter while he went to New York on business. Upon his return four months later, a distressed Betsy Walker, who wouldn’t mention any particulars for another decade and a half, told her husband of her objection to keeping Jefferson as his executor. She also “wondered,” as Walker later reported to a friend, “why I could place such confidence in him [Jefferson].” According to Walker, his wife also informed him that Jefferson made passes at her on several other occasions over the next decade. When Walker went public with his version of events in 1805, Jefferson wrote to Robert Smith, his secretary of the navy, “You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single, I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness.” In this “he said that she said vs. he said” debate, it’s impossible to tell whether Jefferson persisted in his efforts to seduce Mrs. Walker after his marriage to Martha. But whatever the full extent of his harassment, Jefferson was guilty of a serious lapse in judgment that highlights the gulf between his intellectual and emotional intelligence.

  Given Jefferson’s cluelessness around women, it’s surprising that he ever managed to win the heart of the accomplished Martha Wayles Skelton. Born in 1748, she was the daughter of the wealthy landowner John Wayles and his first wife, also named Martha, who died a week after her birth. In 1766, the pretty, well-read, and musically inclined five-foot-tall heiress with the expressive hazel eyes married Bathurst Skelton, another colleague of Jefferson’s at William and Mary. Jefferson first met Martha around the time of her first husband’s premature death in 1768 when he took on her father as a client. The young widow immediately attracted a horde of suitors. Though as gauche as ever, Jefferson made the most of his competitive advantage; he would let his musical expertise do what his clumsy and disorganized words could not. And he had some experience to draw on. Duets were what had bonded him with his elder sister, Jane, whose loss he was still mourning—his favorite sibling had died suddenly in 1765 at the age of twenty-five. His strategy worked to a tee. According to Randall, two rivals once entered Martha’s house and overheard “her harpsichord and voice, accompanied by Mr. Jefferson’s violin and voice, in the passages of a touching song…and took their hats and retired, to return no more on the same errand!” During their courtship, Jefferson kept plying her with music. In December 1770, he bought her a portable clavichord; six months later, he gave her a more expensive mahogany pianoforte. The couple was married on January 1, 1772. Martha was an ideal match. Among the Jefferson papers at the Library of Congress are a couple of pages from an account book that she kept from January to June 1777 in her clear handwriting. In four consecutive entries in March, Martha, then seven months pregnant, recorded her production of soap—on March 8, her output came to a staggering one hundred pounds. Such devotion to cleanliness (and accurate measurement) must have endeared her to her husband as much as her affinity for Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, the one novelist whom this man of facts adored. Sterne’s signature work repeatedly attacked conventional authority, and thus appealed to the adolescent rebel that would forever remain a core part of Jefferson.

  After his admission to the bar in early 1767, Jefferson quickly built a thriving legal practice. Though he missed the nonstop reading, he didn’t mind the mundane tasks of writing briefs and filing motions; after all, for Jefferson, drudgery always held a certain appeal. He kept close track of all the relevant numbers in his copious fee and case books; the former features an eighteen-page alphabetized index of all his debtors and the latter lists all 939 cases that he handled between February 1, 1767, and November 9, 1774, when political unrest shut down the courts. By then, the husband with the growing family was already channeling most of his energy into a promising legislative career that had begun with his taking a seat in the House of Burgesses in May 1769. As he entered government, he felt it necessary to step up his reading of political philosophy. By the end of 1769, he was devouring a host of tomes by such heavyweights as England’s John Locke and France’s Montesquieu. While Jefferson could have become an accomplished lawyer and a legislator without the decade of systematic study—Patrick Henry, whom he called “the laziest man in reading I ever knew,” did not attend college and devoted just six weeks to the study of law—his self-designed professional training would be instrumental in helping him shake up the reigning political order in both America and the world.

  He got his first chance to wield his fiery pen for the cause of freedom in June 1774, when Parliament responded to the Boston Tea Party by closing the Port of Boston. Standing in solidarity with the residents of Massachusetts, the delegates to the Virginia assembly planned a meeting for early August to choose representatives to the new Continental Congress, slated to begin in September. Jefferson soon completed a twenty-three-page pamphlet of grievances, which he intended to show to his fellow legislators. While his body did not reach the capital—en route to Williamsburg, he came down with dysentery—his words did; and they caused quite a stir when published anonymously later that year in the Virginia Gazette and other papers across America as “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” “If it had any merit,” a modest Jefferson would write a generation later of his first publication, “it was that of our taking our true ground, and that which was afterwards assumed and maintained.” Jefferson had issued the most powerful challenge to date of British rule, one which got the colonists to think about their plight in an entirely new way.

  In an attempt to stop Parliament from passing any mo
re unjust laws, Jefferson marshaled a series of brilliant and original theoretical arguments. This was not philosophy for philosophy’s sake, but philosophy as a means to achieve specific political ends. According to Jefferson, just like the Saxons who had emigrated to Britain a millennium earlier, the residents of America were free agents unbeholden to the mother country; but they had been too busy earning a living to be aware of the rights to which they were entitled. “Our ancestors…who migrated hither,” noted the conscientious student of history and law, “were farmers, not lawyers. The fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king, they were early persuaded to believe real.” And not only, stressed Jefferson, was America not a feudal state, but “British parliament [had] no right to exercise authority over us.” That bold assertion was based on the doctrine of natural right, which he had read in Locke and elsewhere. Though Jefferson’s position was radical for the time, he did not yet seek to displace King George III as America’s “chief magistrate.” He envisioned that America might become self-governing just as Scotland had been in the seventeenth century. And he appealed to the king for protection from parliamentary abuses. “No longer persevere,” he implored, “in sacrificing the rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of another.”

  Jefferson would move on to attacking the king in the Declaration. By June 1776, he had already acquired a reputation among his colleagues as a writer with a “peculiar felicity for expression,” as John Adams would later put it; thus, he received the most votes when the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five to draft a document to explain the rationale for independence. Jefferson proposed that the older, Harvard-educated Adams, who had come in second in the balloting, take a first crack at it. Though he was one of the few Founders in Jefferson’s league in the book collection and consumption department, Adams still felt compelled to demur, conceding, “You can write ten times better than I can.” In contrast to “A Summary View,” the Declaration would contain no new ideas. In the intervening two years, a general consensus had emerged among American Whigs that the doctrines of natural law and natural right applied to their dispute with England. “Not to find out new principles,” Jefferson would write of his purpose nearly a half century later, “or new arguments, never before thought of…but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.…It was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” By crafting one of the most revered state papers ever written, which Abraham Lincoln would call that “immortal emblem of man’s humanity,” Jefferson would succeed in doing far more than that; he would also inspire oppressed groups from around the world for centuries to come.

  The Declaration would bear Jefferson’s stamp not in its content, but in its style and its passion. As the historian Carl Becker observed nearly a century ago, its text is a “model of clear, concise and simple statement.” These were the prose skills that Jefferson had honed during his long years of apprenticeship in Williamsburg. The voracious reader was also a compulsive note taker, who prided himself on his ability to “seek out the pith” when summarizing legal cases in his commonplace book. “The most valuable of all talents,” he once wrote, “is that of never using two words where one will do.” In the storied Preamble, he squeezed in all the major arguments of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government in just two hundred words. The urgency behind his plea also had roots in his own experience. For the thirty-three-year-old, who had still lived in his mother’s home just a half dozen years earlier, personal independence had been a long time in coming. For Jefferson, the British monarch represented one more authority figure who stood in his way. And characteristically, the bulk of his achievement number one—more than half of its nearly 1,400 words—took the form of a list, which Samuel Adams later described as George III’s “catalogue of crimes.” In detailing the king’s twenty-seven abuses in its central section, often forgotten today, Jefferson was plagiarizing from himself; the preamble of his draft of the Virginia Constitution, which he had completed that spring, was a close cousin. In the Declaration, he couldn’t help but personalize the conflict, calling the king “a tyrant…unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” This epithet made others squirm. “I thought the expression too passionate,” John Adams would later write, “and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document.” Jefferson wouldn’t budge on his assessment, however. In his memoir, he would refer to the English monarch, whom he met in London in 1786, as a “mulish being.”

  That summer, America’s declaration of independence, rather than Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, was what made headlines. All that anyone seemed to care about was that the colonists had finally broken all ties with the mother country. In cities and towns across the nation, the text was read aloud to cheering throngs rather than studied. Few Americans knew who had written the document or paid attention to its particular words and phrases. That Jefferson had been the primary author was not mentioned in any newspaper until 1784. And only in the 1790s, when he sought to replace Washington as president, did Jefferson start to claim ownership. With the birth of partisan politics, his Republican party saw itself as the defender of the founding principles against its opponents, the Federalists, which it dubbed “monarchists.” In 1797, a Republican paper celebrated the Declaration as a “rational discussion and definition of the rights of man and the end of civil government.” After his presidency, as he started to focus on his legacy, Jefferson was visibly moved whenever he recalled the bold assertions on behalf of human dignity that he had made in his youth. He also kept close track of the relevant numbers. “Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” he reported to John Adams in 1812, “I see now living not more than half a dozen on your side of the Potomac and on this side, myself alone.”

  After completing his work on the Declaration, Jefferson would have little to do with national affairs until the war ended. In October 1776, accompanied by his wife, he headed to Williamsburg, where he took up his seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates. With the new Commonwealth then rebuilding itself from the ground up, Jefferson relished the chance to strike out against “every fiber…of ancient or feudal aristocracy” in order to lay a foundation for “government truly republican.” This “political architect,” as Dumas Malone has called him, wished to bring order and rationality to his home state by creating an “aristocracy of talent and virtue.” Within a month, he notched his first victory by getting his fellow delegates to abolish primogeniture. That fall, he was also appointed to head a committee of five, which was charged with the responsibility of revising all of Virginia’s laws. Two men soon dropped out, and Jefferson ended up doing the bulk of the work himself. The astute legal historian took on the monumental task of revising English common law and statutes until the reign of James I. In June 1779, shortly after he became governor, Jefferson submitted to the General Assembly a ninety-page report of his committee of revisers, which featured 126 carefully wrought bills. As in his own account and fee books, Jefferson stuck an index in the front, which listed the contents of each numbered bill. In the revisions of the outdated laws, precise prose reigned. As Jefferson later noted in his memoir, he thought it useful to eliminate “endless tautologies…involutions of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis, and…multiplied efforts at certainty by saids and aforesaids, by ors and ands.” The bills addressed everything from property rights and education to the penal code and religion.

  His pride and joy was Bill Number 82, “For Establishing Religious Freedom,” which he first introduced in 1779. This cause célèbre, too, had its source in childhood hurts. The adolescent railing against authority had also felt alienated from his Anglican instructors, Douglas and Maury; in his memoir, he insulted the former as “a superficial Latinist, less instructed in Greek.” (Jefferson’s assessment of Douglas was much harsher than the similar one rendered by the poet Ben Jonson of Shakespeare—“small Latin and less Greek
”—because classical languages were supposed to be this clergyman’s bailiwick.) Baptized into the Church of England like everyone else in his family, Jefferson did not hate religion per se; but as a deist, who saw God solely as the omnipotent creator of the universe, he hated the dogma spread by organized religions. To come up with the text for his famous bill, Jefferson once again mined his reading notes. Paraphrasing Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, he stressed the connection between true religious belief and rationality, noting that “the opinions and belief of men…follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.” Decried by critics as “diabolical,” his bill didn’t pass until several years later when it was revived by his protégé, James Madison, then a key member of the Virginia legislature. By the end of 1786, Madison would help transform nearly half of Jefferson’s 126 bills, which he called a “mine of legislative wealth,” into law. Virginia’s Act for Religious Freedom, which created “a wall of separation between church and state,” as Jefferson would later put it, was soon reworked into the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Thanks to Jefferson, all Americans would enjoy both the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion. No longer could the government, as states such as Virginia had done before the Revolution, use tax dollars to support any officially sanctioned church or churches. The socially awkward Jefferson, who experienced most human connections as an annoyance, had gotten another group of intruders—the clergy—to leave him alone. Jefferson’s political philosophy, often summed up as “that government is best which governs least” (even though these words were penned not by him, but by Henry David Thoreau), was inseparable from his personal predilection for solitude.