Читать книгу The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790 - Thomas Jefferson - Страница 6

MICHAEL ZUCKERMAN

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. In their time, our two great players on the world stage, very nearly our only players of any international reputation or consequence. Ever since, our avatars of the American dream. The Philadelphian fully thirty-seven years older than the Virginian, yet the two of them twinned in our national imagination as they were twined in the crafting the Declaration of Independence and the American Philosophical Society, and in finding the passionate love of their lives in Paris.

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Cultivating correspondences and keeping company with the finest minds of the Old World: artists and aristocrats, scientists and philosophers, rulers and revolutionaries. Attracting the statesmen and seers of the great courts of Europe, who found their conversation fascinating, and not just in the patronizing way that worldly sophisticates indulge earnest provincials. Proving themselves—discovering themselves—as informed, ingenious, and inventive as anyone they encountered in the coffeehouses of London or the salons of Paris.

Franklin an impossible act to follow. The most celebrated scientist of the eighteenth century. The greatest diplomat, on the most urgent of diplomatic missions, in all of American history. Literally, the most famous man in the world. His image everywhere: in paintings, prints, statuettes, and busts, on cup and saucer sets, snuffboxes, ashtrays, andirons, wallpaper, elaborate models we might now call action figures, even an equivocally handsome Chevres chamber-pot. His face, he said, almost as well known as that of the moon.

Jefferson appointed to the embassy to France in Franklin’s stead. Able to succeed Dr. Franklin, he liked to say, but not to replace him. Mistaken. Exactly like Franklin, America’s minister to France and the New World’s ambassador to the Old. Both of them embodiments of Europe’s fondest fantasies of a universal enlightenment, reaching even the savage shores of other continents. Each of them savant and scientist, connoisseur of culture and fine wines, a man with a way with words.

In Paris and at Versailles, Jefferson too became a confidant of great men of state. He attended daily on the fateful debates of the States General in the year of the French Revolution. He was “much acquainted with the leading patriots of the assembly.” As he put it, he “had [their] confidence.” After the fall of the Bastille, the chairman of the National Assembly’s committee to form a constitution invited him to join in the committee’s deliberations. At a critical juncture in those deliberations, the Marquis de Lafayette asked him to host a private meeting of the leaders of the assembly. It was at Jefferson’s house, in a meeting that lasted far into the evening, that those men hammered out the principles that shaped the constitution of the first French republic.

No one replaced Jefferson, then or ever after. He and Franklin remain, to this day, our incomparable inspirations, our incarnations of our best ideals. They are what we would wish to be in what Jefferson called our pursuit of happiness.

On just that account, we recur to them over and over again. Franklin’s (too-) witty compaction of Poor Richardisms, The Way to Wealth, is even now the most widely reprinted work in the annals of American authorship. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is still our secular scripture, and his writings on church and state and freedom of speech and press are still central if not canonical for politicians, pundits, and Supreme Court justices. We take for granted that we might still learn from them.

If we would learn, it would seem that we could not hope for better texts than their own autobiographies. There, surely, they would gather for us the harvest of their insatiable curiosity. There, surely, they would distill for us the lessons of their long, eventful lives.

Franklin’s autobiography fulfills its promise and exceeds it. Though put together in patches over two decades, its coherences irradiate its odd disjointedness. Acclaimed from its first appearance, it remains to this day our classic American confession, and easily our most influential and widely read.

Still, it disappoints. It is, or at least it appears to be, preoccupied with the paltry. It is resolute in its confinement to the quotidian. It seems on its surface little more than a succession of trifling incidents. Franklin’s petty disputes with his brother. His floundering faux pas on his first arrival in Philadelphia. His intrigues with friends and fellow workers. His little club of ambitious young men. On and on. Episode after episode, on matters about which we would know nothing and care nothing if he had not included them in his reminiscences.

The memoir keeps its counsel on the great deeds that defined the nation. It is silent on the Stamp Act and the Continental Congress. It does not speak of declaring independence, winning the French alliance, or negotiating the treaty that established a new nation. It reveals nothing of the work of the constitutional convention of 1787.

Franklin could have told us of his part in those stirring scenes if he had wanted to do so. Though he wrote the first portion of his memoir in 1771, when he still considered himself very much a Briton, he wrote the last three parts in the 1780s, after the Declaration that he had helped to draft and the peace that he had helped to secure. Indeed, he wrote the last two parts in 1788 and 1789, after the ratification of the Constitution that he had also helped to draft and secure.

Historians have often regretted his reticence. His account of his life, ending as it does so many decades before his death, seems strangely aborted. It does not even describe his conduct in, let alone provide his perspective on, the struggle for independence. It leaves us to long for his insight into the emergence of the young republic.

Thomas Jefferson takes up, in this autobiography, all that Franklin does not. He recalls the imperial crisis, the writing of the Declaration, his wartime governorship of Virginia, and his diplomatic service in France. His is the memoir that should have become our canonical personal account of the era of the American founding. His is the one retrospect that has it all: a great man and a great writer, writing of momentous actions and ideas.

None of the other Founding Fathers of enduring stature wrote anything to compare. Tom Paine was, like Franklin, a great writer who did not write autobiographically about the new nation he helped to shape. Alexander Hamilton never recorded his recollections of the Revolution, and neither did George Washington, who was not a great writer in any case.

Yet Jefferson’s memoir has not come down to us as the essential Founder’s version of the making of the nation. It does not even stand among our beloved autobiographies. In fact, it has hardly had an audience at all. Its very existence has been virtually unknown, even to scholars of American history. It languished in manuscript for a decade before it was included in a four-volume edition of Jefferson’s writings and correspondence and then, a generation later, in a nine-volume edition of his works. It was not printed as a stand-alone publication until the end of the nineteenth century. Sales of that first production were so discouraging that there was not another one for sixty years. That second, paperback version sold strongly for a while, but within less than two decades the autobiography disappeared again. Except in encompassing collections of Jefferson’s works, it has been out of print for more than three decades.

By contrast, Franklin’s autobiography is currently available in nineteen freestanding texts: seven mass market paperbacks, eight hardcover editions (one in the Modern Library series), a large-type volume, a CD-ROM, a restoration of a fair copy, and a paperback with accompanying audio compact disk.

The disparities in the careers of the two memoirs are as befuddling as the similarities in their composition are uncanny. Both autobiographies were written when their authors were very old men. In a time when males who survived childhood could not expect to live much past fifty, Franklin lived into his eighty-fifth year, Jefferson into his eighty-fourth. Franklin wrote the most famous part of his autobiography when he was seventy-eight, Jefferson the entirety of his when he was seventy-seven. Franklin confined his account to the first forty-eight years of his life, Jefferson to the first forty-seven of his.

It is hard not to be puzzled. Jefferson’s autobiography was so like Franklin’s in so many ways, and it had the ingredients of an imperishable success besides. Why was it, and why has it remained, so obscure? Why have we not treasured it as our indispensable testimony of the Revolutionary era? Why has it faded from sight, while Franklin’s memoir has served us steadily as our instruction manual on the use of the republic?

Answers to such questions are not obvious. Jefferson’s narrative may be, for him, a pedestrian performance, but even if it offered nothing more than the Virginian’s version of the birth of the nation, it should have had—and should still have—our grateful attention. In fact, it offers us much more.

It is studded with incident and episode, some of obvious consequence, others—such as his devising of our dollar-and-decimal monetary system—of incidental but irresistible interest. It is strewn with sprightly, penetrating observations of character, some of surpassing generosity, others—such as his portrait of Marie Antoinette and his asides on Patrick Henry and King George III—of startling frankness.

It is punctuated with perceptions and wry aperçus that could have been written yesterday. (“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?”) And it is dotted with vignettes that still speak to us though they presume upon a world we have lost.

Take Jefferson’s account of his campaign to disestablish the Anglican Church in Virginia. To the time of the Revolution, most Americans knew nothing of what we now take for granted as freedom of religion. They lived in colonies, and then in states, which ordained by law the support of one Protestant denomination over all others (and forbade by law the practice of Catholicism). The autobiography describes the bitter battles to “abolish [this] spiritual tyranny.” It recounts a struggle that lasted a decade and left us a legacy that has lasted centuries. But it does more than merely rehearse what Jefferson called “the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.” It reveals the fragility of popular support for the principle of separation of church and state. It exposes the imperfection of popular understanding of that principle. And it asserts the principle itself with luminous clarity and expansive power, giving the lie utterly to present-day claims that we began as a Christian nation. As Jefferson tells us, “a great majority” rejected an amendment to add “Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion,” to the landmark law, giving “proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

Or take the tantalizing glimpses the autobiography affords us of the astonishing insignificance of our earliest institutions of national governance, the Continental and Confederation Congresses. Jefferson himself quit the Congress within three months of drafting the Declaration of Independence for it, because he was elected in the interim to the Virginia House of Burgesses and “thought [he] could be of more use” there. Indeed, he would never have been in the Congress in the first place had others not shared his sentiments. Peyton Randolph was the most important politician in Virginia. He was speaker of the House of Burgesses and president of the convention that selected delegates to the Continental Congress. As the leader of the leading colony of the thirteen in incipient rebellion against Great Britain, he was chosen chair of the Congress itself. But for him and his fellow Virginians, resolving provincial conflicts with the royal governor took precedence over guiding America at the climax of the imperial crisis. As the break with Britain impended, the proven leader, Randolph, returned to tend to local affairs, while an untried young man, thirty-two-year-old Jefferson, went off to serve the nation in his place. Had Randolph and the rest of the Virginia planters not put their priority on Williamsburg rather than Philadelphia, Jefferson’s mighty pen would never have been at the disposal of the Revolution at the hour of its most urgent rhetorical need.

Or take the autobiography’s account of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence itself. Jefferson tells us almost nothing of his drafting of the document that is, to this day, our iconic American scripture. “The committee for drawing the declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done.” Not another word. But he provides us a stirring story of the politicking that preceded the fateful vote of July 4 and reminds us vividly of what a near thing it was. To the second week of June, six of the thirteen colonies were so reluctant to support rebellion that “it was thought prudent to wait a while for them, and to postpone the final decision to July 1.” Even on July 1, when the Congress “resumed,” there were still just nine colonies for independence. They were a majority, but they could never have sustained a revolution, especially since three of the four holdouts were New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Without those middle colonies, the Revolution would have been riven into two revolutions, one in New England, the other in the South, and the southern one would itself have been riven by the defection of South Carolina. Great Britain would have made short work of both. Jefferson’s laconic narrative of the maneuvers by which, in a few final hours, the four dissident colonies were brought round to revolution rebukes evocatively our schoolbook triumphalism. It reminds us that, from first to last, American independence hung by a thread.

Jefferson and all the Founding Fathers lived in a world of contingency we can scarcely conceive. And the autobiography intimates it again and again, so that we begin to see. Late in 1782, for example, he was made a minister plenipotentiary for negotiating the peace with Great Britain. He never sailed because his ship sat icebound in Baltimore for two months. The following year, he was elected a representative to Congress. He made the long, arduous journey from Charlottesville to the national capital in Trenton, New Jersey, and took his seat the day after he arrived, “on which day Congress adjourned to meet at Annapolis,” the new capital, three weeks later. When the representatives finally reconvened in Annapolis, they discovered that there were only seven states in attendance and “no hope of our soon having nine,” the minimum number requisite to ratification of the peace treaty, which was due to expire if not approved in two months. When such rampant absenteeism drove the Congress to give up sitting in permanent session and the representatives realized that their adjournments left the new nation with no government at all in the intermissions, they created a Committee of the States to remain in session during Congressional recesses. But as Jefferson wryly noted, the members of the committee “quarreled very soon, split into two parties, abandoned their post and left the government without any visible head until the next meeting in Congress.”

The equanimity with which Jefferson met such misadventures exhibits his experimental, adventuring spirit. His extensive exposition of his plans for public education displays the ambiguities of his notions of the public weal, and so too, even more, does his repeated recurrence to his perplexities about race and slavery. A man probably cannot write 160-some pages about himself without revealing himself in some measure. Despite Jefferson’s design, perhaps, his autobiography is a window on his psyche.

Consider the episode on which the memoir concludes, his visit to Franklin as the Philadelphian lay “on the bed of sickness from which he never rose.” The two men talk of mutual friends in Paris and the parts they played in the revolution there. Then Jefferson congratulates Franklin on the report that the old man was writing “the history of his own life.” Franklin replies by pressing upon Jefferson some of his own writing. Jefferson pledges to read it and return it. Franklin instructs him instead to “keep it.” Later—too late, after he turns it over to Franklin’s literary executor—Jefferson comes to believe “that Dr. Franklin had meant it as a confidential deposit in my hands, and that I had done wrong in parting from it.” It is not hard to imagine that Jefferson saw in that gift a passing of the mantle from a Founding Father he admired immensely to a younger man who might also be a Father to his country.

So the puzzle persists. Why, with all that it has to offer, has Jefferson’s autobiography been sunk in veritable oblivion for almost two hundred years?

Let us address that question by beginning at the beginning. Jefferson opens his memoir with a few perfunctory pages about his ancestry and his education. There was nothing original in this introduction. It followed a pattern set by others and certainly set for American autobiography by Franklin. But its lack of originality in this regard was hardly a fatal flaw. A generation later, P. T. Barnum’s reminiscences would be far more derivative from Franklin’s, yet Barnum’s memoir would be the best-selling American autobiography of the nineteenth century.

Nonetheless, there may be a clue that is pertinent to our conundrum in the brevity of Jefferson’s discussion of his family and his schooling.

Even at the outset, Franklin was more forthcoming about his family than the Virginian ever was, and through the remainder of his recollections Franklin recurred to his kin revealingly. Jefferson was done with his family before he was done with his second paragraph on the subject. Though he must have had things to say about his father, his mother, and his seven siblings, he kept them to himself. Though he must have had thoughts about the death of his father when he was still but a boy, and about the death of his mother in the very year he drafted the Declaration, he said nothing about either loss. Though he became the ward of his father’s fabulously rich partner in western land-speculating, he wrote not a word about the transition or about his guardian.

Similarly, Franklin returned repeatedly to the topic of his education. He marked his meager formal schooling, intimated his anguish at his father’s inability to send him to Harvard, and, in a succession of telling anecdotes, traced his subsequent efforts to teach himself what Harvard would not have taught him anyway. Jefferson devoted less than one long paragraph to his formal studies. His reluctance to confide family feelings and secrets may be understandable, but his omission of any more extensive treatment of his education is unfathomable.

Jefferson had a passion for learning. It was evident in his youth, throughout his life, and even in his death. He asked that three of his accomplishments be inscribed on his gravestone, and one of the three was the founding of the University of Virginia. He was a brilliant and precocious student from the first. He started school when he was four or five, began Latin school at nine, and entered the College of William and Mary at seventeen. Sons of the southern gentry attended William and Mary as a sort of finishing school. They rarely spent more than a year there, and they aimed to improve their manners more than their minds. Mostly they met other sons of the southern gentry whom it would be to their advantage to know later in life. Though the college was established in 1693, no one ever actually completed its four-year course of study and graduated with an earned degree in the first three-quarters of a century of its existence. Jefferson did not stay for four years either, but he did stay for two, and he was immensely serious about his studies. His professors mattered to him. He kept company with them more than with his dissipated fellow students while he was in residence in Williamsburg. And he only quit the college to commence an even more extended study with George Wythe, the man he called his “beloved Mentor.” His years with Wythe must have been the most intellectually intense tutorial in American history.

Yet Jefferson allowed just three or four sentences to that tutorial, before passing on to politics. The inescapable inference is that he did not have the autobiographical impulse. He had to be “pressed” to write his memoir at all, though he never had to be pressed to write otherwise. Over the course of his career, he wrote more than 19,000 letters that survive (and unnumbered others that don’t). Writing was, as much as anything, what he did in his life. Though he wrote incessantly, he had no lust to look back or to write about himself. And he certainly felt no urgency about taking up the task, no sense that time’s winged chariot was hurrying near. He was deep into an advanced old age—long past the point when most men of his day died—when he got around to it.

Submitting at last to the importunities of others, he gave them the memoir they pressed him to produce. But we must not misunderstand. He did not write so singlemindedly about politics in petulant resistance to their desire for a more intimate or personal confession. He wrote about public life because he was a public man. He believed the republican writers he studied with George Wythe. He took to heart their insistence that citizenship was the highest calling a man could follow.

He said, again and again, that he was weary of civic service and longed to retreat to the pleasures of privacy at Monticello. But he had no great gift for intimacy or domesticity. He crowded his commonplace book with passages of acrid misogyny. He failed at his first proposal of marriage and did not offer again for eight years. He then married a wealthy widow, whom he called a spinster on the marriage license bond before he caught his slip and corrected it. His role in the Revolution kept him from home frequently during the decade she was his wife, and he never remarried after her death. He was a peremptory and platitudinous father to two daughters who survived infancy. And he denied utterly the five slave children he fathered with his longtime slave mistress Sally Hemings, as he denied Sally Hemings herself utterly.

Jefferson was simply not cut out for autobiography, or for the introspection and self-absorption it entails. Just seventy pages into this memoir, he confessed that he was “tired of talking about myself.”

His was a temper immersed in the immediate. His genius was most manifest in the cut and thrust of conflict. His creativity was most evident when he was confronted with pressing problems. Even his inventiveness appeared in the little ingenuities that abound at Monticello. Though he was abreast of eighteenth-century science, he made no fundamental contributions to it, like Franklin’s assimilation of electricity to the Newtonian paradigm. Though he had a mechanical gift, he left no lasting legacies to technology, like Franklin’s lightning rod or bifocals. Though he was incorrigibly inquisitive, he did not make the discoveries that confer a minor immortality on lesser men, like Franklin’s charting of the Gulf Stream. Where Franklin was sedentary, Jefferson was a man in motion. It was no accident that he was a superb horseman. He was at ease with philosophes, but he was not at his best in cool contemplation. He had his finest ideas and achieved his finest expression of them in the crucible of controversy. His mind worked best when he had to respond to crisis or rise to a rhetorical occasion. He was in his element looking to the future, ill at ease looking to the past.

Alas.

We have his words, wrought in the heat of battle, and we steer by them still. But we have nothing, here, to elaborate or explicate them. We have no hint, in this autobiography, how he came by the convictions they enunciate so eloquently.

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” How did Jefferson arrive at such a sublime acceptance of other religions and of irreligion? “You must . . . neither believe nor reject anything because other persons . . . have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by heaven.” How did he set aside the faith of his fathers and friends and put his trust solely in his own reason? How did he get clear of the established church of Virginia and of Protestant Christianity more broadly? How did he substitute a “wall of separation” between church and state for the government-mandated religion on which he grew up?

This memoir opened a clear, wide window on the war that Jefferson and his allies waged to win Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom. It gave posterity a richly revelatory account of that bitter struggle, which certainly lasted longer and was perhaps more acrimonious even than the Revolution itself. But in it Jefferson betrayed nothing of the seeds of his own command of that war. He imputed motives to others who fought on one side or another, about which he could have only guessed. He said not a word about the evolution of his own religious views, about which he was the ultimate and almost the only authority.

By contrast, Franklin marked telling milestones on the march of his religious thinking throughout his autobiography. He did not tremble to describe the depth of his detachment from the conventional beliefs and practice of his parents and of their Puritan neighbors in Boston. He confessed the heterodoxy and the blasphemousness of his early ideas and the cynicism and faithlessness of his later professions of outward propriety. We meet the man in Franklin, merely the politician in Jefferson.

If Franklin exceeded Jefferson in the radicalism of his religiosity—in his youthful denial of the distinction between good and evil and in his lifelong flirtation with notions of polytheism and reincarnation—Jefferson exceeded Franklin in the depth of his antipathy to authority. “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” he wrote to one friend. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” he told another. “A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” he assured a third.

These were mighty words even if they were only words. But in fact they were much more. They informed Jefferson’s actions. His was a career of courage in opposing the highest powers in the land. He assailed King George III in the Declaration. He opposed George Washington in launching the Democratic-Republican Party. He alienated his fellow planters in instigating disestablishment and instituting a regime of sweeping religious liberty. He repudiated the law of the new nation in promoting the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Indeed, he set himself against cultural tradition itself. “The earth belongs to the living,” he insisted, and any deference of present to past was an illegitimate concession of governance to ancestors in their graves.

Where did that seething antipathy to power come from? Franklin wrote openly of his early conflicts with his father and with the constituted authorities of Boston. Jefferson wrote not at all of his relationship with his father, or of his feelings on losing his father when still just fourteen, or of his experience with his appointed guardian through the rest of his minority.

Americans may be as instinctively anti-authoritarian as any people on the planet. Jefferson was the most searing, soaring, searching voice of that animus against authority that we have ever had. How did he achieve that voice, at once so passionate and so measured? How did he keep his heart in such exquisite equipoise with his head? How did he arrive at such audacity and such assurance, to give utterance to our deepest dreams? Could there be questions more interesting to American readers? And could there be an autobiography more obtuse than this one to those questions? Jefferson did not even seem to suspect that his audience might be interested in asking them. He showed no slightest interest of his own in addressing them.

It is inconceivable that Jefferson was so unconcerned with what moved men. He was, after all, the greatest politician in our history. He could not have been the builder of our most consummately triumphant party organization if he had ignored what men wanted. He could not have been our president most masterful in handling Congress if he had been heedless of why they wanted what they wanted.

But he did not write as he ruled. In his recollections he displayed a disingenuous indifference to men’s inner drives. He neither acknowledged nor explored his own, and he did not often impute any to those around him. Instead, he indulged in a bloodless democratic fantasy. At almost every decisive juncture, he explained developments by a disembodied movement of “the mind” of “the times.”

In 1773, when a cadre of rebellious young Burgesses led by Jefferson and Patrick Henry pushed to organize inter-colonial committees of correspondence, the “old and leading members” of the assembly were not “up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required.” In 1775, when independence was at hand, the deputies who hesitated were “not yet up to the mark of the times.”

Jefferson’s delusory democracy posited a unified “people” and an evolutionary ripening of “the public mind.” It did not matter to him, in his memoirs, that Virginia had in fact harbored large numbers of loyalists and multitudes who did their damnedest to remain neutral. On the day appointed for election of delegates to the first Continental Congress, “the people met generally, with anxiety and alarm in their countenances, and the effect of the day through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man and placing him erect and solidly on his center.”

It did not matter to him that many elected representatives in the second Congress held back from declaring independence, on the instructions of the voters who sent them. The will of “the people” could run contrary to the instructions they had voted. “The voice of the representatives” was “not always consonant with the voice of the people.”

It did not even matter to him that overt opposition was rampant, or that he had no idea what he was talking about. At the call for a constitutional convention in 1787, “the people . . . agreed with one voice” to attempt a new compact to remedy the “incompetence” of the Articles of Confederation. This was sheerest nonsense. Popular opinion on the work of the Philadelphia convention was wildly divided. A majority of voters actually voted against the Constitution when it was submitted to them for ratification. And in any case Jefferson was not there to take the temperature of the electorate. He was an ocean away, in France, at the time. His account of the campaign for the new Constitution had nothing to do with reality but much to do with the cast of his mind. It expressed his impassioned yearning for an undifferentiated “people” devoted to the common good.

And yet he knew better. The people he idealized might unite now and then, for the public weal, but that was not their natural bent. “The pressure of an external enemy” had “hooped us together” in the war for independence, but once the war was over and “peace and safety were restored,” such virtuous citizenship ceased. “Every man” looked to his own “profitable occupation.” Jefferson was painfully aware that self-interest was the default position in American life.

He strained mightily against that awareness. He let his hopes get the best of his fears. He gave in to wishful thinking. In his first inaugural address, he proclaimed America “the strongest government on earth,” despite the fact that its army was a pathetic thing and its navy nearly nonexistent. It was strong, he said, because “every man” would “fly” to defend that government if it called. (A few years later, when he called on his countrymen to uphold his embargo on commerce with Britain, he discovered the fatuousness of that faith.)

He exercised his imagination in fanciful schemes to divide Virginia’s counties into much smaller jurisdictions he called wards. He understood full well that his wards would, by virtue of their size, be more homogeneous and thus more likely to trample the rights of deviants or to drive them away. Such tyranny of the majority was a risk he was ready to run, if it would keep people engaged in the republic, the “res publica,” the public thing.

Jefferson celebrated the free individual, but he put no priority on free enterprise. He hoped that Americans would use their freedom as he had, for public life. He knew, long before Tocqueville spelled it out, that the citizens of a republic had to be “on the alert.” They could lose their freedom if they did not guard the government that guarded it.

All his life, Jefferson was an advocate of small government. But he did not dread central government as modern conservatives do, as a check on the prerogatives of the private sector. On the contrary, he sought to scale down government as a means to preserve its power, keeping it close to the people and the people close to it. His priority was always on the public welfare more than personal fame or fortune. As he said in this memoir, the safety of the republic is “the first and supreme law.”

Like Jefferson, Franklin felt the pull of the personal. Like Jefferson, Franklin fought it. But Franklin caught the wave of American life more presciently than Jefferson. Insisting as he did that there are “natural” claims that “precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them,” Franklin set himself against privatism from within privatism, affirming benevolence as a better way to pursue happiness.

Jefferson’s republican priorities were already out of fashion when he wrote his autobiography. They have been out of fashion ever since. He recognized as much at the time, and his recognition informs his recollections.

In the very year in which he put them to paper, he wrote to a friend, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” He still knew the tune. He just had not, any longer, the energy to dance to it.

His autobiography was an evocation of a golden age, a brief moment when men were “hooped together” in a common cause for the common good. It was not a summons to preserve that moment and that spirit of ’76, because they were past, and Jefferson knew that they were past. It was not a clarion call to revive them, because he despaired of their revival.

This autobiography may be the most despairing thing that Jefferson ever wrote. Its odd inertness reflected his awareness that he was out of touch with “the times.” Its halfheartedness expressed his abandonment of the endeavor that had informed his life, to educate the democracy. His account of the Revolutionary era was not intended as a trumpet blast. It was neither a call to battle nor an invitation to renewal. It was a more muted and somber thing, almost a taps, as if at least to have the reality of his outmoded values on the record, as if at least to insist that America had not always been as it was all too clearly going to be.

Americans could scarcely hear what he was saying when he said it in 1820, or when it was occasionally put before them in later years. Perhaps we cannot hear it now. We are surely more self-absorbed now, and less concerned for the commons, than even the despondent Jefferson of 1820 could have conceived. But there are signs that we begin to sicken of our amuck individualism. It is possible that, at this crisis of citizenship, in our hour of need, we are ready at last to listen.