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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Thomas Jefferson

Sunday, Jun. 27, 2004 By WALTER KIRN

Jefferson�s Virginia home, Monticello

LEONARD PHILLIPS/THOMAS JEFFERSON FOUNDATION INC

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Jefferson's soul was in conflict all his life. Nearly everything he wrote was contradicted at some point by something he did. The prophet of equality owned slaves and, it now seems likely, had at least one child with one of them. The man who said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter," privately urged state officials to press seditious libel charges against editors unfriendly to his presidency. The advocate of a limited Federal Government and opponent of a permanent standing military doubled the size of the country in one stroke by making the Louisiana Purchase and went to war against Muslim pirates with a brand-new fighting force: the U.S. Marines. "He had outsized talents of statesmanship and outsized talents for self-indulgence," says Roger Wilkins, author of Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism. "I don't begrudge Jefferson his iconic status, because he was, in fact, a great, if flawed human being."

But inconsistency is not hypocrisy. If Jefferson's actions sometimes violated his high and, at times, unrealistic principles, our present-day actions violate some of them too. There isn't much about today's America that its visionary third President wouldn't find troubling, in need of improvement or just plain horrifying. The peaceful republic that Jefferson wished for and did what he could to usher into being — a collection of independent gentleman farmers, moderately prosperous and highly educated, living under a thrifty, modest government that was legally bound not to meddle in their affairs, be they commercial, domestic or religious, and which staunchly resisted foreign "entanglements"--seems now like a large-scale version of Monticello, the grand but quixotic hilltop sanctuary that Jefferson never quite finished building and couldn't afford to pass down to his heirs.

Jefferson passed down his ideas instead, many of them still fresh and controversial (the complete separation of church and state, the suspicion that money would conspire with power to establish a sinister homegrown aristocracy), a few of them outlandish and fanciful (his suggestion that the Constitution be revisited every 19 years so that each generation could establish its own government) and a couple of them that were repugnant even to some folks in his day (for example, his pseudoscientific notion that blacks are the mental inferiors of whites). All of them are impossible to ignore, though, because of the care he took in writing them down.

"He wanted to order the world with words," says R.B. Bernstein, an adjunct professor at New York Law School and one of Jefferson's countless biographers. "He also tried to order American history and politics through his words. He argues about checks and balances, what equal means, what liberty means, what freedom of the press means. His command of language really does shape our intellectual, political and philosophical worlds."

But Jefferson was a man of action too. In the 1790s, he became convinced that the Revolution was being betrayed by "deserters from the rights and interests of the people," led by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton, a fellow Cabinet member. A political brawl ensued. Jefferson helped found and back a friendly newspaper, the National Gazette, to help disseminate his views. He and his collaborator James Madison hurled pointed charges at his foes and assembled an influential coalition to oppose what he called "aristocrats" and "monocrats." His aggressive behavior, and Hamilton's, finally drew formal rebukes from the consensus-loving President Washington, but Jefferson did not back down.