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He very politely invited me to actually read his book, and said he thought I might really like it. I was abashed. I know better than to criticize a text based on its review. I should have read his book myself before attacking it, and I accordingly tendered my apologies. It took quite a while for the college library to obtain a copy (few other libraries seem to have it), but I got it. And now, I’m afraid I was right in the first place, and if this is postmodernist history, it’s going to be a long, miserable slog to the next paradigm shift. I almost didn’t make it out of the Prologue.
The Prologue in many ways suffices to support my criticism all by itself. The author creatively presents a day in 76-year-old Jefferson’s life during the year 1819, revealing to us the great man’s thoughts, concerns, and physical condition. I have never seen an author less in love with his subject. This fictitious presentation of Jefferson gives us a man no one would want to know.
Crawford’s Jefferson is physically feeble; the author seems at pains to point out Jefferson’s infirmities, none of which are particularly rare in older men. Jefferson is “helped into the saddle” (xxiv) — of course, most gentlemen were, even if healthy. We are introduced in only the third paragraph to the discomfort caused by boils on his buttocks. [In spite of this Jefferson somehow manages to gallop off for a four-mile ride to be by his wounded grandson at the end of the Prologue (xxviii).]
Jefferson’s private life is portrayed as ridiculously pampered and sheltered from reality. The “tea and coffee with warm mufffins, served in the dining room” (xv) seem to appear only to make his painful butt condition ridiculous in such comfortable surroundings. Jefferson had an “insatiable appetite for books” (xx) and is shown as preferring ancient history to unpleasant news from his own time. Upon receiving a book of Thucydides, he is quoted as writing a friend that he could “slumber without fear, and review in my dreams the visions of antiquity” (xx). Thucydides, of course, is pretty heavy going, not part of “pleasing reveries” as the author claims. And the perplexities of Greek history were in fact very similar to the difficulties of the early 19th century. His biographer may have missed this point; I doubt Jefferson did. To Jefferson, the acquisition of knowledge was an intense recreational activity, not an escape from reality. Reading history, as any historian knows, serves the purpose of increasing ones understanding of the present.
Benefiting from intellectual cultivation requires mental focus. Yet throughout the Prologue, Jefferson’s attention appears to shift suddenly beyond unpleasant thoughts and philosophizing on difficult subjects, to more pleasing and ordinary topics. A passage marking Jefferson’s concern over slave mothers not being allowed to spend much time with their babies is followed by one describing his “great delight in sharing his enthusiasm for Nature” with his own pampered grandchildren, and his knowledge of what would bloom next in the garden. (xviii-xix). Surely this portrayal is an invention of the author. Jefferson’s intellect was of extraordinary depth and expansiveness, as is very marked in Jefferson’s own writing. The narrative here seems determined to portray a Renaissance man as nothing more than a mental gadfly, or an unmedicated case of ADHD.
The issue of slavery appears, of course. When Jefferson goes out to survey his lands “applying, whenever necessary, the small whip that he carried” (xxiv) it is inclear whether this application was to human slaves or his horse. The next paragraph says he had a habit, noted by a visitor, of shaking his whip at slow-working slaves (xxiv-v). When his concern about slavery is noted, it turns out that the problem is slaves who cheat his estate (xvii-xviii). The thoughts about slave mothers and their children proves to center on the issue of efficient slave reproduction. These passages seem calculated to reveal the cruelty inherent in the slave system, and to hold Jefferson to presentist standards of abolitionism and guilt. This has always been a temptation with Jefferson, because he wrote a passage in the Declaration accusing the king of slave trafficking, yet he owned slaves himself. His views, like the economic and humanitarian issues of slavery, were deeply complex. They cannot be summarized in supposed imaginings about good slaves, bad slaves and breeding.
Crawford’s main thesis is that Jefferson, in his declining years, was economically delusional. Regarding the conviction that his neighboring planters should adopt more scientific farming methods to alleviate agricultural depression, “[w]ishing would make it so, Jefferson believed — that and purposeful activity”. He then goes on to describe how a determined cheerfulness was necessary in the face of such issues, making purposeful activity something for another day. Throughout the book, Jefferson’s concerns about his own finances are repeatedly put aside due to unrealistic Candide-like optimism, until he departs the scene leaving his family in poverty. Incompetent at handling financial matters he might have been, but Jefferson as pollyannish and simplistic simply doesn’t jibe. He should not be mocked for believing agriculture would solve his financial woes. His agrarian republicanism may seem utopian in today’s post-industrial world, and certainly he struggled with rising commercialism, which he saw as less virtuous than farming. His philosophy was in keeping with many who historically viewed the connection to the soil as the foundation of republicanism (remember Cato?), and commercial interests as presage to imperial and dictatorial government. This controversy arose again in 1819, when the continual imperial ambitions of Britain threatened, and the northeast was becoming increasingly industrialized at the expense of agricultural interests.
In much of this book, Jefferson’s own words are used out of context, and for Jefferson that context was huge. In a way, his context was the entire Enlightenment and the rationalist mindset it represented. Unfortunately, the author’s own intellectual ability and felicity of expression appear to be below that of his subject. Jefferson wrote and expressed ideas beautifully, but is given no opportunity to expose the farce in this book; his views are reduced to discrete quotations from various sources, with the author creating the themes of Jefferson’s life. The quotations are invariably short, and his concerns described in simplistic terms (i.e. Jefferson “worried about slavery”). The effort to use colloquial phrases to add immediacy and modernity to the narrative is problematic, since it makes the 19th century language sound overly quaint. Enlightenment rationalism comes off as an antiquated way of looking at the world, rather than something sprung from educated and scientific minds after centuries of unexamined traditionalism and superstition in everything from politics to natural philosophy.
I do not mean to imply that Dr. Crawford is a bad historian. The passages throughout the book (ok, I read more than the Prologue) about the economy of the time are excellent. His focus on the building tensions which would much later lead to civil war (sectionalism was a major concern of Jefferson’s, and this is noted) are so clearly written I wanted to lift them to give to my students. He may even be a fine biographer, but I would rather read a work about someone he likes. Good biographers place deficiencies of character into a sympathetic context, instead of inserting misdirected sympathetic elements into a narrative degrading the subject. So why was this approach used?
Reducing historical figures by showing them “warts and all” has been a professional sport since the 1960s. It is of value in offsetting mindless hero-worship. It lets us see that people of the past were flawed, just as we are. But in doing so, it should also demonstrate that those of us who are flawed can still aspire to make a difference in the world, hold to ethical principles, and even lead a nation of great diversity and contrast. Postmodern perspectives see such goals as themselves flawed. Biographies that serve no purpose but to make us sneer at their subjects and feel superior do worse than tear down straw men. They make the very values represented by their subjects the stuff of ridicule, as if the ideas themselves have no clothes. This is the postmodern perspective, to see values as socially constructed, deeply contextual, and thus inherently relative. To put Jefferson in such a setting is to remove him from his own, and diminish his usefulness to us. Thus I find Crawford’s book not only a disappointment, but disturbing as an example of postmodern historical biography.]]>
