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To Begin
the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders by
Bernard Bailyn Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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All-American Ambiguity If you think you’re clear on how each of
America’s leading founders thought and acted, pick up a copy of Bernard
Bailyn’s new book, To Begin
the World Anew, and find out otherwise. Bailyn describes how different
individuals expressed certain genius, while at the same time, behaved in ways
that seemed outside the image of one-dimensional characters, just like the
rest of we humans. Bailyn makes each character richer as a result of his
thoughtful revelation of aspects of their life. Here’s an excerpt about my favorite
founding enigma, Thomas Jefferson (pp. 37-42): The reputations of those who shape the fate of nations become historical forces in themselves. They are twisted and turned to fit the needs of those who follow, until, it seems, there is no actual person left, only a complex mirror in which successive interests see aspects of themselves. Of Jefferson this is doubly—trebly—true. His reputation has had what has been called a "kaleidoscopic changeability." For a century and a half it has been more fluid, more malleable than the reputation of any of the other great figures of the Revolutionary generation, or indeed of anyone else in American history. The 450 crowded pages of Merrill Peterson's The
Jefferson Image in the American Mind show
the fabulous complexity of the problem that faces those who wish to
understand Jefferson and assess fairly his place in American history. Which
Jefferson? The Jefferson image, Peterson writes, has been "an
ill-arranged cluster of meanings, rancorous, mercurial, fertile . . . [It]
was constantly evolving." Endless "errors and legends and
myths" have found their way into history—and not, it seems,
accidentally. The "hysteria of denunciation and the hysteria of
exaltation" that have followed him through the ages were there at the
start—in his own lifetime.' Many of his contemporaries idolized him, but
others—many others—vilified him. Three generations of Adamses spoke of him
venomously.
John Adams, his lifelong friend and political opponent, in many ways
venerated him, but he disagreed with him on basic principles, and declared at
one point that Jefferson was as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell and so
"warped by prejudice and so blinded by ignorance as to be unfit for the
office he holds . . . As a politician he is a child and the dupe of
party!" John Quincy Adams improved on his father's judgment. He conceded
that Jefferson had an "ardent passion for liberty and the rights of
man" but denounced him for infidelity, "pliability of principle,"
and double dealing. And that Adams's grandson Henry discounted
Jefferson's duplicity, but wrote at length, in his monumental history of the
Jefferson and Madison administrations, about what he took to be Jefferson's
failure as a statesman, his opportunistic abandonment of principles, his
willingness to "risk the fate of mankind" to justify his theories,
and his fatal incapacity—so caught up was he, Adams said, in delusive visions
of the present as a golden age—to recognize that he lived "in a world
torn by wars and convulsions and drowned in blood." But it was Hamilton
who was Jefferson's chief enemy in politics, and his feelings were never in
doubt. Hamilton feared what he called the Virginian's fanaticism and believed
he was "crafty" and a "contemptible hypocrite." He worked
feverishly for Jefferson's election to the presidency when the contest
deadlocked in the House, in part because he was convinced that the
alternative, Aaron Burr, would be even worse, and in part because he believed
that such was Jefferson's hypocrisy, he was unlikely ever "to do
anything in pursuance of his principles which will contravene his popularity,
or his interest." After two hundred years, while the panegyrics
continue and Jefferson still stands tall in the pantheon of the
Enlightenment, the savagery of condemnation, increasingly embittered by the
charge of racism compounded by the likelihood of his sexual relation with his
slave Sally Hemings, exceeds anything seen before. Leonard Levy, reviewing
Jefferson's record on civil liberties, subtitled his remorseless case for the
prosecution (1963) The Darker Side ("Jefferson
never once risked career or reputation to champion free speech, fair trial,
or any other libertarian value . . . The certainty that he was right,
combined with his terrifying idealism, led him to nail the fate of the
nation"). Michael Zuckerman (1989) declared him to be "a man
intellectually undone by his negrophobia . . . he was ultimately prepared to
abandon all else in which he believed—and believed passionately—sooner than surrender
his racial repugnances." Michael Lind (1995) called Jefferson "in
many ways the greatest southern reactionary" whose tradition's
"final miserable estuary" lies in the careers of Theodore Bilbo and
Strom Thurmond. "Every major feature of the modern United States . . .
represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism." Pauline Maier (1997)
argued that "what generations of Americans came to revere [as the
Declaration of Independence] was not Jefferson's but Congress's Declaration,
the work not of a single man, or even of a committee, but of a larger body of
men with the good sense to recognize a 'pretty good' draft [Jefferson's] when
they saw it, and who were able to identify and eliminate Jefferson's more
outlandish assertions and unnecessary words." Joseph Ellis (1997), while
conceding that almost alone among the founding generation Jefferson sought
"prescriptions for government that at best protected individual rights
and at worst minimized the impact of government. . . on individual
lives," concludes that "modern day invocations of Jefferson as the
'apostle of freedom' are invariably misleading and problematic." But it
was in Conor Cruise O'Brien's foray into Jeffersoniana (1996) that the
attacks on the Virginian reached their peak—or nadir. "It is difficult
to resist the conclusion," O'Brien wrote, "that the twentieth
century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of January 1793 would have
admired most is Pol Pot . . . We cannot even say categorically that Jefferson
would have condemned the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and
the destruction of its occupants." And in any case, "the Ku Klux
Klan was ideologically descended from Thomas Jefferson." The
condemnations, from Hamilton to O'Brien, are intemperate, impassioned, remorseless—peculiarly
venomous. Yet Jefferson remains a
brilliant star in the firmament of American ideals and aspirations. Why the
contradictions? Why the anomalies in his image and his reputation? To some extent they reflect inconsistencies in Jefferson's policies,
behavior, and character, which are striking. He said he sincerely loathed
slavery, condemned it as "an abominable crime," a "hideous
blot" on civilization which must somehow be eliminated, but he did not
free his own slaves (except a few, probably related to him, in his will); and
at the end of his life he advocated the expansion of slavery into the
southwestern states. Was he not the ultimate libertarian, the passionate
defender of freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of protection
against illegal searches and seizures, of the sanctity of habeas corpus? His
passion for civil liberties radiates through his most profound state paper,
the Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. There is nothing to compare with the elegant, emotive lyricism that
lies within the formal cadences of that extraordinary document. One must read
it aloud to appreciate the perfection of the rhythms and the immaculate
choice of words. But when he came to design the curriculum for the University
of Virginia's law school he deliberately omitted books whose political and
moral views he disapproved of, and the only professors he proposed were those
whose political opinions agreed with his own. In the early Revolutionary
years he endorsed loyalty oaths; in suppressing the Burr conspiracy he tolerated
lapses in habeas corpus; and in attempting to enforce his ill-fated embargo
he ignored the Fourth Amendment and ruled, in certain areas and at certain
times, by executive decree and the threat of armed forced The
anomalies and apparent inconsistencies seem endless. He avoided partisan
debates in public, but urged others to do the opposite, and he helped support
a partisan press. He was a pacifist in principle, but he argued for a
retributive war against the piratical Barbary states, on the ground that if
America meant to be an effective naval power "can we begin it on a more
honourable occasion or with a weaker foe?" He said that a little
rebellion against oppressive conditions, every now and then, would be a good
thing; "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the
blood of patriots and tyrants" were his famous words. But when the
Haitian people rose against their French masters, he declined, as president,
to help them. He was a fervent constitutionalist, indeed a strict and narrow
constructionist, especially in fighting the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798;
but five years later, in arranging for the purchase of Louisiana, he
deliberately exceeded the bounds of the Constitution. "The less we say
about the constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana " he told
Madison, his secretary of state, "the better," and he added that if
some political maneuvers were necessary to overcome constitutional
impediments, they should be done "sub silentio.” So much about Jefferson seemed to contemporaries,
as to many historians, contradictory and incongruous. His appearance
surprised those who came to pay their respects to the famous statesman,
knowing him to be a learned savant, the friend of major figures of the French
Enlightenment. Tall, red-headed, and freckled, dressed in ordinary, rather
dowdy clothes (yarn stockings, a British official reported with surprise,
"and slippers down at the heels"), he sat casually, "in a
lounging manner," perched on one hip. There was nothing, one visitor
said, "of that firm collected deportment which I expected would dignify
the presence of a secretary or minister." Yet everyone recognized that
his conversation was wonderfully informed and often brilliant. And why would
it not be? Though he was no orator in public forums, he conversed easily, and
he was a fabulous polymath: politician, diplomat, architect, draftsman,
connoisseur of painting, anthropologist, bibliophile, classicist, musician,
lawyer, educator, oenologist, farm manager, agronomist, theologian (or rather,
antitheologian), and amateur of almost every branch of science from astronomy
to zoology, with special emphasis on paleontology. Jefferson slipped easily from role to role. His
election to the vice-presidency of the United States coincided with his election
to the presidency of the American Philosophical Society, a position he
enjoyed far more than he did the nation's vice-presidency and which he
proudly and actively held for the next eighteen years. In the midst of the
ferocious struggle, in 1801, to settle the tie vote in the Electoral College—a vote, resolved only on the thirty-sixth
ballot, that would elevate Jefferson to the presidency, transform the
American government, and alter the course of American history—he calmly
continued his correspondence with a professor of anatomy about the disposal
of some recently discovered fossil bones that bore on disputed points of
animal life in North America. After reading To Begin
the World Anew, you may think a little differently about each individual
Bailyn analyzes. Steve Hopkins, April 19, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the May 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/To
Begin the World Anew.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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