Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: Hamilton and Jefferson still live among us.

 

 

Jon Meacham decided to write about Jefferson for much the same reason that I decided to read about him.  He had seen biographies written of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and George Washington that brought their lives to life and he wondered about Jefferson.  I have been most caught by the life of Hamilton, partly from the musical, but also have been thinking about Hamilton and Jefferson who are at the center of the conflict spelled out in the musical and Ron Chernow's book, but both are told from the vantage point of Hamilton.  What does Hamilton look like from Jefferson’s position?  And more, what does Jefferson look like, especially in this summer of COVID and Black Lives Matters.

 

Reading this book, the relationship between Hamilton and Jefferson becomes, in Lewis Carroll’s words, curioser and curioser.  They are very odd mirror images of each other – their lives lived and imagined stand in strange opposition and balance to each other.  Both men recognized the importance of a strong central government, but Hamilton – the immigrant who arrived here all but penniless who became a self-made man – and married well, pined for a king and an aristocratic form of government.  Jefferson, an aristocrat of the south, was able to drop his formal ways when he chose to, but more centrally was a believer in democracy, freedom and self-government.

 

Jefferson is more closely linked in this book with Adams, who was the leader of Hamilton’s party and famously died on the same day as Jefferson – the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Hamilton is more closely linked, of course with Burr.  But Burr, who killed Hamilton, was more frequently an ally – serving in the same party under Adams and practicing law in New York and, in so far as Burr had ideals, sharing those with Hamilton.  But the antipathy – the fulcrum that determined the course of the country – surrounded the issues that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed on.

 

The frustration for me in this biography is that Lin Manuel Miranda hasn’t gotten hold of it and read between the lines.  Jefferson’s disregard of Sally Hemings stands at the center of this.  She is so thoroughly excised from his published life that there is little to stand on as an historian to say this is what Jefferson thought about that.  Additionally, Jefferson apparently destroyed the correspondence between him and his wife.  Meanwhile, the letters and documents that are referenced are so self-consciously formal that the beating heart, the immediacy of the man, is largely missing.

 

Here are the Hemings related facts: Jefferson married a woman who was beautiful, but mostly he was attracted by her mind.  She came from a slave holding family and Sally Hemings was almost certainly her half-sister (their father had sex with a slave, Sally’s mother, likely many times and many of the house slaves in Jefferson’s household were Hemings who came from that union) and Sally was his wife’s slave and much younger than she.  Jefferson had no relations with Sally while his wife was alive.  After his wife had died after child birth, and after vowing to her that he would never remarry for fear that a stepmother would disregard their shared children.  He went to Paris as an envoy, taking his oldest daughter Patsy with him, leaving his younger daughter Polly, who was about six, with friends in Philadelphia.  While in Paris, Jefferson aggressively flirted with a married woman who was in a relationship that, today, we would call an open marriage.  Whether this relationship was consummated is unknown.  Sally Hemings showed up with Polly whom Jefferson summoned across the sea.  Sally was 14 and Jefferson was about 45. There are no pictures of her, but she is described in a letter from the Adams, who were in London, as appearing almost white and they described her as handsome with straight brown hair.  Sally and Polly joined Thomas and Patsy in Paris where Sally’s brother was serving as Jefferson’s cook.  They lived together in Paris with Sally as their “servant” – in France she was a free person because slavery was against the law.

 

Sally wanted to stay in France as a free woman, but when it came time to go, Jefferson wanted her to accompany him.  According to Hemings family history, Sally was pregnant and Jefferson convinced her to come back by promising that he would free her children (the pregnancy would result in their first child) when they reached the age of 21.  Sally agreed and Jefferson made good on his promise.  On his death, all of the other Hemings were officially freed and Sally was apparently tacitly freed because Jefferson’s daughter Polly knew Jefferson’s wishes in this regard.

 

I have spent so much time on this because it is central to the conundrum of understand who it is that Jefferson was as a person.  He hated the idea of slavery.  He worked, early in his career as a Burgess in Virginia, before the revolutionary war, to lay the groundwork for freeing slaves.  This proved to be politically impossible and he gave up this effort rather quickly.  During his time as the first Secretary of State, there was a successful revolution of slaves in Haiti and Jefferson became quite concerned that this could happen in the American South.  His solution?  At that point, it was to free the slaves and relocate them to Africa.  This was his solution for the Native American “problem” when he was President – to relocate the Natives.  He judged Native Americans to be culturally superior to Africans because they had some minimal artistry in the pipes and the other things that they carved, but he did not see Native Americans and Whites, and certainly not Africans and Whites living together.  He just didn’t think this kind of cultural mixing was possible, and yet he somewhat secretly practiced it for years with Sally – they had multiple children together – children that he never publicly acknowledged and generally seemed to treat as slaves. At the same time, his relationship with Sally involved a lot of physical proximity when he was at Monticello - and she never traveled with him to Washington - a sort of acknowledgement that the relationship wouldn't stand up to that kind of scrutiny.

 

Near the end of the book, Meacham tells of Jefferson’s grandson marrying the daughter of a Governor of Virginia.  Because they were now kin, Jefferson, who was deeply, deeply in debt, co-signed a $20,000 loan with the Governor, who ended up not being able to pay it, so Jefferson had to assume the debt.  The daughter of the Governor was mortified to see Jefferson after this, but Jefferson was extremely warm towards her and no one would ever have known that he had any feelings about this.  Further, Jefferson went out of his way to stay on good terms with the Governor, deflecting blame from him for his bad luck. 

 

This is not to say that Jefferson was a saint.  Far from it.  When he was crossed he could hold quite a grudge.  When he and Adams finally disagreed, they did not communicate for years and he did not have fine things to say about Adams.  He also evoked hatred from people who did not like the decisions he made as chief executive or as Secretary of State.  There were a number of death threats and lots of hate mail.  But he was a kind and considerate host, talking with people about their area of interest, engaging intimately with his guests – talking to the person next to him instead of holding forth for the crowd.  He was also famously casual in his dress, receiving foreign dignitaries while wearing slippers or just after having come in from a strenuous ride.

 

As I’m wrestling with how to understand this – Meacham doesn’t help much as a historian – he mostly relates the facts and doesn’t draw conclusions from them – which I think makes sense – I am not constrained by the rigors of historical accuracy.  I am also playing with a new concept that I am embarrassed to admit is new to me.  The concept is repression.

 

Repression holds a special place in the pantheon of psychoanalytic concepts.  It is Freud’s first defense mechanism and it holds pride of place for him.  It originated out of his work with women who had been sexually abused and had “forgotten” the abuse – at least that was the way I was understanding it.  I was thinking of repression as a means of forgetting something that had happened and the memory became unconscious.

 

I think this is probably an accurate enough reading of early Freud, but I think the concept evolved a great deal and I did not keep up with the evolution.  In my lab, we are working to learn how to identify defense mechanisms and we were given an example of a defense mechanism in action.  In this example, a woman remembers having had an abortion, but says that she has not thought about what it means to her – she has put it in the back of her mind is what she says.  We have debated about whether this is repression – a truly unconscious defense mechanism – or suppression – a conscious one.  The expert maintained that it was repression and some things kicked into place for me.

 

Repression may involve actually forgetting events, but it more centrally involves not consciously processing the consequences of events.   The interesting thing in Jefferson’s case is that these are not events that have gone on the past, but recurring, consistent, current events that are, perhaps, not being processed.  Jefferson is seeing Hemings how?  As a slave?  Certainly.  As a concubine?  Probably.  Is there emotional intimacy between them?  Perhaps.  Does he feel affection towards their children?  Perhaps.  Does he see them as his slaves?  Yes.  Does he see Polly and Patsy differently than his Hemings children?  Well, he certainly attends very carefully to Polly and Patsy’s education.  As far as we know, the Hemings received nominal education – most of it of the vocational sort – Sally’s brother was trained as a chef in Paris.  The thought occurs that, if Jefferson felt guilty about breaking his vow to his wife by taking another woman, he atoned for that by treating the children of that relationship more poorly by far than he treated the children of the relationship with his wife - no cruel stepmother here!

 

Jefferson, who was essentially a patrician, was able to become one of our foremost advocates for equality and democracy.  He was able to slum with the plebes but also to be comfortable with the royals because, I am positing at least for a moment, of an essential sense of belonging – wherever he was.  Because he felt this sense, he was able to connect with others in a genuine way and to experience their possibilities in the moment – to get to know them as people with both a history and a future, even if his experience of them was in contradiction to his firmly held beliefs.

 

The problem with this formulation is that Jefferson was also quite thin skinned.  He was, apparently justifiably so, quite concerned about his functioning as the Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War when he did not understand the British threat and troops swept through Richmond and Charlottesville essentially unopposed.  He had to flee from his beloved Monticello because he had been indecisive about having mustered out the militia.  He almost left public service after this debacle – embarrassed and ashamed and convinced that no one would ever vote for him.

 

Perhaps this episode humanized him – meaning that it helped him realize his limitations and helped him be less judgmental about the limitations of others.  It may have limited some of his pretentiousness.  He may have realized that being royal was no guarantee that he would not make mistakes.

 

These musings are driven by the contrast to Hamilton.  Hamilton did not come from royalty.  Brilliant and hardworking, he was the orphan child – perhaps of a man other than the one from whom he derived his name.  In any case, his mother was both abused by and removed from her husband before she died and Hamilton had a hard scrabble existence – and his writing skills earned him a trip to New York from the islands and after that he never looked back.

 

While Jefferson penned the Declaration – in part because he was good with words and in part because he was from Virginia and the delegates needed the Southerners, who had all the money, to be on board, Hamilton had a major role in investing inordinate power in the executive branch as one of the writers of the constitution.  Hamilton, along with his mostly Northern party affiliates, wanted a strong Federal government – thus the party title of Federalists – and they toyed with the idea of a king.  Washington would have been a good candidate, but when he stepped down, it was Hamilton who maintained contact with the British government, at that point officially still a mortal enemy, in part to perhaps enlist an extra son of the king to become the king of the States.  Jefferson was mortally and morally opposed to this notion.  He wanted us to ally with and to emulate the French, who were in the process of throwing off the yoke of royalty – but mostly to stay out of European affairs and to avoid emulating European politics – we should chart a new course.

 

So, we have the kid who came from nothing to a position of considerable power (Hamilton), whom we might think would be the king of democratic ideals, since he seems to embody them.  And we have the nobly born Jefferson, so sure of himself and his way of seeing things that Meacham titles the book “The Art of Power” as a way of noting that Jefferson was a master at wielding power, though often from a distance.  He used intermediaries.  Hamilton was much more direct – a micro manager if you will.  As Secretary of the Treasury, for instance, he penned the regulations for the Coast Guard, down to the size of rope that would be used on ships - and when he was a lawyer in New York he essentially singlehandedly rewrote English Law to become New York State law.

 

These two connected at various other points.  Hamilton had a sex scandal as well – though it was much more public.  He, while working in the Capitol while his wife summered in upstate New York, was drawn into an extramarital affair with a woman whom Chernow believes pulled at the heartstrings of a man who was a sucker for women who were, in the words of the musical, helpless (like his mother – a very psychoanalytic interpretation).  Unlike Jefferson, who kept this kind of thing under wraps while engaging in it in his household, Hamilton decided to explain the episode, including that he was the victim of blackmail by the woman’s husband – in an apparent attempt to convince people that he was in the right in the situation.  This couldn’t have backfired more explosively for him – alienating his wife and effectively ending his ambitions for higher office.

 

Hamilton and Jefferson famously disagreed about the financial system that Hamilton put in place to manage revolutionary war debt – debts that were mostly owed by the poorer Northern states.  Hamilton nationalized the debts – effectively charging the South twice to support the war – but also used debt as a kind of asset in a financial system that he based on faith rather than gold and silver.  In the process of doing this, Hamilton fleeced many revolutionary war soldiers who sold their debts from the government to speculators when they were nearly worthless and the speculators ended up cashing in on them once Hamilton enhanced their value.

 

Personally, though, Hamilton appears to have managed his finances so that he was not in debt, but was actually quite prosperous – and he was able to account for all of the monies that he paid to the blackmailer as coming from his own accounts. 

 

Jefferson wanted a more responsible national bank that worked from wealth rather than from debt.  As President, he was able both to reduce taxes and to reduce spending and debt, all while pulling of the deal of all time – the Louisiana Purchase – obtained from Napoleon for only two cents an acre.  In his private life, however, Jefferson was – at least to my mind – extravagant in his spending and certainly piled up such significant debt that all of his assets were seized and sold at auction at his death, including his beloved Monticello and its artifacts.

 

As I struggle to understand these inconsistencies, I find myself proposing that Jefferson’s psychological style was much more global – he was collaborative and relied on relationships.  And in order to do this, he overlooked limitations in the people that he collaborated with – and in himself.  This allowed him to have a more egalitarian mindset.

 

Hamilton, on the other hand, did not have the ease that Jefferson did.  He was always calculating, always working – from the time he his fourteen and ordering ship captains around as he ran an import export business to the time when he became General Washington’s aide and then first Secretary of the Treasury.  He ran an import export business for someone else and he used Washington’s power to accomplish goals that he can see and aspire to.  He desirds a hierarchy under which he can work – and feels comforted to have a task that he can accomplish. 

 

I have just painted Jefferson as the Hysteric style of person and Hamilton as the Obsessive.  Hamilton builds the executive branch, but Jefferson inhabits it – and uses that branch to hold the country together at a time when it first threatened to break apart – into an Anglophilic North and Francophilic South.  But Jefferson can smooth over the differences and see the underlying similarities – where Hamilton will ferret out and hammer away at the differences.

 

The ability to overlook differences will, then, also be important in Jefferson’s domestic life.  He can hold concepts, like the inferiority of the African and Native American Races, while connecting with Africans and Native Americans as people – and winning their loyalty, trust, and perhaps even love – something that he feels deeply entitled to and comfortable with.  But all of this takes a toll on him.  He does not take to governing like Hamilton does.  He needs to retreat after each episode and revitalize himself.  I think this is because his unconscious has to work overtime to organize the internal inconsistencies and to keep all of his emotional accounts in some kind of order. 

 

So from another point of view, Jefferson could be seen as an introvert – comfortable connecting intimately with others, but not excited by crowd adulation and averse to confrontation – while Hamilton is more extraverted.  Even though obsessives are frequently introverted, Hamilton’s ability to keep his accounts square, both on paper and emotionally, allows him to have more energy to engage in the fray.

 

This is all wonderful, I suppose, but I need to be careful.  I am applying concepts to these two men that won’t be invented until at least one hundred years after their lives – and in the sense I am using the terms, we are now two hundred years past when they were living.  Jefferson’s public and private personae – the difference between his views on race in public writings and the interactions that he had with slaves in his home – were not culturally aberrant.  I am trying to worm my way, I suppose, into understanding a culture from 200 years ago, that is still very much alive and well in some form today, by using concepts from the individual functioning of individuals living currently.  This is, at best, a stretch.   It is further stretched by applying those concepts to extraordinary men. 

 

That Jefferson became Jefferson is remarkable.  He was a man of tremendous curiosity – amazing range of interest – and someone who was tremendously politically and verbally gifted.  There is a confluence of native intelligence, tremendous hard work, good mentors, and a point of incredible privilege from which to start. 

 

That Hamilton become Hamilton is even crazier.  There was great native talent, tremendous hard work, and an abundance of luck.  Each man brought his gifts to bear on an amazing project – to create the first democracy – the first republic – since ancient times.  They differed strongly in their ideas about how it was most likely to work.  At least from Jefferson’s perspective, Hamilton was less convinced that the American experiment could actually succeed – even though he himself had written the blueprints for it.  Jefferson had more faith that we would be able to get along – that we would figure it out. 

 

We are in the process of witnessing whether that experiment will be able to continue.  We have seen a tremendous assault on the idea of self-government over the last two decades with more and more people trying to undermine a strong federal government that serves all of the people – something that Jefferson and Hamilton agreed was in our best interest.  We will see, as we begin to share a belief that we all need to mask together to survive, whether we also come back to the idea that we need to support each other – to have a government by the people, of the people, and for the people – and what that will look like as it is crafted by our very twenty first century characters.   

 

We will also have to see how we come to grips with the tension between Whiteness and Blackness – and all the shades in between.  How do we take the very visible remnants of a system that relied on raw human strength and apply that to a new system, where the gadgets that Jefferson foresaw create unimagined wealth that we could share, but instead continue to concentrate in very few hands?  How do we continue to remain blind to the inequities within our own borders – the Sally Hemings as it were, amongst us – not to mention our role in profiting from the living standards in the rest of the world? 

 

The human tools at our disposal have the same limitations – at least as I have spelled out here – that existed in the time of Hamilton and Jefferson.  Will we be able to harness them in new ways?         

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