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No Bed of Roses: A Biography of George Washington, in progres 2024.
HIS MASTERLY PEN: A BIOGRAPHY OF JEFFERSON THE WRITER
Published November 2022, Harper Collins.
Published November 2022, Harper Collins.
Washington Post Review, November 22, 2022.
In “His Masterly Pen,” a thoroughly engrossing study of Thomas Jefferson, Fred Kaplan demonstrates that he, too, wields a masterly pen. Although the subtitle of the book describes it as “a biography of Jefferson the writer,” it is more accurately an examination of the insights into Jefferson’s character and philosophy that Kaplan has drawn from the personal and public writings of our most celebrated Founding Father....
The primary function of this nicely paced and well-written narrative is to serve as context for Kaplan’s exploration of a number of themes. Four of these themes stand out for this reader: the impact of class and region on Jefferson’s social attitudes and racial and gender assumptions; Jefferson’s seemingly unlimited capacity to rationalize his own behavior and to avoid unpleasant truths; the creation of and commitment to a romantic myth of America as a nation of contented yeoman farmers; and the intense Anglophobia around which his politics and policies took shape after the war. These do not, of course, exhaust Kaplan’s attention, for they do not take into account, for instance, Jefferson’s approach to intimacy or his philosophical ruminations on religion and slavery, both of which are fully developed in this volume. But these four themes illustrate Kaplan’s skill in discovering Jefferson’s character and his political ideology through the products of his “masterly pen....”
Kaplan later explores Jefferson’s capacity for mythmaking in support of his vision for the new republic. As Jefferson envisioned America’s future, he saw an agrarian society sustained by a free, independent and contented White yeomanry. These patriotic yeomen, whose act of tilling the soil ensured their moral superiority over urban tradesmen and merchants, were largely a fiction produced by Jefferson’s capacity to build an argument on unfounded generalizations and distortions of fact. Kaplan provides the reality that Jefferson stubbornly avoids, pointing out that many Virginia farmers, if not most, endured a subsistence-level existence that brought little satisfaction or contentment. Kaplan also dismisses as myth Jefferson’s insistence that city life was rife with immorality while rural life encouraged moral values. As Kaplan points out — and as Jefferson knew — Virginia’s agrarian population had its share of “loafers, wastrels, alcoholics, gamblers, sexual adventurers, and abusive husbands.” Yet Jefferson’s ability to paint a vivid picture of a bucolic American paradise was so persuasive that members of later generations have been known to embrace the myth and to mourn the passing of an era of happy yeomanry.
Kaplan recognizes the synergy produced when these themes overlap, as when Jefferson’s myth of a nation founded on yeomanry combined with his intense hatred of Britain to form the building blocks of his political ideology. Although many historians have narrated the rise of two opposing political parties in the 1790s, it is Kaplan who fully captures the emotional intensity of Jefferson’s hatred of Hamiltonian policies and the nationalists’ attachment to urban life. Kaplan does this not simply by examining the creation and eventual victory of the Jeffersonian Republican Party but by reading Jefferson’s letters and public texts on this subject with what might be described as a forensic attention to detail. Under his textural microscope, the reader can see clearly the obsessive Anglophobia that drove Jefferson to support an absolutist, anti-republican French king, as well as a French Revolution that devolved into dictatorship, in order to achieve his party’s success.
A less-adept historian might substitute parlor psychoanalysis for subtle interrogation of the texts. To his credit, Kaplan does not go further than what the accepted narrative framework and a sympathetic but critical reading of Jefferson’s papers allows. The skill with which the author wields his own masterly pen ensures a better understanding of this brilliant and talented 18th-century man who could not fully escape the moral failings of his social class or the weaknesses of his own character as he helped give birth to a new nation.
Carol Berkin is the author of “A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism.”
In “His Masterly Pen,” a thoroughly engrossing study of Thomas Jefferson, Fred Kaplan demonstrates that he, too, wields a masterly pen. Although the subtitle of the book describes it as “a biography of Jefferson the writer,” it is more accurately an examination of the insights into Jefferson’s character and philosophy that Kaplan has drawn from the personal and public writings of our most celebrated Founding Father....
The primary function of this nicely paced and well-written narrative is to serve as context for Kaplan’s exploration of a number of themes. Four of these themes stand out for this reader: the impact of class and region on Jefferson’s social attitudes and racial and gender assumptions; Jefferson’s seemingly unlimited capacity to rationalize his own behavior and to avoid unpleasant truths; the creation of and commitment to a romantic myth of America as a nation of contented yeoman farmers; and the intense Anglophobia around which his politics and policies took shape after the war. These do not, of course, exhaust Kaplan’s attention, for they do not take into account, for instance, Jefferson’s approach to intimacy or his philosophical ruminations on religion and slavery, both of which are fully developed in this volume. But these four themes illustrate Kaplan’s skill in discovering Jefferson’s character and his political ideology through the products of his “masterly pen....”
Kaplan later explores Jefferson’s capacity for mythmaking in support of his vision for the new republic. As Jefferson envisioned America’s future, he saw an agrarian society sustained by a free, independent and contented White yeomanry. These patriotic yeomen, whose act of tilling the soil ensured their moral superiority over urban tradesmen and merchants, were largely a fiction produced by Jefferson’s capacity to build an argument on unfounded generalizations and distortions of fact. Kaplan provides the reality that Jefferson stubbornly avoids, pointing out that many Virginia farmers, if not most, endured a subsistence-level existence that brought little satisfaction or contentment. Kaplan also dismisses as myth Jefferson’s insistence that city life was rife with immorality while rural life encouraged moral values. As Kaplan points out — and as Jefferson knew — Virginia’s agrarian population had its share of “loafers, wastrels, alcoholics, gamblers, sexual adventurers, and abusive husbands.” Yet Jefferson’s ability to paint a vivid picture of a bucolic American paradise was so persuasive that members of later generations have been known to embrace the myth and to mourn the passing of an era of happy yeomanry.
Kaplan recognizes the synergy produced when these themes overlap, as when Jefferson’s myth of a nation founded on yeomanry combined with his intense hatred of Britain to form the building blocks of his political ideology. Although many historians have narrated the rise of two opposing political parties in the 1790s, it is Kaplan who fully captures the emotional intensity of Jefferson’s hatred of Hamiltonian policies and the nationalists’ attachment to urban life. Kaplan does this not simply by examining the creation and eventual victory of the Jeffersonian Republican Party but by reading Jefferson’s letters and public texts on this subject with what might be described as a forensic attention to detail. Under his textural microscope, the reader can see clearly the obsessive Anglophobia that drove Jefferson to support an absolutist, anti-republican French king, as well as a French Revolution that devolved into dictatorship, in order to achieve his party’s success.
A less-adept historian might substitute parlor psychoanalysis for subtle interrogation of the texts. To his credit, Kaplan does not go further than what the accepted narrative framework and a sympathetic but critical reading of Jefferson’s papers allows. The skill with which the author wields his own masterly pen ensures a better understanding of this brilliant and talented 18th-century man who could not fully escape the moral failings of his social class or the weaknesses of his own character as he helped give birth to a new nation.
Carol Berkin is the author of “A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism.”
HIS MASTERLY PEN: A BIOGRAPHY OF JEFFERSON THE WRITER
DEDICATION: In Memoriam: Rhoda Ackerson Weyr, 1937-2021
PREFACE
Thomas Jefferson is the most controversial Founding Father for our times, above all due to his relationship with slavery. He inherited slaves, bought and sold slaves, and, after the death of his wife, had six children by Sally Hemings, a slave woman who was a half-sister to his wife. It is that part of his life that we condemn today. It is useful to keep in mind, however, that Jefferson was also hated by many of his contemporaries as a Jacobean revolutionary, a populist demagogue, an agnostic or atheist, a slave-holder who believed in liberty in principle but not in practice, who preached against big government and centralized power but did not hesitate to use it in the interest of his policies, and a man whose vision of America’s future minimized banking, industry, and urbanization. All of which is to say, Jefferson has always been a controversial figure and our attitudes towards him will be divided for as long as we study and reflect on our history. Indeed, his legacy, especially his Declaration of Independence which says that “all men are created equal,” is so central to the American experience and the reality of the United States today that Jefferson is the Founding Father who cannot be ignored. What I hope my readers will find in this book is an increased understanding of Jefferson as a whole, his strengths and weaknesses, and particularly the degree to which his brilliance as a writer is a key to his personality and public service; and that his words still have meaning and resonance.
The distinction of this book is that it anchors the framework of the narrative in Jefferson's growth and development as a writer: the relationship between his literary gifts, his personal life, and his public service. They are an inseparable triad. This, then, is a narrative in which Jefferson often has pen in hand, a dynamic element in his life and career from his earliest letters to A Summary View of British America, the Declaration of Independence, and Notes on the State of Virginia, to his religious and scientific writings, his inaugural addresses, his correspondence with Washington, Madison, and Adams, his relationships with his wife, daughters, grandchildren, and slaves, his letters to male and females friends, and his brief, self-concealing autobiography. The narrative is biographical but selective. It proceeds chronologically by highlighting key moments when Jefferson had pen in hand. It is a pen used both to reveal and conceal. This master writer is a master of the shifting line between concealing and revealing from others and himself the complications, the inconsistencies, and the contradictions between his principles and his policies, between his optimistic view of human nature and the realities of his personal situation and the world he lived in.
Jefferson was constantly in the act of defining himself by literary acts, from his first letters to his self-created description for his tombstone. Only occasionally did he write explicitly about himself – his feelings, experiences, and relationships, and almost always in letters. These are among his most powerful and self-expressive writings. To approach Jefferson through his writings helps us get into his mind and feelings; it contributes to our understanding of his strengths and limitations; it fosters an appreciation of his role as a propagandist of the Revolution; of how he both made and recorded crucial aspects of the history of the first years of our republic; it shows how Jefferson wrote in different voices to different people and groups, his ability to change tone and language, as in his addresses to Indian nations, adjusting his appeal to the needs of his audience; and it also allows a focus on Jefferson as a revisionist historian attempting to mold the historical record in favor of himself and his policies. To focus on what and how he wrote helps us better understand his personal and political tensions; it also helps reveal the complexity and fullness of his personality. Perhaps, importantly, it allows us to read and appreciate prose of the highest literary and intellectual quality. It bookmarks Jefferson with Lincoln as a master of the English language. Jefferson was a writer of superb distinction, with a genius particularly suited to the needs of his role as a Virginia legislator, wartime propagandist, governor, Congressional delegate, secretary of state, vice president, president, and the premier intellectual, cultural, and moral voice of the republic he helped create and lived in for fifty years.
Jefferson gave eloquent articulation to the founding ideas of the United States. Many are still the bell weather values of American society. He channeled the widespread sentiment and language of rebellion into a declaration whose first paragraph became a world-wide affirmation of personal liberty and republican government. As a leader in the Virginia legislature, his path-breaking proposals on issues from religious liberty to inheritance reform resonate with a set of values that the country was to embrace over time. And in his few years in the Confederation Congress, his writing talent, his gift for logical organization, concision, and precision, his assiduous work ethic, and his diplomatic tactfulness made him a prominent force in moving disparate interests toward a more unified expression of national priorities. He and his colleagues recognized the need for the confederated states to have a national Congress responsible for interstate commerce and foreign affairs, though how to do this and how far to go required a consensus difficult to achieve. As the second US minister to France, Jefferson’s work ethic, social amiability, writing skills, and aristocratic bearing made him the right person for the assignment. When, in 1789, he returned to America to become its first secretary of state, he had already contributed to the making of the new nation what most others would have considered a full career. As secretary of state and president, he advocated his version of republican values, emphasizing frugality, decentralization, agriculture, westward expansion, and an extension of the franchise.
As he had reason to know, his greatest strength was his pen. Jefferson, though, was a public man who preferred his private home to the civic square. He could not, in March 1809, leave Washington fast enough. Much of it was personal. But he also had intimations of an American future of which he did not approve. He disapproved of the federal court system, especially the Supreme Court as the unelected determiner of the Constitution’s meaning; of the influential role of banks, paper currency, and stock markets in an emerging commercial nation; and of the power of money to influence legislation. He also believed that over time the American people were always right. Jefferson embodies the paradox of an elitist who preached populist rule on the assumption that the people would always elect people like him. In his last decade, with the likelihood that of Andrew Jackson, whom he detested, would become president, he discovered to his horror that his assumption was wrong. And he died a disillusioned man, touched with an edge of bitterness, so distraught was he by the way in which the country was defining itself. The populace did not always elect the best people. And by 1826 the country had rejected his vision of a pastoral republic. It was well on its way to embracing financial and industrial activism. In that regard also, he was considerably out of step with history. Even in his own day, Americans cared very much about many things Jefferson thought they should care less about, especially money and material objects. And they had few of Jefferson’s scruples about how to get them. He would have been appalled at 21st-century America.
The distinction of this book is that it anchors the framework of the narrative in Jefferson's growth and development as a writer: the relationship between his literary gifts, his personal life, and his public service. They are an inseparable triad. This, then, is a narrative in which Jefferson often has pen in hand, a dynamic element in his life and career from his earliest letters to A Summary View of British America, the Declaration of Independence, and Notes on the State of Virginia, to his religious and scientific writings, his inaugural addresses, his correspondence with Washington, Madison, and Adams, his relationships with his wife, daughters, grandchildren, and slaves, his letters to male and females friends, and his brief, self-concealing autobiography. The narrative is biographical but selective. It proceeds chronologically by highlighting key moments when Jefferson had pen in hand. It is a pen used both to reveal and conceal. This master writer is a master of the shifting line between concealing and revealing from others and himself the complications, the inconsistencies, and the contradictions between his principles and his policies, between his optimistic view of human nature and the realities of his personal situation and the world he lived in.
Jefferson was constantly in the act of defining himself by literary acts, from his first letters to his self-created description for his tombstone. Only occasionally did he write explicitly about himself – his feelings, experiences, and relationships, and almost always in letters. These are among his most powerful and self-expressive writings. To approach Jefferson through his writings helps us get into his mind and feelings; it contributes to our understanding of his strengths and limitations; it fosters an appreciation of his role as a propagandist of the Revolution; of how he both made and recorded crucial aspects of the history of the first years of our republic; it shows how Jefferson wrote in different voices to different people and groups, his ability to change tone and language, as in his addresses to Indian nations, adjusting his appeal to the needs of his audience; and it also allows a focus on Jefferson as a revisionist historian attempting to mold the historical record in favor of himself and his policies. To focus on what and how he wrote helps us better understand his personal and political tensions; it also helps reveal the complexity and fullness of his personality. Perhaps, importantly, it allows us to read and appreciate prose of the highest literary and intellectual quality. It bookmarks Jefferson with Lincoln as a master of the English language. Jefferson was a writer of superb distinction, with a genius particularly suited to the needs of his role as a Virginia legislator, wartime propagandist, governor, Congressional delegate, secretary of state, vice president, president, and the premier intellectual, cultural, and moral voice of the republic he helped create and lived in for fifty years.
Jefferson gave eloquent articulation to the founding ideas of the United States. Many are still the bell weather values of American society. He channeled the widespread sentiment and language of rebellion into a declaration whose first paragraph became a world-wide affirmation of personal liberty and republican government. As a leader in the Virginia legislature, his path-breaking proposals on issues from religious liberty to inheritance reform resonate with a set of values that the country was to embrace over time. And in his few years in the Confederation Congress, his writing talent, his gift for logical organization, concision, and precision, his assiduous work ethic, and his diplomatic tactfulness made him a prominent force in moving disparate interests toward a more unified expression of national priorities. He and his colleagues recognized the need for the confederated states to have a national Congress responsible for interstate commerce and foreign affairs, though how to do this and how far to go required a consensus difficult to achieve. As the second US minister to France, Jefferson’s work ethic, social amiability, writing skills, and aristocratic bearing made him the right person for the assignment. When, in 1789, he returned to America to become its first secretary of state, he had already contributed to the making of the new nation what most others would have considered a full career. As secretary of state and president, he advocated his version of republican values, emphasizing frugality, decentralization, agriculture, westward expansion, and an extension of the franchise.
As he had reason to know, his greatest strength was his pen. Jefferson, though, was a public man who preferred his private home to the civic square. He could not, in March 1809, leave Washington fast enough. Much of it was personal. But he also had intimations of an American future of which he did not approve. He disapproved of the federal court system, especially the Supreme Court as the unelected determiner of the Constitution’s meaning; of the influential role of banks, paper currency, and stock markets in an emerging commercial nation; and of the power of money to influence legislation. He also believed that over time the American people were always right. Jefferson embodies the paradox of an elitist who preached populist rule on the assumption that the people would always elect people like him. In his last decade, with the likelihood that of Andrew Jackson, whom he detested, would become president, he discovered to his horror that his assumption was wrong. And he died a disillusioned man, touched with an edge of bitterness, so distraught was he by the way in which the country was defining itself. The populace did not always elect the best people. And by 1826 the country had rejected his vision of a pastoral republic. It was well on its way to embracing financial and industrial activism. In that regard also, he was considerably out of step with history. Even in his own day, Americans cared very much about many things Jefferson thought they should care less about, especially money and material objects. And they had few of Jefferson’s scruples about how to get them. He would have been appalled at 21st-century America.
