American Sphinx — Book Review & Quotes

Highlighted Quotes From The Book

“One could work for several years on Adams and enjoy splendid isolation. But working on Jefferson was like entering a crowded room in which there were always several ongoing conversations, and the constant buzz suggested that more was at stake than the resolution of merely historical questions.”

“What I have tried to do is to recover that man and that meaning within the late-eighteenth-century context in which they congealed and to do so in language that embraces the Jeffersonian belief in the intelligence of the common American.”

“Jefferson did not just get the benefit of every doubt; he seemed to provide a rallying point where ordinary Americans from different backgrounds could congregate to dispel the very possibility of doubt itself.”

“Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. He was, however, an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary. The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable. The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness.”

“The Jefferson who emerges in the pages that follow is a flawed creature, a man who combined massive learning with extraordinary naiveté, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception, utter devotion to great principles with a highly indulged presumption that his own conduct was not answerable to them.”

“He went off to the College of William and Mary in 1760. There he gained a reputation among his classmates as an obsessive student, sometimes spending fifteen hours with his books, three hours practicing his violin and the remaining six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious young man.”

“Embrace such seductive fictions was not a deliberate effort at propaganda. Jefferson believed what he wrote. True, he could consciously play fast and loose with the historical evidence on behalf of a greater cause.”

“The Saxon myth and the doctrine of expatriation, however, were a different matter. They were not clever and willful distortions. They were complete fabrications. And Jefferson clearly believed they were true.”

“They offer glimpses of a very vulnerable young man accustomed to constructing interior worlds of great imaginative appeal that inevitably collided with the more mundane realities. Rather than adjust his expectations in the face of disappointment, he tended to bury them deeper inside himself and regard the disjunction between his ideals and worldly imperfections as the world’s problem rather than his own.”

“Not only was he a thoroughly marginal player within Virginia’s cast of stars, he lacked precisely those qualities that the members of Congress considered most essential. His most glaring deficiency was the talent most valued in Philadelphia: He could not speak in public.”

“By disposition and habit, Jefferson’s most comfortable arena was the study and his most natural podium was the writing desk. Ever since his college days at William and Mary, continuing through his study and eventual practice of the law, Jefferson spent an inordinate amount of his time alone, reading and taking extensive notes on what he read.”

“Solitary study allowed him to work out his private perspectives without interference and without the unpredictability of an improvisational debate.”

“In fact Dickinson inserted the strongest and most quotable words in the entire document: “Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is attainable.”

“More than fifty years later John Adams remembered Jefferson as “a silent member in Congress,” but “so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive . . . that he soon won my heart.”

“Indeed, if there were a fundamental rule of emotional physics for Jefferson, it was an attraction for isolation and an aversion to the public arena: He hated the debates in Congress; could barely tolerate the bickerings on committees; preferred to read and work alone in his quarters, but longed to escape the “cockpit of revolution” altogether and retire to his mountaintop.”

“Jefferson was asked to draft the Declaration of Independence, then, in great part because the other eligible authors had more important things to do.”

“During the debate Jefferson sat silently and sullenly, regarding each proposed revision as another defacement. Franklin sat next to him and tried to soothe his obvious pain with the story of a sign painter commissioned by a hatter, who kept requesting more concise language for his sign until nothing was left on the sign but a picture of a hat.”

“True, he read voraciously as a young man, took notes on his reading and left a comprehensive list of the books in his library. Since we know so much about his reading habits, and so little about other aspects of his early life (the Shadwell fire, again), the temptation to make an implicit connection between his ideas and his books is irresistible. Then once the connection is made with, say, Locke or Hutcheson, one can conveniently talk about particular texts as if one were talking about Jefferson’s mind.”

“This is a long-standing scholarly tradition — one might call it the scholarly version of poetic license — that depends on the unspoken assumption that what one thinks is largely or entirely a product of what one reads.”

“One of the reasons why European commentators on American politics have found American expectations so excessive and American political thinking in general so beguilingly innocent is that Jefferson provided a sanction for youthful hopes and illusions, planted squarely in what turned out to be the founding document of the American republic. The American dream, then, is just that, the Jeffersonian dream writ large.”

“These were emphatic overstatements of his own considerably less belligerent and more trusting convictions. He felt forced into making them in order to answer his critics. His statements are less a measure of what he really thought than a symptom of how vulnerable he felt.”

“Jefferson himself learned that his refined sensibility was ill suited for the rigors of leadership during times of crisis. As for the emotional effects, Jefferson confided to a friend that the experience had “inflicted a wound on my spirit that will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”

“Just as clearly, his favorite ideas were several steps ahead of public opinion. He was more a prophet than a politician.”

“He was more seasoned as a legislator, though still and always an idealist with greater talent at envisioning what ought to be than skill at leading others toward the future he imagined.”

“He even claimed that he had taught himself Spanish on the voyage to France by reading Don Quixote with the aid of a grammar book. (Years later, when he was president, Jefferson recalled the incident over dinner. John Quincy Adams, who was present at the dinner party with the president, recorded the claim in his memoirs, then added: “But Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.”)”

“Abigail was the link between questions of foreign policy and family priorities, probably the first woman Jefferson came to know well who combined the traditional virtues of a wife and mother with the sharp mind and tongue of a fully empowered accomplice in her husband’s career.”

“Abigail observed that all stories originating in the English newspapers were lies: “The account is as false — if it was not too rough a term for a Lady to use, I would say false as Hell, but I would substitute one not less expressive and say false as English.”

“We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”

“It was also becoming clear that his own idealistic instincts worked best when surrounded by more realistic and tough-minded colleagues.”

“Nevertheless, the worrying he did about the public response to Notes exposed his intense discomfort with any expression of his personal thoughts that he could not orchestrate or control.”

“He began to develop the argument — it became the centerpiece of his public position on slavery throughout his mature years until the end of his life — that the problem should be passed along to the next generation of American statesmen. These were the leaders born during the American Revolution and therefore “suckled in the principles of liberty as it were with their mother’s milk.” And so “it is to them,” he now claimed, that “I look with anxiety to turn the fate of this question.”

“Jefferson always regarded candor and courtesy as incompatible, and when forced to choose, he invariably picked courtesy, thereby avoiding unpleasant confrontations.”

“Determine never to be idle. No person will ever have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing. And that you may always be doing good, my dear, is the ardent prayer of yours affectionately.”

“An earlier letter to Polly strung together the same homilies on hard work and then, in a particularly insensitive passage, seemed to say that his own love was conditional upon her measuring up. You must apply yourself, Jefferson lectured, “to play on the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French and such things as will make you more worthy of the love of your friends. . . . Remember too as a constant charge not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.”

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. . . . I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” he observed. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

“The Jeffersonian ideal, in short, was not a specific version of balanced republican government. It was a world in which individual citizens had internalized their social responsibilities so thoroughly that the political architecture Madison was designing was superfluous.”

“I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever. . . . Such an addiction is the last degredation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

“After all, the current French political crisis had been prompted by fiscal problems that now required the present generation to assume the accumulated debts of its predecessors. Inherent in the French political situation, in other words, was a heightened sensitivity toward the burdens the past imposed on the present, especially in the form of debt but also in the form of legacies like clerical and aristocratic privileges. Jefferson and Lafayette seemed to be groping toward built-in constitutional mechanisms that would relieve future generations from the same burdens.”

“Sustaining this posture of organized but unofficial opposition required considerable confidence in one’s political vision of what the American Revolution meant. It also required another quality that Jefferson had developed during his French phase, what might be called a cultivated tolerance for inconsistency that others might perceive as deception or hypocrisy.”

“From Jefferson’s perspective, therefore, the rather striking differences between the American and French revolutions were insignificant incidentals — on this score Adams thought he was either blissfully ignorant or temporarily insane — when compared with their common purpose. Likewise, he believed that the random violence and careening course of the French Revolution were part of a lamentable but passing chapter in a larger story of triumphant global revolution. All specific decisions about American foreign policy needed to be informed by this overarching, almost cosmic pattern. In practice this meant, as it usually did for Jefferson, fitting the intricate complexities of foreign policy into a simple moral dichotomy. This one cast England in the role of counterrevolutionary villain and France in the role of revolutionary hero.”

“The conspiratorial character of his political thinking in the 1790s, as all scholars of the Whig ideology have reminded us, was a common feature of the political literature of the time, and substantial traces of the same feverish mentality can be found in the private correspondence of the entire political leadership, including Adams, Madison and Hamilton. (Only Washington seems to have remained immune, but then he was immune to everything.)”

“Energetic governmental power of any sort was intolerable because it originated outside the individual; it therefore violated his romantic ideal of personal autonomy.”

“Their chief advantage, Jefferson thought, was that “they all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times,” whereas his constituency was “dispersed over a great extent of country, [and] have little means of intercommunication with each other.”

“And then they got the internet.”

“To James Monroe, who was serving as the American minister in Paris, he apologized for the infrequency of his letters, blaming the long silence on “that sort of procrastination which so often takes place when no circumstance fixes a business to a particular time.”

“The unprofitable condition of Virginia estates in general leaves it next to impossible for the holder of one to avoid ruin. And this condition will continue until some change takes place in the mode of working them. In the mean time, nothing can save us and our children from beggary but a determination to get a year beforehand, and restrain ourselves vigorously to the clear profits of the last. If a debt is once contracted by a farmer, it is never paid but by a sale [of the estate.]” Given his own indulged habits of consumption and the eventual fate of his beloved Monticello, this proved to be a highly ironic statement. But in the middle years of the 1790s he could neither foresee the future nor appreciate irony.”

“Indeed, one of the most seductive features of his political thinking in general was its beguiling faith that the future could take care of itself. Slavery, however, proved to be the exception to this larger pattern of calculated obliviousness.”

“Unlike Madison, who had a deep appreciation for the Constitution as an artful arrangement of juxtaposed principles and powers with abiding influence over future generations, Jefferson tended to view it as a merely convenient agreement about political institutions that ought not to bind future generations or prevent the seminal source of all political power — popular opinion — from dictating government policy.”

“Just as Hamilton’s dislike of Burr was rooted in the recognition of their overlapping ambitions and their common affinity for a flamboyant brand of decisiveness, so Jefferson’s mistrust of Marshall was exacerbated by their mutual preference for a more subtle and indirect style that probably had its origins in the Virginia code of politeness. If Hamilton came at you with a saber, Marshall preferred the stiletto.”

“As an eloquent statement of the becoming modesty joined with panoramic wisdom that we look for in a new president, for example, none has said it better: I have learned to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it. . . . I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask for your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional; and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts.”

“Or if one were searching for a classic rendering of the principle of free speech, no American statesman had ever put it so succinctly: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

“Apart from the natural rights section of the Declaration of Independence, this is probably the most famous political statement that Jefferson ever made: “But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans — we are all federalists.”

“The consensual character of Jefferson’s cabinet meetings was real enough, in great part deriving from the fact that Jefferson had selected men who shared his views. But he also orchestrated events to prevent conflict. One reason he kept full meetings of the cabinet to a minimum was to avoid argumentative debates. “The method of separate consultations,” he explained, “prevents disagreeable collisions.”

“He seemed to want the operation of the federal government to be noiseless, invisible and completely collegial. Soon after he formed his cabinet he instituted the practice of scheduling three dinner parties each week at the presidential mansion in order to bring together members of Congress and their wives with representatives of the executive branch and foreign diplomats stationed in Washington. Some of the most vivid physical descriptions of President Jefferson come from personal reminiscences of guests at these intimate (twelve to twenty people) social occasions.”

“The truly significant fact about the dinners was their underlying purpose. They imposed a huge social obligation on Jefferson, especially during the months when Congress was in session. He continued them throughout his presidency because they enhanced the prospects for creating personal bonds and emotional attachments that might help override political disagreements. If people sat down to dinner together and were obliged to observe the customary civilities, they were less likely to be at one another’s throats on the floor of Congress the next day. But the laudable intentions behind the presidential dinners were greatly diluted by the very motives that inspired them. Early on Jefferson established the rule, which must have struck some congressmen as bizarre, that explicitly political conversations were prohibited at the table.”

“The chief business of the executive branch under Jefferson was done almost entirely in writing. Indeed, if we wish to conjure up a historically correct picture of Jefferson as president, he would not be riding or walking toward Capitol Hill for his inauguration but would be seated at his writing table about ten hours a day.”

“He usually rose before daybreak, around five o’clock, worked at his desk alone until nine, when cabinet officers and congressmen were permitted to visit. He went riding in the early afternoon, returning in time for dinner at three-thirty. He was back at his desk between six and seven o’clock and in bed by ten.”

“This extraordinary reliance on the written word had some ironic consequences. On the one hand, it allowed Jefferson to remain one of the most secluded and publicly invisible presidents in American history. On the other hand, it produced a paper trail that has made the decision-making process of his presidency more accessible and visible to historians than any other — that is, until the installation of electronic recordings under John Kennedy and the sensational revelations produced by the White House tapes of Richard Nixon.”

“Moreover, the accumulated wisdom of economists and economic historians has taught us to realize that we ought not to think about the national debt in the same straightforward way we regard personal and family debt, as an unalloyed burden to be eliminated with as much deliberate speed as possible. Hindsight also suggests that even for those disposed to reject the Hamiltonian vision of an integrated and expansive commercial republic, the national debt Jefferson inherited should have been viewed as a wholly plausible investment in America’s future development, a prudent loan, if you will, more than covered by the collateral of prospective economic growth. In all these present-minded ways Jefferson’s fixation on the national debt looks simplistic and silly.”

“On the other hand, it was during Jefferson’s presidency that the basic decisions were made that required the deportation of massive segments of the Indian population to land west of the Mississippi. In the language of the leading scholar on the subject, “the seeds of extinction” for Native American culture were sown under Jefferson.”

“But the experience took its toll on Jefferson’s view of the American press. His eloquent statement in the Inaugural Address — “ let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it” — implied that complete freedom of the press was both inviolable and self-correcting. Now he was not so sure. “Our newspapers, for the most part, present only the charicatures of disaffected minds,” he concluded in 1803, and what he called “the abuses of the freedom of the press” had generated a scatological political culture “never before known or borne by any civilized nation.” Jefferson actually had a point, since his presidency coincided with an exponential increase in the sheer number of American newspapers, as well as the abiding sense — left over from the 1790s — that there were no official or unofficial rules of conduct governing what would or should be printed.”

“Jefferson wanted the press to be free, but he had also presumed that a free press would maintain some measure of respect for the truth. The free-for-all mentality and ricochet style of the multiplying newspapers allowed him to persuade himself that the very principle of freedom of the press was being destroyed by its own excesses. “This is a dangerous state of things,” he explained to Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania, “and the press ought to be restored to its credibility if possible.”

“I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all,” he mused to himself. “I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.” He then went on to list a curious version of his public accomplishments, placing the dredging of the Rivanna River alongside the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, importing olive plants from France beside the efforts to end the slave trade.”

“He rose with the sun regardless of the season, usually getting five to eight hours of sleep, the length contingent upon the retirement hour, which itself depended on the quality of conversation when there were guests in the house or his interest in the book he was reading that evening.”

“Adams commiserated with what Jefferson had called his “epistolary corvée,” noting mischievously that he did not have Jefferson’s problem because he had been prescient enough to make himself unpopular. Moreover, as Adams explained, he simply neglected to answer the letters from cranks and well-intentioned strangers, so that he could devote his remaining energies to correspondents who counted, the chief one being Jefferson himself.”

“But whither is senile garrulity leading me?” Jefferson asks rhetorically: “Into politics, of which I have taken final leave. . . . I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much happier.”

“And so, even though both men were posturing for posterity, there is considerable truth in the classical portrait of Adams and Jefferson as reunited sages, speaking to each other and then across the ages to us, in their unique role as American originals. (At least one would be hard pressed, and at the same point reduced to sardonic laughter, to find an equivalent level of literacy and intellectual sophistication among all the retired presidents of American history.)”

“The study of human emotions was the statesman’s highest duty, Adams claimed: “Our Passions . . . possess so much metaphysical Subtilty and so much overpowering Eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party. . . .” Jefferson’s unshakable faith in the eventual triumph of human reason over prejudice and superstition was, Adams conceded, an admirable hope. But as far as he was concerned, and as the whole sweep of history showed, “it would seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” It was the classic debate between a rationalist and an empiricist.”

“Jefferson distinguished between the natural aristocracy, based on virtue and talent, and the pseudoaristocracy, “founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” Adams’s strictures against aristocracy, he suggested, were really warnings against the pseudoaristocracy, which Jefferson agreed was “a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” Given the favorable laws and the abundant land of America, it was reasonable to expect that “rank, and birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance. . . .”

“Adams would have none of it. “Your distinction between natural and artificial aristocracy,” he insisted, “does not appear to me well founded.” One might be able to separate wealth and talent in theory or imagine idealistic worlds where they were not mutually dependent (“ ideology” again), but in the real world they were inextricably connected in ways that defied Jefferson’s theoretical dissections. Adams was also critical of Jefferson’s vision of a classless American society. “No Romance could be more amusing,” he chided, since the wide-open American environment would only ensure more massive inequalities and more unequal accumulations of property unless government stepped in to redistribute the wealth. Unless one believed that human nature had somehow changed in the migration from Europe to America, the disproportionate power of “the few” would bedevil political life in the American nation too.”

“The ironies abound, since the self-made son of a New England farmer and shoemaker was insisting that neither individual freedom nor social equality was ever a goal of the revolutionary generation, while the Virginia aristocrat with an inherited plantation of lands and slaves was insisting that both were.”

“Alfred North Whitehead once observed that there were only two instances in recorded history when the political leadership of an emerging empire performed as well as one could realistically expect: The first was Rome under Caesar Augustus, and the second was the United States in the revolutionary era. While historians have offered several explanations for this remarkable explosion of leadership at the very start of the American republic — and it truly was remarkable — the self-conscious sense that the future was watching elevated the standards and expectations for all concerned. At least in a small way, we are complicitous in their achievement because we were the ultimate audience for their performances.”

“Jefferson’s idealization of local government as the epitome of the democratic experience was probably connected to a statewide educational scheme he was devising for Virginia about this time.”

“Almost every other political thinker of note in America, especially and exhaustively Adams and Madison, had begun with the presumption that the intimacy of local politics could not be replicated at the national level, which therefore required different and more complex political principles and institutional mechanisms to work effectively, indeed to work at all. But Jefferson did not think about politics in this conventional fashion. For him democracy was to politics as agrarianism was to the economy or health was to the human body.”

“He even opposed efforts to organize discrete interest groups to represent segments of the popular will to the federal government, what we would now call lobbyists. He regarded such associations as “dangerous machines,” which should be “frowned down” as mere “clubbists of Washington” that were “unnecessary, presumptuous, and of dangerous example.” The sprawling and inchoate character of popular opinion, it seems, was one of its chief blessings, not to be tampered with, orchestrated or analyzed.”

“Though he expressed the fervent hope that he would not live to see it, “there can be no hesitation,” he concluded, if faced with a choice between “the dissolution of our Union . . . or submission to a government without limitation of powers.” Secession was preferable to consolidation. It was a sad and pathetic spectacle, all the more so because it seemed to ring all the familiar chords of 1776 and 1800, but he was in fact linking his legacy to the destruction of the republic he had helped create.”

“While Madison himself wanted to blur both the sovereignty question and the extent of his disagreement with Jefferson, his wife, Dolley, in a note appended to her husband’s papers soon after his death, spoke more candidly: “Thomas Jefferson was not in America pending the framing of the Constitution, whose information in all that occurred in the Convention, and of the motives and intents of the framers, was derived from Mr. Madison, whose opinions guided him in the construction of that instrument, was looked up to many as its father and almost unanimously as its only true repositor.” When it came to constitutional questions, in short, Jefferson often did not know what he was talking about.”

“But the abuse of a trust does not disprove its existence.” Madison accepted, and had all along accepted, the principle of judicial review. If there was the spirit of ’76, which Jefferson could plausibly claim to know firsthand, there was also the spirit of ’87, which Madison could claim with equivalent plausibility to know with comparable intimacy. The clear intention of the framers of the Constitution, Madison told his friend, was to make the Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of federal versus state jurisdiction, the final judge, as Madison put it, of any “trial of strength between the Posse headed by the Marshal and the Posse headed by the Sheriff.”

“As the buildings in Charlottesville were going up, his own optimistic version of a national university was going down, replaced by a more narrow and defensive sense of his school as a southern fortress where Virginia’s young men could seek refuge from the poisonous environment of Harvard or Yale, which now specialized in producing “fanatics and tories.” Here was yet another manifestation of his “Virginia-writ-large” version of patriotism toward the end.”

“Even the ideal world of perfect freedom, pure democracy and human affection he thought he had created in Charlottesville refused to cooperate with his expectations. He seemed destined by fate to end up a disappointed idealist.”

“Jefferson’s ideas had also this felicity, and also perhaps a little too much of it. They come to birth a little too easily, and rest a little precariously on the aspirations and ideals of good men, and not sufficiently on the brute concrete facts of the world as it is. — Carl Becker (1944)”

“Clearly, Jefferson’s own conception of individual freedom was more restricted than modern-day notions. His vision was essentially negative: freedom from encroachments by either church or state. It was all a piece with his antigovernment ethos and therefore incompatible with our contemporary conviction about personal entitlements, whether it be for a decent standard of living, a comfortable retirement or adequate health care, all of which depend on precisely the kind of government sponsorship he would have found intrusive. His was the freedom to be left alone, which has more in common with twentieth-century claims to privacy rights than more aggressive claims to political or economic power. He really had little to say about the positive ways that Americans should use their individual freedom, though the nineteenth-century scramble for wealth, then the twentieth-century pursuit of unprecedented levels of consumption, would surely have left him disappointed in his fellowman.”

“Both Adams and Madison and, to an even greater extent, Hamilton, began with the assumption of society as a collective unit, which was embodied in the government, which itself should then be designed to maximize individual freedom within the larger context of public order. Jefferson did not worry about public order, believing as he did that individuals liberated from the last remnants of feudal oppression would interact freely to create a natural harmony of interests that was guided, like Adam Smith’s marketplace, by invisible or veiled forms of discipline. This belief, as Adams tried to tell him in the correspondence of their twilight years, was always an illusion, but it was an extraordinarily attractive illusion that proved extremely efficacious during the rowdy “takeoff” years of the American economy in the nineteenth century, when geographic and economic growth generated its own topsy-turvy version of dynamic order. Not until the late nineteenth century, with the end of the frontier and the emergence of the massive economic inequalities of the Gilded Age, was it fully exposed as an illusion.”

“Just as Jefferson himself was prepared to abandon the principle temporarily when great opportunities (i.e., the Louisiana Purchase) or great crises (the Embargo Act of 1807) required it, twentieth-century Americans have only been willing to adopt a more collectivistic mentality when threatened by the Great Depression or by foreign foes during World War II and then the Cold War. But individual sovereignty remains the seminal conviction and the ideological home-base for all mainstream political thinking after the threats recede.”

“Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind. There never has been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.”

“Jefferson created a particular style of leadership adapted to the special requirements of American political culture that remains relevant two centuries later. It is a style based on the capacity to rest comfortably with contradictions. If you begin with the conviction that government is at best a necessary evil, then effective political leadership must be indirect and unthreatening. It must cloak the exercise of power from public view, appear to be a tamer and more innocuous activity than it really is.”

“But by temperament and disposition he possessed the internal agility to generate multiple versions of the truth, the rhetorical skills to propose policies that different audiences could hear favorably, the deep deviousness only possible in a dedicated idealist, the honest aversion to the very power he pursued so effectively. These remain invaluable political talents. And the bedrock moralistic simplicity of the Jeffersonian vision has only increased its political potency as the size of the American electorate has grown larger and more unwieldy. If we could ever persuade him to run, he would remain a formidable candidate for national office.”