that overt opposition was rampant, or that he had no idea what he was talking about. At the call for a constitutional convention in 1787, “the people . . . agreed with one voice” to attempt a new compact to remedy the “incompetence” of the Articles of Confederation. This was sheerest nonsense. Popular opinion on the work of the Philadelphia convention was wildly divided. A majority of voters actually voted against the Constitution when it was submitted to them for ratification. And in any case Jefferson was not there to take the temperature of the electorate. He was an ocean away, in France, at the time. His account of the campaign for the new Constitution had nothing to do with reality but much to do with the cast of his mind. It expressed his impassioned yearning for an undifferentiated “people” devoted to the common good.
And yet he knew better. The people he idealized might unite now and then, for the public weal, but that was not their natural bent. “The pressure of an external enemy” had “hooped us together” in the war for independence, but once the war was over and “peace and safety were restored,” such virtuous citizenship ceased. “Every man” looked to his own “profitable occupation.” Jefferson was painfully aware that self-interest was the default position in American life.
He strained mightily against that awareness. He let his hopes get the best of his fears. He gave in to wishful thinking. In his first inaugural address, he proclaimed America “the strongest government on earth,” despite the fact that its army was a pathetic thing and its navy nearly nonexistent. It was strong, he said, because “every man” would “fly” to defend that government if it called. (A few years later, when he called on his countrymen to uphold his embargo on commerce with Britain, he discovered the fatuousness of that faith.)
He exercised his imagination in fanciful schemes to divide Virginia’s counties into much smaller jurisdictions he called wards. He understood full well that his wards would, by virtue of their size, be more homogeneous and thus more likely to trample the rights of deviants or to drive them away. Such tyranny of the majority was a risk he was ready to run, if it would keep people engaged in the republic, the “res publica,” the public thing.
Jefferson celebrated the free individual, but he put no priority on free enterprise. He hoped that Americans would use their freedom as he had, for public life. He knew, long before Tocqueville spelled it out, that the citizens of a republic had to be “on the alert.” They could lose their freedom if they did not guard the government that guarded it.
All his life, Jefferson was an advocate of small government. But he did not dread central government as modern conservatives do, as a check on the prerogatives of the private sector. On the contrary, he sought to scale down government as a means to preserve its power, keeping it close to the people and the people close to it. His priority was always on the public welfare more than personal fame or fortune. As he said in this memoir, the safety of the republic is “the first and supreme law.”
Like Jefferson, Franklin felt the pull of the personal. Like Jefferson, Franklin fought it. But Franklin caught the wave of American life more presciently than Jefferson. Insisting as he did that there are “natural” claims that “precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them,” Franklin set himself against privatism from within privatism, affirming benevolence as a better way to pursue happiness.
Jefferson’s republican priorities were already out of fashion when he wrote his autobiography. They have been out of fashion ever since. He recognized as much at the time, and his recognition informs his recollections.
In the very year in which he put them to paper, he wrote to a friend, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” He still knew the tune. He just had not, any longer, the energy to dance to it.
His autobiography was an evocation of a golden age, a brief moment when men were “hooped together” in a common cause for the common good. It was not a summons to preserve that moment and that spirit of ’76, because they were past, and Jefferson knew that they were past. It was not a clarion call to revive them, because he despaired of their revival.
This autobiography may be the most despairing thing that Jefferson ever wrote. Its odd inertness reflected his awareness that he was out of touch with “the times.” Its halfheartedness expressed his abandonment of the endeavor that had informed his life, to educate the democracy. His account of the Revolutionary era was not intended as a trumpet blast. It was neither a call to battle nor an invitation to renewal. It was a more muted and somber thing, almost a taps, as if at least to have the reality of his outmoded values on the record, as if at least to insist that America had not always been as it was all too clearly going to be.
Americans could scarcely hear what he was saying when he said it in 1820, or when it was occasionally put before them in later years. Perhaps we cannot hear it now. We are surely more self-absorbed now, and less concerned for the commons, than even the despondent Jefferson of 1820 could have conceived. But there are signs that we begin to sicken of our amuck individualism. It is possible that, at this crisis of citizenship, in our hour of need, we are ready at last to listen.
CHIEF EVENTS IN JEFFERSON’S LIFE
FROM HIS BIRTH IN 1743 TO HIS DEATH IN 1826
| 1743.—April 2 [or 13] | Born at Shadwell, Albemarle Co., Va. |
| 1748. | Attends English School at Tuckahoe. |
| 1752. | Attends Latin School at Douglas. |
| 1757.—August 17. | Death of his father, Peter Jefferson. |
| Attends Murray School. | |
| 1760.—March 25. | Enters William and Mary College. |
| 1762.—April 25. | Graduates from William and Mary. |
| Enters law office of George Wythe. | |
| 1764. | At Williamsburg. |
| 1766. | Journeys to Annapolis, Philadelphia, and New York. |
| 1767. | Admitted to the bar from Shadwell. |
| 1769. | Elected a Burgess from Shadwell. |
| May 8. | Attends House of Burgesses. |
| At Williamsburg. | |
| 9. | Drafts resolutions in reply to Botetourt. |
| 17. | House of Burgesses dissolved. |
| Signs Non-importation Association. | |
| 1770.—Feb. 1. | House and library at Shadwell burned. |
| Argues case of Howell v. Netherland. | |
| May 11. | Attends House of Burgesses. |
| 1771. | At Monticello. |
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March
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