jefferson let them stand undisturbed as monuments

“More than fifty years later John Adams remembered Jefferson as “a silent member in Congress,” but “so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is attainable.” “In fact Dickinson inserted the strongest and most quotable words in the entire document: “Our cause is just. “Solitary study allowed him to work out his private perspectives without interference and without the unpredictability of an improvisational debate.” 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.” “By disposition and habit, Jefferson’s most comfortable arena was the study and his most natural podium was the writing desk. His most glaring deficiency was the talent most valued in Philadelphia: He could not speak in public.” “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. 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.” “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. And Jefferson clearly believed they were true.” They were not clever and willful distortions. “The Saxon myth and the doctrine of expatriation, however, were a different matter. True, he could consciously play fast and loose with the historical evidence on behalf of a greater cause.” “Embrace such seductive fictions was not a deliberate effort at propaganda. 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 went off to the College of William and Mary in 1760. “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.” The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness.” The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable. He was, however, an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary. “Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. “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.” “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.”

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.” “One could work for several years on Adams and enjoy splendid isolation.

Jefferson let them stand undisturbed as monuments