— John Adams to Timothy Pickering
1822
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… In my mother’s opinion, all white people — the males especially — were lazy, irritable, corrupt and foolish children whom we, like so many Brother Rabbits, were constantly outsmarting — but Mr. Jefferson was the exception. “He’s the smartest man who ever lived,” she used to tell me. “He’s read every book ever written and knows how everything works — and if he doesn’t know, he can figure it out.” And then, of course, he was famous — so much so that, as she put it, “When he walks down the street in Philadelphia, everybody clears out of his way”—an image that when I was a little girl did a good deal more to confirm my fear of Mr. Jefferson than to help me share her veneration.
My mother, however, had only the most indefinite idea of what Mr. Jefferson had done to become so famous — and she wasn’t alone. I remember her telling my sister Mary that he was the king of Virginia and Mary saying, “No, he’s the burgess. General Washington is the king.” My brother Bobby was Mr. Jefferson’s body servant in those days, and he once told us that Mr. Jefferson was a “delegate” and a “governor,” but I had no idea what either of these words meant, and Bobby was unable to explain them in a way that made sense to me or, I think, to anyone else in our family.
One thing that everyone at Monticello knew very well, however, was that Mr. Jefferson was important. We knew that he was written about in the newspapers almost every day and that he was visited by other important men, like General Washington and Mr. Madison. Elegant carriages were always pulling up in front of the great house, and they were filled with men and women dressed in silks and lace and wearing shoes so highly polished they gleamed like the sun on water. Some of these people came from as far away as Boston and New York, and they were clearly thrilled to be in the presence of our master, some so thrilled they were reduced to blushing and stuttering. I remember once helping my mother serve water to guests at a particularly large dinner party and seeing a woman so entranced by what Mr. Jefferson was saying that she kept her full fork hovering over her plate the entire time it took me to make a circuit of the table.
And even we servants shared a small portion of our master’s fame. On Sundays when we were allowed to go into town for prayer meetings or to sell our livestock and the products of our gardens, men, women and children would point at us and stare. They’d ask in low, hushed voices, “You’re Mr. Jefferson’s people, aren’t you?” They’d want to know what he was like or how it felt to work for such a man.
There were those among us who hated Mr. Jefferson — the wisest, I now know. But many more were prone to say things like, “Mr. Jefferson is a good master” and “We’re lucky.” My mother told me many times, “Don’t you forget how lucky you are to have Mr. Jefferson for a master!”
This all seems so pathetic to me now. And cowardly. Yes, we were lucky to be able to go into town on Sundays, and to sell what we grew and raised, and to keep the profits. Yes, Mr. Jefferson had a genuine abhorrence for the cowskin and a desire to be just, even kind. But there was still that dank precinct in his heart and that part of his brain that saw Negroes as more animal than man. Yes, we were lucky, but such luck is a mere drop in an ocean of misfortune. That we counted it as more than that only shows how impossible it was to keep off the deadness….
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Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
— Thomas Jefferson
Declaration of Independence
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“What is the matter? Why do you look so sorrowful?” I don’t know. I was just staring at my hand and thinking that it is not my hand. I have been having such odd thoughts. “You have been too much indoors. I will ask Jupiter to saddle Castor and Diomede. It is a fine, clear day. The new leaves are like a green mist on the mountains.” No. I would rather not. I just want to stay here. For the moment, at least. I can’t even imagine getting out of this chair. “You must be catching something. Go to your cabin. I will bring you hot chocolate and biscuits, and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.” I keep having the feeling that I am not myself. That I am not even here. I wonder if I am going mad. “I have often felt a spectator at my own life, that the person I am is only what the world expects of me and that the real me is standing to one side.” Yes. It is something like that. I feel as if I can’t do anything. “It is fancy. It will pass.” I am not sure. “Go lie down and I will read to you from Henry Fielding.”
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… I was not myself. Is that possible? For almost my whole life I was not the person I imagined myself to be….
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I am Thomas Jefferson. I have Thomas Jefferson’s flowing, frizzed, red hair. I have his ocher eyes. And I look down on the world from a height that is greater than my own. I am on trial. And John Marshall is standing in front of me, in his black robe, his thick black eyebrows arrowed in contempt. “Prove yourself,” says Marshall.
“What is there to prove?” I say, my voice spreading wavelike to the four corners of the room, where it crashes and returns to my ears as a complex echo. “Do you doubt that I stand before you?”
“I doubt everything about you,” says Marshall. “You are incoherent. I don’t believe in you at all.” He has several loose sheets of paper on the desk in front of him. He shuffles them, scowling at each in turn as it passes before his eyes. Then he stands them on end, lifts, drops and pats them until their edges are aligned. “You hear only the sounds of words,” he says, “and care nothing about their sense. A word without sense is only so much gas passing through the vocal cords. It is nothing.”
It is true that I am listening to the sounds of my words — or Thomas Jefferson’s. They have a capacity to boom and reverberate in a way that I am not accustomed to. They are a sort of weapon, but I am not sure how to use them. “I stand for liberty,” I say experimentally, “and for equality.” As these words pass my lips, they have the effect of increasing my stature. Marshall has to crane his head back in order to reply.
“Whose liberty?” he says. “Whose equality?” His own words cause him to shrink. He is shouting, but his voice grows tinny and small.
“I stand for the liberty and equality of all men.”