Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304110238
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
JEFFERSON
be personal, "a concern purely between our god and our conscious."As a man who leaned toward science, he was a meticulous record keeper. He penciled observations on small tablets of thin ivory and transcribed them into his books every night.
He loved gadgets and collected the best instruments and inventions he could find. One of his pets was the polygraph - not the lie detector machine of today, but a mechanical device that allowed him to make copies of his correspondence.
Jefferson wrote more than 66,000 letters and, thanks to his polygraphs, kept copies of every one. Even the heart-rending love letters he wrote to a married woman who did not share his ardor were put into his files.
It's been the bounty and bane of every Jefferson scholar since.
"We do not have as complete a record of correspondence from any other figure of comparable note in American history," Mapp said. "That's a great blessing, too, for biographers of Jefferson. . . . Even when Jefferson is writing on something trivial, he frequently finds something to say that is not trivial, and he says it in a spritely way. He is immensely readable."
But the volume of material has provided a wealth of apparent contradictions.
"It was said shortly after his death that he could be quoted on every side of any question," said Peterson. "He's complex and to some extent he is ambiguous and contradictory."
Peterson wrote a 1,000-page biography of Jefferson and edited a collection of Jefferson's own words, but still finds his essence hard to grasp.
"It's really difficult to penetrate the inner psyche of the man," he said. "Any man engaged in politics," Peterson noted, "has to be a little bit slick."
Jefferson seemed reluctant to take on public office, but when campaigning, fought to win. He quickly saw the value of having a following of like-minded supporters and founded what is today the Democratic Party. He also saw that by combining the rural Southern vote with that of the urban North, he could win the presidency - a mix that his party largely still relies upon.
Although Jefferson is known as an inventor, he more accurately might be called a tinkerer. He loved to gather up the best inventions of others and modify them to his own purposes.
That was most obvious in his architecture. Jefferson believed the science had reached its pinnacle with the Romans and studied their work. But he readily adapted it to local materials and American conditions. His palaces were built of domestic brick, not imported marble. He even specified that the monument over his grave be of a common stone "that no one might be tempted hereafter to destroy it for the value of the materials."
"He was a wonderful borrower," said J. Murray Howard, architect for the University of Virginia and the man responsible for the restoration and preservation program of Jefferson's "academical village."
And Jefferson's endorsement made it acceptable for others also to look back and adapt classical works, he said.
Jefferson also was not a scientist, at least by the definition of his day, said Silvio A. Bedini, historian emeritus for the Smithsonian Institution, who has written a biography, "Thomas Jefferson, Statesman of Science."
In Jefferson's day, a man had to earn more than half his living at science to be called a scientist. "He was a man of science," Bedini said.
That's not to belittle Jefferson's scientific accomplishments. Bedini's book runs more than 600 pages and he is working on a sequel with the 300 that had to be cut.
Jefferson brought contour plowing and crop rotation to the New World, Bedini said. He spent his life trading seeds and plants with other growers. He even risked a death sentence to smuggle a finer strain of rice out of Italy in hopes it could improve the Carolina crop.
He loved astronomy and was a pioneer in the science of weather.
"As a young man at the College of William and Mary he started keeping daily records of rain, temperature and conditions," Bedini noted. He continued the practice to his death and even tried to persuade friends to set up a network of weather watchers.
Scientists checking historic trends in the weather still refer to Jefferson's records, Bedini said.
And Jefferson invented a code machine that could have been a boon to the young nation's secret correspondence. But a friend discouraged Jefferson from using it, and the idea lay dormant until it was re-invented by the U.S. Army in 1919. The wheel cypher that relied on the same ideas then remained in use through WWII, officially named Cipher Device, M-94.
Jefferson also blazed new ground in the area of archaeology. He supervised the scientific excavation of an Indian burial ground, predating by nearly 100 years the techniques that would become common in archaeology.
He also was interested in paleontology and was the first to collect the fossil remains of animals, Bedini said. The collection was given to the American Philosophical Society.
But there's a troubling side to Jefferson, as well. The man who wrote so eloquently of freedom, built his home and life with slave labor. He also wrote that blacks and women had fewer natural abilities than white men.
Still, Jefferson led Virginia in the fight to be the first state to ban the importation of slaves and tried to include emancipation in his Declaration of Independence. It was cut out at the request of the delegations from South Carolina and Georgia, Mapp said.
"A lot of people don't know this, but delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island also opposed it," Mapp said. "They said although they were opposed to slavery, the richest and among the most influential of their constituents had made their money in the slave trade. If we write that into the Declaration of Independence, they will be opposed to the adoption of it, and so as a practical matter, they said we can't have it in there.
"And Jefferson was very frustrated."
Although he remained a man of his times in some areas, what set Jefferson apart from his contemporaries wasn't just his scope of achievements, it was his ability to look ahead. He fought for public schools knowing that an uneducated electorate would not be able to maintain its democracy. He reformed Virginia's legal system so the English laws favoring the aristocracy wouldn't gradually undermine the American republic. He pulled off the greatest land deal in history by predicting Napoleon would need cash for his coming wars. France had land in America it couldn't protect against England. Jefferson offered to pay Napoleon handsomely for something he likely would lose anyway. And America got the Louisiana Territory.
"Grounded as he was in the old regime," Onuf said, "Jefferson was able to look beyond Virginia, to look towards the future."
For Mapp, the Chesapeake scholar who has written two biographies of the man, Jefferson was such a good prophet "partly, because he had such a vast knowledge of history, and then he had such an understanding of human beings."