Words of Thomas Jefferson (An American Prophet?)

Didn’t he die impoverished, compared to his friend John Adams who had gained much wealth?

John Adams started out poor and ended up comfortable.

Jefferson began quite well off and ended up in financial straits. It had to do with the declining productivity of the soil in Virginia and low tobacco prices.

"Land poor" was a term used for those who had property but not much in the way of income or money, and many Virginians were in the same boat in the 1820s.

John Adams had been Sam Adams's poor distant cousin and John Hancock's poor friend. He ended up financially better off than both of them, but I suspect it was due more to frugality than anything else.

I have to say that of the founders, Jefferson is the one I hold in least regard.

He was a stunningly creative fellow and imaginative master of written rhetoric, but as a diplomat, a creator of national order, a supporter of abstract (in lieu of “American) liberty, and a politician he left much to be desired.

It has taken me many years to come around to that understanding. In balance I do not deny there is much greatness about the man.

But reading many studies and biographies has left me cold on his true value.

His efforts to influence Madison from abroad during the writing and confirmation of the constitution were perverse.
From the middle of the first Washington administration on he was a downright bad actor in many ways.

I think that the rise of the dreaded “faction” characteristic was chiefly due to his animosity to Hamilton and created the party faction we have to this day.

He was so in love with the French that their revolutionary excess was something he never saw. His writing on this period is downright stupid in some cases it is so over the top.

Conor Cruise O'Brien does a good job in “The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800” in pointing out his excess in that area and showing how his racial feelings would be considered much more “racist” than any other founder if given proper view rather than being hidden and glossed over by most biographers.

Much like the fellow was given his name for a middle name, William Jefferson Clinton, he was a great talent given to much damage.

I like the interview that I saw with David McCullough about his Adams biography. He said that he started out writing about Jefferson and Adams and as he really got into it he saw that “Adams really was the essential man.”

We can take warning from the fact that out of the American Founders, Chris Hitchens chose TJ for a small biographical subject.

Very well said. Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Jefferson was certainly very talented with words. But his own eloquence convinced himself too easily that he was on the right track.

He was a very paradoxical man: his personality united opposites. But I don't think Jefferson actually had very much insight into the contradictions of his own thinking. And he didn't always understand that pleasing intellectual or rhetorical formulations may not be adequate solutions to real world problems.

Jefferson was mistaken about a lot of things -- the French Revolution, federal-state relations, the need for a strong defense, slavery -- but he was the most popular founding father for much of the twentieth century. That had a lot to do with the claim that he was the father of the Democratic Party. But it also had to do with his ability to put American ideals into words.

Right now there's an understandable reaction against the Jefferson worship of the last century. People look more closely at performance and results, rather than at rhetoric. Jefferson's reputation may make a comeback, though, if we find ourselves involved in the kind of struggles that we were involved in earlier, since so few writers, let alone politicians, have written so eloquently about liberty.

I think you're right about Jefferson and the rise of partisanship. Political parties were probably inevitable, but can be infuriating to read Jefferson putting all the blame for the political climate on Hamilton.

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