Transcriptions of Jefferson's Secrets
<<WARNING>>
This talk contains mature language
and may not be suitable for all audiences.
My book, Jefferson's Secrets, is a portrait of Thomas Jefferson's imagination. I have divided the book into sections: medical concerns; domestic cares; race and the sexual imagination; politics; and, religion and dying. I'll try to give you clues tonight about each of these topics, and give you a general picture of the new ideas I think are worth considering, as we further our conversation about Thomas Jefferson.
I begin the book in 1826 and look backwards. So we see Jefferson reflecting at once on body and mind, or spirit. On the meaning of the Revolution, and on the prospect of death. He knew he could not make time stand still. He knew his influence would be felt in the future, but to what degree, he could not guess. He knew with greater certainty that his body was deteriorating, and he wrote, more than once, of its mechanical properties, like a ticking timepiece, a pinion worn here, a spring, there. It is his persistent concern with a vulnerable body, with the study of physiology, which has escaped students of Jefferson till now. And it's a very curious story.
Body tells us of Jefferson's appetites and desires. His fears of bad air, contamination, of disease. His was a world of intense physicality. Of urban life he wrote, the mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.
As early as 1795, when he retired from Washington's cabinet, and thought he was retiring from politics for good, he wrote to James Madison, "my health is entirely broken, and I set less store in a posthumous reputation than in my present time. My age requires that I should place my affairs in a clear state." At the age of 52, he thought he was nearing the end of his life, in line with the expectations of his peers.
In his post-presidential retirement, he suffered on and off from rheumatoid arthritis, and much later from an enlarged prostate. Once, in 1813, he called his body "this old crazy carcass." (LAUGH)
But he believed that a human being was not powerless, and health, more often than not, was a state of mind. He liked to think that positive activity served the heart and cleared the head, just so long as a body did not lapse into sedentary pursuits. Or as he more distinctly called it, indolence. For this reason, he considered that horseback riding prompted internal, as well as external movement. The combined force of the muscles stimulating circulation. He suffered from diarrhea, the official cause of his death, at various times, beginning in the first term of his presidency. And he learned from the medical literature he owned, and letters to and from doctors, that diarrhea was best relieved by rides, he said, on a hard trotting horse. (LAUGH)
His self-monitoring was rigid. Bathing his feet in ice cold water every morning to avoid colds is one famous habit he maintained. His regular diet of vegetables with moderate portions of meat and wine bears this out, too. His friend, Dr. Waterhouse of Harvard, a pioneer in vaccination, insisted that there was, quote, "an inseparable sympathy, a beautiful balance, between the processes of breathing and digestion," and Jefferson concurred.
The quest to maintain that sympathetic balance between the lungs and the stomach and intestines was subservient to nothing, and in his mind only surrendered to the ultimate power of nature over the doomed human organism. As he experienced physical weakness and decay during his 17 retirement years, Jefferson often seemed to invite, or at least he never resisted, death. "The most undesirable of all things is long life," he wrote Dr. Waterhouse in 1825. "And there is nothing I have ever so much dreaded."
He was talking, at this point, at the age of 81, of his fear of losing his sharp mind, and living with reduced sensation, something that never happened. His hearing diminished. His eyesight remained uncommonly strong. He still rode his horse, though he needed help getting on and off.
It seems almost peculiar that the various and often agonizing ailments that he endured did not produce an unusual amount of distress among his doctors, his friends and loved ones who interacted with him. Indeed, it tells us a great deal about peoples' expectations from the aging process that Jefferson was regarded as an unusually healthy man for his day. He sometimes meditated on the death that awaited, but he was never more preoccupied with that than with the means of comprehending life.
PART II
What did life mean to Thomas Jefferson in the most literal sense, as he aged? His answer to the pessimists who complained of life's desperate decline was to pursue tranquil, permanent felicity, a phrase he once employed that I particularly relish. By understanding the feeling brain, the science of nervous sensations, he figured he could maximize his chances for sound health. He called this a "just equilibrium of all the passions." He wrote to good and trusted friends, such as doctors Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Waterhouse, exchanging theories of health, keeping the dangerous passions under control. And still, he suffered those periodical headaches, migraines, throughout his decades in politics.
This only intensified his interest in health science, so that by the time he retired for good, he had an extensive vocabulary applicable to this new phase of life. That vocabulary is still comprehensible to us, but not as viscerally felt as it was in his time, when the language of health reflected the primitive condition of medical treatment and inability to combat deadly seasonal diseases. But let me try to explain the inner world of Thomas Jefferson and other early Americans through the images he created with his clever and continuous application of a language of sensation.
The key words I've isolated that meant the most to Jefferson, and I find them in a host of sentimental novels from this period. These are "vibrations," "spasms," "convulsions," 'commotions," "tremors," "irritants," and "agitations." Nervous sensations spoke to Jefferson elementally of life. In the Declaration Of Independence, he rhetorically divided the US and the Tory and British enemy into two camps. The feeling, and the unfeeling. After the last stab to agonizing affection, and what more visceral sensation could there be? "Manly spirit," he said, "required that we renounce these unfeeling brethren."
And why was this? Because Loyalist forces in 1776 were producing convulsions in the body politic. "Invasions from without, and convulsions within," wrote Jefferson in the Declaration.
Again in his first inaugural address as president in 1801, Jefferson contrasted his modern, progressive outlook with the throes and convulsions of the ancient world. The agonizing spasms of infuriated man. He's ever keeping to this language of nervous sensations. The body's vulnerability concerned him, when he acknowledge in 1816 at age 73, "There are," even in the happiest life, "some terrible convulsions."
That same year, he wrote of his relationship to the corporeal inhabitants of this corporeal globe. In corporeal affairs, nerves carried a healthy kind of excitement, sympathy. But nerves also contain the seeds of disorder. Personal disorder, public disorder. Even positive passions had to be moderated. His friend, Dr. Rush, referred to an "excess passion for liberty," nerves bent and twisted and out of control. He called it "a species of insanity." Jeffersonian Americans were keenly aware of the need for balance, and conditioned their speech, their actions, their hopes for a better life.
Part III
The medical enlightenment that Jefferson subscribed to accepted that nerves were invisible and mysterious and potentially devastating. They formed a powerful connection between the brain and the soul. When delicate women read novels that threw their nerves out of balance, Jefferson felt they would suffer, in his words, bloated imagination. (LAUGH) Sickly judgment. Doctors described women who died after giving birth as having succumbed to an, excuse me, overactive imagination. Physicians referred to something that they called, are you ready for this one? Uterine fury. (LAUGH)
So in bringing up his own daughters, and several granddaughters who lived with him in Monticello throughout his retirement years, Jefferson believed it was his job to make sure they grew up modest and passive, or at least accepting of the "natural" hierarchy that made men both breadwinners and mental health monitors. (LAUGH)
Yes. In other words, women had to be protected from themselves. Young women should be kept from novels that were too adventurous. Romantic themes that permitted their imaginations to fixate on being swept off their feet by a dashing hero. Real life was not like that, because real men were flawed and crude. I doubt this comes as any surprise to anyone here today. (LAUGH) So there's something to be learned by examining the novels that Jefferson recommended to young women. The only one authored by a male was William Godwin's Caleb Williams, first published in 1794. Godwin was probably better known in Europe than Thomas Jefferson was, and it would not be inaccurate to call Jefferson the American Godwin.
Godwin's political radicalism, his support of the French Revolution, his religious skepticism, mirrored Jefferson's. Both men were attacked for refusing to censure atheism. Jefferson for insisting that there is nothing particularly sacred about what went on inside a church. Anyway, um, both heralded freedom of conscience.
Caleb Williams was a novel celebrating emotional democracy, in which the hero, a man of modest means, used an inherent quality of sympathetic feeling and profound generosity to overcome a man of privilege who was out to destroy him. In his mounting psychological struggle with Squire Falkland, Caleb is constantly caught up in the hazardous world of nervous sensations. Each recollection of the danger he was generating for himself was a powerful sensation. I quote, "a kind of tingling sensation, not altogether unallied to enjoyment. The further I advanced, the more the sensation was irresistible." And late in the novel, as he ruminates over his years of turmoil, "my sensations at certain periods amounted to insanity." This was the dramatic world of nervous sensations that Jefferson keenly understood, and that conditioned how he saw everything from his own body to national politics.
The story of Caleb Williams is about two men of different social stations whose destinies are joined. The underdog, Caleb, is pursued by Falkland's personal police force, the arm of privilege. For accusing the master, Caleb must suffer a series of, of unspeakable torments as he runs, hides, is captured, escapes, trusts, is betrayed. Everything one expects for a novel of this period. Falkland is left, again, I quote, "convulsed with fury." His passion unchecked. Caleb persists in the process of self discovery. He emerges the stronger man by learning the value of openness.
In the end, the long-obsessed Falkland cedes power and exonerates Caleb. Standing before a magistrate, Caleb is able to unburden his heart with self-effacing innocence. Doing so, he utterly over-awes Falkland. He's armed with the truth, the knowledge that Falkland is a murderer, but he refuses to brand his tormenter, calling him, instead, a man worthy of affection and kindness. Sympathy and sincerity conquered Falkland, who rises to confess his crimes, and as Caleb tells it, "he saw my sincerity. He was penetrated with my grief and compunction. He rose from his seat, supported by his attendants, and to my infinite astonishment, threw himself into my arms." Something in Caleb's conciliatory voice had pierced through the fog of old society privilege.
This is an essentially Jeffersonian ending. Because Jefferson had predicated his career on the ideal of fashioning social harmony by conquering social prejudice, and seeing social justice realized.
PART IV
"We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." That's what he pronounced in the Senate chamber, in his most heralded attempt to leave behind the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, and to bind the nation. Jefferson, like Godwin, believed that there were Falklands to be converted. To be melted by the language of enlightened Republicanism. Jefferson and Godwin each wanted to believe that class tyranny would be crushed in the natural, natural course of human events. So why did he recommend Godwin's novel to his granddaughters and others? Jefferson believed that without encouraging them to take the political stage, women should be taught to distinguish in a man between the soft, sympathizing Republican, and a hard, unfeeling aristocrat.
He may have desired that women remain politically harmless, but he did not want them politically uninformed. They should suppress public ambition, but they should not suppress feelings of humanity. This is what undergirded Jeffersonian democratic theory. The one woman I focus on in this section of the book, Susan has already introduced to us. Ellen Wayles Randolph. Ellen, who embodies both Jefferson's spirit and practical mindedness, who in 1825, near the end of his life, married Joseph Coolidge of Boston, and moved north with him.
She bore a physical resemblance to her grandfather. But what, what makes Ellen the true inheritor of his mind is in part revealed in her letters, which show her to be exceedingly resourceful and versatile. Not only does she echo his style, she captures his sentiments. Godwinian sentiments with respect to nature, and the human spirit. She writes, for example, to her future brother-in-law, Nicholas Trist, in the metaphorically resonant manner of her grandfather. "Time, as he bears us along with him, frequently appears to have a slow and heavy wing. But when we look back to the span over which has carried us, we are astonished and even dismayed at the rapidity of the flight."
I can't tell you how much this sounds like Thomas Jefferson when he was in his thirties and forties. His familiar letters, always sentimental, always nostalgic, without losing solemnity or sobriety. And yet, Ellen was conventionally religious. More responsive to her generation's renewed sense of faith than she was a Jeffersonian religious skeptic. In 1816, Jefferson wrote of his 20-year-old granddaughter, Ellen, "she merits anything I could have said of a good heart, good temper, an sound head, and great range of information."
When she moved to Boston, he shipped her the desk on which he wrote the Declaration Of Independence. That's how much she meant to him. To yourself, "I am all love," he signed more than one letter, to the granddaughter I have dared to call his favorite. In 1823, when the Jeffersonian presidential candidate, William Crawford of Georgia was languishing at the home of a Virginia politician, having suffered a stroke, Jefferson's personal physician was uneasy about leaving Crawford alone. Or leaving his side, where there were others, such as doctors who were going to bleed the patient.
But then Ellen arrived, and the, Jefferson's doctor expressed his relief in announcing to the patriarchal Thomas Jefferson of the "presence of EWR, your most intelligent granddaughter." (LAUGH) "She was so competent, so self confident, so charismatic, with a modest, yet somehow commanding presence, that I don't hesitate to say that but for the gender restrictions in place, if she were not a woman, and obliged to be content as a wife and mother, I believe she could have been president." Her grandfather, however, held socially conservative views, even for his time.
Insisting in 1808 that the appointment of a woman to any political office would be to invite anarchy. Their trembling nerves made them ill equipped for partisan combat. (LAUGH)
PART V
Jefferson and the intellects of his generation devoted a good deal of attention to the unwanted side effects of mental stimulation and mental exertion. Dr. Samuel Auguste [André] David Tissot of Switzerland was the Alfred Kinsey of his time. Jefferson owned his collected works in French, and a portion in English. The influence of Tissot and other medical and scientific writers on his generation helps us to appreciate how it was that Jefferson was so focused on carnal appetites when he approached the slavery questions, and relations between the races.
As many of you know, because it's been repeated by students of Jefferson and race for some time now, in writing about Black and White tensions in his notes on Virginia, Jefferson expressed his fear of "the extermination of the one or the other race." He explained that when the deep-rooted prejudices held by Whites came face to face with the 10,000 recollections held by viciously exploited Blacks, it was, what word did Jefferson choose --"convulsions" --that would provoke the catastrophic race war he foresaw sometime in America's future, if a solution to the race problem was not found.
But what was it that triggered his use of the word convulsions here? His next thought informs us. Color of the skin, color of the blood, color of the bile. Or some other secretion, he writes. In this important discussion relating to sex across the color line, he was drawn to consider bodily fluids, racial comparisons of beauty, and mixtures producing expressions of every passion. This is, once again, a language we need to understand. Jefferson did dwell on the carnal life. There's an incisiveness and heartiness to him when he writes about the body. He defined himself against men of, and I quote, gloomy and hypochondriac minds, diseased bodies, disgusted with the present.
Those men and women whose nervous balance was inferior, or substandard, were diseased in the imagination, which often meant lacking the ability to control their passions. Black Americans, enslaved and free, were to Jefferson of a scientifically observable inferior quality. Their poetry was technically imitative, and essentially unfeeling. He scoffed at Blacks' efforts to appear distinguished, or intellectually resilient, as a poor copy of the White, because Blacks were, he insisted, physiologically and neurologically inferior. He would never compromise on this. It is what makes Jefferson look pitifully ignorant to our century, but he was, in fact, mainstream in many of his racist beliefs. The liberal-minded Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia surmised that African skin pigmentation was the result of widespread leprosy that became hereditary.
Blacks, Jefferson wrote in Notes, "secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which give this, gives them a strong and disagreeable odor. In imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. They are more ardent after their female, but love seems with them to be more an eager desire than a tender, delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient." None of this was original with Thomas Jefferson. As faulty and dangerous and abhorrent as his conclusions are, they show how reliant he was on medical studies.
He believed, as he wrote in 1809, the first year of his retirement, that those Blacks who demonstrated any perceptible talent in writing, the arts, or mathematics had to be of mixed race. Had to have a significant percentage of non-African blood. This is why he wanted the races separated, and Blacks ideally removed from White society, where the White man's boisterous passions made race mixing inevitable, and tainted, the word that they used, the White community, requiring several generations before the taint was wiped away.
He was abolitionist in the narrowest sense of the term, as one who wanted Blacks to prosper in Africa. They should learn to be a republic, and to improve their native continent. This is what Peter Onuf means when he writes of Jefferson's view of African Americans as a captive nation, unable to thrive within European-American's nation. One color would dominate, the other would be miserable, and eventually revolt, and there would be tremendous bloodshed. Convulsions. That was Jefferson's physiologically-based theory. He and many other self-proclaimed liberals considered mass deportation the most humane solution to America's race problem.
PART VI
Now, to explain his presumed relationship with Sally Hemings. How could Jefferson rationalize maintaining a healthy body, a healthy nervous system, and cross the color line to father children with his slave? Isn't that losing control of his passions, and sacrificing balance and equilibrium? The answer, in his context, and in eighteenth century context, is no it's not. Because the medical literature, beginning with Tissot, consistently instructed so called literary and sedentary person, or upper class intellectuals, to do as follows. One, maintain a semi-vegetarian diet. Two, exercise daily, as by horseback riding. And three, have regular sex with a healthy, attractive, fruitful female.
Jefferson, as we have established, ate little meat, rode his horse daily up to eight miles, and took great interest in monitoring his bodily functions. As for that third requirement, sexual activity, men like Jefferson understood that they could rule their own sex lives. This was masculine authority, the male prerogative. His was effectively the last generation before our society was to be broadly persuaded that sexual sinfulness adhered to men as well as women.
Not only was he pre-Victorian, Jefferson certainly knew all about sex across the color line, and rape on southern plantations. When you add to this assessment his perception that Sally Hemings was not one quarter Black, but three-quarters White, their children, for the most part, able to pass for White, despite fuzzy legal restrictions as to the enslaved status of the mother, then Jefferson was providing for the economic well being of his extramarital offspring. This was within the bounds of morality as his community defined it.
He thought of the Hemings family as a parallel subordinate family. They were, we understand, related to Jefferson's wife through her father, John Wales. They were not generic Black people. Only the satirical northern critics of his political policies chose to darken Sally Hemings' skin pigmentation, for they had never seen her, and they transformed her into the African Venus of ironic poetry, so as to embarrass Jefferson. So as to say, you, Mr. President, so philosophical in your pretensions, with so large a library, with so cerebral a reputation, you're really just a man, an ordinary man, with ordinary urges, because we know the English lords and squires have plenty of illegitimate offspring, and you're just like them, not above sleeping with your servant.
Jefferson has always been described on the basis of his corporeal style. His body language. He was called reserved, and a bit shy. The opposite of, say, the vain, hyper-masculine Alexander Hamilton, whose extramarital sex life is better documented. Hamilton called Jefferson and Madison weak-willed and womanly. Jefferson had his own definition of enlightened masculinity. It was connected to the brain, and not to acts of military courage or sexual boastfulness. A body language of outward reserve, and a mentally engineered bodily control, however, does not mean that one is celibate.
James Madison is perhaps the most asexual of American notables, but he was also most likely a sexually active man. He did not marry the extroverted widow, Dolly Todd, until he was past 40. There's nor record of private ardor before then, yet Madison's letters to and from Dolly were sometimes quite naughty. And so, in all likelihood, and I have no proof, (LAUGH) Madison was not a virgin at the age of 40. (LAUGH)
He unsuccessfully courted a 15 year old when he was in his mid thirties, which was okay back then. Reminding us not to transpose our own sexual values to the eighteenth century. And he probably, I'm guessing here, bedded with prostitutes before he met Dolly.
The point is, absence of evidence does not equal celibacy. One in 20 women, maybe more, in Philadelphia or in New York City, were prostitutes. The founders were a class and of a generation that had fewer qualms about sex than we, retrospectively, imagine. They just kept it private. Jefferson's problems arose when an ill tempered, maverick journalist made public what gentlemen refrained from.
PART VII
Thomas Jefferson called James Thompson Callendar hypochondriac, which was defined then as diseased in the imagination, a nervous disorder. That was how Jefferson responded to his accuser in the papers. And my point is that Jefferson understood human sexuality in the context of the great medical minds of his day, the Swiss and French influence, perhaps stronger, uh, in America than the English. And strong on Jefferson. It was Dr. Tissot who developed an aesthetic for the (SPEAKS IN FRENCH) , the members of the intelligencia, in selecting a sexual partner. And on the basis of what he recommended, Sally Hemings could have fulfilled Jefferson's need for sex for the purpose of good health, without their relationship being anything close to the love affair satirical poets and modern advocates of equality would like to portray it as.
In Tissot's works, seminal fluid, the genital liquor, the essential oil, the most perfect and important of all the animal liquors, as it was described, (LAUGH) was thought to support one's nervous constitution. The loss of this vital fluid at a moment of sexual excitement caused a change within that required replenishment. For this reason, masturbation, onanism, as it was known, or any immoderate sexual activity weakened the nerves over time, and led to melancholy and even suicide. (LAUGH)
Jefferson's taking of Sally Hemings as a concubine would have offered him a nearby sexual outlet, fulfilling Tissot's call, urgent call, really, for accomplished, intellectual men to forego the wasteful activity of masturbation. The Swiss physician even asserted, and this allowed Jefferson to further justify the correctness of his course, Tissot asserted that spermatic fluid was as healthy for the female who received it as it was unhealthy for the man who wasted it through masturbation. (LAUGH)
It's amazing how these things work out. (LAUGH)
And Sally Hemings was known as a pretty woman. The medical thinkers Jefferson read assured their readers, their male readers, that sex with a pretty woman was better for your health than sex with an ugly woman. (LAUGH)
His servant's exclusive attention to him would also have protected Jefferson against venereal disease, which was quite prevalent at the time. Jefferson's doctor from 1819 to 1825, Thomas Watkins, who I mentioned earlier, thought that Jefferson might have contracted gonorrhea at some point, but refrained from asking him until he was leaving Monticello for the last time, when Jefferson was 82 and suffering from an enlarged prostate and pain in urination. It is doubtful that Jefferson ever had a sexually transmitted disease, but the fact that a doctor he trusted thought it very possible meant that it was quite common among well to do men in the south.
In the context in which he lived, based on the health science he studied, a monogamous relationship with his three-quarter White, or quadroon servant did not have to represent a loving commitment, but rather a servant's implicit agreement to safeguard her master's sexual health. I'm not saying with absolutely certainty he did not have fond feelings for her. We simply cannot know what happened, because no one on the inside spoke about it. But what I am saying is that if he lived according to the habits widely recommended by doctors for men of his social class and intellectual pursuits, then as a widower, an intellectual, meant to have regular sexual outlet in order to preserve his health, his very life, Jefferson should have found a nearby, attractive, compliant sexual partner. He could easily have rationalized the sex life we assume he enjoyed, but which looks unequal, and perhaps even immoral, to modern critics.
PART VIII
I'll speak very briefly to Jefferson's politics, uh, so as not to keep you, and because beads of sweat are pouring down. (LAUGH) Just give you a taste for how he used that medical vocabulary as a political partisan. So I'll start with the metaphor that he uses. Bigotry, he wrote, is a disease. That's Jefferson, the enlightened liberal. His fiercest remarks about the Federalists were cast in the language of nervous physiology.
To describe democratic Republicans, he used such words as energy and buoyancy. Those are his allies. To describe the opposition Federalists, he pointed to their, and I quote, "lethargic nerves." "They were nervous persons whose languid nerve fibers have more analogy with the passive than active state of things." The political opposition, then, suffered from what Jefferson conveyed metaphorically, or perhaps read literally, as nerve damage. Relaxed nerve fibers. And a pathological resistance to political democracy. Impaired nerves and bodily deficiencies made them afraid of social progress to Jefferson.
So let me conclude. I have tried to get you to look at Jefferson in a new way, sensitive to the environment that he knew. Americans have always admired his ability to pull off a dramatic, euphonic intermingling of words that appeal to an alert sense of right and wrong. But what we have ignored until now in our studies of Jefferson is that he sees his world as an unstable mix of nervous agitations and convulsions, excess passions. On the other side of the spectrum of human behavior, he sees a corresponding threat from nervous lethargy, melancholy, by which government is dull and insensitive.
Its leaders become victimizers unable to appreciate democracy. Remember when Jefferson writes, "I like a little rebellion now and then," it's like a storm on the atmosphere? This is what he's talking about. He prefers, over political stagnation, a self-contained, nerve-driven, outward-directed, healthy, moderate, measured enthusiasm. In such a democracy, the body is feeling and doing as nature prescribed. Fighting against lethargy, fighting to achieve, aiming to prevail over nature as much as nature allows. Rebellion in the interest of extending human liberty is for Jefferson evolutionary progress.
Rational behavior. He believes that this is best attained in an agricultural setting, where the air is healthy and refreshing. The well-tempered nervous system is an eighteenth century way of looking at the inner world, and extending it to the body politic. In those worlds, Thomas Jefferson can, albeit ineffectively, rationalize his racism. And he can somehow sustain a sexual relationship that is at once medically acceptable, privately moral, and publicly embarrassing. His world is not our world, and yet even in his flawed logic, he speaks to us, he opens himself up to us. He had a sublime sense of justice, which is, in some respects, but not every respect, ours.
He worked with the tools he was given. As students of Jefferson in the founding, we are best served by understanding American history in such a context. Only then can we judge historical actors in moral terms. Thank you very much. (APPLAUSE)
©Andrew Burstein
August 2005