Historians have often regretted his reticence. His account of his life, ending as it does so many decades before his death, seems strangely aborted. It does not even describe his conduct in, let alone provide his perspective on, the struggle for independence. It leaves us to long for his insight into the emergence of the young republic.
Thomas Jefferson takes up, in this autobiography, all that Franklin does not. He recalls the imperial crisis, the writing of the Declaration, his wartime governorship of Virginia, and his diplomatic service in France. His is the memoir that should have become our canonical personal account of the era of the American founding. His is the one retrospect that has it all: a great man and a great writer, writing of momentous actions and ideas.
None of the other Founding Fathers of enduring stature wrote anything to compare. Tom Paine was, like Franklin, a great writer who did not write autobiographically about the new nation he helped to shape. Alexander Hamilton never recorded his recollections of the Revolution, and neither did George Washington, who was not a great writer in any case.
Yet Jefferson’s memoir has not come down to us as the essential Founder’s version of the making of the nation. It does not even stand among our beloved autobiographies. In fact, it has hardly had an audience at all. Its very existence has been virtually unknown, even to scholars of American history. It languished in manuscript for a decade before it was included in a four-volume edition of Jefferson’s writings and correspondence and then, a generation later, in a nine-volume edition of his works. It was not printed as a stand-alone publication until the end of the nineteenth century. Sales of that first production were so discouraging that there was not another one for sixty years. That second, paperback version sold strongly for a while, but within less than two decades the autobiography disappeared again. Except in encompassing collections of Jefferson’s works, it has been out of print for more than three decades.
By contrast, Franklin’s autobiography is currently available in nineteen freestanding texts: seven mass market paperbacks, eight hardcover editions (one in the Modern Library series), a large-type volume, a CD-ROM, a restoration of a fair copy, and a paperback with accompanying audio compact disk.
The disparities in the careers of the two memoirs are as befuddling as the similarities in their composition are uncanny. Both autobiographies were written when their authors were very old men. In a time when males who survived childhood could not expect to live much past fifty, Franklin lived into his eighty-fifth year, Jefferson into his eighty-fourth. Franklin wrote the most famous part of his autobiography when he was seventy-eight, Jefferson the entirety of his when he was seventy-seven. Franklin confined his account to the first forty-eight years of his life, Jefferson to the first forty-seven of his.
It is hard not to be puzzled. Jefferson’s autobiography was so like Franklin’s in so many ways, and it had the ingredients of an imperishable success besides. Why was it, and why has it remained, so obscure? Why have we not treasured it as our indispensable testimony of the Revolutionary era? Why has it faded from sight, while Franklin’s memoir has served us steadily as our instruction manual on the use of the republic?
Answers to such questions are not obvious. Jefferson’s narrative may be, for him, a pedestrian performance, but even if it offered nothing more than the Virginian’s version of the birth of the nation, it should have had—and should still have—our grateful attention. In fact, it offers us much more.
It is studded with incident and episode, some of obvious consequence, others—such as his devising of our dollar-and-decimal monetary system—of incidental but irresistible interest. It is strewn with sprightly, penetrating observations of character, some of surpassing generosity, others—such as his portrait of Marie Antoinette and his asides on Patrick Henry and King George III—of startling frankness.
It is punctuated with perceptions and wry aperçus that could have been written yesterday. (“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?”) And it is dotted with vignettes that still speak to us though they presume upon a world we have lost.
Take Jefferson’s account of his campaign to disestablish the Anglican Church in Virginia. To the time of the Revolution, most Americans knew nothing of what we now take for granted as freedom of religion. They lived in colonies, and then in states, which ordained by law the support of one Protestant denomination over all others (and forbade by law the practice of Catholicism). The autobiography describes the bitter battles to “abolish [this] spiritual tyranny.” It recounts a struggle that lasted a decade and left us a legacy that has lasted centuries. But it does more than merely rehearse what Jefferson called “the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.” It reveals the fragility of popular support for the principle of separation of church and state. It exposes the imperfection of popular understanding of that principle. And it asserts the principle itself with luminous clarity and expansive power, giving the lie utterly to present-day claims that we began as a Christian nation. As Jefferson tells us, “a great majority” rejected an amendment to add “Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion,” to the landmark law, giving “proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
Or take the tantalizing glimpses the autobiography affords us of the astonishing insignificance of our earliest institutions of national governance, the Continental and Confederation Congresses. Jefferson himself quit the Congress within three months of drafting the Declaration of Independence for it, because he was elected in the interim to the Virginia House of Burgesses and “thought [he] could be of more use” there. Indeed, he would never have been in the Congress in the first place had others not shared his sentiments. Peyton Randolph was the most important politician in Virginia. He was speaker of the House of Burgesses and president of the convention that selected delegates to the Continental Congress. As the leader of the leading colony of the thirteen in incipient rebellion against Great Britain, he was chosen chair of the Congress itself. But for him and his fellow Virginians, resolving provincial conflicts with the royal governor took precedence over guiding America at the climax of the imperial crisis. As the break with Britain impended, the proven leader, Randolph, returned to tend to local affairs, while an untried young man, thirty-two-year-old Jefferson, went off to serve the nation in his place. Had Randolph and the rest of the Virginia planters not put their priority on Williamsburg rather than Philadelphia, Jefferson’s mighty pen would never have been at the disposal of the Revolution at the hour of its most urgent rhetorical need.
Or take the autobiography’s account of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence itself. Jefferson tells us almost nothing of his drafting of the document that is, to this day, our iconic American scripture. “The committee for drawing the declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done.” Not another word. But he provides us a stirring story of the politicking that preceded the fateful vote of July 4 and reminds us vividly of what a near thing it was. To the second week of June, six of the thirteen colonies were so reluctant to support rebellion that “it was thought prudent to wait a while for them, and to postpone the final decision to July 1.” Even on July 1, when the Congress “resumed,” there were still just nine colonies for independence. They were a majority, but they could never have sustained a revolution, especially since three of the four holdouts were New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Without those middle colonies, the Revolution would have been riven into two revolutions, one in New England, the other in the South, and the southern one would itself have been riven by the defection of South Carolina. Great Britain would have made short work of both. Jefferson’s laconic narrative of the maneuvers by which, in a few final hours, the four dissident colonies were brought round to revolution rebukes evocatively our schoolbook triumphalism. It reminds us that, from first to last, American independence hung by a thread.
Jefferson and all the Founding Fathers lived in a world of contingency we can scarcely conceive. And the autobiography intimates it again and again, so that we begin to see. Late in 1782, for example, he was