The equanimity with which Jefferson met such misadventures exhibits his experimental, adventuring spirit. His extensive exposition of his plans for public education displays the ambiguities of his notions of the public weal, and so too, even more, does his repeated recurrence to his perplexities about race and slavery. A man probably cannot write 160-some pages about himself without revealing himself in some measure. Despite Jefferson’s design, perhaps, his autobiography is a window on his psyche.
Consider the episode on which the memoir concludes, his visit to Franklin as the Philadelphian lay “on the bed of sickness from which he never rose.” The two men talk of mutual friends in Paris and the parts they played in the revolution there. Then Jefferson congratulates Franklin on the report that the old man was writing “the history of his own life.” Franklin replies by pressing upon Jefferson some of his own writing. Jefferson pledges to read it and return it. Franklin instructs him instead to “keep it.” Later—too late, after he turns it over to Franklin’s literary executor—Jefferson comes to believe “that Dr. Franklin had meant it as a confidential deposit in my hands, and that I had done wrong in parting from it.” It is not hard to imagine that Jefferson saw in that gift a passing of the mantle from a Founding Father he admired immensely to a younger man who might also be a Father to his country.
So the puzzle persists. Why, with all that it has to offer, has Jefferson’s autobiography been sunk in veritable oblivion for almost two hundred years?
Let us address that question by beginning at the beginning. Jefferson opens his memoir with a few perfunctory pages about his ancestry and his education. There was nothing original in this introduction. It followed a pattern set by others and certainly set for American autobiography by Franklin. But its lack of originality in this regard was hardly a fatal flaw. A generation later, P. T. Barnum’s reminiscences would be far more derivative from Franklin’s, yet Barnum’s memoir would be the best-selling American autobiography of the nineteenth century.
Nonetheless, there may be a clue that is pertinent to our conundrum in the brevity of Jefferson’s discussion of his family and his schooling.
Even at the outset, Franklin was more forthcoming about his family than the Virginian ever was, and through the remainder of his recollections Franklin recurred to his kin revealingly. Jefferson was done with his family before he was done with his second paragraph on the subject. Though he must have had things to say about his father, his mother, and his seven siblings, he kept them to himself. Though he must have had thoughts about the death of his father when he was still but a boy, and about the death of his mother in the very year he drafted the Declaration, he said nothing about either loss. Though he became the ward of his father’s fabulously rich partner in western land-speculating, he wrote not a word about the transition or about his guardian.
Similarly, Franklin returned repeatedly to the topic of his education. He marked his meager formal schooling, intimated his anguish at his father’s inability to send him to Harvard, and, in a succession of telling anecdotes, traced his subsequent efforts to teach himself what Harvard would not have taught him anyway. Jefferson devoted less than one long paragraph to his formal studies. His reluctance to confide family feelings and secrets may be understandable, but his omission of any more extensive treatment of his education is unfathomable.
Jefferson had a passion for learning. It was evident in his youth, throughout his life, and even in his death. He asked that three of his accomplishments be inscribed on his gravestone, and one of the three was the founding of the University of Virginia. He was a brilliant and precocious student from the first. He started school when he was four or five, began Latin school at nine, and entered the College of William and Mary at seventeen. Sons of the southern gentry attended William and Mary as a sort of finishing school. They rarely spent more than a year there, and they aimed to improve their manners more than their minds. Mostly they met other sons of the southern gentry whom it would be to their advantage to know later in life. Though the college was established in 1693, no one ever actually completed its four-year course of study and graduated with an earned degree in the first three-quarters of a century of its existence. Jefferson did not stay for four years either, but he did stay for two, and he was immensely serious about his studies. His professors mattered to him. He kept company with them more than with his dissipated fellow students while he was in residence in Williamsburg. And he only quit the college to commence an even more extended study with George Wythe, the man he called his “beloved Mentor.” His years with Wythe must have been the most intellectually intense tutorial in American history.
Yet Jefferson allowed just three or four sentences to that tutorial, before passing on to politics. The inescapable inference is that he did not have the autobiographical impulse. He had to be “pressed” to write his memoir at all, though he never had to be pressed to write otherwise. Over the course of his career, he wrote more than 19,000 letters that survive (and unnumbered others that don’t). Writing was, as much as anything, what he did in his life. Though he wrote incessantly, he had no lust to look back or to write about himself. And he certainly felt no urgency about taking up the task, no sense that time’s winged chariot was hurrying near. He was deep into an advanced old age—long past the point when most men of his day died—when he got around to it.
Submitting at last to the importunities of others, he gave them the memoir they pressed him to produce. But we must not misunderstand. He did not write so singlemindedly about politics in petulant resistance to their desire for a more intimate or personal confession. He wrote about public life because he was a public man. He believed the republican writers he studied with George Wythe. He took to heart their insistence that citizenship was the highest calling a man could follow.
He said, again and again, that he was weary of civic service and longed to retreat to the pleasures of privacy at Monticello. But he had no great gift for intimacy or domesticity. He crowded his commonplace book with passages of acrid misogyny. He failed at his first proposal of marriage and did not offer again for eight years. He then married a wealthy widow, whom he called a spinster on the marriage license bond before he caught his slip and corrected it. His role in the Revolution kept him from home frequently during the decade she was his wife, and he never remarried after her death. He was a peremptory and platitudinous father to two daughters who survived infancy. And he denied utterly the five slave children he fathered with his longtime slave mistress Sally Hemings, as he denied Sally Hemings herself utterly.
Jefferson was simply not cut out for autobiography, or for the introspection and self-absorption it entails. Just seventy pages into this memoir, he confessed that he was “tired of talking about myself.”
His was a temper immersed in the immediate. His genius was most manifest in the cut and thrust of conflict. His creativity was most evident when he was confronted with pressing problems. Even his inventiveness appeared in the little ingenuities that abound at Monticello. Though he was abreast of eighteenth-century science, he made no fundamental contributions to it, like Franklin’s assimilation of electricity to the Newtonian paradigm. Though he had a mechanical gift, he left no lasting legacies to technology, like Franklin’s lightning rod or bifocals. Though he was incorrigibly inquisitive, he did not make the discoveries that confer a minor immortality on lesser men, like Franklin’s charting of the Gulf Stream. Where Franklin was sedentary, Jefferson