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Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson
This book emphasizes the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson’s thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realize in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the narrator of what he once called “American Story”: as the historian, the sociologist, and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson around the concept of American nationhood recovers an otherwise easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of a number of conundrums in his thought and practice.
Brian Steele is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Southern History.
CAmBridge STUdieS on THe AmeriCAn SoUTH
Series editors
mark m. Smith, University of South Carolina, Columbia
david moltke-Hansen, Center for the Study of the American South, University of north Carolina at Chapel Hill
interdisciplinary in its scope and intent, this series builds on and extends Cambridge University Press’s long-standing commitment to studies on the American South. The series not only will offer the best new work on the South’s distinctive institutional, social, economic, and cultural history but will also feature works in a national, comparative, and transnational perspective.
Titles in the Series
robert e. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood
Christopher michael Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion
Peter mcCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry
Jonathan daniel Wells, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South
Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood
Bri AN S T eele
University of Alabama, Birmingham
cambridge university press
Cambridge, new York, melbourne, madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, delhi, mexico City
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First published 2012
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Steele, Brian douglas, 1970–Thomas Jefferson and American nationhood / Brian Steele, University of Alabama, Birmingham. pages cm. – (Cambridge studies on the American South) includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-02070-2
1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826 – Political and social views. 2. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826 – Philosophy. 3. United States – Politics and government – Philosophy. i Title.
e332.2.s77 2012
973.4′6092–dc23 2012013662
ISBN 978-1-107-02070-2 Hardback
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Acknowledgments
“All this was given to you. . .”
This book has its earliest roots in a paper written for an inspired senior seminar with Lawrence Cress at the University of Tulsa and a dissertation written at the University of north Carolina under the direction of don Higginbotham. neither man lived to see the book; both shaped it in fundamental ways, and, i might add, altered the course of my life.
Among the other teachers who inspired me, i must, for the pleasure of mentioning them, single out Paul dykes and Judith Kimrey at Booker T. Washington High School; Thomas Buckley at the University of Tulsa; and Harry Watson, Peter Coclanis, and Lloyd Kramer at Carolina. i understand even more today how much i owe to each of them. Harry, in particular, deserves a medal – and perhaps a therapist’s license – for his open door and unfailing kindness. my colleagues in the department of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been universally supportive and have provided a stimulating environment in which to think, teach, and write. i have benefited from knowing each of them. Andrew Keitt and ray mohl, extraordinary mentors in word and deed, each in his own way, has made this book possible and my life better. neither has ever once disputed my childlike presumption that a closed door did not apply to me. danny Siegel, michele Forman, John moore, and mary Whall have also become valued friends – and mentors – here.
dick Latner gave me my first job at Tulane University. i will always be grateful to him and the members of that department as well as the students i taught there and who taught me, in turn. Jim Tent, chair of the department my first few years at UAB, was generosity itself to me. i do not underestimate the value of his particular care or what it has meant to my family and to my ability to complete this project. Carolyn Conley, our current chair, has been supportive as the tenure clock ticked; i’ve learned much from her storehouse of knowledge. Tennant mcWilliams, dean when i first arrived, understood the meaning of scholarship and its indispensability to good teaching; his enthusiasm infected me from the beginning. i am grateful for the UAB Advance grant that
bought me a course release one semester and the laptop on which the majority of the manuscript was composed.
Andrew o’Shaughnessy at the international Center for Jefferson Studies gave me two months of uninterrupted time to write in the inspirational environs of monticello. more, he offered consistently cheerful and enthusiastic support for my project. endrina Tay, also at iCJS, offered me a “word fitly spoken” at just the right time. What a gift. Christa dierksheide was extraordinarily generous with her time and knowledge and continues to be a trusted friend and adviser on all things Jefferson.
Conversations and various exchanges with matthew Crow, Johann neem, rob mcdonald, and Frank Cogliano – perhaps the finest Jefferson scholars of this generation – have been enormously challenging and exciting even as they have convinced me that i don’t understand the half of it. matt and Johann fundamentally shaped the way i read Jefferson; Johann read drafts of three of the chapters and offered invaluable suggestions for sharpening the argument. rob and Frank both gave me opportunities to write through ideas that eventually made their way into the book, which is the stronger for their generosity and editorial guidance. rob has been a valued friend for many years.
Kris ray read portions of the manuscript and always challenged me to think bigger, as he does. ruth Homrighaus stepped in at a crucial moment with her customary combination of ruthless editing and gentle guidance and affirmation. i am very grateful to John Boles for his support and encouragement at an early stage in the development of the argument.
Peter onuf has surpassed his already extraordinary reputation for generosity. As he has with almost every scholar writing on Jefferson today, he has become a much appreciated surrogate mentor to me, and my debt to his scholarship will be clear in the pages that follow. my experience of his kindness and humor leaves fewer traces on the printed page; i acknowledge it here and thank him.
i owe an enormous debt, both intellectual and personal, to Paul rahe, who read the entire manuscript in draft and offered invaluable guidance. His careful critique forced me to greater precision in many places and saved me from embarrassing errors in others. His support, in spite of certain fundamental disagreements with the argument, is a credit to his generosity.
i join a very long list of students and scholars grateful to William Leuchtenburg for an example, perhaps unattainable, of scholarship and integrity. Bill read the entire dissertation and portions of the draft manuscript, which might seem well outside his field of expertise were such limits applicable in his case. i appreciate him most for his fundamental decency, which i have experienced, in ways large and small, for many years now.
Chris and mary meyers, James and Joy nelson, margaret myers, Susan myers, and mike ross all transformed new orleans into a city teeming with happy memories, much as david and Amelia o’dell and Ben Huffman did for Chapel Hill.
With more space and ability, i would be justified in writing a volume on each of the following friends. As a substitute, i will simply affirm my love and admiration for Jonathan Weiler, Steve Keadey, Spencer downing, Adam Tuchinsky, Karl and elizabeth davis, Bill estes, and mike Wilhoit: “i cannot tell how my ankles bend . . . nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,/ nor the cause of the friendship i emit . . . nor the cause of the friendship i take again.”
david Voelker read every word of the manuscript, some of them many times, and often at a moment’s notice. if emerson is right to say that a friend is “a person with whom i may be sincere” and who handles shortcomings with “tenderness,” then david is surely the best of friends. He has long enlarged “the meaning of all my thoughts.” one might search a lifetime for a more virtuous soul.
The book is much better for its time at Cambridge University Press. i had heard that Lewis Bateman sets the standard for professionalism and efficiency in academic editing. i heard correctly. Anne Lovering rounds went beyond the call of duty in ways i very much appreciate. Both overlooked the numerous mistakes of a freshman author. The Press’s anonymous readers clearly knew what they were about. i took every one of their invaluable suggestions as seriously as they engaged my manuscript; their work strengthened the thing immeasurably.
The portions of this work that have appeared in other forums are all the better for the careful attention of editors and anonymous readers. Chapter 2 is a slightly revised version of “Thomas Jefferson’s gender Frontier,” Journal of American History, 95 (June 2008), 17–42. Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded version of “‘The Yeomanry of the United States are not the canaille of Paris’: Thomas Jefferson, American exceptionalism, and the Spirit of democracy,” in robert m. S. mcdonald, ed., Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Knowledge (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 19–46. Portions of Chapter 6 first appeared in slightly different form as “Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union,” Journal of Southern History, LXXiV, no. 4 (november 2008), 823–854. And the epilogue is a shortened and revised version of “Jefferson’s Legacy: The nation as interpretative Community,” in Francis d. Cogliano, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Thomas Jefferson (malden, mA: Blackwell, 2012), 526–550. i am grateful to the publishers and editors of each, both for the original publications and for permission to reprint here.
ruffin and melissa Snow, in-laws from heaven, have made my way pleasant and have given me an extended family of incredible warmth and fun: Joel and Bradley, daniel and Jenny, Lowell and Peggy have all enriched my life in ways too numerous to recount.
Brandon and Betsy, my life is irrevocably bound up with yours. i’m grateful to have such good and faithful siblings. And for new ones in Jen and Spencer. Jennifer Snow and our four wonderful children, gretchen, Cora, Christopher, and graham, our pearls of great price, have endured the writing of this book
and have given me a life apart from it. The very “earth is metamorphosed” in their hands.
i dedicate the book to don Higginbotham, whose generosity, guiding hand, and fundamental goodness are deeply missed; to Sam ramer, whose friendship buoyed me in dark times and light; and to my mother and father, who raised me to understand that there is something better than mammon. All of the above suggests that they were right. And to Jennifer, who reminds me every day.
“may i prove to be deserving of that high company.”
Key to Brief Citations
AHR American Historical Review
AJL Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2nd ed., (Chapel Hill, 1987)
FE Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Federal Edition, 12 vols. (new York, 1904–1905)
JAH Journal of American History
JER Journal of the Early Republic
JSH Journal of Southern History
LC Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress
L&B Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, d.C., 1903–1904)
Notes Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1954)
PAH
Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 25 vols. (new York, 1961–1977)
PJM William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962–)
PTJ
Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 34 vols. to date (Princeton, 1950–).
PTJ, Retirement Series J. Jefferson Looney, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, 8 vols. to date (Princeton, 2004–)
ROL James morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (new York, 1995)
TJW
WJA
WMQ
merrill d. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (new York, 1984).
Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston, 1850–1856).
William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series
Introduction
Jefferson’s America
My affections were first for my own country, and then generally for all mankind. Thomas Jefferson 18111
Jefferson’s most enduring love affair was with America. Onto it he projected some of his deepest longings, and he drew sustenance from its reciprocal affection. He neglected his family, his farm, and his books for it and at times seemed to abandon cherished principles and to forsake the world itself for its service. He must have been particularly gratified to hear John Adams admit that “the nation was with you,” because his “yearning for” its “sympathy,” as Henry Adams later suggested, “was almost feminine” and a “loss of popularity was his bitterest trial.”2 Jefferson long insisted that his principles were “unquestionably the principles of the great body of our fellow citizens,” and, in point of fact, Henry Adams noted, “every one admitted that Jefferson’s opinions, in one form or another, were shared by a majority of the American people.” Jefferson’s “visionary qualities seemed also to be a national trait,” much to the dismay of the Federalists.3 Jefferson had a palpable sense that his own life would always be bound up with America’s, for good or ill – that his own fame and legacy depended to a large extent on America’s future greatness. His relationship with America, then, was symbiotic, and his own assertions about America occasionally verged on the autobiographical. His claim to have expressed the sentiments
1 Thomas Jefferson (hereinafter “TJ”) to Thomas Law, January 15, 1811, PTJ, Retirement Series, 3:298–299.
2 John Adams to TJ, May 1, 1812, in AJL, 301; Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, (2nd ed., Chapel Hill, 1987); Henry Adams, History of the United States of America in the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1986), 100, 1239.
3 To Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, in TJW, 1058; Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York, 1984); Adams, History, 117.
of all America in the Declaration of Independence looks very much like a way of saying that he spoke for America or, even more boldly, that America spoke through him. If the “sense of America” really did “approve” of Jefferson’s views, as he once told Washington, he had merely to “acquiesce,” in turn, for the identification to be complete.4 In any case, he once told French political economist, Jean Baptiste Say, “I think for America.”5 Historians are sometimes frustrated by the tendency of Americans to take Jefferson as a kind of proxy for America, but Jefferson himself was probably the first to do so.6 This book explores the story that Jefferson told about America and suggests that this narrative shaped his politics, his statecraft, and, ultimately, his – and our – identification of his own person with the nation. In short, it envisions Jefferson as the author of an American nationalism.
Nearly everything Jefferson did in public life (and much obliquely in private) he justified in the name of the American nation. Yet few historians have explored the centrality of nation as an organizing principle of Jefferson’s thought, politics, and statesmanship.7 Jefferson’s nationalism manifested itself in a rhetorical discourse, a political and cultural project, and an evaluative assessment of American identity and experience as the universal ideal toward which all nations would one day aspire.8
There is no essential or exclusively authentic Jefferson, and I steer clear of any attempt to unveil one here. What I do suggest is that scrutinizing him through the lens of nationalism envisions some coherence to a career that others have characterized as a bundle of contradictions. Scholars have gleaned important insights by looking carefully at the sources of Jefferson’s ideas. But Jefferson was not the defender of a preexisting Lockean or a classical republican tradition. These are scholarly paradigms – created to serve contemporary historiographical needs – that Jefferson might not have recognized as worth distinguishing in the way scholars have so carefully done.9 Jefferson’s thought was no doubt molded by his education and studies but was also crucially forged in the fires of experience and necessity. What if, instead of beginning with Jefferson’s commitment to a tradition of thought, we begin with Jefferson’s assumptions about national identity and try to understand the implications of those assumptions for his politics and statecraft? In other
4 See TJ to Washington, September 9, 1792, in TJW, 996.
5 TJ to Say, February 1, 1804, in TJW, 1144.
6 See the reflections in Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, “American Synecdoche: Thomas Jefferson as Image, Icon, Character, Self,” in AHR, 103 (February 1998), 125–136.
7 The major exception is Peter S. Onuf in Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, 2000) and The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, 2007).
8 See Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1997), 6.
9 See Daniel Rogers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” in JAH, 79 (June 1998), 11–38; Alan Gibson, Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (Lawrence, 2007), 130–164.
words, what if we begin with Jefferson’s conception of the “good people” whom he believed constituted the American nation in 1776, and with the stories he told about them?10
Nationhood was never a dispensable element in Jefferson’s thought, never merely a means to an end. My emphasis on the significance of nationhood does not exclude the centrality of individual natural rights or federalism in his thought. To the contrary, Jefferson always imagined that when the American nation was truest to its character and purpose, individual rights and the deepest interests of its various communities would be fulfilled. Jefferson rarely had to prioritize rights or federalism over nationhood precisely because his highest universal principles were manifested, in historical time, in a particular nation, the only one on earth explicitly committed to them.
Jefferson’s commitments to state, nation, and world overlapped. To the degree that scholars (or partisans) have emphasized one of these to the exclusion of others – Jefferson’s Virginia provincialism, for example, over his enlightenment cosmopolitanism; his commitment to states’ rights over his expansion of national power; his lifelong effort to enlarge the capabilities of individuals over his sense that such individuals were fully liberated only as members of something larger than the self – they have missed something crucial about the complexity of his thought.
Jefferson came of age – and grew old – among the Virginia gentry, and he remained throughout his long public career in national government a member of the planter class.11 This fact, to be sure, informed his deepest values, but it did not limit (or exhaust) them. Likewise, his membership in the trans-Atlantic “republic of letters” was a fundamental aspect of his self-understanding, but he typically described in capacious or universal language characteristics he believed to be uniquely American. Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and provincialism are not mutually exclusive, but are of necessity bound up with one another. Cosmopolitanism can be assimilated by provincial culture, nationalism is generally experienced locally, and cosmopolitan values can shape provincial perspectives. The tired and generally unexamined assertion that Jefferson meant Virginia when he said “my country,” for example, is not only empirically false – Jefferson’s “country” could mean Virginia, America, or Albemarle County, depending on the context – but is also analytically useless, telling us little about the way Jefferson’s deepest values were an inseparable amalgamation of the cosmopolitan, nationalist, and provincial.
In this book, I make two broad suggestions that may appear to be in tension. First, I describe Jefferson as an American nationalist. American historians
10 See “Original Rough Draught,” in PTJ, 1:427.
11 For two treatments that emphasize this aspect of Jefferson’s public life, see, Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1995) and Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, “I Tremble for My Country”: Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Gentry (Gainesville, FL, 2006).
have been reluctant to do this because they tend to juxtapose Hamilton’s fiscalmilitary state with Jefferson’s federalism. Now, to the extent that Jefferson understood the indispensability of a central state (and served in its offices for decades), he was a nationalist in this traditional sense, yes, and one of the aims of this book is, in fact, to recover this aspect of Jefferson’s politics.12 But when we drop the equation of nationalism with attachment to a particular form of the state, and focus instead on the claims Jefferson made about the nation, we can begin to see the multifarious nature of his nationalism.13 If nations are the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson has suggested, then it might be fruitful to think of nationalism as the process of imagining.14 And, indeed, Jefferson’s imagining is a central subject of this book. If all nationalisms assume a collective homogeneity that renders internal differences superficial and external ones endemic and profound, Jefferson’s was no exception.15 He imagined a national unity deeply rooted in affection and in what he considered a peculiarly American set of characteristics: unified history, general prosperity, republican “spirit,” and domestic happiness. Jefferson was, if not the first, then
12 Also see the important insights in Colin Bonwick, “Jefferson as Nationalist,” in Gary L. McDowell, Sharon L. Noble, eds., Reason and Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of Liberty (Lanham, MD, 1997), 149–168.
13 Nationalism is less an “identification with the state than loyalty to the nation” (Walker Connor, “A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group is a . . .,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1 [October 1978], 383; emphasis added). Among a multitude of studies, I have found particularly helpful two books by Craig Calhoun and two review essays by Lloyd Kramer. See Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1997) and Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London and New York, 2007); Kramer, “Historical Narratives and the Meaning of Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), 525–545, and “Nations as Texts: Literary Theory and the History of Nationalism,” in The Maryland Historian, 24 (1993), 71–82. I also gratefully acknowledge my debt to David Potter’s classic essay, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism, and Vice Versa,” in AHR, 67 (July 1962), 924–950, and to Peter Onuf, “Federalism, Republicanism, and the Origins of American Sectionalism,” in Peter Onuf, Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Stephen Nissenbaum, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore and London, 1996), 11–37; 107–117. Also see the lucid introduction to the literature in Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (New York, 2011), esp. 3–15.
14 Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2006). Anderson is quick to point out that “imagined” does not mean “imaginary,” a nice corrective to an assumption all too common in the literature on the “constructed” nature of nations (6). On the denaturalization of the nation, see Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago, 1965), 150, 168, and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge and New York, 1990), especially 1–15. For a brilliant defense of the viability and continued relevance of national history rooted in a vision of nations, not as assumptions to be taken for granted (naturalized), but as the results of historical processes, see Johann Neem, “American History in a Global Age,” History and Theory, 50 (February 2011), 41–70, esp. 62–68. I also maintain a particular appreciation of David Hollinger, “The Historian’s Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002), 381–395; and, from a different but not ultimately incompatible perspective, Louis A. Perez, Jr., “We Are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International,” in JAH, 89 (September 2002), 558–566.
15 See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 7.
certainly the most prolific and articulate early exponent of a kind of American exceptionalism.
If my first contention dislodges nation (and nationalism) from an exclusive association with the state, my second turns our attention back to the state, though this time, I hope, with new eyes. Jefferson’s conception of the state was both deeply intertwined with his nationalism and more complex and profound than a simple preference for limited government. Many of the most common spurious quotations attributed to Jefferson emphasize his hostility to state power, and many of Jefferson’s actual phrases have been decontextualized and used for purposes he would not recognize as his own.16 Thoreau, not Jefferson, asserted “that government is best which governs least,” and Gerald Ford, not Jefferson, first warned Americans (in 1974) that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”17 Misattribution of this sort is understandable because Jefferson did value limits on government power, and he eyed the state with an ambivalence rooted in traditional republican concerns about corruption: “Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence,” he wrote.18 The point here is emphatically not to trade proof texts (we could certainly find genuine Jefferson quotes that approximate the spurious ones and others that undermine them, but that would do little to clarify matters) or to encourage a snide contempt for the public (hardly a Jeffersonian occupation, as we will see). But it is incumbent on the historian to seek to understand words in the context in which they were uttered. Ford’s concern, for example, could not have been Jefferson’s, precisely, rooted as it was in a critique of a twentieth-century welfare state that Jefferson could never have imagined. Jefferson can be neither a social democrat, a New Deal liberal, or a libertarian (or a Maoist, for that matter),19 because he lived in a world that was not animated by the specific issues and institutions that gave rise to those later political ideologies. Indeed, one of my intentions is to recover the Jefferson of history from exclusive claims made by any twentieth-century political ideology. Jefferson’s fear of consolidation and abuse of power was rooted in his democratic nationalism, and understanding this renders Jefferson’s approach to government less sphinx-like and more coherent, if not always perfectly consistent or free from the gyrations of pragmatic flexibility that bewilder the ideologically rigid. What Jefferson feared about consolidation was its threat to disconnect the state from the only thing
16 See the running list of lines misattributed to Jefferson compiled by the research staff at Monticello: http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/spurious-quotations, accessed August 13, 2011.
17 Ford, Address to Joint Session of Congress, August 12, 1974. Text at John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, Santa Barbara, CA: http://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=4694, accessed June 11, 2010.
18 Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, October 1798, in TJW, 454.
19 See Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago, 1996), 150; Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 127.
that could grant it legitimacy, the people. The goal of Jefferson’s federalism, which diffused power, then, was, perhaps paradoxically, an intimacy between state and nation rather than an inflexible bulwark against state action.
Because, if “the nation” was, as Jefferson once told George Washington, “the source of authority with us,” Jefferson also understood that the will of the nation enabled and required power.20 The state could not rest content with proper ideology; it had an obligation to enact the nation’s ends. As he once put it, “governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of the people and execute it.”21 Jefferson understood that threats to liberty could come from the state, certainly, and from private concentrations of power as well as distant empires. But the American federal system with its overlapping spheres of authority and separation of powers would limit state violence against citizens while also mobilizing government power for the fulfillment of the nation’s purposes. This is why Jefferson could value the Bill of Rights precisely for setting “further guards to liberty without touching the energy of the government.”22
Jefferson understood that the state could become powerful in ways that undermined liberty: He had seen this happen at home and abroad, even though he could never have anticipated all the resources the modern state has at its disposal to monitor and organize the most intimate details of the lives of citizens. But Jefferson’s ambivalence became hostility only when the state failed to embody the will of the nation. By the mid-1790s, Jefferson believed that the Federalists were willing to take the power of the state as an end in itself rather than as a facilitator of the nation’s purposes. So his political opposition was never about rendering government impotent. His end was always what he believed to be the only proper goal of the republican statesman: alignment of the state with the will of the nation. This commitment to nation offers a fundamental continuity between the politics he pursued in the 1790s and his statecraft as president. Despite the many apparent twists and turns in his career, the Ariadne’s thread that follows them all is Jefferson’s belief that government submission to what he called the “will of the nation” was sine qua non in a republic.23 This book explores the ways in which that commitment played out over the various political battles of the era.
Jefferson envisioned a fairly intimate relationship between the state and the people, rooted in a democratic sensibility alien to the possessive individualism embraced by classic descriptions of modern American liberalism.24 Jefferson
20 TJ to George Washington, February 4, 1792, in PTJ, 23:100–101.
21 TJ to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, in TJW, 1396, emphasis added. For important and compelling reflections on the relationship between executive energy and public approbation in Jefferson’s thought, see Jeremy D. Bailey, Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (Cambridge, 2007).
22 TJ to John Paul Jones, March 23, 1789, in PTJ, 14:689.
23 “Notes on the Legitimacy of Government,” December 30 1792, in PTJ, 24: 802.
24 For recent efforts to render American liberalism historically less individualistic and more democratic, see Adam-Max Tuchinsky, “‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever’: The New-York
never defended a radical individualism or imagined that democracy was possible in the absence of certain social conditions that made it viable. Without economic independence, education and access to information, and maximum popular participation in government, democracy would add up to nothing other than what all political thought to his day said it would: mob rule. In other words, democratic procedure was important to him, but it could never be efficacious in the absence of a substantive democratic culture – a culture that he believed existed uniquely in America.
I make no definitive claims here about American nationality, as distinct from Jefferson’s assertions about it. In this sense, then, this study is both less and more than we typically get in studies of Jefferson. This is not a biography of Jefferson, nor is it an exhaustive history of his political thought, his statecraft, or his political career and achievements, much less an exploration of his personal life, though all of these are crucial to its theme. Neither do I tell the story of the nation itself (or even assume its unqualified existence) but, rather, identify and analyze the story Jefferson told about it. In doing so, I claim Jefferson as a progenitor of American nationalism, and I make suggestions about how his conception of the nation shaped his politics and statecraft. My goal is neither to find a definition for the nation nor to insist that Jefferson conforms to some predetermined theory of the nation, though many of those theories inform this work (and in crucial ways make it possible). Rather, I explore the process by which Jefferson himself imagined the nation and developed the claims he made on its behalf.
Because Jefferson believed that the nation was constituted by popular embrace of its existence and purpose, and that no state could be legitimate without embodying the people’s will and aspirations, he never imagined that a nation could be understood entirely through a study of its intellectual elite. The people themselves (as several recent studies have demonstrated) created a national identity through their practices of nationhood and citizenship (including, but not limited to, participation in parades and national celebrations, absorption of civic texts, erection of memorials, voting, petitioning, writing, and imagining). Jefferson would be the first to – in fact was the first to – describe American nationhood as an embodiment of popular aspirations.25
But Jefferson’s “American story” is worth thinking through if only because, like all discourse, it is an “event” in its own right, a “driving force . . . of
Tribune, the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse,” in JAH, 92 (September 2005), 470–497; James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford, 1998), esp. 21–37; and Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America,” Reviews in American History 29.3 (2001), 460–476.
25 Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, 1997); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006).
history, and not merely [a] representation.” 26 Arguments and assertions, David Hollinger reminds us, “are social acts” and, therefore, legitimate “objects of historical study.”27 If, like all national discourses, Jefferson’s was congratulatory and often self-serving, ignoring, or papering over, the multiple contradictory realities and experiences that failed to align with it (or which might form the basis for an alternate narrative), such was, to some degree, the basis of its popular appeal.28 The significance of Jefferson’s narrative rests, in part, on its historical capacity to persuade large numbers of Americans (including historians), whose assent thereby constituted certain social realities in the early Republic and ultimately shaped the meaning of the nation for many.29
Jefferson also understood, as Thomas Bender put it, that “the nation cannot be its own context” but owes its existence to “a framework larger than itself.”30 From the beginning, Jefferson’s assertions of American sovereignty assumed a “candid world” and a global system of states and national experiences and histories against which to define America’s own. So the international or interstate system defined and legitimized the nation even as it threatened its existence. Jefferson’s national project was no mere exercise in political theory, and this exploration of his practices of nationalism remains separate from any discussion of whether Jefferson was a successful statesman. The sometimes crooked timbers of Jefferson’s thought cannot be straightened without distorting the historical record. Though I make a case for the essential coherence of Jefferson’s nationalism, I do not suggest that it remained unchanged or consistent throughout his life. We will witness plenty of contradictions and paradoxes – as we might very well expect of any pragmatic nationalism. The historian’s task, it seems to me, is to describe, explain, and interrogate claims, not to force clarity on what is inherently irreconcilable. I hope to describe Jefferson’s thought without necessarily embracing his as an absolutely trustworthy depiction of contemporary events (particularly when it comes to his assessment of Federalist motives and ideals). So, the book is not a defense or exoneration of Jefferson any more than it is an attack on him. Perhaps it should go without saying that what follows is not by any means the “whole truth” about Jefferson – everything we need to know. But if it is one truth
26 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1993), xiii.
27 David Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington, 1985), x.
28 For explorations of this theme, see Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York, 1990), esp. 1–7, and the succinct statement in Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 208.
29 Fabián Alejandro Campagne, Homo Catholicus. Homo Superstitiosus. El discurso antisupersticioso en la España de los siglos XV a XVIII (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2002), 21–25. I am grateful to Andrew Keitt for translating these pages and sharing them with me.
30 Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006), 7.
about him – and I believe it is – we will need to accommodate the other stories we tell about Jefferson to it.
In the chapters that follow, Jefferson will appear as the historian, the sociologist, the ethnographer, and the political theorist of America, as well as the most successful practitioner of its politics and its most enthusiastic champion. Chapter 1 describes Jefferson’s narrative of American nationhood as it first emerged in his revolutionary writing in the 1770s. Jefferson’s “American story” assumed and asserted the existence of a people, described the character of that people, and projected this people into nation-time past and future, as well as the obvious present.31 I argue that the Declaration of Independence made cultural and historical claims about American character and identity even as it asserted American sovereignty in a world of states, or, rather that these two projects were intimately connected; the political claims could be legitimate, by the Declaration’s logic, only if the cultural and historical ones were true. The legitimacy of the statehood project, Jefferson implied, rested on the existence of a people.
The second through fourth chapters explore some of the more complex and particularistic claims Jefferson made about the character of this American people. Chapter 2 explores Jefferson’s description of American domestic life as a universal standard achieved fully only in the United States. Chapter 3 follows out this analysis by unpacking Jefferson’s further elaboration of the American “spirit” and character that he believed made democratic politics possible in the United States and rendered European political theory inapplicable to its experience.32 Chapter 4 examines the intimate relationship Jefferson envisioned between the public and the state, between citizens and republican leadership, a relationship that rendered Americans remarkably free but that also, somewhat paradoxically, sharply circumscribed the boundaries of the public. In this chapter, I also suggest that the democratic Jefferson we celebrate today is inseparable from the Jefferson who temporized on slavery, excluded African Americans from the national public, and included Indians on only the most rigidly assimilationist terms. Jefferson’s nation, like all nations, gained coherence from its “others,” abroad and at home, so that the same nationalism that welcomed participation among citizens also found it imperative to close off paths to citizenship for those not easily assimilated.
Chapter 5 explores the ramifications of all of these claims and assumptions about America for Jefferson’s politics, or, rather, it suggests that Jefferson’s politics in the 1790s might best be understood in light of his nationalism. Federalists, Jefferson came to believe, did not share his understanding of the ways in which the American experience had created a public uniquely suited
31 See Stefan Berger, “The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe,” in Berger, ed., Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective (New York, 2007), 36.
32 On national character as causally sufficient explanation for behavior, see Joep Leerssen, “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey,” Poetics Today, 21 (Summer 2000), 267–292, esp. 272.
for democratic politics or the ways in which this experience could be indefinitely reinforced by a close connection between the public and the state. Eventually, he came to read the Federalist agenda as a counterrevolutionary and ultimately un-American effort to administer the national state according to its own rationale, disconnected except in the most superficial of ways to the will of the nation. His political opposition, I argue, was, at heart, a project designed to realign the state with the only thing that rendered it legitimate: the nation. Reading Jefferson’s political project through the lens of nationhood, I suggest here, might contribute to new insights into his presidency, rendering his expansion of executive authority and aggressive uses of national power less a contradiction than a fulfillment of his opposition in the 1790s. Chapter 6 reads the Kentucky Resolutions as an episode in this larger project of reconnecting state and nation, reflects on the problem of coercion in his theory of union, and considers the inextricability of Jefferson’s federalism from his nationalism.
While the body of the book strives to describe Jefferson’s program as historically specific, unassimilable precisely to any of our own political ideologies, the Epilogue faces the reality that Jefferson always slips the bounds of historicism because he remains an icon of our public culture. What I hope to suggest here is that the continuing national project of renewing civic life and national purpose operates largely in the broad terms Jefferson laid out for the continuation of the national community. Insofar as the nation continues to link itself with that tradition, it remains Jefferson’s America, even as its scale, scope, and structure have been transformed out of all recognition from the America Jefferson himself knew. Jefferson may have felt little sense of debt or obligation to the past, because he believed his generation had made the world anew. But he remained concerned that future generations maintain a sense of connection with that revolutionary and constitutive moment. Whenever we reverence the “founders,” Jefferson included, as “our” ancestors, we are in some fundamental sense affirming Jefferson’s original vision of a national community moving through time. In a sense, then, the Epilogue concedes the defeat of history by tradition and collective memory. And this takes us back to the founders’ conception of history as a moral exercise rather than an effort to simply reconstruct the past as it really was.
Reading Jefferson as an American nationalist, then, may offer a way of envisioning him anew, of questioning our shibboleths not only about him but also about ourselves. The world may not need another book about Thomas Jefferson, but I hope that this one at least suggests that wrestling with Jefferson remains a fruitful exercise for both the scholar and the citizen.
American Story
Few people have extended their enquiries after the foundation of any of their rights, beyond a charter from the crown. There are others who think when they have got back to old Magna Charta, that they are at the beginning of all things. They imagine themselves on the borders of Chaos (and so indeed in some respects they are) and see creation rising out of the unformed mass, or from nothing. . . . But liberty was better understood, and more fully enjoyed by our ancestors, before the coming in of the first Norman Tyrants.
James Otis, 17641
I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with his providence, and our riper years with his wisdom and power.
Thomas Jefferson, 18052 Jefferson began what would prove his most enduring piece of writing with distinctions between peoples. It was a theme that would never be far from his thought and writing. “One people” (or as he put it in his initial draft, “a people”) was deciding to sever its previous connection with another.3 Americans would climb “the road to glory & happiness . . . in a separate state.”4 “By our
1 “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” (1764), in Merrill Jensen, Tracts of the American Revolution (Indianapolis, 1966), 20–21.
2 Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, in TJW 523.
3 See Peter S. Onuf, “A Declaration of Independence for Diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic History 22 (1998), 71–83, to the insights of which this chapter is deeply indebted. Also see J.G.A. Pocock, “America’s Foundations, Foundationalisms, and Fundamentalisms,” Orbis (Winter 2004), 37–44, at 39; and Pocock, “States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective,” in Terence Ball, ed., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence, KS, 1988), 55–77.
4 Jefferson’s “original rough draught” of the Declaration, in PTJ 1:427. In a later fragment, Jefferson changed the phrase to “apart from them.” See “Fragment of the Composition Draft of the Declaration of Independence,” in ibid., 421. Congress excised both.
separation from Great-Britain,” he explained later, “British subjects became aliens” in America.”5 So the crisis that led to Revolution created two peoples, and there could be “no middle character” between them: “Natural subjects” of the crown could not be “American citizens” who had somehow become “aliens” to the English, free citizens of “a nation now separated from them.”6 In this reading, the Declaration of Independence was the genesis of American nationhood as well as the “fundamental act of union of these states,” as Jefferson later characterized it.7 The real question, Jefferson and other supporters of independence in the Congress argued, had not been whether a Declaration would “make ourselves what we are not; but whether we should declare a fact which already exists.” The Declaration would simply describe “an existent truth.”8 The Declaration’s logic – and Jefferson’s later explanation that with that document he was simply expressing “the American mind” – assumed the existence of the nation already.9 But two peoples cannot become two overnight, and the burden of much of Jefferson’s most important writing from the Revolutionary era fell to explaining the origins and describing the unique character of the American people, a people with a past and a future as well as a present. For this explanation, Jefferson first turned to history. Americans, he argued, were connected through a common experience of expatriation and of alienation from Britain. If there was “a people” in North America, as the Declaration assumed, his 1774 pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, described its history. If the Declaration was a birth, a “rupture in time,” the Summary View described the long gestation of a nation. In the Summary View, Jefferson first began to spin what he there called “American story.”10 In becoming one of the first chroniclers of the nation’s past, Jefferson became its first postcolonial theorist of the nation’s present and projector of its indefinite future.
A People in the Empire
The most compelling work written on the “first” British Empire suggests at least three conclusions: first, that the practice of empire was federal whatever it purported to be in theory; second, that intercolonial relations were tenuous at best and that whatever gave Britons in North America any semblance of unity was precisely their shared embrace of British identity; third, that the craving of the eighteenth-century colonial elite to emulate British cultural
5 Notes, 155.
6 Notes on British and American Alienage [1783], in PTJ, 6:433.
7 Minutes of the Board of Visitors, University of Virginia, 1822–1825, March 4, 1825, in TJW, 479.
8 Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress” [June 7 to August 1, 1776], in PTJ, 1:311.
9 David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, 2007), 17.
10 See the reflections in Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1991, rev. ed.), ch. 11.
standards – to measure up – was consistently thwarted by the knowledge of its provincial status vis-à-vis the real British aristocracy, a knowledge continually reinforced by traffic patterns of administration. Unlike Spanish Americans, British Americans had a good deal of experience running local affairs. But as among the former, it was only the extremely rare American Creole who could even imagine acquiring enough cultural and economic capital to ever parlay that into some kind of authoritative political power in the metropolis.11 When American elites did show up in England, they were typically awestruck.12 It speaks worlds that the artificially unifying term American emerged out of Britain as a nomenclature of difference.13
It was their very status as provincials that nevertheless freed Americans to make remarkable leaps in political creativity.14 Moreover, British efforts to overadminister the colonies after the 1760s, as well as the print culture that reinforced America’s distinct status as an outpost to be administered, gradually set into place a “grammar” of imagining that would awaken a kind of national consciousness in Americans vis-à-vis the “imperial” center. Such imagining rhetorically rendered the diverse “American” pasts a common heritage even as colonial political claims to statehood (and unity) were shockingly new. In other words, British practice of making “others” of American provincials helped wear a footpath toward American nationalism.15
Colonists who opposed the implementation of new British policies in the 1760s and 1770s – Jefferson included – rooted their initial resistance in their Britishness but ended, of necessity, making claims as Americans.16 If their initial opposition was rooted in collective historical experiences they believed they shared with all Britons, their Revolution very quickly demanded that
11 On the aspirations of one such rarity, see Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2004), esp. ch. 2.
12 See a description of John Adams’s (now an official representative of the United States) encounter with George III in Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “‘If Others Will Not Be Active, I Must Drive’: George III and the American Revolution,” Early American Studies (Spring 2004), 1–46, at 1–4. Naturally, colonial self-loathing could manifest itself just as loudly as resentment or disgust at the luxurious self-indulgence of the British court. See H. Trevor Colbourn and Richard Peters, “A Pennsylvania Farmer at the Court of King George: John Dickinson’s London Letters, 1754–1756,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 86 (July 1962), 241–286 and (October 1962), 417–453. See also the complicated response(s) of Benjamin Franklin detailed in Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
13 P.J. Marshall, “A Nation Defined by Empire, 1755–1776,” in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom?: The Making of British History (London and New York, 1995), 220.
14 Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and the Creative Imagination,” in To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York, 2003), 3–36.
15 My debt to Anderson, Imagined Communities, should be obvious here and throughout this chapter.
16 Anthony Pagden and Nicholas Canny, “Afterword: From Identity to Independence,” in Canny and Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, 1987), 277–278. Also see Jack P. Greene, “Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study,” in ibid., 214.
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In studying the work of a young etcher—and Mr Webster is still young as an etcher—it is almost always possible to trace certain influences which, quite legitimately, have acted upon his choice of subject and his technique. In one of his first etchings, The Court, Bourron, the Whistler influence is frankly apparent. Les Blanchisseuses is in no sense an imitative plate, but I should have said it was the work of a man who knew Whistler’s Unsafe Tenement by heart. And there comes in the critic’s danger of leaping to rash conclusions, for Mr. Webster tells me he never saw that print by Whistler till long after his etching was made. For the Meryon influence, which is clearly apparent in much of his work, Mr. Webster makes no apology. Nor need he do so; for if he reminds us, here a little of Whistler, there a little of Meryon, there is always a large measure of himself besides. The true artist lights his torch from that of his predecessors: it is his business to carry on great traditions. “I have done my best simply to learn from him, not to steal” —that is Mr. Webster’s own expressive way of putting it.
W . N D A
“The ordinary observer will delight in Notre Dame des Andelys for its beautiful rendering of a noble fragment of architecture
Those who have real knowledge of etching will appreciate it still more for its clever biting and for its subtle delicacy of line so cunningly used for the indication of stone, glass, and woodwork with their different surfaces and textures ”
Martin Hardie
Size of the original etching, 11 × 7⅛ inches
W P M , S O , R
“Gothic canopies and tracery are drawn with loving care in the Porte des Marmousets, St. Ouen, Rouen, but here again
it is the mystery of shadow in the deep porch that supplies the true theme.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 10⅛ × 7 inches
Mr. Webster has not learned from Meryon at the cost of his own individuality, and one reason for the freshness that characterizes his work is that he is one of those who like to transfer their first impressions of nature direct to the plate in the open air. With very few exceptions, that is how his etchings have been made. A certain amount of work is necessarily done afterward in the retirement of the studio, but the straightforward method of rendering nature gives a vividness and spontaneity that careful work from intermediate studies in pencil or color can rarely produce. This spontaneity is the very essence of good etching, for with etching, as with water-color, its highest charm is inevitably troubled by mechanical labor; it is essentially a method of which one feels that “if ’twere done, ’twere well done quickly.” The etcher should no more be able to stay the quick gliding of his needle in the middle of a line than the skater to stand still upon the outside edge. And I think that the etcher who works straight from nature is more apt to search out the notes and accents of character and to seize upon those structural lines which are a fundamental necessity to his work.
Another chief excellence in Mr. Webster’s work lies in the fact that from the first he has been his own printer. He is no believer in the principle followed by many other etchers of biting their plate and leaving it to some one “with the palm of a duchess” to do the rest. Patient acquisition of craftsmanship is bound to tell, for the paid printer, be he never so skilled, cannot hope to understand an artist’s intentions quite so well as the artist himself. Mr Webster, however, has no need of any artifice; there is no trace in his etchings of the meretricious printing which Whistler condemned as “treacly.” Light and shade enter into charming alliance in his prints, but line is always of the confederacy, and it is to purity of line that the shadows which tell so strongly owe their strength. In the very depths of them there is always a luminous gloom, never a trace of the harshness and opacity that come from slurred workmanship and reliance upon printer’s ink.
Perhaps I have said too much already, for Mr Webster’s work is well able to speak for itself. But there is one noteworthy feature, common to all his plates, that claims attention, and that is his power of rendering sunlight. If he loves dark and dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and moldering plaster, it is for the sake of those quaint shadows that peep from their recesses and climb the high walls, and still more for the patches of brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows give so full a value. He seems to hear, like Corot, the actual crash of the sun upon the wall—“l’éclat du soleil qui frappe.”
P II
It is difficult to clothe one’s speech in the detached terms of a catalogue when writing of an artist whose work always kindles fresh enthusiasm. And so I may perhaps be pardoned if, in adding something to a previous essay upon the etchings of Herman A. Webster, I venture to strike a more personal note.
W . V M , R H , P
“He loves dark and dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and moldering plaster, ... for the patches of brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows give so full a value ” Martin Hardie
Size of the original etching, 11¼ × 5⅞ inches
W . L R L
“In landscape, as in his architectural work, Webster sets his theme upon the plate with fine skill of arrangement and with exquisite draughtsmanship.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 6 × 8¼ inches
There can be few men to whom art is more of a religion than to Webster On two occasions when I saw him during his hurried visits to London in the spring of 1910, he spoke of his art with all the zeal of a missionary and the fervor of a convert. He seemed to be laboring in a slough of despond, beset with a feeling that his past work was something worthless, to be thrown aside like Christian’s bundle. He appeared to be torn in sunder by divers doctrines, telling me of the constant ebb and flow of argument in the Paris cafés and studios between the parti métier and the parti âme—those who
maintained that finished technique, the “cuisine” of the French student, was the final aim, and those who held that the artist’s own emotion, howsoever it might find expression, was the greatest thing of all. Webster felt—and it was a fact, indeed, at which I hinted in writing of his work before—that he was sacrificing something of the âme to the métier; and his own realization of that is already becoming apparent in his outlook and his style. Then, too, his talk was all of the attainment and suggestion of light as the supreme quality in an etching; and here I could reassure him, for few have ever preached the gospel of light with more truth and earnestness than Webster himself in the Quai Montebello and many other plates. Still, there matters stood more than a year ago, and the plates that Webster had etched at Marseilles and elsewhere lay rejected and unbitten in his studio. Then he set out to America, where he spent the summer of 1910, and, like Mr. Pennell, fell a victim to the skyscrapers of New York. “They are the most marvelous things,” he wrote, “on the face of Mother Earth to-day. It took me two months to begin to see them, but then they began to glow, to take shape, and to grow. Perhaps no work of human hands in all the world offers such a stupendous picture as New York seen from almost anywhere within the down-town district, or from the river or the bay. There are cliffs and cañons where sun and shadow work the weirdest miracles, and soaring above them, between forty and fifty stories from the ground, rise arched roofs and pointed ones, gray and gold and brown, that one must see with one’s own eyes to have the faintest conception of. From across the Hudson in the afternoon when the sun goes down you can watch the shadows creep up the sides of these mountains of brick and stone until you’d swear you were looking out on some gigantic fairyland.”
His admiration of those sky-scrapers found expression in a series of drawings made on behalf of The Century Magazine, and in, at any rate, one etching—the Cortlandt Street, New York. The subject will appeal most, perhaps, to those who live beneath the familiar shade of these monstrous habitations, with their hundreds of staring eyes; but the ordinary man, though he may find it strangely uninspiring and unromantic, will at any rate admire the firm decision of the drawing
and welcome the slender filaments and trembling gray spirals of smoke—so difficult to express in line with a point of steel—that cast a veil over the sordid reality of the scene. Though Webster carried that one plate to a finish, he was still obsessed by all sorts of doubts. Many drawings were torn up, and many plates that he etched were wilfully destroyed. Just as the golfer falls victim to too much reading of theoretical works, so for Webster his eager indulgence in theory and science put him “off his game.” I say all this to account for what must seem a small output during two years for a man whose sole work is etching. It is all to the artist’s credit; but, none the less, we have suffered, nous autres, for his convictions. Now, however, Richard is himself again. A month or more spent in Frankfort this summer has produced a series of pencil-drawings and etchings which should bring satisfaction and content both to the artist and to all who admire his work.
W B , F
“Then there are the Street of the Three Kings, the Bendergasse, and Sixteenth Century Houses, all of them felicitous in charm of theme, in play of light and shade, and in the suggestion of life given by the animated figures.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 8 × 5¼ inches
W . C S
Size of the original etching, 12⅞ × 7½ inches
Before speaking of the Frankfort series of etchings, a word may be said about Webster’s pencil-drawings. I know of no other artist, save perhaps Mr. Muirhead Bone, who can use the pencil-point with such exquisite fineness and precision in the production of an architectural
drawing that, with all its accuracy, still retains the freshness of a sketch. Finding in a portfolio a drawing of Cortlandt Street and several others that repeated the subjects of the Frankfort etchings, I felt curious as to the exact relationship between these drawings and the work on the copperplate. This interest was largely, perhaps, that of a fellow-etcher, keen to see “how the wheels go round,” but Webster’s reply to a question on this subject may interest others as well. “I determine my composition,” he wrote, “in outline first. This outline I transfer to the plate. Then I go out and carefully study in pencil, on the original outline sketch, the subject I want to do, so as to ‘get acquainted’ with it before beginning the more exacting work upon the copperplate. I never use a drawing to work from except sometimes as an extra guide in the biting, where a careful study can be very useful.” They are beautiful things, these pencil-drawings of New York and Frankfort, but there can be only one of each. The etchings, fortunately, can be shared and enjoyed by many possessors.
Frankfort has grown to be a large and very modern town with broad thoroughfares and palatial buildings; but it has its old quarter as well, and among the houses that nestle in narrow streets round the cathedral, Webster has found the same kind of subject that fascinated him before in Bruges and Marseilles and Paris. A brilliant draughtsman, he never seems to hesitate or lose his way among the manifold intricacies of the old-world buildings that he depicts. He aims always at knitting his subjects into fine unity of composition by broad massing of light and shade. “In the last few months,” he writes, “I have grown never to make an etching for etching’s sake, but for the means it gives of studying closely the play of light across my subject.” That is his main theme: the light that travels now with cold curiosity as it did centuries ago, glancing into open windows, throwing into relief a corbel or a crocket, casting a shadow under eave or window ledge, revealing, like a patch in some tattered garment, the cracks and seams in moldering plaster or time-worn timber. In depicting these storehouses of human joys and aspirations, hopes and despairs, he has none of Meryon’s gloom and morbidness. It is true that behind many of the windows in these poor homes of his pictures some Marie Claire may be toiling in sad-
eyed poverty; yet for Webster the outside shall be sunny, little white curtains shall veil the gloom, and flowers shall blossom on the window ledge, though the sad worker may have watered them with her tears. And if sunshine is still potent in these new plates, there is also a fresh and joyous note of life and movement in the streets. The introduction of figures, well placed and full of character, is a new development in Webster’s art. Bustling workers, or happy groups of gossiping women, or the dark mass of a distant crowd, are introduced with consummate skill, and the picturesqueness of the old streets gains new value from the suggestion of this living stream of human traffic. The presence of modern life enhances the gray and wrinkled age of the buildings which have watched so many generations come and go.
W . L , F
Size of the original etching, 8 × 6⁵⁄₁₆ inches
W . D L F , F
“Der Langer Franz, a view of the Rathaus tower that took its nickname from a tall burgomaster of the town, is a little gem, brilliant with light and rich in the mystery of shadow ” Martin Hardie
Size of the original etching. 4⅞ × 3⅜ inches
Among the new plates are four that deal with street scenes in the Alt Stadt of Frankfort. Der Langer Franz, a view of the Rathaus tower
that took its nickname from a tall burgomaster of the town, is the smallest of all, but a little gem, brilliant with light and rich in the mystery of shadow. Then there are the Street of the Three Kings, the Bendergasse, and Sixteenth-century Houses, all of them felicitous in charm of theme, in play of light and shade, and in the suggestion of life given by the animated figures. There are admirable figures again in An Old Court, one of the plates that the collector of future days will most desire to possess. There is less in it of obvious labor than in the street scenes; the etcher has overcome a natural fear of blank spaces; and his reticence and more summary execution have lent to this plate much of the unconscious and unpremeditated charm that is one of the finest qualities which an etching can possess.
Two etchings of old bridges over the Main at Frankfort must rank among the best work that Webster has yet produced. One is a small and spirited plate showing the tower of the cathedral and a row of houses, most delicately drawn, rising with a beautiful sky-line above the solid mass of the shadowed bridge with its heavy buttresses. The other shows the old bridge that spans the Main between Frankfort and Sachsenhausen. Legend tells that in compensation for finishing the building within a certain time the architect made a vow to sacrifice to the devil the first living being that crossed the bridge. Then, when the fatal day arrived, he drove a cock across, and so cheated the devil of his due. Much the same story of outwitting the devil is told about the building of the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle. Whether Webster ventured upon any compact I do not know; but this plate, in its building, in its well-constructed composition, in its splendid effect of brilliant sunshine, is one of the most successful tasks he has ever accomplished. The group of figures on the near bank, happily placed like those in Vermeer’s famous View of Delft, adds no little to the charm of the scene. I would set this plate beside Les Blanchisseuses and the Quai Montebello, which Mr. Wedmore has found “modestly perfect,” as representing the very summit of Webster’s art.
W . T O B , F
This old bridge spans the river Main between Frankfort and Sachsenhausen
“I would set this plate beside Les Blanchisseuses and Quai Montebello, which Mr. Wedmore has found ‘modestly perfect,’ as representing the very summit of Webster’s art.” Martin Hardie
Size of the original etching, 5½ × 8½ inches
W . L R S . J , P
“ One of the best etchings he has ever made It is not merely fine in its pattern of light and shade, but it has a direct force and simplification that are rich with promise for the future ” Martin Hardie
Size of the original etching, 8⅝ × 5⅞ inches
While he has surrendered for the time being to the charm of Frankfort, Webster has not been unfaithful to the Paris of his early love. Of Paris he might say, like Montaigne, “That city has ever had my heart; and it has fallen out to me, as of excellent things, that the more of other fine cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this gains on my affections. I love it tenderly, even with all its warts and blemishes.” All the more for the warts and blemishes of its old buildings Webster loves it, too; and while working on his Frankfort plates he has completed another of La Rue St. Jacques, Paris, which, I think, is one of the best etchings he has ever made. At times, even in his Frankfort plates, one still feels that his superb draughtsmanship and his love of detail—ce superflu, si nécessaire— have led him to a uniformity of finish that is almost too “icily regular.” I do not mean that Webster’s elaboration is the cold, almost meaningless, elaboration of the line-engraver; nor do I forget that the technique of Meryon, one of the greatest masters of etchings, was, in Mr. Wedmore’s happy phrasing, “one of unfaltering firmness and regularity, one of undeterred deliberation.” All the same, one wishes that Meryon had done a few more things like the Rue des Mauvais Garçons, and wishes that Webster also, in a similar way, were now and then less sure of himself, were held sometimes by a trembling hesitancy, or driven sometimes by the passion of the moment to allow room for fortunate accident and rapid suggestion. For that reason I welcome his Rue St. Jacques. It is not merely fine in its pattern of light and shade, but it has a direct force and simplification that are rich with promise for the future.
Since writing the above, I have seen working-proofs of two new etchings of landscape. And here, too, there is high promise. They show, at least, that Webster is not going to remain a man of one subject; that he is opening his heart to the beauty and romance of simple nature. He has sought his first themes in that pleasant countryside where, between tall poplars, you get peeps of Château Gaillard, nobly set upon its hill. In landscape, as in his architectural work, Webster sets his theme upon the plate with fine skill of arrangement and with exquisite draughtsmanship. These two plates, Château Gaillard and La Route de Louviers, are exhilarating in their feeling of sunshine, and they please by their absolute simplicity of
