"I Tremble for My Country": Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Gentry, and: Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (review)

Ronald Hatzenbuehler's book asks a particularly promising question: How did Thomas Jefferson's lifelong membership in the Virginia gentry inform his deepest values? It is promising because there is an important argument to be made about how Jefferson's cosmopolitanism and nationalism were infused with Virginia provincialism. But this is not exactly the way Hatzenbuehler goes about it. He argues, instead, that "there is an important distinction to be drawn between Jefferson as an 'American' and Jefferson as a 'Virginian'; the two identities are not synonymous" (6). It follows, then, that one of the identities must generally predominate and, for Hatzenbuehler, this one is provincial. Jefferson is best understood, he argues, with reference to his identity as a member of the Virginia gentry.

The editors of Hatzenbuehler's book begin with the suggestion that Jefferson's "most famous statement," outside of the Declaration of Independence, is "that government governs best which governs least." The trouble is that Jefferson never said it. And, although Hatzenbuehler cannot be blamed for the editors' foreword, it lays out a couple of misconceptions that inform the whole book. One is that we can somehow call Jefferson a provincial Virginian and be done with it. Jefferson's "outlook," the editors say, "was shaped more by Virginia's interests than national and international developments" (xi–xii). Another is that centralization of state power must always be the focus and source of nationalist sentiment. On the contrary, Jefferson's very nationalism celebrated as uniquely American the strength of a federal union that diffused power. It may be possible for historians to tease Jefferson's provincialism out of his thought and action in ways he could not himself, but to distill and isolate Jefferson's "Virginianness" leaves us with something less than the whole man. What seems at least as significant as Jefferson's membership in the Virginia gentry are the multiple ways in which he consciously transcended its values. Furthermore, the abstractions nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and provincialism, though in some necessary tension with one another, are not mutually exclusive. As theorists of identity have long understood, cosmopolitanism can be assimilated by provincial culture; nationalism is generally experienced locally; cosmopolitan values can shape provincial perspectives. The old saw about Jefferson meaning Virginia when he said "my country" is not only empirically false (Jefferson's "country" could mean Virginia, America, or Albemarle County, depending on the context), it is analytically useless, telling us little about the way Jefferson's deepest values were an inseparable amalgamation of the cosmopolitan, nationalist, and provincial.

Making him provincial leaves us with the Jefferson of Federalist polemic who, when he was not too much the utopian philosophe to be any worldly good, tended to sacrifice national interests for Virginia's. Although Hatzenbuehler is properly sensitive to the ways in which Jefferson remained concerned about the potential of the national state to consolidate power to the detriment of a true federalism, he misleadingly presents Jefferson as very nearly a lifelong Antifederalist who saw the Constitution primarily as a danger to Virginia liberties. Even the Declaration was "less a statement of American nationalism than . . . evidence that [Jefferson's] views coincided with those of his gentry peers at Virginia's constitutional convention" (61).

A powerful case can be made for the centrality of Virginian values in Jefferson's thought and policy, but such a case will need to remain alert to the ways in which Jefferson's provincialism, to the extent that we can isolate it, expressed itself in universal or national terms. For...