Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours

The Many Wests of Thomas Jefferson

Peter J. Kastor The Many Wests of Thomas Je√erson ‘‘Je√erson and the West’’ is a phrase that rolls o√ the tongue. It seems familiar. It suggests continuity. After all, what account of Thomas Je√erson is complete without a discussion of his abiding interest in the West? Indeed, it is almost impossible to conceive of Je√erson without the West, for it was in the West that Je√erson found the means to understand human nature and America ’s future. Je√erson’s fascination with the West likewise lends itself to discussions that often seek to celebrate or to condemn Je√erson. Whether in academic or public circumstances, these discussions tend to characterize Je√erson in two ways: Je√erson the visionary who understood how to extend institutions of freedom, representative government, and individual opportunity into the West; or Je√erson the architect of conquest and misery, setting in motion the eradication and forced removal of Indians, the expansion of African American slavery, and the ethnic subjugation of the Hispanic residents of Spanish North America. The title of the symposium at which this paper was first presented is particularly appropriate. In his time, Thomas Je√erson helped to define how Americans conceived of the West. In our time, the celebration of the West remains something that Americans unquestioningly associate with Je√erson. The Many Wests of Thomas Jefferson 67 With that, I should be done. After all, Je√erson’s commentary on the West has already been the subject of academic history, popular biography, and public commemoration. That conversation has long been in place but recently reached new heights during the bicentennial observations of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. And that is the problem. How do we approach the issue of Je√erson and the West in a way that moves us beyond the most familiar of stories? I want to engage that question by problematizing a set of assumptions about geography, narrative, and consistency that underscore much of the work on Je√erson and the West. In geographic terms, Je√erson wrote about not one West but two, both literally and figuratively. In geographic terms, he often discussed a Near West from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River and a Far West beyond the Mississippi River. Distinguishing the two is all the more di≈cult because Je√erson himself did not use these terms. Nonetheless, they do clarify his outlook, and as a result I use them here instead of the academic nomenclature (be it borderland or frontier or backcountry) that scholars have developed to describe conditions often (but not exclusively) associated with western North America. It was in the Near West of the eighteenth century that Je√erson saw both the greatest opportunities and the fewest threats. It was the Far West of the nineteenth century that was more troubling to Je√erson in his own time and more confusing in our time. In the process of reconsidering the West, I also want to reconsider the ways we approach the written record and chronology itself. While Je√erson remained consistently fascinated by Western regions , his specific comments responded to a highly specific chronology . Before 1790, Je√erson began a process of theorizing a Western future. From 1790 through 1803 he grappled with the task of governing the Near West but remained generally confident about rapid settlement and federal consolidation. From 1803 to 1809 President Je√erson faced new challenges in governing the Far West that he expressed in terms far more circumspect than he had a decade earlier. From 1809 to 1819 Je√erson returned to a more theoretical 68 Peter J. Kastor and in the end a more optimistic outlook toward Western development . From 1819 to his death in 1826, new fears led Je√erson to withdraw from the West even as he sentimentalized it. This periodization reflects the typical biographical organization of Je√erson’s life (emerging leader, secretary of state and party leader, president, engaged retiree, and increasingly disengaged old man). More important, though, this periodization corresponds to major shifts in Je√erson’s conception of the West, shifts that occurred not only because Je√erson’s attitude changed but also because his job changed. I emphasize this point because Je√erson occasionally functions in the popular imagination as a figure beyond chronology. He appears bound by a set of consistent...