Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family, and Romantic Love Collected by America's Third President (review)

From 1801 to 1808, while Thomas Jefferson was serving as president of the United States, he was also spending some of his leisure hours on the popular nineteenth-century activity of "scrapbooking"—cutting out his favorite newspaper articles and poems and pasting them onto the backs of old letters to create a sort of personal literary anthology. Comprising two volumes of prose and two of verse, Jefferson's scrapbooks remained, as it were, hidden in plain sight for nearly two hundred years. Few historians or literary scholars even knew of their existence, and those who did were uncertain as to whether the books had been compiled by Jefferson himself or by one of his granddaughters. Only in recent years has the mystery been solved—the scrapbooks are indeed the work of Jefferson—and now, Jonathan Gross has made the verse portion of the scrapbooks available to modern readers in this fascinating and valuable collection.

In all, Jefferson's notebooks contain some 884 poems, roughly divided into one volume of political verse and one devoted to moral and sentimental poetry. Of these, Gross has selected approximately 240 poems and recategorized them into three parts, "Poems of Nation," "Poems of Family," and "Poems of Romantic Love." The first section, "Poems of Nation," constitutes something of a commentary in verse on Jefferson's presidency and his political philosophy. Beginning with "Jefferson and Liberty," an anonymous campaign song from 1800 (composed as a reply to Robert Treat Paine's "Adams and Liberty"), the poems follow a rough chronology through Jefferson's two terms in office, from campaign and inauguration songs to poems on the Lewis and Clarke expedition and the embargo. Not surprisingly, most of the poems represent a decidedly pro-Jeffersonian bent (though there are several contrary examples, including a few elegies on the death of Alexander Hamilton). There are songs in commemoration of the Fourth of July and Democratic-Republican gatherings—both implicit tributes to Jefferson—and more than a few satires against his Federalist opponents. Scholars familiar with the larger body of poetry of the Early Republic will be fascinated to notice which poems Jefferson chose to include and which poems he didn't: Joel Barlow's celebration of the Lewis and Clark expedition is in, while John Quincy Adams's satiric retort to Barlow, which calls into question the ideology of westward expansion, is not. And though in reality, poems critical of the embargo far outnumbered those in favor, in Jefferson's collection the reverse is true. Indeed, the juxtaposition of poems on the embargo—usually viewed as the great failure of Jefferson's presidency—demand to be read as an exercise in ideological justification: in one place, a single anti-embargo song is succeeded by two parodic responses to that song and followed, in turn, by several additional defenses of the embargo, as if Jefferson used the scrapbook to dramatize the "victory" of his own position over those of his critics. Jefferson scholars will undoubtedly discover other such examples of literary-political ventriloquism in this collection.

If the "Poems of Nation" reveal Jefferson the political apologist, the "Poems of Family" bring to light the widow, father, and grandfather, who sought, in his absence from home and family, to use poetry as a means of cultivating his relationship with his grandchildren. As Gross points out in the introduction to this section, Jefferson sent clippings of verse to his granddaughters and encouraged them to assemble scrapbooks of their own. He also seems to have considered his own scrapbook not merely a personal collection but as something to be passed on to his heirs, and thus to communicate to them a set of values regarding love, marriage, and family. Unlike his political views, which sometimes veered toward the radical, Jefferson's domestic values tend to reflect the common verities of eighteenth-century literature and life: there are poems praising moderation and...