Money and That Man From Monticello

As I write, the new film by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory on Thomas Jefferson’s Paris years has reinvigorated all the tired speculations about his alleged sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Meanwhile, in an act of inadvertent irony, the scaffolding has gone up around the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin, presumably to spiffy up the monument as the tourist season begins in earnest.

At the more scholarly level, the books and articles on Jefferson continue to grow exponentially. Two full bibliographic volumes are now required merely to list the entries. The editors of the Jefferson Papers at Princeton continue to march along at a stately pace, having required twenty-five volumes to carry the story to 1793. When the project is completed and Jefferson expires in 1826, it is unlikely that anyone reading these lines will be alive. What Edmund Morgan once noticed about the proliferating histories of New England is even more true about the books on Jefferson — no sane observer could possibly justify such volume. Like some quasi-scholarly version of the O. J. Simpson trial, the obsession with Jefferson has become the longest running miniseries in American history.

The reasons for this phenomenon are an intriguing blend of the silly and the substantive. The silly stuff usually flows out of the Sally Hemings story, which was a tin can tied to Jefferson’s reputation by James Callendar in 1802 that has rattled through the ages and the pages of the history books ever since. Revised for a modern audience by Fawn Brodie in 1974, it is now being revived again by the Merchant and Ivory film. ¹ If this were a court case, the charges would have been thrown out long ago for lack of evidence. But as a historical problem, it is a publicist’s dream, since the documentary record is sufficiently scanty to prevent a decisive verdict for or against. The scholarly community, to the extent we can talk in such terms, is overwhelmingly of the opinion that the allegations are false. Informed popular opinion, if such a term is not dismissed as an oxymoron, tilts in the opposite direction; and it is bolstered by the obviously sincere testimony of several African Americans who claim to be Jefferson’s direct descendants. It seems to me that both sides should want to put an end to this controversy by commissioning a team of distinguished pathologists to dig up the remains of Jefferson and perform the requisite DNA tests to resolve this matter once and for all.

The substantive reasons for our abiding obsession with Jefferson are more ideological than sexual. He is America’s preeminent political prophet, the man who wrote the magic words of American history (i.e. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”), and therefore our most convenient vehicle for arguing about what Herbert Croly called “the promise of American life.” In this sense the proliferation of books on or about Jefferson is plausible, since the underlying issues-at-stake involve nothing less than the original intentions of America’s most visionary founder and the viability of the liberal values he championed. There is, unfortunately, nothing like a DNA test available to use on Jefferson’s mind, which is generally regarded as one of the most elusive subjects in American history.

It is Herbert Sloan’s singular contribution to have opened up a new window into Jefferson’s thought and character that simultaneously allows us to look past all the silliness and gaze almost clinically into one of the deepest chambers of that mind. Principle and Interest is the most impressively original and beguilingly stylish interpretation of Jefferson’s ideological obsessions since Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968). It does for the question of debt what Jordan’s pathbreaking book did for the question of race; namely, send a shaft of light into the Jeffersonian abyss that not only illuminates one important region of former darkness...