A Founder's Notes

By LANCE MORROW

THE PORTABLE THOMAS JEFFERSON

Edited by MERRILL D. PETERSON 589 pages. Viking. $7.95.

The men who invented the country 200 years ago have long since been enshrouded by the myths of textbooks and the mists of hagiology. The most elusive figure in that gentlemen's club of revolutionaries was Thomas Jefferson. Henry Adams wrote that every other American statesman could be portrayed with "a few broad strokes of the brush," but Jefferson "only touch by touch with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon shifting and uncertain flickers of semitransparent shadows." Many biographers have attempted to draw that chiaroscuro character, most recently Fawn Brodie in her Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate Biography. The result has been an overemphasis of the difficult side of his character: the spiky Freudian dimension, his relationship with Sally Hemmings, a mulatto slave who may have borne Jefferson seven children, his epic ambivalence toward blacks and slavery. Indeed, in his one full-length book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson was capable of declaring that Negroes were in their reason and imagination much inferior to whites and even that they smelled bad. Even so, he seems genuinely to have abominated slavery, and he expressed terrible premonitions: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

Such interlunations, of course, remain--Adams' "shadows." But those aside, Jefferson possessed a resplendently Baconian intellect, a mind with all its windows open. The scope and subtlety of that mind is on full view in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, a superb collection of his letters and public writings. The reader can begin almost anywhere in the book and come away refreshed. Perhaps the best starting point is Jefferson's stately, passionate argument for independence: a declaration that issues from a ripe philosophical vision of the natural rights of man. His Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom begins with resonances that summarize every belief he holds: "Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free..."

Notes on the State of Virginia, a response to a series of questions posed by the secretary of the French legation in Philadelphia, is a mixture of guidebook, history, scientific ledger, philosophical treatise, vindication of American nationalism and casual introduction to Jefferson's opinions on practically everything. The Notes and the 79 letters included here are the most compelling part of the Viking collection.

For Jefferson, observation is a delight and a kind of secular salvation: the escape from superstition. He records temperatures with Talmudic attention. He knows the weights of otters, the principles of architecture, the paleontological importance of certain prehistoric bones. He is an alert tourist; while Minister to France, he advises Lafayette: "Absolutely incognito, you must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself but in fact to find if they are soft." Nothing is lost on him --books, ideas, weather, grains, diet, a new vaccine, the complexities of Indian languages. It is his huge intellectual appetite that makes him so attractive. For with his heroes Newton, Bacon and Locke, Jefferson was finally an optimist of knowledge. It may have been his vision of the widening possibilities of the mind in an ever widening country that allowed him to embody the contradictions of aristocrat and revolutionary.

There are times when Jefferson can seem bloodlessly theoretical, when one misses the wit and truculence of, say, John Adams. Jefferson could be charming but never humorous. There was a peculiar distance in his character. But he possessed something rare: a splendid sanity, an equilibrium. The American mind has been trying to recover its balance ever since.

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