Thomas Jefferson was by habit a self-reflective person. In a late-in-life letter to his physician, Dr. Vine Utley (21 Mar. 1819), he writes as part of his daily regimen, “I not ever go to bed without an hour, or half hour’s previous reading of something moral, whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep.”
In 1790, when he returns from France and addresses the citizens of Albemarle (Feb. 12), Jefferson says, “My feeble and obscure exertions in service, and in the hold cause of freedom, have had no other merit than that they were my best.”
Some 10 years later, in a memorandum, Jefferson writes: “I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.”
Jefferson then limns 11 noteworthy deeds: acts for clearing the Rivanna River for navigation (1765), for freedom of religion (1776, and made law in 1785), for ending entails (1776), for prohibiting importation of slaves (1778), for expatriation of citizens willing to leave America (1779), for riddance of primogeniture (1785), for apportioning punishments to crimes (1796), and for the general diffusion of knowledge (this last, not ever done); his Declaration of Independence (1776); importation of olive trees from Marseilles for South Carolina and Georgia (1789–90) and of upland rice to South Carolina and Georgia (1790).[1]
That Jefferson says that all such deeds would have been done by others is reason for his use of reference to himself as “instrument.” Yet it is not clear that all, or even most, would have been done by others. It is especially not clear, knowing Jefferson’s matchless preparation for activities and his penchant for accommodating minutiae, that they would have been better done.
On his deathbed, Jefferson is noted to have said, “I have done for my country, and for all mankind, all that I could do; and I now resign my soul, without fear, to my God.”[2]
Jefferson’s self-catechizing throughout his life and the ardency with which revisionists, postmodernists, and neo-Marxists aim to cancel Thomas Jefferson led to the notion, aided in conversation with Donna Vitek, of imagining the world without Thomas Jefferson.
Thus, this book is history of an unusual sort—counterfactual history. I ask the question: What would the world have been like today had Thomas Jefferson never lived?
Historical understanding of the past is itself an unachievable task. The best for which we can hope with all our efforts at disclosure is a decently close approximation to an understanding of events as they occurred, as we have no direct access to the past, and the problem becomes acuter with remoteness. If we work on the assumption that historical explanation is essentially the task of ferreting out causal links between phenomena—that is not an uncontested point—and we work on the reasonable assumption that, given the former point, such links form inordinately complex networks, then it is a historian’s task to work toward recapitulation of certain links of that network. Jack McGlaughlin for example introduced us to Jefferson the builder; John Martin, to Jefferson the scientist; and I, to Jefferson the moralist. All such accounts have virtues, and too, flaws. It is for future historians critically to assess such works, underscore the virtues, disclose the flaws, and create narratives with more virtues, fewer flaws.
With that noted, writing credible counterfactual history is a task seemingly even more nonsensical. The likelihood that an account any scholar gives of a world tainted by omission of some “slight” detail—say, the non-existence of Thomas Jefferson—is veridical will be nil. The concatenation of cosmic causes is merely too inordinately complex, too intricate, for any historian to gain access to a past that actually occurred let alone to an imagined world in which something that actually happened in the real world did not happen.
What, then, is the perceivable benefit of such an approach?
The first benefit is some measure of the significance of Thomas Jefferson. On this view, should we remove certain key events of history—e.g., if we imagine a world in which Jefferson did not construct the Declaration of Independence, the Bill for Religious Freedom, and University of Virginia—we would be fronted with a world, substantially different. Going further, should we imagine a world in which Jefferson himself never existed, then we would be fronted with a world, wholly unlike ours, though it is an impossible task to describe just how that world would be wholly unlike ours. We can, however, make some inferences that are reasonable: e.g., were Jefferson never born, then the American Revolution would have taken a different course, because he was so instrumental in the goings on of the Revolutionary cause—especially in the Continental Congress. It is perhaps superfluous to add on this model, that the true significance of the life of any person can be thus measured by an assessment of just how that world would have been different, had that person not ever lived.
A second benefit is indirect: a critical reply to radical revisionists, neo-Marxists, and postmodernists who ever paint Thomas Jefferson as nothing more than a charlatan, racist, and hypocrite. In the postmodernist tradition, it is voguish to dilate on “small history”—the history of neglected and oppressed minorities (e.g. Blacks and Native Americans) and neglected stories (e.g., homosexuality in the Catholic Church)—as if traditional Thucydidean or von Rankean historians have by fiat declared that such topics make for illegitimate history. Consequently, postmodernists readily dismiss as bogus the “big history” of modernist historians and their accounts of large men, like Jefferson, and large events, like the American Revolution. Such men and events are large merely because white, Europe-originated historians, themselves racist and Eurocentric, have made them large. Hence, we have an explication for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s abhorrence of Thomas Jefferson—his racism and hypocrisy—and sanctification of slave Sally Hemings, who though likely illiterate and relatively insignificant and nowise involved with Thomas Jefferson, slyly becomes one of the most significant figures in early American history.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and revisionist Jeffersonian scholars, like Pete Onuf, have for decades been intent on annihilating the Jefferson of Gilbert Chinard, Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and I dare say, of M. Andrew Holowchak—all, they would say, who have in common whiteness, and consequently, are incapable of even one step in the direction of objectivity—and reconstructing a new Jefferson, as only the bitter and ire-driven postmodernist imagination can do.
Thus, this book, A World without Thomas Jefferson, is a cool reply to the radicals who have crafted, bolt by rusty bolt, the Frankenstein-like Jefferson of the villainous postmodernist imagination. In essaying to reconstruct a world in which the influence of Thomas Jefferson is negligible—he dies on his third day of existence—I introduce readers to a world, incalculably different from ours, where the ideals of liberty and equality have never been fully mused on because of the non-existence of a certain soft-speaking, but large-minded polymath from Albemarle. As my aim throughout is descriptive, not normative, it is for judicious readers to adjudge whether the world I introduce is conceivable, and if so, is better, or worse, than our own.
[1] Thomas Jefferson, Services to My Country, Thomas Jefferson: Writings ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 702–4.
[2] B.L. Rayner, Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson (New York: A. Francis and W. Boardman, 1832), 554.
MAHolowchak, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Thomas Jefferson and His Time
https//www.mholowchak.com
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