Founders’ Keepers

Thomas Jefferson

Author of America

by Christopher Hitchens

HarperCollins, 208 pp., $19.95

CAN BOOKS GET MUCH SMALLER and shorter? We all know that attention spans are dwindling, but can a book about the life of a famous person be too brief? Is there no end to publishers’ putting out ever tinier biographies of prominent historical figures? The latest series of this sort is Eminent Lives by Atlas Books published in collaboration with HarperCollins. The idea behind this series is to have celebrated writers with strong sensibilities and sharp points of view take on notable persons in the past whom they especially admire and then hope that something exciting results.

It’s a tricky business having nonexperts write about famous individuals who have been studied to death by generations of biographers and historians. Presumably the non-experts bring something–freshness of perspective and passion, perhaps–to tired and overworked subjects; but being nonexperts, they also run the risk of making so many mistakes that the credibility of their account is brought into question. Does this imaginative publishing scheme work in these two brief biographies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

Paul Johnson is certainly a writer with a strong sensibility and a sharp point of view. In terms of history writing he is a veritable polymath, with books on subjects as varied as a history of the Renaissance and a history of the Jews. He has chosen for his eminent life George Washington, who, he says, “was one of the most important figures in world history.” But Washington is not a person easily understood. Despite leaving papers that “constitute the most complete record of a life in the entire 18th century,” Washington, Johnson writes, “remains a remote and mysterious figure.” He was puzzling to his contemporaries and “he puzzles us. No man’s mind is so hard to enter and dwell within. Everyone agreed, and agrees,” he writes, that Washington “was a paragon. But,” says Johnson, posing rather stark alternatives, “a rich or an empty one? A titan of flesh and blood or a clockwork figure programmed to do wisely?”

Naturally, Johnson finds Washington to be a rich, flesh-and-blood human paragon. Yet in the end he isn’t quite able to enter the mind of this ambitious Virginia planter and explain how a man who seems to have no special talents emerged as one of the greatest men in the world. Washington never attended college and was never regarded by anyone as intellectually gifted. His initial forays into the West as a Virginia militia colonel in the 1750s were disasters; indeed, by himself he helped precipitate the Seven Years War between Britain and France. As commander in chief of the American Continental Army during the Revolution he lost most of his battles; for his victory at Yorktown, French aid was crucial.

Yet by the 1780s he had emerged as a world-famous man–all because of his willingness to retire completely from public life. All successful generals in recent British history–Cromwell, Marlborough–had sought political rewards commensurate with their military achievements. Washington’s willingness to give up power made him at once an unprecedented kind of hero–famous worldwide for his character. Reluctantly, he risked that fame to help create a new Constitution for the United States and, as president in the 1790s, to put the new government on its feet and bind the fledgling Union together. Unlike the other Revolutionary leaders from the South, he even managed upon his death to set forth a plan for the freeing of his slaves.

With only 30,000 words or so to work with, the authors of these little biographies should not want to waste any. But unfortunately Johnson does. He repeats himself several times, telling us more than once that George III never left Britain and never saw the sea until he was 34, and doing the same with the story of Washington addressing his officers at Newburgh in 1783, fumbling with his glasses and telling them that he had grown nearly blind in service to his country. Such repetitions are nothing, however, compared with Johnson’s many mistakes and unreliable statements, which suggest that the book was hastily written and poorly edited and vetted.

Johnson says that the royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade white settlement west of the Appalachians, was Washington’s “fundamental reason for resisting Britain,” when actually Washington never took the Proclamation seriously at all. When Johnson refers to “the Articles of Association, 1775-6, precursor of the U.S. Constitution,” he conflates the Association of 1774, by which the Continental Congress authorized local enforcement of nonimportation of British goods, with the Articles of Confederation, approved by the Congress in 1777 but not ratified until 1781.

“Nowhere did slaves outnumber whites,” Johnson writes, and not until the invention of the cotton gin did “the South as a whole” become “hopelessly enmeshed” in slavery. Alas, well before the invention of the cotton gin, one-fifth of America’s population was enslaved, most of them in the South, with 60 percent of South Carolina’s population already composed of African slaves. Johnson says that Washington thought slavery was “morally wrong” from the outset, when in fact Washington initially objected to slavery on the grounds that it was inefficient and only gradually came to believe it was immoral as well.

Johnson implies that Washington–“a strategist of genius”–understood from the outset that he should use Fabian tactics in waging war against the British, when actually it took awhile for Washington to comprehend how he should fight. Johnson says that the British people, apart from the king, “had no emotional commitment to the war” and that the “war made virtually no impact on the letters, literature, and even newspapers of the time.” This would be news to all those Londoners who experienced the destruction of the Gordon rioters of 1780. In addition to anti-Catholic militants, the Gordon protesters, who eventually constituted a London mob four miles long, were made up of tens of thousands of pro-American supporters. Because by 1783 “Washington had traveled wider [in America] than any nonpreacher,” Johnson calls him “the first secular American,” forgetting about the extensive prewar travels of deputy postmaster Benjamin Franklin.

Johnson attributes great influence to Alexander Hamilton in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787–making him the author of the Electoral College, for example–when in fact Hamilton’s influence was confined to before and after the Convention. He even turns Hamilton as Treasury secretary into someone who could have gone without his salary because “he was rich and did not need the money,” when actually Hamilton was always strapped for funds and had to leave office in 1795 to go back to Wall Street to practice law. Johnson says “the all-important objective” of Hamilton’s financial program “was to get rid of the debt once and for all,” when in fact all Hamilton wanted to do was consolidate the various debts, fund them, and turn the unified national debt into a more or less permanent source of economic productivity. Johnson claims that it was during Washington’s presidency “that America achieved takeoff into self-sustaining industrial growth,” when most economic historians would say that takeoff into “industrial” growth came many decades later. He has Jefferson resigning as secretary of state because of the Genet affair when, in fact, Jefferson had informed Washington of his intention to retire well before the French minister Genet arrived in America. After Washington suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, writes Johnson, “it was never necessary, in his lifetime or for long after, for internal defiance of the constitutional law to be put down by federal force.” He has forgotten Fries’ Rebellion of 1799.

So it goes. One or two serious errors might be forgivable, but with so many mistakes and exaggerated statements the reader’s confidence in the reliability of the biography is undermined. If one wants to read a very brief but dependable biography of Washington, read Marcus Cunliffe’s little gem.

Christopher Hitchens’s little biography of Thomas Jefferson is very different and probably what the series editor James Atlas ideally had in mind. Not only is it reliable, but it is interesting and insightful (and, it must be noted, a third again longer than Johnson’s book). It is not that Hitchens has discovered new information about Jefferson–that would scarcely be possible in this scholar-saturated world–but he does offer fresh perspectives and perceptive emphases on many aspects of Jefferson’s life.

Instead of trying to recount every event in Jefferson’s life, Hitchens focuses on important ones and spends some time on each of them. For instance, he devotes several pages to analyzing Jefferson’s radical pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) and his draft of the Declaration of Independence, which, says Hitchens, is the only example in history, “apart from the King James version of the Bible, in which great works and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee.” Hitchens also has interesting comments on Jefferson’s fascination with Britain’s Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he astutely notes Jefferson’s repeated use of religious language and imagery in describing revolutions. His lengthy discussion of Jefferson and the Barbary pirates is especially arresting.

Typical of Hitchens’s nice touch is his comment that “it is perhaps both heartening and sobering to reflect that, in the contest between Jefferson and Adams in 1796, the electors were offered a choice between the president of the American Philosophical Society and the founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and chose both of them.”

Hitchens’s brief life is not a celebration of Jefferson in the manner of Jefferson’s great biographer Dumas Malone; indeed, Hitchens wishes he could, like Jefferson with the Bible, go through Malone’s volumes and cut out “all the superfluous, ridiculous and devotional parts,” especially those having to do with Malone’s exculpatory view of Jefferson and slavery. But neither is Hitchens’s book the kind of crude bashing of Jefferson that has become increasingly common among recent historians. Hitchens thinks Jefferson is a great man and, along with Lincoln, the only American whose life requires a biographer “to consider and reconsider the whole idea of the United States ab initio.” In fact, writes Hitchens, Jefferson is one of the few figures in American history “whose absence simply cannot be imagined: his role in the expansion and definition of the United States is too considerable, even at this distance, to be reduced by the passage of time.”

During the last decades of his life Jefferson became parochial and narrow, railing against the North and its nationalizing antislavery tendencies and fervently defending the South and its states’ rights protection of slavery. In effect, he gave himself over to “a slave power that he half-abominated.”

“This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament,” writes Hitchens, in the final and best line in the book, “is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale.”

Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way university professor and professor of history at Brown, and the author, most recently, of The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.