Lewis Simpson is a professor emeritus of American literature at Louisiana State University and served for 25 years as editor of The Southern Review. His books include The Brazen Face of History, The Fable of the Southern Writer, and The Mind and the American Civil War.
What draws you to Thomas Jefferson?
I don't know precisely, but I've been interested in Jefferson, of course, for years. I think it's, more than anything else, the quality of his mind and also his writing, his remarkable writing. And in my interpretation of Jefferson, I've sometimes called him a poet because he had that quality of the poet and he had, sometimes, a melodramatic imagination. All of his more powerful writings, they have a distinct poetic quality. Of course that derives probably from his study of rhetoric more than the study of poetry formally, but he did study prosody, he wrote an essay on prosody. Jefferson was quite an accomplished literary person.
How do you reconcile the man who wrote the magic words of America and who owned other human beings?
Well, that's the great problem with Jefferson, of course, and it's an endless and complicated problem. And I don't know that I've ever solved it and I don't think anybody can solve it. But Jefferson had certain ideas about slavery and the evil of slavery that he never abandoned despite the fact that he was a slaveowner all of his life and freed almost none of his slaves, except for five he did free in his will. He was dependent on slavery, dependent on it economically. And I think in some ways he was dependent on it psychologically. It was part of his life and part of the whole ambiance of the life he was brought up into. I sometimes think of a story of an old Southerner who ran a plantation—I think it was in 1830s—who had a certain woman on the plantation, a slave woman, who had had a child and he said, "I named him Thomas Jefferson for that great apostle of liberty." So naming a slave Thomas Jefferson for the great apostle of liberty—that's the sort of thing you get when you try to deal with enigma you're talking about.
Is the story of Thomas Jefferson a mirror of the story of America?
Oh, certainly, certainly. And, of course as far as race is concerned, there is a profound racial dimension in Southern slavery, ante-bellum slavery. I mean, in America slavery was different from any place it had ever been before in the history of the world. It was a peculiar thing. But Jefferson, of course, believed implicitly that the Africans were inferior, that they were human beings but they were inferior human beings. And he documented this in a number of his writings, including the Notes on the State of Virginia—in which, however, you find probably his most profound denunciation of slavery as well. In the 18th query in the Notes on the State of Virginia, there is a really remarkable, almost sudden outbreak by Jefferson in which he denounces slavery not so much altogether for its effect on the lives of the slaves but for its effect on the lives of the masters. And he sees slavery as essentially destroying not only manners but basically mind itself and making a mockery of all the ideals that he expressed, say, in the Declaration of Independence.
The plantation culture has been the crucible of liberty....
I've used his own home, Monticello, as the symbol of the 18th century—for what was once called the "republic of letters." He had a library there of 6,000 books. He had all kinds of paintings. He had all kinds of scientific things. It was something like a museum in a way. There were things from the Lewis and Clark expedition and whatnot.... All these things that intensely interested Jefferson. There was almost nothing that Jefferson didn't know. At that time in history, it was possible for a man of his genius and learning to know about everything.
All provided for, though, by slave culture....
And provided for by slave culture in the sense that it was essential to his living. Of course Jefferson was perpetually broke or at least perpetually in debt, partly because of the Revolution and debts that were incurred when he sold some of his wife's property and so on. And he got in debt and he never got out of it. Finally, I think he was completely bankrupt at the end of his life. But still, slavery was a necessity. And that's why, in one graphic entry in his correspondence—I think it was directly to one of the overseers five or six years before his death—he's arguing that the slave women should not be worked in the fields if they were pregnant, that what was in their womb was a lot more valuable than the labor in the fields, you see, because you could sell the child. In other words, slavery in American was a commodity. A slave could be sold, unlike the peasant in Europe, who belonged to the land.
Do you forgive Thomas Jefferson for this paradox?
I do because I try to understand things historically and I have a strong belief in the fact that everything is historical. That's of course a kind of relativism, but I think that if you try to understand Jefferson in the context of the history of America, particularly the history of the South, that's the way in which you can understand these contradictions. And they're everywhere in Jefferson. He was a very contradictory man. I notice that once Merrill Peterson somewhere refers to Jefferson as, "a man thinking." Well, 'a man thinking' is a phrase that I think he got from Emerson. But there was a strange resemblance in a way between Emerson and Jefferson as I've argued sometimes in that Emerson said that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Jefferson had many contradictions but, in a way, he had those because he had such an ample mind.
So even those others freed their slaves, and Jefferson never could—that should not trouble us?
Oh, I think it should trouble us because it brings up the whole question of the nature of liberty. You also have to realize that Jefferson did have a strongly held belief or scientific theory, as he referred to it, in the inferiority of the Africans. Now American Indians, quite different. He regarded them as equals, so to speak. But the question of the inferiority of one race to another is a very old belief and he bought into that because he believed in the great chain of being. We don't use that belief much anymore, but that's the idea that everything is placed in a chain by the Creator. And Jefferson, of course, believed in God. He was not an atheist as many said. He was a deist and he believed in God the great Creator. So he believed in the great chain of being and he believed in the design in which some races had been created inferior to others, I guess you'd say. So that was always a part of it. And he believed if there was emancipation, it had to be through colonization—that you could not leave the former slaves in this country. They must be placed beyond the reach of mixture, he said.
If you could be a fly on the wall.....
I think that one of the most graphic moments must have been when he was inaugurated the first time as president. When you think about Jefferson's inaugural address, you have to remember that he really wasn't much of a public speaker. He apparently had great difficulty with public speaking. And at the same time, he understood rhetoric and his writings in a way are all influenced greatly by his knowledge of oratory. And when he wrote the Declaration of Independence according to some students he was really writing it to be read. In those days, the word "published" could include reading as well as print. You were in this period when you're emerging out of the age of the voice into the age of print. So Jefferson in a way commanded all of the skills of the orator except he just didn't have the presence and the voice of the orator. But I would like to have heard him give that very dramatic first inauguration address.
Sally Hemings.
Well, the Sally Hemings story is one that has haunted Jefferson ever since being accused by this really dastardly person named James Callender, who was worse than most of the tabloid people today, of course. But Jefferson was not blameless in the sense of being associated with Callender because he had used Callender for certain purposes himself during the days before he was elected President, in all that desperate time. So then when Callender didn't get the preference from Jefferson that he thought he should get, he got mad and, among other things, he created pretty much out of whole cloth the Sally Hemings story. He also got onto a story which had some substance about a Mrs. Walker, a woman with whom Jefferson had been sort of infatuated for a long time, and Jefferson even admitted that finally.
But what do we do with Sally Hemings?
I don't know except that since you can't factually prove or disprove it, you have to resort to Jefferson's character and it seems to me that the whole thing is a great libel on Jefferson's character, that everything that Jefferson did in his life repudiates that story about Sally. And it's been exploited for various reasons down through the years either by people who are just plain against Jefferson or by other people who want to exploit romanticism of one sort or another, you know, about a great man. So you have then the constant use of that story in one way or another, but Fawn Brodie's book was the one that really set it off.
Tell me about the University of Virginia.
Well, that was one of the things he wanted to put on his tombstone: that he was the father of the University of Virginia. He first advanced the idea publicly, seriously, in 1805, and then later came back to it with the whole scheme of education he had for the state of Virginia in 1814. And he conceived a plan for the education of all Virginians—I mean men of course— which was a stratified system of schools ending with the University which the best minds would attend, what he called the aristocracy of intellect. He had no use for blooded aristocracy, you know. But the aristocracy of intellect would come to the University of Virginia. They would become, you see, the statesmen and the leaders of the country.
Was this the place to hide planters' sons from the developing argument over slavery?
It really wasn't a place to hide anybody, at least in the sense of his conception of the mind. He believed implicitly that God, as he said, "hath created the mind free." And the University was to be an embodiment of that. It was to be, in other words, an embodiment of the whole idea of the republic of letters which Jefferson referred to as the great fraternity of learning, with knowledge and independent ideas spread everywhere. So the University would be a great symbol of that. But ironically, as the whole thing developed, you had the great struggle about the Missouri question, and Jefferson began to be more and more defensive, more and more concerned by what he thought was consolidation of federal control. So he was very much concerned that you have a place in which the youth of Virginia could go to school and there imbibe the right principles which were partly the principles, that he had stood for.
How are we to finally understand Thomas Jefferson?
I think of the Declaration of Independence as our one great poem. It's the great American poem. Everybody subscribes to it in a way. If you accept those ideas, which we all do, about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and so on, you do so on a very strong emotional basis. In spite of the fact that Jefferson was a great man of reason, he was also a man of great emotion. So you really accept the Declaration as he intended it to be accepted—as a very emotional argument in a great poem in which he itemizes all those things against the king when the king really, of course, did not have a great deal of power actually. But it's a powerful document, a very powerful document, one of the most powerful ever written. So when Lincoln came along, at that climactic moment at Gettysburg, he conceived of this small speech, a little shorter than the Declaration, in which he epitomized the struggle for freedom in America. And he seizes that moment—again, out of great poetic sense of America, a poetic sense of liberty and poetic sense of justice.
So you see Jefferson as a Founding Father but also as a poet of America.
You have to realize, of course, that Jefferson's sense of the individual is implicit in the Declaration and the autonomy of the self is probably the great American theme. It remained for Walt Whitman finally, to state it, and when Whitman talks about the "destiny of me," well, this is one of our greatest problems, also one of our greatest strengths—our belief in the autonomy of the individual and the individual identity.
So Whitman again is the key to Jefferson. He contains multitudes....
I think Jefferson is the key to so much. If you move beyond the point of considering Jefferson politically and get into the power of his writing and the power of his mind, I think you do come to the conclusion that he had a great poetic hold on the American imagination. He's a very difficult man to live with, just as the ideas in the Declaration are very difficult to live with, but they are absolutely the basis of our life and even though the Constitution is supposedly what we live by and the Declaration really has no legal status, it's the great poem. It's the poem by which we've lived.
Are all men created equal?
Well, I think Jefferson believed in a sense that they were created equal. I don't think he really intended to equate equality and freedom, and that's been the central problem always with us. How do you relate freedom to equality? Jefferson obviously, in his scheme of education, did not believe that all minds are equal—because he didn't conceive of everybody being a member of an aristocracy of intellect. So he didn't really subscribe to equality in a sense that everybody's equal to everybody else but that was the idea that began to be very strongly asserted in America by the 1830s and 40s, of course.
For Jefferson, who wins, the Head or the Heart?
Of course you're referring to that famous letter he wrote to Maria Cosway. I don't know. I was reading that over again the other day. I'm not sure who wins but I would think the heart wins, the way it all works around. And of course, the whole mode of the life of the time in which you could carry on a flirtation with somebody in a serious way and yet not get too serious. And I don't think anything ever happened there, really, except Jefferson was greatly attracted to her. I don't think there was any real liaison between the two. So he was yielding to his heart, but I think that there is a tension between the head and the heart throughout his life. And that, of course, is frequently talked about in the 18th century, the head and the heart business, and on down into the 19th century.
Do you think Jefferson is aware of the personal conflict within himself or is he blind to the paradoxes?
I've often wondered about the sense of irony in Jefferson. As I've wondered about the whole question of the sense of evil in Jefferson. Did he really have any sense of the evil in man? He wouldn't seem to. And in Robert Penn Warren's famous poem"Brother to Dragons," Warren seems to be saying in a sense that, "I'm going to save Thomas Jefferson's soul by giving him a sense of evil," you know, "and by making him realize that man is not a perfectible creature," and so on. But I think Jefferson had some sense of irony. He really was very much opposed to institutions. He seemed to feel that all institutions throughout history had coerced man, had ridden man, and that you wanted to be as free of institutionalism as you could.
And yet this man continued to support the peculiar institution of slavery.
I think more and more as time went on, his support of slavery was not so much connected with the question of freedom. Later on, in the history of the South, you find in the pro-slavery arguments that slavery is a necessity of our freedom, that you can't have freedom without slavery. Well, Jefferson never quite goes into that state of mind, but he believed that the whole question of slavery was tied up with that of states' rights, as we say. And slavery became so tied up with that in his mind that it was hard for him to divorce slavery. He always believed in the immorality of slavery but still accepted it, apparently, as both a political and an economic necessity.
So is this paradox echoed throughout American history?
Jefferson never ceased to hope that slaves would be emancipated, but except for the colonization idea, he never had any idea about how to do it. He even had this ridiculous notion at one point late in his life that he could somehow sell public lands in the West, and all that money could be used to compensate slave owners for their slaves, and then they could all be transported to Haiti, recolonized in Haiti, you see. Well, it's obviously a crazy notion. That wouldn't work at all. But he still believed in emancipation. He believed in freeing slaves, that they could be freed. And yet he saw that, as he put it, he had the wolf by the ears. Slavery was like the wolf—you couldn't let go without really endangering everything, you see. So the question of morality and slavery was always a problem with him, and he seems to have resolved it at times just by saying rather pragmatically, "Well, we've got to live with it for awhile. We'll eventually get rid of it."
It seems so hard to tolerate that evil pragmatism on the part of the man who wrote this great poem for us.
It is. It is indeed. And when you get down to it, you know, perhaps you can't really ever quite resolve that contradiction. It's there. It lives with us all the time. It's part of our whole being. But within these tensions, I think, is in a way where we have our freedom. As long as we can keep the tensions. And Jefferson believed very strongly in the freedom of the press, you know. He would put up with all kinds of things without trying to quash the press, say, as John Adams did. He really never tried to do that at all even though, God, you know, they called him everything under the sun. So he believed in the freedom, he believed in the efficacy of the ideas always. And, in a way, that, of course, is what we all subscribe to because America is, after all, an idea. A great idea. We live with that. But we have all kinds of difficulties in living with it. All kinds of tensions that we have to reconcile ourselves to. And when we don't, then we're really in trouble. And a civil war came along because we could no longer reconcile these tensions.
So you're saying that really, the good or the bad of it doesn't matter, that we find ourselves suspended in the irony.
Well, I'm talking about freedom. That irony is a necessity of freedom. If you don't have an ironic mind, I doubt if you can ever truly be free, if any of us can be free in any full sense. But we have to have an ironic attitude in order to be free, don't we?
Do you like Thomas Jefferson as a man?
I've often wondered what it would have been like to meet Jefferson. I suppose, you know, that for a person today to meet someone like Thomas Jefferson, or George Washington, or John Adams, would be really be a kind of shock because it was a different world in many ways. But we can still relate to it basically because it's our world, because that's where we come from. But I don't know what it would be like personally to sit down and talk to Thomas Jefferson.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think the inclination would be to ask him some of these very questions about why did you support slavery all of your life. I doubt if you'd want to be that frank. But, still, that would be what you'd want to ask him since that's the question we ask so much today. How could he support slavery and still be the author of the Declaration of Independence? It's a very fundamental question. And the Civil War involves the whole question of the nature of man and the Civil War was really fought about the nature of man because America was founded on a revolutionary conception of the nature of man, the first government in history that has ever developed the idea that you should separate church and state. So that, who's going to control the morals of the country if you don't have an official Church? It puts everything onto the individual finally. And Jefferson was willing to accept that—that the individual mind, the individual heart is the final arbiter of all matters relating to religion, philosophy and so on. He was willing to accept the will of the majority as he understood the majority in his time. Of course, the voting franchise had not been extended too far.
So we've also in the tension had to put up with the terrible by-products as well as the wonderful by-products of this responsibility.
Right. We have indeed. And those tensions, as I say, really led to the Civil War in the sense that you couldn't any longer reconcile certain tensions that had developed. And particularly, they had to get down to the fundamentals about the nature of man. All through the centuries men had owned each other. Well, the Revolution and the conception of the nature of man that had occurred in the 18th century that produced the Declaration of Independence went against that, man now being able to do for himself what for centuries had been assumed he must rely on the authority of the Church and the State to do. Then, you see, you have a very different conception of what man is able to do. And we've had to somehow reconcile that with the whole question of, how do we get along in society? Who's going to be the authority?
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