The Declaration of Independence, the most revered document to have been issued from the pen of Thomas Jefferson, contains both soaring rhetoric and serious constitutional arguments that the colonists had been making for over a decade. And Jefferson’s other writings similarly evince both a striking literary style and serious thought. In His Masterly Pen, Fred Kaplan admirably captures the former, but dismisses the latter.

I enjoyed reading and arguing with this book. The prose is engaging and the narrative style is well paced. Most readers with an interest in Jefferson will find it intriguing and provocative, but they should be warned that this is not a historical biography. It is rather a literary interpretation of Jefferson’s paper trail from his earliest forays in writing until his last compositions near death, and that distinction matters.

Kaplan is a talented writer in his own right and an expert in English literature. As such, his treatment makes a welcome addition to the puzzle that is Thomas Jefferson, but the work should be approached critically on matters of fact and interpretation. The tempo of the narrative moves quickly, lending a sense of immediacy to each moment that Jefferson puts pen to paper, and that is quite an accomplishment for a text that spans over five hundred pages. But part of the basis for that achievement rests in the fact that the story is grounded in the author’s present-day assumptions about politics, economics, and psychology. The narrative, therefore, isn’t burdened with all the surrounding encumbrances of qualification and argument that accompany a fuller historical treatment of time and place.

Among my chief concerns is the absence of any sustained attention to the political and cultural context out of which Jefferson’s thoughts and actions originate except in so far as such evidence supports the particular interpretive biases of the author. By focusing almost entirely on Jefferson’s own words, little time is given to filling out the much broader set of ideas, values, and concepts from which those texts arose. And where secondary historical material is cited, it is almost always to confirm the author’s specific viewpoints. How this problematizes the author’s narrative, I will go into, but first, let me say what Kaplan does well.

A Fresh Literary Assessment

Kaplan’s primary focus on Jefferson’s writings gives a freshness to his study that one rarely finds outside of a few specific treatments of particular pieces like The Declaration of Independence or the Notes on the State of Virginia. As a consequence, Kaplan is able to describe in greater detail the specific talents that made Jefferson exactly the right choice for the composition of the document announcing the colonies’ separation from the empire.

Jefferson’s capacity for logical philosophical thought and his ability to see the linkages in the various viewpoints informing the revolutionary moment are given their impressive due, discarding old tiresome assertions that he was merely plagiarizing or was somehow ancillary to the process of independence and the construction of America’s national narrative. As Kaplan writes, confirming the judgment of John Adams who had been on the committee charged with drafting the Declaration, “Jefferson’s discipline, eloquence, logical mind, and previous accomplishments helped make him the committee’s candidate for the assignment.” Those qualities allowed him to produce a document that was “philosophy, argument, and propaganda combined and raised to the highest level of political literature.”

Kaplan’s sympathies align almost entirely with Jefferson’s opposition throughout the length of the narrative.

Secondly, Kaplan illustrates well how those same powerful capacities for logical and philosophical thought had an equally powerful and darker flipside: The ability to compartmentalize and rationalize aspects of his life that did not comport well with his stated ideals. The talent for just the right rhetorical phrasing could also be readily translated into other idioms, such as landscaping, horticulture, and architecture, where Jefferson displayed a particular knack for avoiding confrontation with the realities he didn’t like. Monticello could thus become an elaborate orchestration to hide from Jefferson’s sight and the sight of his many visitors, the daily reality of owning other human beings, or as Kaplan writes, “His slaves were airbrushed out.” Individuals are complex, and Kaplan provides yet another wrinkle to that aspect of the character and abilities of the third president.

Presentism

But Kaplan’s treatment runs into difficulty precisely in those areas most important to historians.

Kaplan accepts the art and logic of the Declaration. It is, he writes, “concise, eloquent, forensically powerful, and emotionally resonant,” but when judging the document for its truth or historical accuracy, he leans altogether too far in the direction of propaganda. All of the author’s present-day sensibilities serve him ill when judging the facts and the ideas that were the basis for the opening paragraphs and the long list of grievances. This, to my mind, is where the interpretive framework of the book falls hard, not simply with regard to Jefferson, but the whole constitutional, political, and economic argument of the revolutionary movement.

Every one of the charges in the Declaration has, in point of historical fact, a basis in reality, but a reader not well versed in the history of the colonies would not know this from Kaplan’s account. And he is altogether too dismissive of the constitutional theory of the empire that informed the American understanding, paying virtually no attention at all to the specifics of the grievances.

Instead, Kaplan’s sympathies align almost entirely with Jefferson’s opposition throughout the length of the narrative. That point holds true whether we are speaking about the Tory arguments against the American cause in England or later Federalist arguments and policies during the early republic. For this reason, Kaplan is unable to fully appreciate the idea that there were unifying revolutionary principles or credit the sincerity of Jefferson’s later invocation of those principles as anything but self-serving.

Contrasting Jefferson’s Declaration with Samuel Johnson’s arch-Tory pamphlet, Taxation No Tyranny, issued in the year before independence, Kaplan writes that Johnson had “the more factual presentation than Jefferson of the historical justification for British rule of the colonies.” Indeed, as to the theory justifying separation, it was, according to Kaplan, merely a denial of the force and conquest that Johnson recognized as undergirding all titles to property in America. The Declaration, by that reading, was merely justification by “revolutionary proclamation,” and by “inference” was a denial of the reality of “the legal chain of ownership that had put [Americans] in possession [of the land] in the first place.” This idea has become an increasingly popular one in the current scholarship, but it is one-sided and inaccurate.

Without seriously examining the grievances and the legal theory behind the Declaration’s charges, such a pronouncement simply can’t be accepted as history. And it is not merely a matter of asserting particular facts, but of how those facts were understood, which is to say, how precedents were interpreted by contemporaries as either legally binding or not. An entire history of common law disputation and practice was in contention, but absent a discussion of these aspects, merely asserting the present-day state-centered modern view of power is unacceptable. But that appears to be an increasingly difficult point to get across today when people are more interested in signaling their judgments about the past than understanding it.

Political theory and even political economy of both the modern left and the right incline heavily to the idea that the modern, unitary state is the essential lynchpin of both social justice and economic power. In that view, Hamilton looms larger today than Jefferson in public estimation, and Kaplan’s instincts appear to embrace that tendency. Hamilton and Washington are thus credited with being “in favor of sufficiently energetic government to make the United States a successful and independent nation-state.” But Jefferson, who could only be appalled at the bank bill, the funding system, and Washington’s policy towards France, “became a deeply engaged oppositional politician rather than a loyal member of Washington’s team.”

What few secondary sources Kaplan cites in his page notations are those that tend to share these state-centered biases. Whether it is the pro-Hamiltonian view of finance as found in Robert Wright’s One Nation Under Debt, or the pro-British imperial interpretation of Andrew Roberts’ Last King of America, or Washington’s views on foreign policy in Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life, there is little sense of the wider historiographical debate. These are all serious historical works, but to lean so heavily on them as Kaplan appears to do, without developing the ideas of their critics, raises serious questions about the degree to which Kaplan appreciates the economic, political, and economic complexities of the time.

Narrative Over Facts

There may well have been a very practical consideration at work. To have developed the themes embedded in the grievances, and the ideas about independence that Jefferson referred to as the “Spirit of ’76,” would have dramatically slowed the narrative pace of the book. Instead, Kaplan’s style is to assert interpretation as fact and move on. Thus “the policies of Washington and Hamilton on the role of government and the economy” are seen to have “sketched out and sketched in America’s future.”

This old notion has been powerfully challenged by important historians of economics and economic thought, but you will search in vain for those views in Kaplan’s book. “Of course,” Kaplan has still to concede that “they [Washington and Hamilton], like Jefferson, would in the America of the twenty-first century find themselves strangers in a strange land, but Jefferson considerably more so.” Even that concession, however, is grounded on the belief that the modern reader will simply accept the premises of modern governmental control and management. Perhaps he’s right, but that is to accept the path of least resistance in the telling of a story. It is not to write history.

Another aspect of the same problem is Kaplan’s tendency to indulge in the use of modern terms to make explanatory connections, dropping words like “hormones” when raising matters of Jefferson’s thoughts on love and attachment or “syndicate” and “stakeholder” when discussing economics and land policy that jar historical sensibility. These were not terms typically used by contemporaries. It’s not that such words can’t be applied, but Kaplan offers little by way of justification and even sometimes makes them appear to come directly out of Jefferson’s mouth through the artful use of quotations.

By using “hormones,” he is building the case for a more emotionally amorous if awkward Jefferson. By deploying the concept, he seeds his psychological explanation while maintaining the pace of his story. That keeps the narrative brisk. But be warned and keep a wary eye out lest you assume a fact where none exists. The case for a more amorous Jefferson is a popular Hollywood trope, and the letters exchanged with Maria Cosway have lent themselves to just such a use. But even Kaplan has to admit that the relationship was never actually physically consummated.

One of the key reasons for raising this aspect of Jefferson’s life, however, is to prepare the ground for the assertion of a fact where none has actually been proven: the current popular interest in the relationship of Jefferson to his household bondswoman, Sally Hemmings.

Since the DNA study began at the end of the last century, the possibility of a sexual relationship has certainly become more probable, as the historian Lance Banning himself noted, but it has not been absolutely proven. Eston Hemmings was the child of a Jefferson male, but Jefferson never so much as acknowledged or in any way hinted at an amorous relationship with Eston’s mother, nor do the majority of reports by visitors and immediate family other than reports by later descendants of Sally, confirm such a relationship. What are we actually to make of this?

I would have been entirely satisfied if Kaplan had merely indicated some degree of qualification in his story, such as “most likely” or “probably.” Instead, Kaplan boldly asserts the facticity of the relationship without pause or hesitation. “He hosted and advised Lafayette and other political activists,” Kaplan writes nonchalantly of Jefferson’s trip to France, and “he brought his daughters to live at the Hotel de Langeac. He had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemmings. By March 1789, he had begun to write letters of farewell to friends who held a special place in his heart.”

There was a time, earlier in his life and on the eve of his composition of the Declaration, when Jefferson had made an actual and substantial effort to combat slavery in Virginia.

Admittedly, this telling makes for greater intrigue. Now one must put Jefferson’s lack of expression in the context of his powerful ability to compartmentalize and rationalize. As the narrative rolls on, Kaplan continues: “For Jefferson, 1795 seemed a year of blessings. Perhaps he considered the birth of a daughter by Sally Hemmings one of them. Maybe not.” The assertion permits Kaplan to run with a fairly disturbing sub-text.

Jefferson, it appears, wasn’t really serious in his opposition to slavery. His approach was bloodless, theoretical, and philosophical, but at base, insincere. He was, Kaplan writes, “seldom without thoughts and theories,” but slavery and all the other unpleasantries of his surroundings were successfully shut away and repressed: “He seemed not to notice that rural life had at least its proportional share of crime, including rape, incest, sexual abuse of children, other forms of domestic abuse, drunkenness, drunken violence, sober violence, revenge violence, and murder.” At root was a deep-seated almost mystical psychological impulse that made land ownership paramount in Jefferson’s Virginia, where “one became the possession of the land one possessed.”

Life Without Slavery?

Kaplan seems to have adopted this idea in part from T. H. Breen’s 1985 work, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters, but he powerfully extends the imagery through the artful application of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Gift Outright.” It is the notion that American settlers somehow just believed that the land was theirs even before occupation. They were possessed by the land and were, ultimately, to possess it. And that impulse does much of the heavy lifting for Kaplan’s explanation of the peculiar disconnects between Jefferson’s ideals and his actual practices.

“Slaves were part of the land,” Kaplan writes. “They were possessions, inseparable from the soil and buildings. Jefferson built Monticello as an act of possession. Eventually, it possessed him. He owned slaves as a necessary component of the wealth his land created. His slaves, as extensions of the land, also possessed him.” And he drives that theme relentlessly through the whole narrative.

Thus, Kaplan writes, “Personally, he [Jefferson] never seems to have considered life as a non-slave owner. It was a practical and psychological impossibility.” By the second half of the book, where Kaplan considers Jefferson’s incomplete translation of Condorcet’s writings against slavery, a task Jefferson apparently undertook for the sake of posterity and not his own generation, Kaplan comments that “slavery remained an essential reality of his time and place. Life as he had known it and as he expected it to be for some time did not admit of an alteration in its psychological and economic structure.”

But that is not quite correct. There was a time, earlier in his life and on the eve of his composition of the Declaration, when Jefferson had indeed made an actual and substantial effort to combat the institution in Virginia. But Kaplan misses the moment and mentions the attempt only very briefly and at the very end of his book, without elaboration or explanation. He fails to cast his historical net wide enough, and that omission arises from the very same limitation that constrains his view of the American constitutional and political arguments discussed earlier. One might say, Kaplan gets about two-thirds of the intellectual milieu of Jefferson’s intellectual world.

From William Small, Kaplan gains a fairly good sense of the origins of Jefferson’s thoughts on philosophy and Scottish moral theory. From his attention to the mentorship of George Wyth, Kaplan gets to Jefferson’s grounding in legal procedures, the law of property, and the history of the common law. But you will find no discussion of the mentorship of Richard Bland in the House of Burgesses dealing with the imperial constitution, local legislative jurisdictions, and antislavery.

It was from Bland that Jefferson acquired his understanding of the importance of local representative bodies within the imperial order. It was from Bland that he took his basic view of distinct colonial jurisdictions, self-government, and taxation, separate from the English Parliament. And that case was far from unusual, impractical, or ill-founded, Samuel Johnson and Fred Kaplan notwithstanding. Bland’s argument was in fact the very same line of reasoning that united Jefferson with the other major actors of his day from James Otis to John Adams and from John Dickinson to James Wilson. It obtained its fullest expression in both the Summary View of the Rights of British America and the Declaration.

But perhaps even more interesting for present-day readers, Bland was also a powerful voice for constraining the practice of slavery in Virginia. In that first and sadly ill-fated attempt to make emancipation easier and extend to slaves certain protections of due process, a young Thomas Jefferson was Bland’s enthusiastic cosponsor. There was, then, a time when a younger Thomas Jefferson could indeed think of the possibility of life without slaves.

The result did not work out well for his more senior co-sponsor, who up until that time, had enjoyed one of the most prominent reputations in the Old Dominion, established during his powerful opposition to the Stamp Act a decade earlier. The effort to set slavery on the road to gradual abolition in 1769 nearly destroyed Bland’s career. But Jefferson continued to value his mentor’s guidance, and as historian Kevin Gutzman points out, he credited the elder stateman with being the “foremost expert on constitutional matters he ever knew. (Recall that Jefferson’s best friend and ally was James Madison.)” Indeed, when Bland passed away in 1776, Jefferson sought to acquire a large portion of his famed library.

It should come as little surprise then that Kaplan gives the American case for independence so little credit, and this applies not only to the grievances retained by Congress in the final draft of the Declaration, but also to the grievance omitted about slavery and the slave trade. The charge of English duplicity in the fostering of the peculiar institution and the commerce in human beings that made it possible was not false. It was an argument well known to Franklin who had published an essay on it nearly five years before the Declaration and it was a history once well known to an older generation of historians, as I have noted elsewhere.

The king had on several occasions interdicted colonial attempts to tax, regulate, and prohibit the trade in slaves for the sake of preserving and extending the interests of the Royal Africa Company. But Kaplan, breathing deeply of the wafting winds of modern monarchical sympathy, inexplicably asserts, once more without qualification, that “the claim that the Crown was responsible for the existence of slavery in the colonies had no basis in fact.”

Despite these drawbacks, I suspect Kaplan’s work will attract a substantial following simply because of his masterly pen. His analysis of Jefferson’s literary abilities will be rightly prized as a significant addition to our understanding of Jefferson’s important role in the articulation of America’s revolutionary ideals. But to properly situate those abilities and ideas in time and place, the reader will have to look elsewhere.

Sadly, the mode of citation is not conducive to that endeavor. I do not know whether this was the choice of the publisher or the author, but the references at the end of the book list, almost exclusively, sources quoted per page. Consequently, much of the interpretive framework is left to the reader to discover independently, and with very little reference to critical secondary literature. I have tried to indicate a few possible links to such sources above. My worry is that many will not follow through with such extra-curricular reading but merely assume to be facts what are really only Kaplan’s interpretations. That would be a shame.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.