Americanism Redux
April 9, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1776
WATCH HERE
A knot is one thing. A knot made up of hundreds of threads is quite another.
It takes patience, time, and great care to do the untangling, the pulling apart and laying aside.
Where do you go when you need to sort it all out? What will you need to get it done?
And is it okay if a massive throbbing pain beats away in your brain while you’re trying the untying?
* * * * * * *
(what a migraine looks like)
It’s today, 250 years ago, and once again, hour by hour and day by day, Thomas Jefferson feels awful. A later age will call “migraines” what he’s labeled as “head achs”. He’s back from Philadelphia at his home in Virginia, in the living space he calls Monticello, or “little mountain”. At 860 feet above sea level and overlooking waves of green hills and thick forests, he ought to be feeling serene, the right state for knot undoing.
But he’s not, and in fact, the opposite is true. From one task to another, his head hurts. Dawn to dusk, his head hurts. Seven days a week, his head hurts. He might as well be back in Philadelphia where his chair as a Virginia delegate in the Continental Congress sits empty.
* * * * * * *
(Jane, his mom)
Why the migraine? Hard to say, really. Thirty-two years old, tall and lanky, healthy and athletic, Jefferson has shown some slight tendency toward these headaches. This one now, however, is the worst he’s had.
Possibly it’s personal trauma. His mother died two weeks ago. Though they weren’t especially close, his mother’s death has happened in a period when destruction, chaos, and the likelihood of dying are all commonplace these days. Jefferson knows his wife’s health is also tenuous, and he’s increasingly worried that his family could be vulnerable to attacks by British armed forces. He’s already wrestling with the need to bring his wife and daughter to Philadelphia when he returns to the Continental Congress later in the spring. Whatever his final decision, death is personally present for Jefferson and is poised to strike again. He can’t know for sure and the ache pounds in his head.
* * * * * * *
(Mulberry Row)
The specter of death and upheaval could spark from among the two hundred enslaved men, women, and children of Mulberry Row, the section of Jefferson’s mountaintop estate where they eat, sleep, love, rest, and worship when they’re not working at whatever task they’ve ordered to do. They include Elizabeth Hemmings and her six children—at least one of whom, young Sally, is actually related to Jefferson’s wife through his deceased father-in-law, their enslaver—Ursula Granger with her husband and their one-year old child, and the Hern family of woodworkers and wheelwrights.
Jefferson’s head throbs from knowing that any of these enslaved people might turn against him and accept the call to attack their enslavers by former Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore. Any dawn and any dusk could be the setting for a sudden revolt among these forced laborers of Monticello.
He’s deeply aware of what he’s doing. To seek freedom on one hand and take it away with the other, Jefferson understands the clash that he’s holding. It darkens his heart and troubles his mind.
* * * * * * *
There are occasional breaks in the pain.
An avid horseman, Jefferson has helped one of his prize mares birth her foal. Wet and shaky and all legs in the straw, the new-born horse is now up and strong, staying close to its mother. Jefferson is nearly as watchful, and as proud, as the mare. Meanwhile, another set of four legs can be seen in the fields—that’s the new white-tailed deer that Jefferson has had brought to his estate to populate the enclosed meadows. From horse to deer, Jefferson loves the grace, the elegance, the poetic motion of these animals. He has both an eye and an ear for beauty and the exalted.
* * * * * * *
The sense of beauty that deflects Jefferson’s pain is further seen in the work done now on his actual home, another of his loves and passions. He’s constantly altering, adjusting, adding, tinkering, and reworking its layout and appearance. The creativity and re-creativity enliven his spirit. He’s an artist who masters the dividing of space into interior and exterior, shaping one from the other so that each unites in a visual, and visceral, harmony.
* * * * * * *
Somewhat surprisingly in light of his migraines, Jefferson is willing to pour himself a taste of his favorite Madeira, of which he’d lately purchased more than a hundred gallons of a 1770 vintage. A sip here of nuttiness, a taste there of burned sweetness, the pleasure reminds him of his humanity, a momentary triumph against the power of these infernal pains in his head.
* * * * * * *
At least one cause for gratitude is that the migraines didn’t hit him earlier after arriving at Monticello. Thankfully for him, Jefferson was able to write an essay he considered urgent. It’s entitled “Refutation of the Argument that the Colonies were Established at the Expense of the British Nation”.
Jefferson’s writing aimed to refute a claim by British King George III in a speech where he asserted the British nation alone had created and supported the colonies. Offended, Jefferson listed and summarized various expeditions to Virginia that were private ventures, each with settlements launched with their own efforts. He concluded that a monarch who would lie about such a thing was one that deserved whatever horrible fate might come.
Both the king and his prime minister, Jefferson concluded in the essay, would deserve what they got.
* * * * * * *
(riding to an encounter)
It was Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, not the migraines, that affected Jefferson’s essay. A few weeks after he finished his writing, Jefferson received a copy of Paine’s booklet. Paine’s forty-six pages compelled Jefferson to take up a new course of action. He began an informal project of encountering people and asking them for their views on separation and independence. These weren’t mini-debates or micro-arguments; he wanted to ask them and then quietly listen to their replies and explanations. He kept a running tally in his head—a chore indeed with his migraines—so as to gain a view of local public opinion. With Paine’s work burning its way through the Virginia Tidewater, Jefferson saw that his most important action was to learn more deeply about the impact and implications of “Common Sense”.
An impression crowded into Jefferson’s mind alongside the throbbing pain. Where he’d offered pinpoints, Paine stoked a furnace. Where he’d listed invoked old names and events, Paine hurled burning torches into a dried-up world. Where he’d called up the feeling of courtrooms and witness chairs, Paine stood on tabletops and knocked over tankards. Where he’d criticized a remark by a king, Paine had laid waste to the idea of a king at all.
No wonder, then, that as of today, 250 years ago, Jefferson’s essay lays quietly in a private space of Monticello.
* * * * * * *
Behind his eyes and in the front of his head, the pain remains with Thomas Jefferson.
Also
(Goethe)
At his new home in Weimar (modern Germany) 27-year old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has started his work as a councilor in local public administration. He’s continuing his writings as part of the “Sturm und Drang”—storm and stress—movement in central Europe. This style of literary work emphasizes the most extreme and outlandish forms of emotion and passion. The individual occupies the highest place of importance in the plots of “Sturm und Drang” literature. Moreover, the actions of an individual are allowed to overturn and violate objective fact and objectivity. That which is natural and authentic is preferred to that which is artificial and inorganic. In style and substance, Sturm und Drang is an echo of life unfolding on the western side of the Atlantic.
Yet Goethe feels himself slowly shifting into a calmer life with his new political responsibilities, that of a builder and a tender rather than a destroyer and over-turner.
For You Now
Thomas Jefferson has zero awareness that within three months he’ll be the primary author of a document that will be celebrated 250 years later in both the United States and around the world. He also doesn’t know that these migraines will return periodically for the rest of his life.
All he knows in his space of Monticello is that beyond the pain are the great sources of happiness in his life, and that among them is a desire to know more clearly what’s going on in the world around him, the world of which he is part. Thus, he seeks to converse and to understand the conversant.
In the sorting out at Monticello, in the great untying, Jefferson releases himself from a role and set of actions that have steadily tightened around him at the Continental Congress. By loosening the knot to the point of disconnection, he’s not opening a package. He’s opening himself and he’s the contents of what’s inside. To not do so, to leave the knot where it was, would have been to close himself off to the next series of opportunities and chances that could come his way. He couldn’t reach out if he can’t extend, and he can’t extend if he’s still bound up. Every talk with a Paine reader was the movement of a thread loosening the bond.
Little of this was easy or pleasant. Jefferson was in pain. I wonder, though, if the source of that pain was in his cumulative fear that he’d receded into the background of what was going on, that his contributions had grown stale and crusty. From death of family to the drift of an essay’s purpose, the inability to see a fresher involvement laid him low.
Could this be a point for you?
Yes. Singular and away from the spotlight though it is, take up the thrust of Jefferson’s moment. He does not let the pain prevail or prevent—it does not prevail in defining the future ahead, and it does not prevent him from finding a position for making a major contribution in the future ahead. He seeks to stay involved, engaged, active and open to what he learns from other people and where such learning will carry him into the future.
It’s a time of untying.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: are you untangling anything right now?
(Your River)
