Sublime

It would be gilding the lily somewhat for me to try to talk too much about this, so I’ll just say that author/artist Maira Kalman visited Monticello and captured the experience in one of her trademark picture-essay blog entries, entitled “Time Wastes Too Fast.”  It is, in the words of one commenter, “sublime.”  And the comments on her entry (379 and counting) are the most remarkable outpouring of emotion about Jefferson that I’ve ever seen.  You must see this thing.

Whacked another mole

True Story:

In 1820-something, John Adlum, one of America’s first wine geeks and sometime correspondent of our TJ’s, writes to his friend Nicholas Longworth, “In bringing this grape [by which he meant the Catawba] into public notice, I have rendered my country a greater service, than I would have done, had I paid the national debt.”  Twenty years later, in corresponding with one C.W. Elliott, Longworth repeats Adlum’s comment.  Elliott publishes his correspondence with Longworth – including Adlum’s comment – in The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste.  The comment is also subsequently published in all sorts of fora, including Patent Office documents, wine encyclopedia, and other journals.

Fast-forward to 2009: every single wine website on the planet is trumpeting the quote, “By making this wine vine known to the public, I have rendered my country as great a service as if I had enabled it to pay back the national debt…”  – Thomas Jefferson

How did this come to be attached to Jefferson?  As I said, he did correspond with Adlum, and on the subject of wine.  Perhaps someone saw the statement out of its original context and assumed it appeared somewhere in Adlum’s letters to Jefferson – a not-unreasonable assumption, actually.  It’s only a short leap from there to attaching the statement to Jefferson himself.  Generally speaking, I suspect that the obscure and feeble chain of this quote’s true genealogy was no match for the gravitational pull of Planet Jefferson.

CSI: Natchez Trace

As I believe I mentioned in a previous blog post, this fall will mark the 200th anniversary of Meriwether Lewis’s untimely and weird death on the Natchez Trace.  To prepare for the momentous occasion, I felt the need to read up on the whole debate on the nature of his death: was it suicide, or murder, or something else?  Since at work I have the attention span of a gnat, I am having to keep my background reading cursory, and so my program consists entirely of reading By His Own Hand? The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis, ed. John D.W. Guice (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).  A few weeks ago I read the chapter on the case for suicide, after which I firmly believed Lewis killed himself; yesterday morning I read the chapter on the case for homicide.  Unfortunately I have to say that I don’t think that this second chapter is as well-argued as the first, but after reading it I will say that I’m not prepared to entirely dismiss the possibility of homicide.   Mostly because it seems a little hard to believe that someone could manage to shoot themselves twice with .69-caliber bullets, using a 14 1/2-inch-long pistol, then stagger around still alive for hours afterward.  I’m just saying.

Others are even more adamant in their skepticism about the suicide theory.  There was a recent article in the local paper about a group of collateral Lewis descendants who are petitioning the federal government to have Lewis’s body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed on whatever remains, er, remain.  Lewis’s grave lies inside the boundaries of a national park, and so far the government seems less than keen on allowing poor Lewis to be dug up.  I can’t really blame them, I suppose – don’t want to encourage all the distasteful furor and so forth.  Of course, it’s already kind of a circus.  Maybe they should just give up and hire Geraldo to come and preside over the exhumation. Of course, then they’re sure to open up the coffin and find nothing but a bunch of buttons.  Perhaps some whisky bottles.

One of the rather fascinating things about this debate is not necessarily the subject matter itself, but the people doing the arguing, their attitudes towards the whole thing, and how they’re viewed by their opponents and others.  My basic impression is that, historically, the suicide theory has always enjoyed wider and more mainstream acceptance, while the murder theory has a bit of the wacky underdog about it.  The two sides were rather dramatically personified in one incident recounted in my reading yesterday – a rather snippy exchange of letters in the 1960s between Julian Boyd, original editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, and Vardis Fisher, author of Suicide or Murder?.  Boyd apparently took exception to Fisher’s quotation of him in his work, or his criticism of Jefferson (maybe both).  Fisher retorted that Boyd had an “idolatrous attitude towards Jefferson.”  (Er, he was kind of right there.)

Anyway, tune in next week, or whenever I get the chance, for my humble opinion on what happened to Meriwether Lewis, based on superficial reading and no subject expertise whatsoever!

Alcorans, and the acquisition thereof

Since I set up my Google Alert, which allows me to track when new mentions of “Thomas Jefferson” appear on the Internet, I’ve been amazed to see that there is almost always a tiny little wave of rhetorical consultations of TJ in reaction to each big news story.  In essence, every time something big happens, people start asking themselves and others, “What would Thomas Jefferson do/say/think about this?” and quoting his writings on the topic and talking about how he dealt with similar problems.  TJ apparently had lots to say about the recent bank crisis; he had the solution to the Somali pirate issue (“just send Stephen Decatur after them!”); and there’s been all sorts of invoking of Himself’s name in response to President Obama’s mention of Jefferson owning a copy of the Qur’an.

I am astonished, however, to find people out there in the Internet World claiming that the “real reason” Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an was so he could “study his enemy.”   Now, I’m no Jefferson-and-his-Qur’an expert, but, as my sister used to say, “I fail to see the logic underlying that conclusion.”

This topic was of course very hot when Congressman Keith Ellison had himself sworn into office using Jefferson’s copy of the Qur’an in 2006.  At the time there was all sorts of news reportage – really, all the kerfuffle seemed positively prurient – and a flurry of questions sent to us about it.  We really we didn’t have much to say about it except what was in the Sowerby Catalogue.  So I decided it was time to have another look at this, and spent a merry 30 minutes discussing this with my colleague Endrina, who has been working on the Jefferson’s Libraries project ever since I’ve known her.  Anyway, here’s what we know – and do not know – about Jefferson’s Qur’an:

• Jefferson’s purchase of a copy of George Sale’s Alcoran is recorded in the daybooks of the Virginia Gazette on October 5, 1765, for 1 pound, 6 shillings.
• Jefferson was studying law at this time under George Wythe in Williamsburg.
• It is possible that this very book survived the 1770 fire at Jefferson’s family estate of Shadwell and is the selfsame book now at the Library of Congress, and used by Keith Ellison.   By Jefferson’s own admission, very few of his books survived the 1770 fire.  It is also possible that the book Jefferson purchased in 1765 was destroyed five years later and he later purchased another identical copy of the Qur’an; we haven’t found any record of such a purchase, however, so we really can’t say for certain.
• We do not know for certain why he purchased it. No clear evidence has yet to be revealed on this subject.  There are no known letters where Jefferson explicitly discusses his purchase of a Qur’an.  His main instructor, George Wythe, is not known to have had a copy; the presence of a Qur’an in Wythe’s library might suggest that Wythe considered it an important text for study and may have suggested or required that Jefferson read it as well.

The only substantial scholarly treatment of this specific topic that I’m aware of is Kevin Hayes’ 2004 article in Early American Literature, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an.”  Hayes suggests that Jefferson’s primary motivation in purchasing the Qur’an was his interest in it as a legal text.  This seems highly plausible to me.  What does not seem plausible is that, 21 years before he encountered a representative of an Islamic country in a professional capacity, he 1) decided that he considered Muslims his “enemy” and 2) conceived of a need to study their main religious text so as to be better equipped for conflict with them.

An Incidental Architect and his Disgruntled Wife

First off, apologies (again) for the lackadaisical nature of my blogging in the last few weeks.  I fear the pace may slow down a bit as we enter the busy months of summer.

So, on with the business: just minutes ago I received a book which I feel certain will set many scholarly hearts aflutter here: Incidental Architect: William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794-1828, by Gordon S. Brown (Ohio University Press, 2009).   This is of course the very period that Jefferson spent a good deal of time in Washington, D.C. (what a coincidence!).  And in fact he knew the Thorntons, who visited him on his mountaintop in 1802.  Anna Maria Thornton wrote in her diary that Monticello “is a place you wou’d rather look at now & then than live at.”  Indeed.

Among the other treats inside the book: a full-color profile portrait of none other than George Watterston, one of the first Librarians of Congress.  He has a rather striking shock of red hair.  Like a ski jump.   This is definitely the coiffure of a man destined to lose Jefferson’s carefully-compiled packing list for the 6,487 volumes he sent to Washington, and to take liberties with Jefferson’s beautiful Baconian classification system.

The book is not cataloged yet, but look for it on the shelves soon…

New book on Marbury v. Madison

The Jefferson Library recently purchased The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court by Cliff Sloan and David McKean. It presents complex legality in a easy style for all readers. The book also sheds light on how the Supreme Court really was not seen as an equal to Congress and the Presidency until this case. We take judicial review for granted now, but this book gives us a glimpse in time before it.

All John Soane All the Time

The 2008 issue of Furniture History: The Journal of the Furniture History Society is All John Soane All the Time, with “A Catalogue of the Furniture in Sir John Soane’s Museum,” as well as several articles on John Soane and his furniture.  Who’s John Soane, you say, and what’s he got to do with Thomas Jefferson?  And I say: well, architecture, neoclassicism…something like that.  All I know is, Curatorial wants me to buy lots of books on John Soane, and I do whatever they tell me.*  Anyway, here’s a panoramic video of Soane’s house/museum in London, which should give you the general idea…

Oh, and here’s a thought to ponder: Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandmother was Judith Soane (1646-1703).  Maybe TJ and John Soane were related…

*Except when I don’t.

That’ll teach me

Increasingly I’m coming to believe that I’m totally wasting my time in assiduously searching all sorts of websites, databases and books to figure out whether or not Thomas Jefferson is the source of a given quote.  Really (I tell myself), if it quacks like a duck, it’s most likely a duck.  Or, in my case, if it sounds like a Hallmark card or a self-help book, it’s probably not from the pen of Thomas Jefferson.

Just to entertain you, here are some of my favorite silly quotes that people have attributed to  Jefferson:

• “Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
• “That which we elect to surround ourselves with becomes the museum of our soul and the archive of our experiences.”
• “The reason that Christianity is the best friend of Government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.”

Ha ha!  Those are awful.  No way Thomas Jefferson ever wrote any of that twaddle!

The latest “clunker,” as I call these types of, er, obvious non-TJ quotes, is apparently fluttering around the Twitter-verse, and goes like this: “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”  Gah!  It sounds like a Hallmark card.

But, as you may have already surmised from my title, my TJ-quotation radar was totally off in this instance.   He did write that.  “I am sure [the succeeding generation] will have more worldly wisdom, and enough, I hope, to know that honesty is the 1st chapter in the book of wisdom.”  (to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819)

So, no intuitive shortcuts.  Even the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote cheesy stuff sometimes.

Chicago is cooler than normal

Here at the Jefferson Library we are great consumers of pie, leftover food, and quirky publishers’ catalogs.  (Also Alpenland catalogs.)  For the past month we’ve been amusing ourselves with the Shire Books catalog – you can buy entire books on things like perambulators and village pumps and Victorian undertakers from them! – but just a few days ago we received the newest brain candy, the University of Chicago Press catalog.

I find most university press catalogs tedious.  Chicago’s is delightfully wacky yet simultaneously intellectual.  Flipping through one of their catalogs is like a parade of all the fascinating little corners of human inquiry and experience.  To give you an idea, in this season’s catalog:

• Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend
• The Subversive Copy Editor
  
• Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America
• In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression
• A Tenth of a Second: A History
• Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times
• Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts
• Socrates and the Fat Rabbis
• Sinister Yogis
• Collections of Nothing
• Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History
• On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters
• Running: A Global History
• (which is cancelled out by) Pie: A Global History
• Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions
• The Rules of Association Football, 1863

And of course I won’t mention the naughty titles, because my mother is reading this blog.  Anyway, Chicago did not pay me to say this but, if you love books, their catalog is a garden of delights.  (You can actually download it in PDF form from their website here, if you’re interested.)

It’s raining Campeachy Chairs

This month’s Magazine Antiques features an article by Cybèle Gontar on Campeachy (Campeche) chairs – the article is heavy on the TJ content.  Campeachy chairs, for those who may be unfamiliar with them, are curious low-slung neo-something pieces of furniture, of which Jefferson was inordinately fond and owned several.  Sitting in one shifts your center of gravity in such a way that they are right tricky to get out of.

Happily, MA seems to have revamped their website and the entire article is available here.