Jefferson’s Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind
By Michael Knox Beran
Review by James S. Turner
Watch out for this book. It could be dangerous to your knowledge. Written with attitude by yet another National Review Yalie trapped in ephemeral left/right, liberal/conservative, Democratic/Republican dichotomies, it draws on the latest culture war maneuvers to respond to perceived political, social and historical slights from the left. No transpartisan, integral, or spiral dynamics, there are just good guys and bad guys insistently taking sides.
In Beran’s book there is no Democratic Party, nor Liberal Whig, and Eros is transformed from uplifting love daemon to foreboding demon. Does it matter?
For example, why not call this book “Jefferson’s Angels: Portrait of a Curious Mind.” What would an author gain and/or lose by writing positively of “Jefferson in flesh and blood,” as one book jacket endorsement puts it, “in mind and soul, a man haunted (contrast “invigorated”) by the sights, smells, ideas, obsessions, of his own age”. Here are some items not in “Demons” which might find their way into “Angels.”
The Democratic Party, created by Jefferson, does not appear by name in the text. Beran does say, “Jefferson created what was to become the world’s most durable democratic party….” but leaves the reader guessing just what party that might be. We know he means the Democratic Party because the single reference to the “Democratic Party” in his index refers to that sentence. There are twelve index references to “Republican Party.”
Beran introduces the “Whig principle…the right to be left alone and to be allowed to cultivate one’s garden in peace,” from which, he says, the Declaration of Independence sprang. He does not let the reader know until page 203, the second to last page of the text, and after twenty-four previous indexed references to “Whig” that liberalism “…grew out of the enlightened ideals of the Whigs.” By such omission and misdirection this book aids today’s neoconservative propagandist effort to transform Democratic Liberal Jefferson into a Conservative Republican, or at least demote him from the national pantheon.
To advance this effort, Beran attacks liberalism, quoting Lionel Trilling, saying that liberalism “tended to envisage the world in ‘a prosaic way,’ that in exalting the rational powers of the mind it tended to ‘constrict and make mechanical’ our ‘conception of the nature of the mind,’ that it did violence to the imagination and stifled the life of the emotions.”
Despite his critique of liberalism as a constrictive, stifling force, Beran worries about the colorfulness of Jefferson’s private life. Jefferson’s bedroom depictions of Eros imply dark forces to the author. Jefferson lived, he suggests, a life haunted by a cavalier past of country estates, tarnished knights, and dark eroticism (“Mediterranean dissipation” n. p. 89) that turned him morose, troubled, and prone to historic mistakes. His misery was only leavened by flashes of creative conservative brilliance. During this life, Beran’s story goes, Jefferson fought superstition with enlightenment while demons besieged him.
Beran compounds this misdirection by obscuring the difference between “demons” (archfiends or beasts) and “daemons” (divine power, fate, or god). His notes section (p. 233, 8th page 100 reference) tells of the image of the “genius spirit…Eros, who was variously conceived in antiquity, as a god or as a daimon [sic] of love” in the bedroom frieze at Monticello. This demon/daemon conflation misleads the reader.
A sinister air colors Jefferson’s Demons. It repeats the canard that a cowardly revolutionary Governor Jefferson abandoned Richmond, Virginia’s capital, to British attack. In the subsequent inquiry, Beran writes (p. 30), “Jefferson…acquitted himself well, and the matter was eventually dropped.” Jefferson’s governing peers reviewed his Revolutionary War policies and actions as Virginia governor and came down on his side against his inflamed enemies. Why? Beran does not tell us. He is content to gossip with a raised eyebrow.
As President, Jefferson resisted “war party” pressure to seize Louisiana militarily. Instead, he bought it. Instead of war over British impressments of American sailors, he used a trade embargo. Beran skips the non-violent theme in Jefferson’s policy choices. The embargo failed, he says, setting back America’s economy decades. Others have suggested that the embargo launched America’s corporate sector and ended the 1812 war diplomatically.
These alternative possibilities do not fit Beran’s brooding Jefferson. Nonetheless it is hard to believe that the embargo could have been as bad as Beran asserts. Jefferson’s contemporary and historic reputation did remain intact. But a positive spin on the embargo does not fit a brooding book on demons. However, an exploration of the angels of Jefferson’s curious mind might turn up useful information and insights.
Beran does great service by highlighting Eros in Jefferson’s life. But for Beran, Eros sits uneasily. “Even after the DNA tests, there is still no definitive proof” that Sally Hemings bore Jefferson’s children (p. 127). Sally Hemings was very likely the half sister, sharing the same white father, of Jefferson’s beloved deceased wife Martha Wayles. Fawn Brodie tracks the calendar, recording several Hemings births occurring nine months after Jefferson’s visits to Monticello. We know that master-slave sexual intimacies were a staple of the “ubiquitous sights, smells, ideas, obsessions of Jefferson’s age.” Washington’s slave descendants are said to be doing their own DNA testing. We know from his forty-year conversation with Maria Cosway that women enlivened Jefferson’s heart. No fact offers definitive proof according to Beran. How about persuasive proof?
Even if we did know definitively of Jefferson/Hemings intimacies, Beran prepares for the next round in the “brooding” Jefferson saga, “we would still know nothing about the nature of the master’s relationship with his slave.” (p. 128) But what if, through her and her family’s intimacies with Jefferson, Sally Hemings played a midwife role to the birthing of America?
What if the erotic in Jefferson’s life, the esoteric arts of Eros, played a major role in the totality of Jefferson’s life? What if the non-violence of the Virginia capital, Louisiana and the embargo were intimately connected to the erotic charge provided by Maria Cosway, Sally Hemings and Martha Wayles, which were in turn intimately connected to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? In various notes, Beran alludes to this possibility without comment.
Beran says that “At Rome, too, the fertile or creative forms of love were thought to be inspired, and facilitated by erotic demon [sic] spirits, those ‘genii’ that enabled men to beget children on the nuptial couch.” (n. 233) Does the erotic daemon beget love in broader than personal terms? Does it infuse the statesman with a resistance to violence, the citizen with a love of life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Here is a set of questions for a transpartisan, integral historian to feast on. The driving force for such a history is the realization that each dichotomy drains energy from life, knowledge, and insight. Each fusion creates new energy. An effort to use Beran’s material to find thematic synergies might well brighten some of the darker regions of American life such as race, violence, and the nature of happiness.
The core of Beran’s argument lies in the dichotomy that, he asserts, lies at the heart of the American Revolution. After setting out the fundamental Whig principle of being “allowed to cultivate one’s own garden in peace…a worthy ideal, one by which most of us now live,” Beran says (p.21):
...private devotion does not win wars. It was the paradox of their revolution that, in order to win it, the Americans were forced to develop qualities of character that were anathema to their end. To prevail, the provincial rebels were required to study, and master, those forms of civic heroism that their revolutionary efforts were intended to render obsolete.”
It is possible to read the American Revolution in the opposite way—as a human undertaking that addressed the issue of how the best uses can be made of civic heroism without trampling on ones own garden or on the gardens of others. Perhaps it can be viewed in this fusion light that the American experiment in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness has been reasonably successful. Perhaps private intimacy at the core of the social split created by slavery molded the national character as much as public pronouncements did. Perhaps the Jeffersonian use of warfare recognized martial heroism as only one aspect of civic heroism—Americans lost most revolutionary battles in ways that allowed shrewd diplomacy to win foreign allies essential to national victory.
When addressing a life like Jefferson’s, picking and choosing what one likes and denigrating what one dislikes creates unnecessary and unproductive dichotomies. Taking Jefferson as an integrated whole—looking for synergies between apparently conflicting attributes or actions--might tell us more about our history, character and strengths than proclaiming the inconsistencies and anomalies that we see from our lofty historical perch.
Sex to Jefferson might have been different than it is to us and that difference might matter in our unfolding as a nation. Delving into these questions, possibilities, without succumbing to a predetermined liberal, conservative, left, right, neo conservative, Democratic, Republican worldview could enlighten us. Brooding, doubt and deconstruction of the kind in Jefferson’s Demons dissipate the observers as much as or more than the observed. Beran brings us information but leaves us thirsty for knowledge.
James Turner is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Liberty and Community and a contributing editor to the Free Liberal.