Word: jefferson
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...bicentennial of his re-election as President, Jefferson still intrigues Americans for another reason: his tantalizing inner complexity. The tall, soft-spoken Virginia squire who loved fine wines and whose enormous book collection became the core of the Library of Congress was no unfeeling, detached egghead but a passionate, somewhat elusive human being. When his wife Martha died in 1782, he wrapped a lock of her hair with a scrap of paper containing an excerpt from the couple's favorite novel, Laurence Sterne's comic masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, and stashed the token in his desk. Four years later, while serving...
...Jefferson's soul was in conflict all his life. Nearly everything he wrote was contradicted at some point by something he did. The prophet of equality owned slaves and, it now seems likely, had at least one child with one of them. The man who said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter," privately urged state officials to press seditious libel charges against editors unfriendly to his presidency. The advocate of a limited Federal Government...
...inconsistency is not hypocrisy. If Jefferson's actions sometimes violated his high and, at times, unrealistic principles, our present-day actions violate some of them too. There isn't much about today's America that its visionary third President wouldn't find troubling, in need of improvement or just plain horrifying. The peaceful republic that Jefferson wished for and did what he could to usher into being--a collection of independent gentleman farmers, moderately prosperous and highly educated, living under a thrifty, modest government that was legally bound not to meddle in their affairs, be they commercial, domestic or religious...
...Jefferson passed down his ideas instead, many of them still fresh and controversial (the complete separation of church and state, the suspicion that money would conspire with power to establish a sinister homegrown aristocracy), a few of them outlandish and fanciful (his suggestion that the Constitution be revisited every 19 years so that each generation could establish its own government) and a couple of them that were repugnant even to some folks in his day (for example, his pseudoscientific notion that blacks are the mental inferiors of whites). All of them are impossible to ignore, though, because of the care...
...wanted to order the world with words," says R.B. Bernstein, an adjunct professor at New York Law School and one of Jefferson's countless biographers. "He also tried to order American history and politics through his words. He argues about checks and balances, what equal means, what liberty means, what freedom of the press means. His command of language really does shape our intellectual, political and philosophical worlds...