Word: jefferson
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Wills starts in Philadelphia. Jefferson rode up alone to substitute for Peyton Randolph in the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress: "This marginal first appearance of the man is somehow typical. He moved oddly in and out of his own life, keeping a shy but observant distance between himself and his surroundings." For a man doing such heavy work in a forest of intellectual history, Wills keeps a lively eye. Washington and Jefferson were both taller than 6 ft., "but Washington inhabited his height, seemed tall to those who thought Jefferson rather collapsible, all wrists and elbow." Sam Adams possessed...
...columnist and author (Nixon Agonistes. Bare Ruined Choirs), Wills has performed an amazing job of scholarship-a total immersion in the world that gave Jefferson's mind its contours. In 1770 a fire destroyed his library and most of his papers. While other historians have tended to base their conclusions on Jefferson's later correspondence, Wills persuasively argues that Jefferson's mind was thoroughly matured by the time he was 27, the year so many of his books went up in smoke. Wills shrewdly reconstructs Jefferson's intellectual inheritance: the lan guage and assumptions with which...
Parsing the Declaration, the author sometimes labors like an exegetical lecturer heading up a steep incline. But the exertion yields refreshing perspectives. Wills argues that Jefferson, far from being the Lockean individualist that scholars and patriotic orators have assumed, believed in sociability, ties of affection, a religion of the heart rather than of the head, a sentimental spirit-grounded in sensibilité. He was inspired not by Locke but primarily by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, like Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid, and their intellectual cousins on the Continent...
This is a warmer Jefferson than Americans are accustomed to. It is also a far more precise man, one for whom phrases like "the pursuit of happiness" were not decorative rhetoric but exact formulas. He thought that happiness was a measurable commodity, that in a science of man, human life could be geared to natural law and to the intricacy and precision of the universe. Similarly, when Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, Wills believes, he had in mind not some vague...
...impression, gained from going through Jefferson's home many times... is not quite the same as Professor Peterson's. What impressed the visitors ... was the 'Yankee' ingenuity of various tricks and utensils about the place, rather than the place itself. Doors opening by 'magic' if you touch but one of them. Other doors swinging food in, as the mantle quietly slips wine bottles up ... He had a Connecticut Yankee's engineering mind inside a Southern gentleman's frock coat. This superficially clashes with the popular image of him as a vague idealist...