HistoryThomas Jefferson, the third president of the US, remains one of the more fascinating figures in American history. Jefferson's egalitarianism led him to question the institution of slavery, yet his own dependence on the institution as a Virginia planter meant that he never truly accepted black people as the equals of whites.
He was highly critical of what he saw of monarchical tendencies in the Washington and Adams administrations that preceded his; yet, as many of his opponents pointed out, many of his most notable acts as president, including the Louisiana Purchase that pushed the boundaries of the US west of the Mississippi, were accomplished through the use of precedents his predecessors had developed.
In Christopher Hitchens's Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, one of the more controversial political intellectuals of our time grapples with Jefferson's legacy. Hitchens, who for most of his career in Britain and the US as an essayist, activist, and author was associated with the political left, has in recent years become an odd darling of the American right due to his vociferous support for the Bush administration's "war on terror", including the war in Iraq.
Hitchens's book is not a hagiography of Jefferson, nor a simple act of flag-waving for his adopted country. In particular, Hitchens treats Jefferson's ultimate defence of slavery despite his misgivings as a crucial - and invidious - component of his political outlook. Moreover, Hitchens does not whitewash Jefferson's political opportunism. In this account we see a man who, while dedicated to the high principles he enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, was quite capable of political intrigue and a considerable degree of political flexibility in pursuing his pet projects.
One criticism Hitchens makes of Jefferson, though, says at least as much about Hitchens and his political trajectory - namely Jefferson's sympathy for the French Revolution, as well as the participants in Shays' Rebellion, a farmers' uprising in Massachusetts in 1786. In the later case, Hitchens quotes Jefferson as excusing the rebellion by saying, "The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - and proceeds to note that Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, was wearing a T-shirt bearing those words at the time of his arrest. With regard to the radical Jacobins who controlled the French government in the early 1790s, Hitchens goes so far as to glancingly compare them to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Jefferson sometimes comes across, though somewhat implicitly, as might a glassy-eyed fellow traveller staring admiringly at Stalin's Glorious Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union.
INDEED, THE FRENCH Revolution comes across as the counterpoint to the American in Hitchens's book. Where the American Revolution created a stable, imperfect yet nonetheless democratic society, the French Revolution, with which Jefferson flirted ardently, was excessive, bloody and fanatical. Hitchens writes, in an assertion of American exceptionalism that would make many Americans blush: "The French Revolution destroyed itself in Jefferson's own lifetime. More modern revolutions have destroyed themselves and others. If the American Revolution . . . has often betrayed itself at home and abroad, it nevertheless remains the only revolution that still retains any power to inspire."
This is the ultimate point of the exercise for Hitchens. Though he is too smart to treat Jefferson's life as a morality tale, and too responsible to treat the political events of 200 or so years ago as a simple metaphor for the political questions of today, Hitchens is too political a writer not to have an agenda. And the agenda here is to figure out why the US was successful when so many other nations created or reborn through revolutions have failed.
Jefferson, writes Hitchens, "is one of the few figures in our history whose absence simply cannot be imagined: his role in the expansion and definition of the US is too considerable, even at this distance, to be reduced by the passage of time." Whether through fusing a more egalitarian conception of politics with the Constitutional structure his Federalist rivals had created, or greatly expanding the borders of the US through the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson managed to solidify the position of the new republic and indeed to allow it to become what it is today, whatever its faults, hypocrisies and betrayals of its stated ideals.
But Hitchens's conclusions, however nuanced his narrative, reinforce a dangerous tendency in American thought to see the nation's political history as unique and, indeed, better than everyone else's, particularly the ostensibly messier, more violent revolutions of Europe, as well as to see the American system as a blueprint for the world as a whole. The troubles of the present American administration in most of the rest of the world - an administration whose foreign policy Hitchens generally endorses - might, perhaps, indicate that the American example is less than universally admired.
Quincy Lehr lectures in American history at Trinity College Dublin
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America By Christopher Hitchens Harper Press, 188pp. £12.99