Abstract
In this chapter, Cillerai shows how Thomas Jefferson’s employment of cosmopolitan imagery is an example of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism’s origins in British colonialism and imperial expansionism. The post-independence cosmopolitan American landscape that Jefferson presents in his only published book Notes on the State of Virginia is a belletristic exercise. Jefferson’s representation produces a powerful image of exceptionalism that contains traits of a narrative that will characterize future representations of America. Cillerai argues that for Jefferson the American cosmopolis exists because it is a part of the eighteenth-century republic of letters, yet within this larger entity, America stands out for its exceptional characteristics. The cosmopolis Jefferson places at the foundation of his idea of America is a reflection of the imperial connections that made the world he lives in possible.
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Notes
- 1.
Joseph Jones, a member of the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress and James Monroe’s uncle, gave Jefferson the list of twenty-two questions that Barbé-Marbois had passed around in hopes to find somebody to write about America.
- 2.
Following is the text of Barbé-Marbois’ queries:
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1.
The Charters of your State.
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2.
The Present Constitution.
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3.
The exact description of its limits and boundaries.
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4.
The Memoirs published in its name, in the time of its being a Colony and the pamphlets relating to its interiors or exterior affairs present or ancient.
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5.
The History of the State.
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6.
A notice of the Counties Cities Townships Villages Rivers Rivulets and how far they are navigable, Cascades Caverns Mountains Productions Trees Plants Fruits and other natural Riches.
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7.
The number of its Inhabitants.
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8.
The different Religions received in that State.
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9.
The Colleges and public establishments. The Roads Buildings & c.
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10.
The Administration of Justice and a description of the Laws.
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11.
The particular Customs and manners that may happen to be received in that State.
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12.
The present State of Manufactures Commerce interior and exterior Trade.
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13.
A notice of the best Sea Ports of the State and how big are the vessels they can receive.
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14.
A notice of the commercial production particular to that State and of those objects which the Inhabitants are obliged to get from Europe and from other parts of the World.
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15.
The weight measures and the currency of the hard money. Some details relating to the exchange with Europe.
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16.
The public income and expenses.
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17.
The measures taken with regard to the Estates and Possessions of the Rebels commonly called Tories.
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18.
The condition of the Regular Troops and the Militia and their pay.
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19.
The marine and Navigation.
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20.
A notice of the Mines and other subterranean riches.
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21.
Some Samples of these Mines and of the extraordinary Stones. In short a notice of all what can increase the progress of human Knowledge.
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22.
A description of the Indians established in the State before the European Settlements and all those who are still remaining. An indication of the Indian Monuments discovered in that State (Jefferson 1951, 166–167).
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1.
- 3.
Scholars introduced this argument in the 1980s and early 1990s. Robert Ferguson, for example, has described the ideological placement of the republic as Jefferson’s main theme in Notes, achieved through an organization of its materials in a form derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century law treatises (Ferguson 1984, 38). Christopher Looby has argued that, with the categorization of Virginia’s natural order, Jefferson was indeed organizing and categorizing the raw material of American social and political order (Looby 1987, 260–261). Similarly, Susan Manning has illustrated Jefferson’s ordering of the questions and his obsession with classification as an attempt to control the socio-political chaos of the early republican years. She has argued that “Jefferson transformed what appeared to be the neutral task of documentation into an intellectual and patriotic discovery of the emergent nation and a means of personifying one of the voices of what his correspondent Hector St. John Crèvecoeur characterized as ‘the American, this new man’” (Manning 1996, 348–349).
- 4.
And the book’s central aim has been seen as one of national identity development. The changes that Jefferson made to the order of the original “queries” reflect the concerns and the fears that American intellectuals like Jefferson had regarding Europeans’ material and ideological support. They reflect assumptions about how to address those who wanted to be reassured about the feasibility of the revolutionary enterprise in view of the fact that France was the ex-colonies’ largest economic supporter. In addition, Jefferson’s organizational strategy in the book that his answers formed reflects a response to the standards and expectations of the international political and scientific community that he addressed.
- 5.
Years after the composition of Notes on Virginia, Jefferson wrote to correspondent John Hollins comparing the community of scientists to the “republic of letters” itself (Bergh 1903, XII: 253).
- 6.
Although the two main authors whose theories Jefferson engages directly in Query VI are de Buffon and Voltaire, the group of natural philosopher who theorized about the natural state of the Americas was much larger and involved a numbers of intellectuals from a variety of European countries, including the Dutchman Cornelius de Pauw, the Scotsman David Hume , the Frenchmen Guillaume Raynal and the Baron de Montesquieu, to name some of them. All of these writers developed theories about the climate, natural environments, animal, and people of the Americas. They exchanged ideas and argued over the variety of transformations or the lack thereof that took place once similar species developed in one or another place (Gerbi 1973).
- 7.
Susan Manning has described the results of this strategy as “a characteristic Enlightenment interaction of topography, climate, and culture” (Manning 1996, 348). Robert Ferguson has explained Jefferson’s changes in the order of the queries as part of a larger unifying project by which Notes is to be organized like a legal treatise. In Ferguson’s view, Jefferson’s rationale was the following: “just as the multiplicity of human law might give rise to a science of jurisprudence, so the bewildering physicality of America could be made to yield a unified republic” (Ferguson 1984, 46).
- 8.
Letter to James Madison, February 8, 1786.
- 9.
To George Whyte, August 13, 1786.
- 10.
Jennifer Kennedy has raised the same questions about the last sentence of this passage. In her interpretation, however, Kennedy considers Jefferson’s account in relation to his attitude towards the events that took place in France after the French revolution. Kennedy argues that the many imprecisions in the account are part of a pattern of forgetting and misremembering that Jefferson develops in order to “protect his legacy from the charge of fanaticism” after the failure of the French Revolution in which he had seen a projection of his own ideas. Kennedy reads Jefferson’s remarks on Notes as a metaphor for the French Revolution. The bad translation of his ideas in the French context had caused the revolution’s failure, thus Jefferson’s resentment in his account (Kennedy 2000, 553–573).
- 11.
The question of truth relates to Notes in another way as well. Jefferson was accused of having forged the speech of the Native American Logan he quotes later on in Query VI in order to provide an example of Native American natural oratorical powers. The attacks against him had begun in 1797 when a Federalist opponent and son-in-law to Colonel Cresap (the alleged murderer of Logan’s family in Jefferson’s version of the episode), Luther Martin , had charged Jefferson of forgery and challenged him in a series of newspaper articles. At the time Jefferson had refused to take part directly in the dispute, which he had deemed offensive and argued that “forbade the respect of an answer” because of its partisanship (Peden 1953, 298). Nonetheless, his preoccupation with Luther Martin’s accusations continued and resulted in an almost obsessive research, which lasted over three years, to find enough evidence to support the veracity of the facts he had described in the book, the authenticity of Logan’s words, and Jefferson’s own good faith in reporting them. He then attached all the documents he had collected, mainly letters in response to his inquiries, and published them in the 1800 reprint of the book as an appendix. Jefferson’s worries about the veracity of his account of Notes’ genesis in the autobiographical account were also probably related to this longstanding polemic about the veracity of that account which had brought the work to the center of Jefferson’s conflict with his federalist opponents. The anxiety that prompted the decision to collect and publish evidence in his favor and information about the story after the accusation—the fear of having fictionalized the story of the murder—may be another reason behind the usage of the blunt expression in the Autobiography. In both cases Jefferson’s preoccupation about the veracity of what he is recounting reveals his preoccupation with imaginative writing, the role that eloquence plays in such writing, and the production of discursive misrepresentations—a series of elements that, as I show later in this chapter, permeate the central section of Notes.
- 12.
In addition to the short autobiographical account, the anxiety concerning the relationship between the writer and his material characterizes Jefferson’s references to Notes in writings that precede it in composition. When Jefferson gave a copy of the book to James Madison, he distanced himself from authorship and wrote “Do not view me as an author, and attached to what he has written. I am neither.” Jefferson’s reference to his book—characterized by an insistence on its being a compilation of informative notes and a wariness to attribute it any literary value—are significant. Describing himself a writer would have meant to draw a connection between his work, eloquence, and the literary world that he seems to be trying hard to avoid. In the enlightenment context the lines between disciplines such as history, literature, and science, had blurry separating lines, but here Jefferson seems to want to draw clear ones (Schlereth 1977, 17–25). Robert A. Ferguson notes how Jefferson’s apparent disregard for his work was voiced in a number of letters he wrote at the time of Notes’ publication (Ferguson 1984, 34 and ff). Ferguson also notes that scholarship (until the early 1980s) was accepting of Jefferson’s claims and did not consider the text as a literary work.
- 13.
Buffon’s work, entitled Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, was composed during a twenty-year period (1749–1779) and consisted of various volumes that Buffon never quite organized as a unified work. The result is a composite collection of information, often contradictory, which can be described as a work in progress (Gerbi 1973, 3–34).
- 14.
The first bones of mammoths were found near Albany, New York, in 1705.
- 15.
Benjamin Franklin’s British correspondent Peter Collinson had described the bones as those of an antediluvian animal. The anatomist William Hunter called them the bones of “the American incognitum,” to indicate a different species not yet identified. Jefferson was probably aware of Collinson’s and Hunter’s hypotheses or he just argued following the same lines. It was only between 1796 and 1806 that the French naturalist Georges L.C.F.D. Cuvier named the animal mastodontis (now mastodon) and distinguished the ones found in America from those found in Siberia, which he called Mammoth. Daubenton, Buffon’s associate and contributor to the Histoire Naturelle, was the first scientist to study American fossils in 1762 (Franklin 14: 222; Bedini 1990, 97).
- 16.
Charles A. Miller has described Jefferson’s approach to nature “deistic science,” and argued that it derives from Jefferson’s elaboration of the Lucretian premises that matter and motion always have a primary cause in a natural law and that each biological species is fixed in such laws. To the Lucretian position, Jefferson adds a Christian belief that such a state is determined by the overarching power of God. Miller argues that Jefferson’s representation of Notes’ semi-perfect nature originating in the deity’s harmonious design of the universe derives from such a view (Miller 1988, 23–55).
- 17.
Denis Diderot’s definition in the Encyclopédie states that to be a cosmopolitan meant to be a “man at home in every country, a man who placed his family above himself, his country above his family, and humanity above his country” (Diderot 1751, 4: 297). See Chap. 2 for a discussion of Diderot’s definition of cosmopolitanism and its connection to eighteenth-century culture. This attitude was the premise for the approach to the study of the natural world as well that naturalists like Jefferson adopted. Scientists, in the words of the members of the Royal Society who presented the Copley Medal to Benjamin Franklin, needed to “consider themselves and each other, as Constituent Parts and Fellow-Members of one and the same illustrious Republick,” and thus abide by impartiality both towards the republic’s members and the subject matter they studied (Schlereth 1977, 37).
- 18.
Sandra Gustafson has documented how Anglo-American colonials were first fascinated by Native American oratorical performances used in their formal interactions with the colonists and then had appropriated these practices to define the traits of an American colonial spirit, later interpreted as the spirit of independent America. Jefferson’s use of the Native voice as a marker of an American distinctive past implies a similar assumption and elevates America to a level of common understanding (Gustafson 2000, 111–139).
- 19.
Peter S. Onuf has argued that Jefferson saw Native American people and culture as the disappearing ancestors of the Europeans who currently inhabit North American territories. This imagining allowed Jefferson to reframe past and contemporary events and claim ownership of the stories he tells (Onuf 2000, 18–52).
- 20.
Myra Jehlen has also noted the connection between oratory and the legitimacy of native American eloquence and argued that: “Eloquence, the locus classicus for the expression of intellectual power, is granted to an Indian [Jehlen refers to Logan’s speech at the end of the chapter] in the same measure as the greatest ever possessed by white men in the highest moments of the golden age of their culture” (Jehlen 1989, 48).
- 21.
Philip Morin Freneau’s stories of Tomo Cheeki, the Creek Indian in Philadelphia were published in the New Jersey Chronicle (1795) and in The Time Piece, and Literary Companion (1797). The Persian Letters by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, were published in French in 1721.
- 22.
My understanding of the historical development of the notion of eloquence, as well as of the process that brought together eloquence, belles lettres, and pedagogy derives from the work of the following writers who have analyzed the history of rhetoric and its development in the North American colonies during the eighteenth century (Guthrie 1951, 17–30; Howell 1971; Fliegelm 1993; Warnick 1993).
- 23.
- 24.
The relationship between Jefferson’s appropriation of the Native idea of tradition, the reference to that past as immemorial, and the English tradition of common law often conflated with natural law constitute is also reminiscent of what Jefferson did in an earlier essay entitled “The Rights of British America” (1775). In the essay Jefferson had used the notion of an Anglo-Saxon past as ground for the American independent spirit and resorted to Anglo tradition of common law to make his case (Ferguson 1984; Pocock 1987).
- 25.
The meaning of the word philosophy at the time was the same that it has today, the “study of things and their causes” (Oxford English Dictionary). Natural philosophy was the branch of philosophy that studied the natural world. Its method of inquiry was experimental analysis, which consisted of first discovering all the external facts of nature and then giving them an order through which the natural law underlying them could be reconstructed. Natural history constituted the more descriptive side of the science and aimed at a more general classification of natural data. With the extended list of faults in Buffon’s study, Jefferson both shows how Buffon misapplied the method of study and gives an example of an appropriate philosophical analysis and of the form that its results should take. It was a common assumption of the republic of letters’ intellectuals that the talented naturalist was he who, in Oliver Goldsmith’s phrasing, could assume the attitude, of “A citizen of the world,” and as such be open to inquiry outside of his national boundaries and to an unprejudiced encounter with other cultures (Schlereth 1977, 187).
- 26.
The recurrence of rhetorical figures, such as the one found in this passage, is a reminder of Jefferson’s investment in the role that rhetoric plays in conveying truthful meaning, which he derived from the contemporary rhetorical theories he had embraced (Fliegelman 1993, 30–35).
- 27.
Voltaire had developed his theory about the shells from the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who had suggested that mountains were primordial features of the surface of the earth. Keith Thomson has noted that Leonardo da Vinci had already argued that the presence of fossilized shells in mountainous areas was the result of sea water covering the mountains (Thomson 2012, 281–282). Caroline Winterer also discusses eighteenth-century philosophes’ interest in theories about the presence of fossil shells in elevated territories and Voltaire’s theories about them (Winterer 2016, 64–69).
- 28.
Jefferson discusses this issue in various contexts and, during a trip to the south of France while minister in Paris, he visited the spot on which Voltaire had observed the shells. See his letters to Chastellaux on June 7, 1785 (Jefferson 1953, 8: 184–186), to Madison on May 11, 1785 (Jefferson 1953, 8: 147–148), and Madison to Jefferson on November 15, 1785 (Jefferson 1954, 9: 38–38). In a letter to David Rittenhouse written on January 25, 1786 (Jefferson 1954, 9: 215–216) Jefferson reiterated his indecisiveness regarding the process (Martin 1961, 146–167; Schachner 1951, 1: 226; Bedini 1990, 165–167).
- 29.
Mitchell Breitwieser has argued that in Notes, Jefferson “does join theory and experience … in an antithetical unity in which the role of experience is to upset theory, to challenge it by exposing its reductiveness, and to instigate further revision, rather than to advertise theory’s adequacy.” Breitwieser contends that Jefferson supplies Barbé-Marbois with a series of responses that emphasize the arbitrariness of theory whenever it is placed against the mirror of experience. Although this is the case in Jefferson’s general confutation of Buffon’s argument, Jefferson reverses this point when he decides to embrace the paucity of evidence to support his hypothesis concerning the mammoth. Breitwieser explains this moment as a moment of indecision between the two epistemological paradigms of the time (static and progressive). I see it as moment in which Jefferson arbitrarily assigns fact status to his hypotheses so that his theoretical stand can be supported. In the case in question, in fact, the mammoth’s linguistic existence and its potential survival generate the fact. Both these features are arbitrary. Jefferson’s testing of experience uncovers the discursive realm in which he bases his theory, an understanding that he puts into use in constructing his own argument against Buffon whenever evidential material is weak. I do agree with Breitwieser’s view, though, when he argues against a traditional critical attitude to equate Jeffersonian pragmatism with wisdom when interpreting his perspective on experience and theory in Notes. Breitwieser’s correct premise is that the instrumental reason expressed in Jefferson’s work does not escape historical determination and as such it does not escape ideological bias. His uses of weak evidence in order to frame his argument in favor of a static view of nature confirms it (Breitwieser 2007, 84–121).
- 30.
Here is the text of the speech:
I appeal to any white man to say, if ever he entered Logan’s cabin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came hot and naked, and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, and advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites, that my countrymen pointed as they passed, and said, ‘Logan is the friend of white men.’ I had even thought to have lived with you, but for the injuries of one man. Col. Cresap , the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbour a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? —Not one. (Peden 1982, 63)
That Jefferson is not interested in the content of the speech itself as well as in Logan’s own words is made evident by the fact that Logan’s story is indeed about the end of his people. No member of his family survived the slaughter, and the American Cicero will produce no future generations of orators. So the speech itself ironically confirms Buffon’s implication that the human species of the continent are bound to disappear, albeit by the hand of man rather than that of nature!
- 31.
In the Appendix that he attached to the text in 1800, Jefferson specifies that the implication of Buffon’s theories, as the claim of Buffon’s follower Raynal also exemplified, is a physical as well as moral degeneration “not excepting even the man, native or adoptive.” Such theory, he continues, “so unfounded and degrading to one third of the globe, was called to the bar of fact and reason. Among other proofs adduced in contradiction to this hypothesis, the speech of Logan, an Indian chief, delivered to Lord Dunmore in 1774, was produced, as a specimen of the talents of the aboriginals of this country, and particularly of their eloquence; and it was believed that Europe had never produced any thing superior to this morsel of eloquence” (230). The implicit equation between eloquence and morality shows Jefferson’s concern for the social implication that Buffon’s charges had. The idea that the moral character of a people depended on their form of government and social institutions was commonly accepted by the philosophes of the republic of letters . In his essay “On National Characters” (published in 1748), for instance, David Hume had defined the moral factors contributing to a nation’s character as those “circumstances, which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons, and which render a peculiar set of manners habitual to us. Of this kind are the nature of the government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours, and such like circumstances.” (Hume 1985, 198) Jefferson’s interest in legitimating a portrait of his country’s character as compatible with, if not superior to, that of its European counterparts being his primary objective in writing Notes underscores his manipulation of the text’s linguistic form and his attempts to make it remain within the frame that, he maintains, Buffon has given the representation of the American character.
- 32.
Matthew Cordova Frankel has pointed out the fundamental importance that aesthetic pleasure and imagination have in Jefferson’s understanding of science and politics while considering the relationship between the idea of the sublime and that of citizenship in Notes (Frankel 2001, 695–726).
- 33.
Jay Fliegelman has read the interchangeability between Jefferson and Logan as “the silent, but proud suggestion that in writing the Declaration he too assumed the role of national poet by producing a text that realized, animated, and invented his people” (Fliegelman 1993, 98). Given the context in which the statement appears, I only see this connection as an induction made possible by the role of national speaker that the rhetorical construction allows Jefferson to assume within Notes itself.
- 34.
Jefferson often talked about the importance that discursive cohesion had for the cohesion of the republic of letters and drew parallels between the latter and the community of scientific societies. In 1809, he wrote to an English correspondent that these societies constituted a tight community, which, unlike that of their nations, was always in peace, and that “Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth” (Jefferson 1984, 1201). And like the cosmopolitan idiom that united the members of the republic of letters, the scientific community shared a set of terms, the classifying idiolect of Linnæan taxonomy and the expressive codes of the republic of letters itself, which Jefferson called the”universal language” of this transnational community. When I refer to Jefferson’s efforts to remain within the discursive frame of the intellectual community, I mean both the idiolect that its members used to communicate and the ideology that their ideas reflected (Boorstin 1993).
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Cillerai, C. (2017). Jefferson’s Cosmopolitan Nature in Notes on the State of Virginia . In: Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Writing and Culture. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62298-9_3
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