Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism

by Gilbert Chinard

The twenty-three Queries cover such an enormous range of information and contain such a mass of facts that it would have been physically impossible for any one to complete the work in so short a time, if it had been an impromptu investigation. We can accept without hesitation the statement of the "Autobiography" on the methods of composition employed in the "Notes":

I had always made a practice whenever an opportunity occurred of obtaining any information of our country, which might be of use in any station public or private to commit it to writing. These memoranda were on loose papers, bundled up without order, and difficult of recurrence when I had occasion for a particular one. I thought this a good occasion to embody their substance, which I did in the order of Mr. Marbois' queries, so as to answer his wish and to arrange them for my own use.

The book was printed in France, in England, in Germany, and went through many editions in America. It probably did more than any other publication to propagate the doctrine of Americanism, for, in his retreat of Monticello, Jefferson formulated the creed and gave final expression to the hopes, aspirations, and feelings that were to govern his country for several generations. It also gives a complete picture of the mind of Jefferson at that date, when he thought he had accomplished the task assigned to him and felt he could stop to take stock, not merely of his native "country", but of the whole United States of America.

Unimaginative, unpoetical, unwilling to express personal emotions as he was, he had always been deeply moved by certain natural scenes. His description of the Natural Bridge, the site of which he owned, is well remembered.

You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet, and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ache. If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful in an equal extreme. It is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here; so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven, the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!

The "passage of the Patowmac through the Blue ridge" is even more famous, and the broad, peaceful, almost infinite scene is painted by the hand of a master:

It is a true contrast to the foreground. It is as placid and delightful as that is wild and tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of small blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach to the calm below.

Only Bartram a few years later, and Chateaubriand at the beginning of the next century, with much longer and more elaborate descriptions, could equal or surpass these few strokes of description. Jefferson was truly the first to discover and depict to Europeans the beauty of American natural scenery, and to proclaim with genuine American pride that "this scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic—and is perhaps one of the most stupendous in nature." It matters little that he followed Voltaire in the origin of fossils, to decide timidly in 1787 that we must be contented to acknowledge that "this great phenomenon is as yet unsolved." I shall not even remark on the completeness and exactness of his list of plants, "medicinal, esculent, ornamental or useful for fabrication", of which he gives the popular names as well as the Linnæan, "as the latter might not convey precise information to a foreigner", or on his list "of the quadrupeds of North America"; nor shall I mention his long dissertation on "the bones of Mamoths" found on the North American continent and his refutation of Buffon. Far more interesting is his protest against the assertion of the great French naturalist that "the animals common both to the old and new world are smaller in the latter, that those peculiar to the new are in a smaller scale, that those which have been domesticated in both have degenerated in America." He composed with much tabulation a complete refutation of Buffon's error, and demonstrated that plants as well as animals reached a development hitherto unknown under the new conditions and the favorable circumstances of the American climate.

When it came to the aborigines, he had little to say of the South American Indians, but of North American Indians he could speak "somewhat from his own knowledge" as well as from the observations of others better acquainted with them and on whose truth and judgment he could rely.