Read Online American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis - Free Book Online Page A

roots in his personality. The Whig histories did not create his romantic expectations. They put into words the visionary prospects he already carried around in his mind and heart.
    During the initial months in Philadelphia Jefferson was less concerned with plumbing the depths of his Whig principles than with sharing their practical implications with his fellow delegates. The key term was “expatriation.” The core idea was that America was the refuge for the original Saxon values. Throughout the fall and winter of 1775 Jefferson did extensive research in Richard Hakluyt’s
Voyages
with the aim of documenting the claim that the earliest migrants from England to America came over at their own expense “unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain” and, most significantly, regarded their migration as a clean break with the mother country. If true, this was revisionist history with the most revolutionary consequences, for it suggested that independence from England was not some future prospect that he and his fellow delegates in the Continental Congress were seriously contemplating; it was an event that had already happened in the misty past. 18
    The theory of expatriation was utterly groundless as history. (Jefferson clung to the theory with nearly obsessive tenacity throughout his life, though even he admitted that “I had never been able to get any one to agree with me but Mr. Wythe,” his old law teacher.) John Adams had only recently published his own survey of colonial history, entitled
Novanglus,
in which he too searched for the sources of American claims to independence from royal and parliamentary authority. But instead of a mystical Saxon past, Adams discovered a complex web of overlapping precedents and contested jurisdictions. This was truer to the inherent messiness of English and colonial history, which had witnessed several major changes in the relationship between royal and parliamentary power during the colonial era, fundamental differences among charters contingent on when different colonies were founded, and only the most gradual realization on the part of English authorities that they in fact were overseeing an empire. Jefferson’s theory of expatriation bore the same relation to colonial history as a nursery rhyme does to a Jamesian novel. That undoubtedly was part of its appeal. 19
    The Jeffersonian impulse to invent and then embrace such seductive fictions was not a deliberate effort at propaganda. Jefferson believed what he wrote. True, he could consciously play fast and loose with the historical evidence on behalf of a greater cause. Jefferson’s intellectual dexterity in assigning blame for the slave trade on George III, for example, could be explained as a clever ploy. No one in his right mind believed it, but it could be endorsed as a politically useful misrepresentation. The same thing could be said for his spiffied-up version of the Boston Tea Party in
Summary View.
In Jefferson’s account, a dedicated group of loyal Bostonians risked arrest and persecution to destroy a cargo of the contraband. Samuel Adams, a major figure in the Continental Congress and the chief organizer of the Tea Party, must have chuckled in satisfaction, knowing as he did that the “loyal Bostonians” were really a group of hooligans and vandals who had disguised themselves as Indians in order to avoid being identified and who had enjoyed the tacit support of the Boston merchants, many of whom had made their fortunes in smuggling. Sam Adams realized that the Tea Party was an orchestrated act of revolutionary theater. Jefferson described it as a spontaneous act of patriotism conducted according to the etiquette of, well, a tea party. But then again, perhaps Jefferson’s version was itself a propagandistic manipulation, just as self-consciously orchestrated as the Tea Party itself. 20
    The Saxon myth and the doctrine of expatriation, however, were a different matter. They were not clever and willful