The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia / Political Leadership in Jefferson's Virginia
Niemczyk, Caroline P.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: FAMILY AND VALUES IN JEFFERSON'S VIRGINIA jan Lewis/Cambridge University Press/S24.95 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN JEFFERSON'S VIRGINIA Daniel P. Jordan/University Press of...
...As they had on other occasions, the elite chose reaction to creative activity, serving Jefferson, one of their own, in blind loyalty...
...books such as this one...
...As more and more Virginians engaged in non-agricultnral economic activity, the landed gentry shrank in disgust...
...Kilpatrick does not shy away from the description...
...Their obstinate response was of their own choosing...
...some became lawyers...
...Were he to read James J. Kilpatrick's The Writer's Art, he would learn that it matters, it matters a great deal...
...The urge is not always bad...
...Candidates were now expected to gladhand total strangers, to distribute handbills, to debate in newspapers.and on the stump, and, of course, to ladle grog...
...Writing is carpentry...
...most remained farmers in the old, time-honored tradition...
...ally...
...Name Address City State Zip Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery avocation and more the realm of profes'sional politicians...
...Furthermore, the second generation did not entirely withdraw "from politics to serve their families first and only...
...THE WRITER'S ART James J. Kilpatrick/Andrews, McMeel & Parker/S14.95 William McGurn lies in the personal voice of the author, which John Henry Newman deemed essential to great art...
...And for Lewis, the question: What happens when an elite fears that the terms of worldly success directly threaten their self-esteem...
...He analyzes the personal background and political behavior of the period's ninety-eight congressmen from Virginia, placing these men amid the very real demands they encountered...
...The western Piedmont and Trans-Allegheny sections of Virginia fared a bit better, buoyed by a more diversified and resilient economy...
...This is true to a point but is a misleading way to pose the issue., It is important to remember, as does Professor Jordan, that the beau ideal of many of the Virginia Founding Fathers had been to separate America from England's "corrupting" commercial empire, to establish a republic that would function like "clockwork" (Jefferson's phrase), and to get back to life's finer activities--farming, a bit of abstract philosophizing, and enjoying one's family...
...Not least of these was the alacrity with which he returned to Mount Vernon after each successful stint in public life and the reluctance with which he left his farm ,when drafted anew to serve his country...
...I laughed when he warned against such constructions as Rosemary started cooking herself when she was eighteen...
...Even as Virginia seemed to be at the height of her powermin farming, in commerce, and in political influence-events left outmoded the ruling gentry's traditional way of life...
...Indeed, these elite seemed to have lived in order to despair...
...A steady whine sounds from these books' pages as the gentry argue that they deserve better--not that they will work for it, mind you, since deference is due rather than earned...
...I cheered at the distinction between while and since...
...But the westerners made no headway in either more state spending for transportation or a more equitable representation in the General Assembly, both of which might have spared Virginia further economic decline...
...G i l m e r ' s fatalistic self-pity is repeated often by other spokesmen in Lewis's and Jordan's books...
...Against the argument that communication need only be "effective," his retort is worthy of Disraeli: " I f the purpose of housing were solely to provide shelter from the rain, the Sun-King could have erected an A-frame...
...Yet even the best of them, and certainly Mr...
...In the foreword, William F. Buckley, Jr...
...editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/Europe...
...I confess that in my more wicked moments I myself have been known to favor host as a verb and to flout the distinctions between such a s and like (or among such as, s u c h . . , as, and like...
...The gentry's predicament raises for Jordan the intriguing question: What happens when leaders are leaders in name only, when elites occupy the seats of power but are obstructionist and anachronistic...
...Yet the gentry generally chose to remain slave-holding farmers, plugging along ,in the same manner as their forefathers, even though shifts in the economy sank .them further into debt...
...Proud of Virginia's glorious revolutionary past, the elite greeted the present and future with deep misgivings...
...Here is one paradox of Jeffersonian Virginia: It would seem that some fundamental reordering of values had occurred between the eighteenth century's generation of active menm Washington, Jefferson, Mason, 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 Henry, and so on--and their nineteenth-century, Romantic progeny...
...but we are from this day forth, tributary to northern shoe makers, Irish potato, pumpkin, and Rutabaga-man...
...But this was denigrated as a Hobson's choice...
...In the instance of the Embargo, Jefferson had willfully engineered the distress, hoping to rekindle the Revolutionary spirit of self-sacrifice...
...Brother Satire, for instance, has taken to preaching the vulgar use of hopefully...
...When at last we find someone with whom we are in general agreement (or someone who generally agrees with us) the real delight is in the theological nitpicking...
...Electoral districts were expanded and, to the gentry's growing discomfort, a campaign could no longer be waged as it had been for a hundred years by "treating" friends and neighbors to extemporaneous decTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 35 tion-day speeches and ladles of grog...
...Peachy Gilmer wrote in 1827, "Virginians have become Yankeys as to all that is bad . . . . They have become coarse, rude, dishonest and in all things fraudulent . . . . Delicacy is considered as a hindrance to enterprize and business...
...The succeeding Presidents, Madison and Monroe, however, lacked Jefferson's personal charisma and failed to control the Virginia delegation as deftly...
...Chief among these were a more influential Speaker of the House, contenders for the Presidency who mastered factional obstruction in Congress, and a more sophisticated system of standing committees...
...Buckley correctly observes that it is difficult to read The Writer's Art v~ithout finishing the better for it...
...Adding insult to injury, these declines were palpably related to the policies of Virginia's own native son Presidents...
...The extravagance of emotion on this point is impressive and repugnant and, as Lewis points out, more unrestrained than anything an eighteenth-century Virginian would have written...
...refinement hypocrasy...
...Lewis, in a muddled and addled way, offers a profusion of interesting material that shows a generation aiming for a romantic, tragic vision of life but succumbing tO the trite and hackneyed...
...Stanton Evans in Human Events...
...But to remove the story, as Lewis does, from its historical context is neither good psychology nor good history...
...others moved out of Virginia entirely, like Henry Clay, succeeded elsewhere, and never looked back...
...Also, the creation of new courts on the district, state, and federal levels undermined the justices of the peace, a gentry-controlled gateway to local and higher offices, from sheriff to legislator...
...Bad News shows how the Times" own party line has been braided into world events from the Suez crisis to the fall of Indochina and after...
...With the creation of a nation-state, the center of power and the aim of ambitious men shifted from the House of Burgesses to the House of Delegates to the General Assembly and then out of the state altogether to the Continental Congress and finally to the U.S...
...Very few are the men and women who could honestl~ strike a note of optimism, ambition, or humor...
...Rather than make an effort to change and prosper, they preferred to sulk, watching their investments dwindle and their debts rise...
...So if one thinks of the Founding Fathers as rising to the challenge of creating a new nation, one must also realize that their offspring faced different challenges...
...They knew it, and their women folk did too...
...it is the craft of joining words together...
...In fact, throug h worry, ambivalence, and lack of purposeful effort, they forfeited the power that had been their elders...
...Each passage drips with sentimentality or protestations of intense religiosity, familial piety, and world-weariness...
...In this spirit, much of Mr...
...One can taste the sour grapes in Thomas Jefferson's daughter's brisk admonition to her child to stay out of politics: "It's a paltry business...
...Indeed, it seems that when a member of the upper class wrote in a diary or to family or friends, it was an exercise in wailing, breast-beating, and teethgnashing...
...Serving there was considered by many to be an expensive, "timeconsuming, and excruciating burden...
...In this observation they were right...
...Jordan, crisply, drily, but carefully and persuasively shows how Virginia statesmen (to paraphrase the historian James Schouler) took a large state and made it small...
...The country riddler brings skill to his instrument, and often a remarkable level of skill...
...Younger upper-class men of promise slowly began to enter other fields...
...Of course there are some, like my brother John, who wonder if it really matters...
...In the author's own words: There is nothing arcane or mysterious about the crafting of a respectable sentence...
...The world was a difficult and demanding place for Virginia's second generation, people who had been raised to expect positions of influence as a matter of course but found that a republic entailed perpetual selfgovernment and self-assertion and who found further that their own corner of the republic was in economic decline...
...Now depressions were suffered under a government of one's own making...
...It was a nasty affair that set managing editor against assistant, friend against friend, and an exasperated typesetter against both...
...There can be no doubt where Mr...
...For the most part, I have no difficulty with Mr...
...They also faced growing challenges in Washington...
...This shows only that all of us have something to hide...
...George Washington was hailed by his peers for a host of worthy attributes and accomplishments...
...Jan Lewis, in The Pursuit o f Happiness, and Daniel P. Jordan, in Poh'tical Leadership in Jefferson's Virginia, both gave the upper-crust "second generation" a lot of back-handed credit for sticking to their conservative principles through a series of self-defeating decisions...
...When a man is writing to endorse rules, inevitably there will come an urge to assert his independence...
...Her peers, she thought, "cannot dash from their lips" a draught drugged with self-pity: "Drink deeply and often, if you would become useless, enervated, repining, .unfit for the situation in which you are 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 placed & incapable of its duties...
...A good number of Virginia's gentry--forming the majority of the state's congressional delegation--made that journey...
...Kilpatrick is among their ranks, occasionally fall from grace...
...In the early 1800s, Williamsburg and Richmond (the capital from 1789-80) were centers of luxury and of social and intellectual life...
...Notwithstanding the two-term presidencies of the Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, which span the 1800-to-1824 period of "Jeffersonian America," the Old Dominion elite-even those who held seats in Congress--felt increasingly uninterested in and estranged from public leadership, and especially national politics...
...Their introspection, unfortunately, was far more morbid than deeply searching...
...The emphasis of this book is on the practical, and though witty it is never (okay, rarely) pompous...
...They could choose, so'they reasoned, to ape the energy and gumption of the Yankee...
...the state as a whole suffered several sharp economic declines without ever fully recovering...
...Common sense tells us t h a t economic depressions are psychologically depressing, and these studies confirm it...
...Jordan's study of Virginia's congressional delegation demonstrates that many gentry remained active in public life...
...Such disputes are to be expected in an establishment where, I am happy to report, the serial comma is still respected...
...Kilpatrick is no populist on these mat1 "~1 ot long ago, while I was still laboring as assistant managing editor for this family magazine, the mere question of punctuation was enough to turn an otherwise idyllic Hoosier afternoon grey and ugly...
...and What's the latest, dope...
...Kilpatrick only a bit more understanding here--I was reassured by his forthright condemnation of hopefully...
...Many remained farmers and simply stepped out of the now more demanding world of politics...
...F o r all their vaunted power, these were men clearly out of step with the times...
...The Virginians were, as Jordan says, "caught between the first and second party systems and were a bit incongruous in both...
...Just to cite the example of commas again, Mr...
...From Washington, Representative John Clopton wrote to his son, "To leave all the comforts of home to be here in my situation O what a fool I have been...
...the pursuit of happiness generally...
...Perhaps this is because she is intent on rendering a psychological portrait of relations between generations, in which parents reared their children according to a patrician ideal, and the children, in turn, adopted lives more indolent than energetic...
...Only a few contemporaries, it seems, rejected this sort of indolence, the "musing & melancholy," as Ellen Coolidge, Jefferson's granddaughter, called it...
...Virginia's elite, as if distant spectators, watched themselves losing power and prominence but generally refused to engage in new tactics to maintain or enhance their position...
...Their complaints were not just about love and money but also about stature in the world...
...For some unknown reason, Lewis, while always careful to contrast what she labels "preRevolutionary" with "post-Revolutionary" behavior, fails to make clear why the Revolution made a difference...
...Back and forth the copy would go, commas inserted, then deleted, inserted again, deleted again...
...Writing is a skill...
...New congressional and party institutions gradually shifted power from the President to Congress...
...Jordan concludes that the Virginia delegation performed as Jefferson's obedient lieutenants, carrying the commander's messages back to their districts, defending their leader, and little questioning an immensely unpopular policy...
...at high levels it becomes an art...
...My hope in this book is not to make better Menuhins, but to make better fiddlers...
...But my brother is a man who uses finalize as a verb, without the slightest blush...
...As Lewis puts it, " . . . when those sons of the gentry for whom civic affairs had been a way of life withdrew from politics to serve their families first and only, a tradition was broken, a way of life itself profoundly changed...
...What changed in this period were the terms on which offices were gained and power exercised, and the elite became ever more disenchanted by the changes...
...For the Virginia sons and daughters of the Founding Fathers it seems the answer was never self-evident...
...Perhaps they found the price--increasing material discomfort and loss of political cloutmworth the cultural continuity by which they maintained a semblance of a purely Southern, patrician way of life...
...All this cramped the gentry's style...
...My opinion is that he doesn't really believe this himself, and, with the rest of his admirers, I pray that he will repent of his apostasy...
...She had served her widower father only a few years earlier as the First Lady of the White House...
...Virginians were masterful, on the other hand, at manipulating the congressional nominating caucus that placed Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in the White House...
...As Theodore Bernstein similarly pointed out years ago, there is an important difference between What's the latest dope William McGurn is presently (sic...
...Kilpatrick reminds us that without them it would be impossible to distinguish between a pretty tall woman and a pretty, tall woman...
...The Tidewater region, the home of the most established elite, suffered disproportionately...
...Dwight Schear The Seattle Times I Gateway Books, c/o The American Spectator, P.O...
...Numbered or gone were the days of the gentleman justices, kingpins usually related in a web of kinship who individually or collectively wielded executive, legislative, and judicial authority...
...Though an Englishlanguage Tory, he is no fanatic, and Mr...
...Lewis emphasizes that the elite believed th~.y had a ready alternative to their genteel distress...
...With the Tennessean Andrew Jackson's stunning popular election in 1828, the era of the Virginia Dynasty was over...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 37...
...Box 877, Bloomington, IN 47402...
...politeness affectation . . . . " With thi~sort of attitude toward the new republic's world of commerce, westward movement, "internal improvements," and hurly-burly politics in the nation's capital, it is little wonder that the upper-class heirsapparent were left in the dust wondering where America had gone...
...Jordan also underscores the importance of economic factors...
...J o r d a n ' s study, on the other hand, does take seriously the new circumstances that tested the second generation's mettle...
...His is an absorbing study of the interaction between history and those who profess to be 'merely' reporting it...
...The slavedriven plantations lost their competitive edge to non-slave farming...
...Though I was dismayed by his flippant dismissal of the subjunctive--were Mr...
...Joseph Sobran in National Review "In ease after case, he (Braley) shows the pattern being followed now in treatment of El Salvador has been repeated with stunning regularity.., a reactive assignment for the major media--gutting yet another U.S...
...Buckley's foreword is a gentle poke at Mr...
...other cities and states fostered the political leaders of the next era and the institutionalized and competitive party apparatus with which to perpetuate their power...
...Jordan quotes Francis Walker Gilmer, who wrote in 1821, "We may struggle 'till doomsday,' but Virginia is a barren country, and all which it inherit must be poorwadventitious circumstances have deceived us--but nature will work its waywwe may boast of the Chesapeake bay, and think we are a great people...
...Washington was a swamp...
...Enclosed is $24.00 for Bad News ($22.50 for book and $1.50 for postage...
...Some, like Lelia Tucker, thought life so unrewarding that death at an early age would have been the perfect antidote to adult responsibilities: "Who of us has not wished in bitterness of spirit, wished a thousand times & a thousand times that it had pleased our heavenly Father to have taken us to his bosom in our days of childhood . . . . " Lewis provides an entertaining sample of such extracts from the diaries and letters of prominent Virginians in an effort to show how this group turned from public life and toward family and other personal concerns...
...refers to him as a "firm custodian," and Mr...
...Some of the tangible factors that changed during this era were political...
...THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: FAMILY AND VALUES IN JEFFERSON'S VIRGINIA jan Lewis/Cambridge University Press/S24.95 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN JEFFERSON'S VIRGINIA Daniel P. Jordan/University Press of Virginia/S20.00 Caroline P. Niemczyk What are the children of a competent, creative, successful ruling class to do when it is their turn to take charge...
...But, like the temptation for that "one last drink," it can be dangerous...
...Beyond this "sectional" challenge to the gentry's dominance was the sticky problem of finding an appropriate political response to the economic depressions...
...Others will have their own tests of orthodoxy (meaning, everyone will have his own test...
...Some, like Robert E. Lee, went to West Point...
...But this institution was being made obsolete and eventually extinct by the contemporaneous rise of the competitive party system that brought Jackson to power...
...Kilpatrick's propositions (his prepositions, too...
...They are equally culpable, then, when their dogged behavior leads to economic and political defeat and personal despair...
...Yet there was a world of difference between serving in the state capital and serving in Washington, D.C...
...For decades Virginia had suffered waves of economic distress, and this period was no exception...
...Where once Virginia had supplied leaders who helped to found a republic, now other states, especially New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Ohio, rushed in to claim the central vantage points of power in Congress, the White House, and party politics...
...Perhaps I oughtn't have said "mere," because these disputes-chiefly about the commamwere as serious as those concerning that~which, bring/take, even compose~comprise...
...Farmers, politicians, lawyers, all bemoaned "this World of selfishness," of "trouble and deceit," a "theatre of vice & wickedness," a "howling wilderness of woe...
...Once elected, the representative no longer spent a brief, convivial sojourn in the state capital but undertook a full-time marathon amid the mosquitos and boarding houses by the Potomac...
...a quality, documented piece of work...
...Kilpatrick's prohibition against using unusual words...
...Menuhin on a Stradivarius is something else...
...Politics became less an BAD NEWS THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES CASTRO-THE BAY OF PIGS-THE BERLIN WALL-THE MURDER OF DIEM-DEFEAT IN VIETNAMWATERGATE WHY DID IT HAPPEN...
...In colonial days the Crown and Commons could be pilloried...
...Clearly, Mr...
...One hears this voice in Fowler's Modern English Usage, and it is also what makes it easy to distinguish William Satire's columns from, say, James Kilpatrick's...
...It led only to the depressing realization that they were losing their grip in politics, money-making, status, and in Caroline P. Niemczyk is a graduate student in history at Columbia University...
...A few of the gentry moved to the city and became lawyers...
...But the entire process was debilitating...
...Virginia's delegation could not lay claim to these new sources;of authority because they had shunned their development...
...Braley is a veteran newsman who has followed events, saved his clippinss, and studied a lot of people's self-serving retrospective accounts...
...The charm of books like this one (such books...
...Kilpatrick lines up on the issues...
...The 1807 Embargo and the Panic of 1819 took their toll on the gentry's self-confidence...
...The construction of a good, solid sentence is no more a matter of instinct than the putting together of a dovetailed drawer...
...House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House...
...These are refreshing histories in which the men and women under study are not hapless victims of impersonal historical forces but are free agents, capable of making the important choices in their lives...
...Just between us, this man knows how to make a sentence crack...
...The region's industrious Scotch-Irish and German lower- and middle-class citizens chafed under eastern gentry dominance in Richmond...
...other states invested more aggressively in transportation infrastructure such as roads and canals and outstripped Virginia in manufacturing and agricultural efficiency...
Vol. 17 • October 1984 • No. 10
